Anti-Climacus

IGNORANT, STUPID, OR A MORAL BARBARIAN? I'm going to take up Norm's question here, since I think it's an especially good one:

"Is this man ignorant, stupid or a moral barbarian? I'm happy not to count him among my acquaintances and so I'm unable to say. Then there's a 'Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return' letter; which, used like this, if you think about it, makes everything OK, since we can all shunt the blame and guilt ever backwards, and jeepers, you know, Osama, Blair, Straw, beheaders, Bush, Saddam, Stalin, Hitler, what's the bloody difference? Finally there's someone wanting Blair impeached for war crimes."

We can certainly rule out the possibility that he's stupid, because every leftist knows the difference between authoritarian governments and democratic ones, and the difference between intentional and accidental violence, right?

We can also presumably rule out ignorance; we think leftists like these misinterpret the facts and their moral obligations, but we don't think they're unaware of the existence of both.

I suppose this leaves moral barbarian, and a tempting choice it is (and quite possibly correct, as well). But I think there's one other option for a response: perhaps these people aren't really leftists at all: if you wanted to criticize along these lines, you'd note that there's very little talk of moral obligation*, very little about natural rights or underlying principles of liberalism (rule of law, universal sufferage, etc), and NOTHING about international solidarity. Whatever 'leftism' they can claim is merely an epiphenomenon with respect to what's actually driving their politics. Perhaps it's time for us to stop thinking of them as being merely off about this one issue.

*though much talk of morals, which is not at all the same thing. It's one thing to get sanctimonious about the killing of innocent people, and quite another to discuss, really and seriously, what's to be done about that killing, about how we do not have the option available to us to turn our backs on our fellow human beings, to really look at what our morals will require us to do, and to constanly come back to these questions and ask ourselves to prove and re-prove them, about which more above.