One of the arguments in Dinesh D'Souza's new book contrasts what he calls traditional Muslim attitudes with radical (and more militant) ones, proposing that America dial down what he regards as the trash of our popular-culture exports to prevent the traditionalists from being radicalized. One of the many problems with this way of conceptualizing the challenge of terrorism emerges in this dispatch from National Public Radio. When curiosity and needs for excitement and identification motivate members of other cultures to create cultural artifacts controversial within their own cultures, should we automatically side with whomever is angry with the latest innovation, for example by not exporting works that might spur on the Saudi avant garde?

Efforts to implement cultural conservatism as a tool of public diplomacy invite constant self-doubt and embolden increasingly censorious impulses among foreign commisars struggling to stem the raucous tide of cultural creativity. (How would reflexive capitulation to voices of fear and conformity really protect modern liberal societies in a globalized world? Who knows from what corner of our cultural life another country's cultural rebels will draw their inspiration?)

As I've implied, the entire project D'Souza advocates along these lines is not simply fraught with random difficulty; rather, it is likely be be counterproductive because it is actually incoherent. After all, the development Kenyon describes, occurring in one of the more culturally restricted settings in the Arab world, illustrates the prohibitive contentiousness of populist or oligarchic attempts to draw a meta-line, conceptually, between benign and harmful cultural products. Qualitative aesthetic judgment is crucial to many individual and social goals in any culture, but it best occurs in thought and conversation amidst the backdrop of a vigorous civic array of art, ideas, folkways, and other cultural forms, not as a matter of a necessarily stagnant canon of received wisdom. To set oneself, or worse, one's country, as fundamentally opposed to the dynamic nature of imagination and its unpredictable unfolding within a social context is to fight a battle that can only be won temporarily and partially by the imposition of totalitarian social organization (and heaven help the culture that "succeeds" in this task for any length of time). This losing-battle dynamic obtains within a country and also, essentially, across cultures. The concept of an open society carries more challenges, but also more uses and levels of meaning, than we often appreciate.