Moral Purity

Rich has something else up. I recommend Synova's comment at BF, here.

Comment below written by: Synova

America is the source of all bad stuff. If we didn't teach "ignorant foreign kids to kill, maim, murder" they would never figure out how.

/sarcasm

I honestly don't know what it is... and *great* comment, Rich... I don't know if it happened when we rejected the concept of Original Sin and started teaching that children were good and pure unless taught to be otherwise, and then started treating (or continued?) to treat other nations and peoples like children?

Or maybe it's multi-culturalism and it's roots which absolutely demand that we *never* criticise another culture, particularly one that we can view as primative or less developed? (An interesting paradox, to simutaneously qualify a culture as those things while refusing to "judge" that culture in any way.)

I mean seriously... was it STAR TREK? This generation growing up believing that the "Prime Directive" is anything other than immorality codified? Or maybe it was all the things in our culture that made the Prime Directive seem obvious, and fine, and good? The Prime Directive demanded no judgement, no valuing, no intervention... and we watched that and we thought it was *good*. It was *good* not to save people. It was *good* not to try, for fear of unintended consequences.

Posted by: Synova | Nov 16, 2006 12:30:57 PM

Perma link in the date stamp.

The entire Star Trek Prime Directive thing, is telling. Because I also wrote about this same subject, except I called it Moral Purity of the Left. That Puritan belief that keeping your hands clean must take precedence over actual pragmatic concerns and hard work.

However, this post reflects a thought I have been chewing on for some time: have we, as I suggest above, swept things under the rug that we should be keeping in mind as we act today? Have we become too warm and fuzzy in our assurance that we have already "progressed" beyond such barbarism, and therefore believe we have no need to dirty our hands with further consideration of it?

Other people seem to be concerned about the same subject as well.

What are my views on this? I wrote about this awhile ago, so you can get the goods here.