I read this, and wondered when or if he was going to render an opinion. He never did. He merely surveyed the landscape.
Here are some basic questions: Is slavery wrong? We argue it is, we make movie after movie after movie showing how evil white America was for countenancing it, but we are unable to denounce it in Muslim and African nations. Western Leftists are unable to denounce it in Communist nations, instead inventing a new word “chattel slavery” to differentiate the kind they are prepared to overlook from the kind they supposedly care about.
If slavery is not always wrong, then it is sometimes acceptable. How and when, then, is it acceptable? Practically, when denouncing it means renouncing Soviet era propaganda intended to undermine Western beliefs in their own Liberal system. Practically, when it means turning the rejection of slavery into an absolute value. Practically, when it means acting and speaking in a morally coherent and defensibly consistent way.
Is beating and raping women wrong? Is fucking 9 year old girls? Not trying to give anybody trouble, but these things clearly happen, and they are clearly condoned in some cultures. In other cultures, drunken consensual sex equates to rape, and we are told rape is wrong. It is wrong here, but I remain unclear what the Left feels about the rape of boys and girls and infidel women by Muslims. Is rape wrong in China when it is done by high Party officials and the police refuse to investigate, much less punish it? This, too, happens. It happens in Cuba and North Korea, guaranteed.
Here is the problem we have: nobody frames these questions with this degree of clarity. They use weasel word, big words, ambiguous words, ultimately, meaningless words, useless words.
The task of improving human life is a practical one. The task of spreading democracy is not that of spreading a system of government, but rather spreading Enlightened, better, values, and gradually building a more genuinely moral world, one which is ABLE to embrace and use democracy. You cannot impose democracy on morally and intellectually inferior people, and for our part we cannot protect our democracy as moral and intellectual cretins.
But academics, particularly, need to ask themselves what they believe. Do they REALLY oppose slavery? Do they REALLY support the right of women to be equal in their status to men? Do they REALLY support the right of children–both male and female–not to be raped?
If you support it through silence in some cases, and condemn it only when convenient, the proper word for that is unprincipled coward. Ah, but you can dispute whether or not being brave is a universal value, too, no? Yes, you can. And I can call you a fucking pussy. You and I live in different worlds. Mine has right and wrong and the possibility of useful moral judgement. Yours is that of a leaf blowing in the wind, if the leaf was also filled with self contempt, unexpressable and unquenchable anger, and an absolutely vapid and unstable sense of self, purpose, and place.