Throughout all of this thread, and for that matter throughout most of the Bush and all of the Obama administrations I cannot help but be reminded of this post from September of 2004. It concentrates on the evils of Situational Ethics and morality and has always seemed to me to speak to the very core of what passes for Liberalism in the US today. In particular the following passage seems to encapsulate why the US shouldn’t give a damn what European intellectuals think of us:
The situation in Western Europe is far worse. The sickness of moral relativism (and that truly is what the less provocative phrase “situation ethics” means) has been virtually enshrined in the European mind. Nations that howled under the crushing boot of fascism some seventy years ago now pay homage to the sovereignty of butchers and tolerate the killing of Jews. Corruption in government is so widespread that it barely raises an eyebrow unless those caught out are somehow in disfavor at the moment. Two World Wars and a half-century of reliance on the sheltering arm of the United States for their security have thoroughly fractured the heart of once-great peoples. Moral relativism has turned justice in to crime, liberation in to imperialism, and patriotism in to nascent fascism. There is now half a continent of peoples who cannot recognize evil by its stench or its vileness. When the European Union collapses in to civil war they will be helpless to resist the resulting tyranny. Instead they shall welcome it, for tyranny shall be salvation and liberty an evil lie. The circle of “situation ethics” as the core of moral philosophy shall be complete. All that shall remain is to build the camps and fire the ovens.
The whole thing meanders about a bit, but in the end it seems to apply both to Liberals/Progressives and in a smaller way to why they are so enraged to find they cannot twist the meaning of words to render an unqualified ‘evil’ as something objectively ‘good’. The attempt to warp reality this way has to be daunting and most of them are not up to the intellectual challenge, so the fall back on the old stand-by: hate and anger.
