D'Souza Finds Virtue in Modern Prosperity

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 18, 2000 | by Stephen Goode

Dinesh D'Souza, writer and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, argues in his new book that want and scarcity can be ended if affluence is used wisely.

Five million American families now have a net worth of more than $1 million. According to Forbes magazine, there are more than 250 American billionaires in 2000, up from 13 in 1982, less than two decades ago.

In The Virtue of Prosperity, Dinesh D'Souza takes a close look at this prosperity and the millions of Americans who enjoy it. Will it corrupt and debase, as wealth often has in the past? That is a possibility. But D'Souza is optimistic. He thinks the new prosperity has enormous potential for good if we take the proper attitude toward it and make proper use of it.

Proper attitude means eschewing arrogance and materialism. It means avoiding the idolatry of worshipping our own technological prowess.

But what is the proper use of our prosperity? To eliminate want and drudgery. "We are living," D'Souza contends, "in an astonishing moment in history in which the problem of scarcity, which has plagued our species from the dawn of mankind, is vanishing before our eyes." Interestingly, for D'Souza, government will play little or no role in creating the good the new prosperity may provide the world.

Insight: In your book, you divide the world between the "Party of Yeah" and the "Party of Nah." It's basically a division between optimists about the future and those who are pessimistic about it, isn't it?

Dinesh D'Souza: The Party of Yeah, these are the gung-ho enthusiasts. They love technology. They've invested enormously in the New Economy and they've been rewarded for it. On the other side, you have the Party of Nah. Those are the naysayers. The good economy? It's a bubble. It's a hoax. How can companies that aren't making any profits be worth anything? Even if it is a new economy, it's not a new society that we're getting. Technology, they say, might make our lives more convenient, but it will turn us and our kids into automatons sitting at computers.

The gulf is between those who think that capitalism and wealth and technology will liberate us and those who think they somehow will harm our society. What kind of harm? The naysayers feel our success economically might make us materially better off, our pocketbooks might be better off, but it's not necessarily good for our souls and not good for the community. They say there used to be a better world where people were closer to each other, close to their families and close to nature. They contend that whole world is being dissolved, and we're not replacing it with anything better.

Insight: These two groups differ so fundamentally that they aren't even talking to one another. Is that right?

DD: The two camps are populated by different kinds of people. One is talking about the economy and material gains and the other is talking, I think, about cultural and moral things.

The new-economy guys read Fast Company and Wired, and they inhabit laboratories and companies with names like Genentech, and they talk to one another. On the other side, you have the intellectuals, the clergymen, the social critics, and they talk to one another, to their own guys. So, yes, there's not enough engagement.

If you came up to the typical technologist and said we should impose moral limits on biotechnology, it would strike him as an outrageous thought. He'd say, "You can't stop knowledge: I think I can combine the genes of a human being and a pig and produce a pig-man. Are you telling me I shouldn't do it? Shouldn't we see if we can improve on nature? If we can do it, we should do it!" On the other side, in the world of ethics, you might hear that this is unbelievably awful: What could be more appalling than a pig-man!

But there's something uninhibited about the technologists. They'll talk about things like living to the age of 150. They will talk about the miracles we could be performing with technology.

Insight: So you're describing replacement of an older cultural elite by a new group?

DD: In the 20th century, power was centralized in the hands of intellectuals and bureaucrats. It was the age of the welfare state. If we go back to the Kennedy-Johnson era, it was the job of the intellectual to be a visionary, to see further ahead. The intellectual was the planner, the guy who figured out where society is going and got ahead of it.

What's happened in the last 20 years is the shift of cultural leadership from the intellectual and the bureaucrat to the techno-entrepreneur. The scientist and the entrepreneur now become the cult heroes of our society. So it's not surprising they're the optimists, because the tide appears to be moving their way.

Insight: Has everything changed under the powerful momentum of the New Economy and prosperity?

DD: I don't think the old laws of economics are repealed in the new world nor do I think that old values are obsolete. Those are the two main areas where people claim the past has been repealed, but we should be skeptical. You sometimes get the idea listening to CNBC or going to a high-tech conference that the profits don't matter or that we've repealed the business cycle or inflation no longer is a potential problem.