To continue my thoughts from last night/earlier today, I feel like I need to talk about morality more in detail. This is a bit of a worldview existential thing. Remember how I studied worldviews before? Yeah. I feel like I need to go all existential to explain why I fall in the way I do in foreign policy conflicts.
So...when I was a Christian, it was hammered into me that the only objective morality is from God, and that without that, we'd all run around murdering each other. After all, without a divine being to tell us what to do and to set the rules and laws, anything is permitted, and perhaps we would use that freedom to all run around murdering each other.
Now, when I left Christianity, I came to believe this is false. Clearly, as a new atheist, I still had the same ethics I always did, if anything my ethics became superior to those offered in the Bible. And much like Penn and Teller would say, I don't murder, because I wouldn't want to murder. And the fact that we need a god to tell us that is more damning of the people claiming that than it is of anyone else.
But...let's be honest, I also was raised in a western tradition of law and morality, and I also am highly educated in it, much more so than most people. I have taken literal ethics classes in college, I've studied different ethical systems, and while I admit that there is no single right system out there, most systems seem to at least seem to trend toward some level of betterment of the human condition. We generally prefer not to be murdered so we don't murder. We generally prefer not to be stolen from, so we establish property rights and don't steal, etc. etc. etc. And again, we can debate what's the best way to run a society. And there is no straight answer, but at the same time, for a while, I kind of believed that most people were inherently "good" in the sense that most would agree on similar base rules and apply them across societies.
But honestly, I've been kind of thinking about this in the face if the Ukraine invasion and now the Hamas attacking Israel thing. And the more I look at these conflicts, the more I realize that some people, especially those without some sort of western moral system or education as such, just don't care. For some people, it really is as simple as killing those who they don't like and disagree with. And that's why I tend to support western society, and tend to be critical of other societies. Because many nonwestern societies can't even agree on valuing human life. All of our morals and ethics around life and progressivism is actually a cultural thing, not an objective thing.
When America went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, yes, civilians died, and people criticized the wars at home, but at the same time, we didn't TRY to kill civilians. We TRIED to be the good guys, to have rules of engagement meant to limit civilian casualties. Again, sometimes we failed our own standards, and it taught many of us an important lesson about the nature of warfare in general, and how it's often not worth intervening in the rest of the world to do "peacekeeping" activities and the like.
But then I see Russia just invade Ukraine, and rape, torture, and murder civilians. They're not even trying to avoid killing civilians, they're INTENTIONALLY targetting them, and based on what seems to happen in the regions that the russians capture, they largely try to forcefully deport thousands of people out of the country (if they don't kill them there) and then ship busloads of their own citizens in. Basically emptying the areas of Ukrainian civilians, and filling them with Russian ones. And then they claim the territory is theirs. I'd argue if they control the land for more then a generation or two, you might as well just let them have it as removing the people there would constitute as grave as a sin as what was committed in the first place, but honestly? Let's not ignore the actual sin here. This is genocide, plain and simple. And it should not be accepted as moral by the international community. I dont believe the rest of the world has a moral duty to act directly, but we should probably support Ukraine monetarily and with weapons to defend their homeland against the Russians, since if Russia is just allowed to get away with this crap, they'll keep doing it.
In some ways, the Hamas actions are just as disturbing to me. I mean, they basically paraglided into a rock festival and gun all the people down, and they take hostages, and rape and torture and murder people, and quite frankly act like animals. Like that's what this is, the morality of animals. More beast than rational human. And we're supposed to feel sympathetic here? Nah.
I mean, it's kind of true, there is no objective morality. Without a god instituting a divine morality, we can all do whatever we want. And that includes killing each other. Normally I'd expect people to act rationally enough to know that engaging in such behavior isn't helpful long term, and appeal to their reason and empathy, but in cases where people have none, what can be done other than doing warfare back onto them? If it's kill or be killed, at some point, good people have to do something or watch the bad people win.
And that's where I tend to come from in foreign policy disputes. America, its western allies, they're not perfect, and I'll admit it, our empires are, themselves, built on a pile of corpses (hello, Columbus day, don't think I haven't noticed you there), BUT....morality is for the living, not the dead. These are rules that we live by in the present, in dealing with real and alive humans today. We can't do anything for the dead, because they are dead. I'm not interested in relitigating the sins of the past like some SJW or some crap (hello "indiginous peoples' day", don't think I haven't noticed you either). But right now, we have moral systems that while not perfect, generally speaking, do right by most people. And we progressives, we continually try to improve them and make them more fair, and more just. We believe in improving the human condition, we believe in using institutions like the state, with ethics to guide us, to make our existence on this planet as comfortable as reasonably possible.
This is all built on the legacy of western institutions, flaws and all. And we need to protect such institutions. They did not just spring up out of nowhere. Many of the reforms we take for granted have been fought for and people have died for them. They are built after a long history of trial and error, and they work. And they will continue to work, as long as we support them.
And the correct way to fix them, is through reform. Not revolution like some lefties want, burning things down will just set back progress hundreds or thousands of years, which is why most communist revolutions have failed, and just ended in repressive police states. But fixing them through the institutions themselves, maintaining the spirit of those institutions. We need to defend our western societies from the evil barbarians. I know this sounds overly dramatic, but this is how I see the world. Compared to us, I look at factions like Russia and Hamas, and I just see barbarism, plain and simple. And when the barbarians come to the gates, we have to fight to protect our way of life. This ins't to say that we should be actively invading anyone who disagrees with us. I think Bush showed us the flaws of trying to export our ways of life on those who are unwilling to support it, or stand up for it. But, we need to maintain our ways of life from outsiders who wish to destroy it. And this is why I support Ukraine over Russia, and this is why I support Israel over Hamas. This is not to say that Ukraine, or Israel, are perfect. They are not. Not by a long shot. And neither is the US. But honestly, we get a lot more right than we get it wrong, and we're also comparatively better to the rest of the world. This does not mean we should overlook our past (again, looking at you columbus day), but that doesnt mean we should demonize it either and act like everything we do is evil (again, looking at you, indiginous peoples' day).
And I just feel like this needs to be said, given what today is in America (Columbus/Indiginous peoples' day) and what's going on in the rest of the world (conflicts where one side is clearly more in the wrong than the other).
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