For those of us on the non-MENA side of the Atlantic, he gives a valid criticism of certain idealists or idealism. (One caution is he affords too much self-righteousness regarding us over here. A bigger caution is the fact that while he speaks accurately of "the passions stirred by family, tribe, faith, race, and charisma, by the contemplation of imagined honor, glory, and transcendence", he does so as if they are preferable things).

We in the West have sunk into some seriously false beliefs about human nature. This is perhaps truer in the USA than elsewhere...Our national fondness for high-flown rhetoric about liberty, rights, and the brotherhood of Man, which we have inherited from our Founding Fathers, and which we have been applying with special diligence to our domestic affairs since the 1960s, has worked on us like a spell, enchanting us into folly. It has left us blind to some of th by the contemplation of imagined honor, glory, and transcendence. Having lost touch with those things, or having willfully blinded ourselves to them, a great deal of what goes on in the world is difficult for us to understand, and easy for us to misunderstand.

[Via Jim Henley]