Is Our Morality Warped?
It's an unsettling thing to reflect on.
“We dismiss—or even condemn—at home exactly what we honor and praise abroad. This is a remarkable phenomenon.”
It’s interesting to consider whether our society has a sick morality in which everything is backwards and everything is twisted and everything is upside down—thought experiments are a way to shed light on this.
Let me know if I make any errors in this piece—I want to correct any errors that I make. I should probably get a philosopher to look over this piece carefully and see whether everything holds up.
Minimizing
Westerners are showing a lot of moral outrage regarding the war in Ukraine—it’s justified moral outrage, but it’s also extremely selective moral outrage.
There’s an awkward situation that I’m sure has played out a few times where some critic of Western foreign policy points out how selective the moral outrage is, the interlocutor expresses confusion, the critic explains that the war in Ukraine isn’t a uniquely large-scale atrocity, and then the interlocutor gets upset at the way that the critic just—in the interlocutor’s interpretation—minimized the war in Ukraine.
I’m not sure what the best way is to avoid that awkward situation. There must be a way to discuss how selective the moral outrage is and—at the same time—make it crystal clear that you’re not minimizing anything.
But imagine if a critic slipped up and actually genuinely minimized the war in Ukraine—how would you personally react and what would be an appropriate reaction?
Bob and Alex
Noam Chomsky makes—in his commentaries on foreign policy—the following important observations:
there are some kindergarten-level moral principles
these principles are intuitively obvious to us when we look at enemy states
we somehow can’t fathom applying these principles to ourselves
our dissidents try to make us apply these principles to ourselves
we treat our dissidents like absolute shit
So it’s like Through the Looking-Glass—everything flips and inverts and reverses when you move from other states to our own state. We dismiss—or even condemn—at home exactly what we honor and praise abroad. This is a remarkable phenomenon.
Let’s just consider two people—one named Bob and one named Alex.
Bob lives in the US—he’s a good dissident regarding US foreign policy and he properly opposes US atrocities and he does good activism regarding US foreign policy, but he parrots the most disgusting Kremlin propaganda when it comes to Russian foreign policy.
Alex lives in Russia—he’s a good dissident regarding Russian foreign policy and he properly opposes Russian atrocities and he does good activism regarding Russian foreign policy, but he parrots the most disgusting Washington propaganda when it comes to US foreign policy.
I can personally say that my instinct is to say: “Alex is a good dissident—I really don’t care at all if he says gross stuff about US foreign policy.”
But strangely it all goes upside down when I consider Bob—my instinct is to say: “Bob is gross and the stuff that Bob says about Russian foreign policy makes me want to throw up.” And I wonder whether that inversion means anything.
And there are surely many more thought experiments that we could come up with in order to probe our morality and look for inversions.
An Interesting Implication
Gilbert Achcar writes in his excellent 6 April 2021 piece “How to Avoid the Anti-Imperialism of Fools” that there are certain Western anti-imperialists who do some really bad things—these people focus “exclusively on the hatred of the US government”, engage in “knee-jerk opposition to whatever Washington undertakes in the global arena”, and uncritically support “utterly reactionary and undemocratic regimes”.
I know the type of people Achcar is referring to. I’m curious about how much good these people do in opposing US atrocities—I’m not sure whether these people are good dissidents regarding US foreign policy, but if they are then they’re like Bob in my thought experiment.
And if they’re like Bob, maybe I should see them like I see Alex, since I should see Bob like I see Alex. So maybe I shouldn’t have such a harsh view regarding these people—that’s an interesting implication.
Soviet Dissidents
I took these notes based on an interesting Chomsky interview that appears in a 1977 book:
regarding the US reaction to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s statements, some in the liberal press “criticized his extravagances”—Solzhenitsyn went “well beyond” what these US liberals “could tolerate”
Solzhenitsyn “denounced American weakness in abandoning the struggle to subdue the Vietnamese resistance” and also made other statements that US liberals couldn’t tolerate
the liberal press in the US “never ceased marveling at what an absolute moral giant this man was”
Solzhenitsyn was actually “quite comparable” to “many American Communists” who “fought courageously for civil liberties here in their own country” and at the same time defended—or refused to criticize—the “purges and labor camps in the Soviet Union”
Andrei Sakharov was “not as outlandish in his views as Solzhenitsyn”, but Sakharov did—regarding the Vietnam War—repeat every “fabrication of the U.S. propaganda apparatus” in the same way that US Communists who “struggled for civil rights” in the US parroted the Soviet Union’s propaganda
I thought that it would be interesting to share these notes because Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov are like Alex in the thought experiment.
Apparently Solzhenitsyn and—to a lesser extent—Sakharov had some gross views about US foreign policy. And my personal view is that I don’t care: “Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov were admirable dissidents—I really don’t care at all if they said gross stuff about US foreign policy.”
So I might have to think about whether to view Bob differently, given my view on Alex and given my view on Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov.
Flipped Values
I took these notes based on an interesting 2011 Chomsky article that discusses our warped morality:
“intellectuals who serve their governments are considered responsible”
“value-oriented intellectuals are dismissed or denigrated”
the values flip when you move away from home and look at enemies
regarding the USSR, the “value-oriented intellectuals were the honored dissidents” and we felt “only contempt for the apparatchiks and commissars, the technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals”
regarding Iran, we “honor the courageous dissidents and condemn those who defend the clerical establishment”
“if we are serious about suffering and atrocities, about justice and rights, we will focus our efforts on where we can do the most good—typically, where we share responsibility for what is being done”
we disregard “elementary moral principles” like the principle about where to focus one’s efforts
we “have no difficulty demanding that our enemies follow such principles”
And Chomsky comments as follows in the 2011 piece:
Few of us care, or should, what Andrei Sakharov or Shirin Ebadi say about U.S. or Israeli crimes; we admire them for what they say and do about those of their own states, and the conclusion holds far more strongly for those who live in more free and democratic societies, and therefore have far greater opportunities to act effectively. It is of some interest that in the most respected circles, practice is virtually the opposite of what elementary moral values dictate.
It’s important to look for any moral distortions that exist in our society—I’ll definitely look into the topic of moral distortion more in future pieces.