Today Slate columnist Camille Paglia, in responding to a reader’s letter complaining about her “moral relativism,” had the following to say:
What makes me uneasy in your argument is the Manichean polarization between “good guys” and “bad guys” among world governments. In my view, such stark moral absolutes do not exist, except from a fundamentalist religious perspective — such as the one that animated the Muslim fanatics who attacked and destroyed the World Trade Center. “The Iranian regime epitomizes evil,” you say. While we may rightly abhor and condemn the archconservative social policies of that regime, surely we should reserve extreme terms like “evil” for the genuine monsters of history, like Nero, Vlad the Impaler or Hitler. Calling every petty regional dictator “evil” is ultimately counterproductive by coarsening our political discourse and dehumanizing our opponents.
There are two major conceptual problems with this passage – disappointing ones from a liberal that I usually read with great interest and respect, even if I usually disagree with her.
The first is calling Iranian social policies “archconservative.” This may be technically correct, in that in Iran oppressing women and Jews, theocracy, and governmental control over all aspects of business, industry, and life are longstanding traditions that the Iranian regime would like to conserve. But to use that term in front of an American audience is to suggest that American conservatives are also in favor of racism and total government control over a populace – or at least that this is the end result if our conservative ideas are followed through to their natural conclusions.
But that’s relatively minor. The really egregious disconnect is her wrong headed view of evil.
It is of course true that calling every tin-pot dictator or other assorted bad guy “Hitler” is a bit silly and inaccurate, not to mention all the idiots who compare anyone they don’t like to Der Fuhrer. But that’s not because the smaller fries are necessarily less evil, it’s because the threat is usually far from comparable.
Evil itself, though, is not less evil because its scope is limited. If you murder one person just for the pleasure of it, does that mean you aren’t evil because you aren’t one of the “genuine monsters of history”? What about Fidel Castro or Che Guevera, who only killed several thousand people? What if you’re “only” a murderous thug who sponsors terror groups throughout the Middle East? To the victims of the killers, is the murderer less evil because they share a mass grave with fewer people?
You cannot have a coherent political or social theory unless you first have some solid and immutable baselines of Right and Wrong (which of course means that liberals who espouse such relativism either don’t practice what they preach or don’t care as much as they think they do). That may be polarizing, but the alternative is to be adrift as a society, with no core principles to guide you. The college liberal meme that it’s somehow enlightened to not believe in absolutes like “good” or “evil” is not only wrong, but it’s dangerous – especially to a nation such as ours that was founded more on ideas than on a love of the geography. And of course, those college hippies hardly practice what they preach, or they’d refuse to judge Republicans as “wrong” while allowing themselves to be seen as “right.”
Not all bad things are Evil. People who die due to negligence, incompetence, bad judgment, or even accidents are just as dead, but they are not victims of evil, and they shouldn’t be viewed as such – even when a great many are dead. But when people are killed or enslaved or otherwise deprived of their fundamental rights due to the malice of a person or a government, that is evil – no matter how few are deprived of life and liberty.
