I'm going to preface this by saying I'm not sure we're arguing about the same thing, so I'll try to make myself more clear below.
On Sun, 27 Jan 2002, Gautam Mukunda wrote: > Me: > But that's nothing more than a convenient generalization on your part. > History does in fact show that the Founding Fathers were in the right to do > what they did. Morality is not nearly as conditional as you think it is. > It's _convenient_ for you to say that, but I actually think it's rather > morally lazy. It lets you avoid making moral judgments because everyone has > sinned. Everyone has, but not everyone has sinned equally, and people with > power and responsibility must make those judgments. If you believe that > democracy and freedom are good things, then you can't just dismiss that that > is what they were fighting for. It wasn't a landholders grab for power - a > historical reading of the War of the Revolution that held it that way would > be _wrong_, whatever the historians of the time chose to believe. I think we're missing each other here. I'm not trying to argue that we shouldn't make moral judgements (I made several in the post to which you originally replied, as you'll recall). But I think that a lot of what passes for moral/political reasoning in any ongoing war is mostly political spin. I do think that the morality of an act can depend a lot on one's perspective. Or perhaps I should rephrase: the ability of group A to grasp group B's moral reasoning is highly conditioned by perspective. The moral reasoning used by the West to justify Israel's existence and defence clearly doesn't agree with the moral instincts of many Arabs and Palestinians. Now, are their moral instincts wrong? Yes, when it comes to justifying terrorism. But their moral instincts are NOT wrong when they look with skepticism on the way the West behaves in the Middle East and see us constantly preaching higher values on the one hand while constantly cutting deals with cutthroats on the other. They are right to look skeptically on claims that the state of Israel "deserves" to exist where it does owing to some accidents of history while at the same time being told their own claims and lives are somehow of lesser value. To reiterate my earlier moral judgement: If the West robs Peter to pay Paul, it still owes Peter a debt. Palestinian terrorism doesn't erase that debt. If the West wants to clear its debt to the Palestinians, it has to put aside justifying the state of Israel as such and start work on doing good for the Palestinian people themselves. Not at the expense of Israel, but in addition to defending Israel. No argument is needed to justify feeding the hungry or mending the wounded. These goods we hold to be self-evident, and they do not require elaborate logic to defend. One can argue in response that nothing we do will be of any value unless the Arabs, as a culture, decide to grow up. If that's the case, then the question remains, what do we do while we wait? Defend ourselves, yes, but how do we discharge that debt without the satisfaction of which we must find ourselves on the defence for a very long time? [snip] I stand better educated w/respect to the British government. As for your question, > Let me ask another question - why are you so resistant to the idea that they > were doing the right thing, and should be judged (and praised) as people who > chose to do the right thing? History is not lacking in examples of people > who, having the opportunity to stand up for the right, failed to do so. Why > then do you think it is necessary or useful to argue that people who - at > extraordinary risk to themselves - did do so were actually acting in a > morally neutral fashion? What does that achieve? My point is not that the FF were wrong, or that they shouldn't be praised for doing the right thing, but that history isn't history until it's written. There are cases in which the difference between barbarity and brilliance depends on what side you are on. I think that in a case like Palestine vs. Israel, where several generations have of peoples have been committing violence against each other which each side sees as well-deserved retaliation and the prosecution of a noble cause -- in a case like that, continuing to argue about whose at fault for the whole situation becomes rather pointless and distracting. A different kind of moral reasoning is needed, not the abandonment of moral reasoning altogether. > Marvin: > In short, the Western stance towards the Middle East is largely grounded > in stupidity, hypocrisy, and good intentions gone awry. Arguing about > who deserves blame for what in the middle of a multifaceted clusterf*ck > like this gets really silly, really fast, and only servers the narrowest > of viewpoints, it seems to me. > > Me: > Again, that really strikes me as a rationalization. By saying that you > excuse yourself from making moral judgments. Some of the people involved > are more to blame than others, and justice requires that those who are to > blame are not rewarded for their actions. I don't disagree, but I think that we (the West, including the US and Israel) are so focused on rooting out the bad guys that we've conveniently forgotten our debt to the innocent, and by placing ourselves in a position in which we say, "No help for the innocent until the guilty have been punished," we may be hurting our chances of changing some critical memes and encouraging future reconciliation. > If you want to argue that we > should not support Israel (I don't know if you do - that's a hypothetical) > do so. If you don't, then do so. I think that we should support Israel, but I also think that supporting Israel is not sufficient. I believe that by supporting Israel, which is the right thing to do, we also incur a debt to the Palestinians, which as a culture we have failed so far to acknowledge. > But claiming that blame is irrelevant to > the situation is exactly equivalent to claiming that justice has nothing to > do with how the situation must be resolved. No, I'm claiming that justice can only be served by going beyond the eye for an eye formula. Placing blame only serves the cause of retribution and punishment, which is only the first step towards justice, not it's realization. Peace depends on eradicating a bad idea, not just some bad people, and ironically the bad idea in question thrives on the suffering brought about by our attempts to kill the bad people. > It removes the moral burden of > making judgments from your shoulders - but does not remove it from those > people whose choices in this situation actually matter. Then, once they've > made their decisions, you get to criticize them for "stupidity, hypocrisy, > and good intentions gone awry." But whatever we do, someone will be helped > and someone will be hurt. I think it is morally incumbent upon us to look > at the history of the region and help those who deserve to be helped - not > just pretend that there are no moral differences between the two sides or > argue that because no one involves meets some imaginary level of moral > perfection none of them deserve assistance. And I'm arguing that if we look closely at the history of the region, and of our involvement in it, we fill find that those who deserve to be helped include not only our allies to whom we owe a debt (Israel), but also to our enemies, who are our enemies in part because of a debt not yet paid. So my question to you, is, who deserves to be helped? The Israelis, to be sure. But the Palestinians also deserve to be helped. And which scale of justice will we use, the one that we understand but which many suffering innocents do not? And when they fail to understand, because they never had a chance, will we blame them in turn? Something bolder is needed than just cutting off Arafat, again. And I hate to use words like hypocrisy and stupidity, but I think they apply. Hypocrisy is inevitable in international relations, where we must choose between bad and less bad while keeping an eye for our own interests. I think stupidity comes into play when we start thinking we can somehow "manage" as thought by remote control a crisis of this kind, with the implication that if we just tweak here and there people will fall into line. Well, they won't, because they live in a different universe from us. And none of this detracts from the good intentions of everyone who has tried to work out a solution, but then we all know what paves the road to hell. Marvin Long Austin, Texas
