The Western writers advancing this theory don't usually state it so directly. They apparently feel the theory -- which turns not on factual evidence but on a guess about deepest human motives -- must be dressed up a good bit before being shown in public. So they bedeck it in fancy rhetorical garb.

A recent essay by David Brooks in the conservative magazine, The Weekly Standard, is a prime example. Brooks argues in the piece that the West’s leftist intellectuals and writers – from Marx and Toynbee to Daniel Bell, Robert Bellah, Arthur Miller, and J.D. Salinger – have always harbored a hatred of bourgeois society and capitalism based on an all-consuming envy of their indisputable success.

Brooks paints a picture of the West’s great thinkers and writers eating stale bread crusts in their drafty garrets, their creativity endlessly fueled by bitterness at seeing their intellectual inferiors, who toil in the vulgar trades, nevertheless landing the best-paying jobs, living in the nicest homes, and marrying the prettiest girls.

Bin Ladenism, Palestinian suicide bombers, and all of militant Islam is just this same "bourgeois-phobia" now arising in Arab society, Brooks argues. The Arab form of the condition is marked, however, by two differences from the Western form. They are, first, the "sexual shame" felt by Arabs who are forced by their religion to sublimate their sexual drive, even to the point of committing mass murder by commercial jetliner; and second, by the "humiliation" caused by the fact that the Arab world has tried to modernize but repeatedly failed.

Meanwhile, the great similarity between militant Islamists and Western lefties – between Bin Laden and J.D. Salinger says Brooks -- is that both are filled with a seething envy of the strapping, sand-kicking beach bully called America.

According to Brooks, this is the driving force in the Arab world, the twisted dynamo fueling their hatred of the West.

"Deep down, they know we possess a vitality that is impressive," Brooks writes of the suicide bombers. "Islamic extremists regard us as lascivious hedonists, and in a backhanded way they are acknowledging both our freedom and our happiness."

The word "backhanded" is the key. Secretly, bin Laden envies us. Deep down, the 9/11 hijackers and the Palestinian suicide bombers want more than anything to have the same freedoms – the same life – whose bounties we enjoy.

It’s very troubling to see public intellectuals like Brooks oversimplify like this.

Bin Laden is not a Green. He is not a Seattle protestor. He is not Holden Caulfield.

He is something new and different and difficult to fathom in the West. It’s the West’s challenge to expand its mind wide enough to encompass this new reality. To continue to explain it in old terms, such as by putting the entire Arab world on a Freudian couch, is to be willfully complacent and thus to invite further attacks on our society that come out of the blue. The blue of our ignorance.

Who is David Brooks to know what Bin Laden, or the 18-year-old Palestinian girl who blew herself up in Israel, feel "deep down" in their hearts? That’s just the kind of mush-mindedness the intellectual left indulges in, according to Brooks himself.

The facts don’t suggest the entire Arab world is seething with sexual envy of the West. For one thing, women in the Middle East are blowing themselves up now, as well as men. If it’s true that the 9/11 hijackers were sexually confused, at least to the extent of professing devoutness while enjoying the occasional lap dance, militant Islamists who are women have show no signs of a similar confusion.

Let me be clear. I don’t think Arab’s quarrel with the West is a matter of sublimated sexual urges, but I’m still not sure exactly what it’s about. I think precious few of us in the West have any such idea, and I think it's important that we acknowledge this fact to ourselves.

Making up theories that in the end do nothing but provide a false sense of security and understanding and, worse, that force-fit a set of entirely new facts and realities into outdated theories and prejudices, only increases our blindness.

What stands between the Arab world and the West is the clash of conflicting fundamental values. In such cases, there is by definition no easy explanation or solution. The only way forward is obvious but emotionally difficult to embrace: a long and painful and eternally frustrating conversation which, nevertheless, will hopefully will take the place of a nuclear bomb being exploded in New York City. That outcome would only be the attempt by one of the arguing parties to solve every problem all at once.

Thinking there is such a solution is in itself, as this example shows, a great danger.

In our actions, and in the ways of thinking that lead to our actions, we need to avoid the temptation to oversimplify and to rush to conclusions. Arguing that Bin Laden is Marx-warmed-over is just the kind of lazy intellectual pigeonholing that's going to get us in more trouble. From inside that pigeonhole, feeling safely sheltered by our ignorance and our arrogance, the terrorists will just build more bombs.