Moral Health

One does not have to be a brilliant observer of human behavior, on the order of, say, the great sociologist Erving goffman in order to see that there are many fundamental respects in which Western culture has changed for the worse.  I am going to offer an explanation for that change that in a very loose way that draws upon the work of both John Stuart Mill and Sigmund Freud, ending with a reference to Aristotle.  I am concerned more with the general framework of each thinker rather than the components with which their theoretical artifice was constructed.  I will further argue that modernity has masterfully exploited the deep, deep vulnerability that has been created.

First of all, I hold that a great many young people these days are angry.  And I regard anger as a form of pain.  When we are sufficiently pained, then we do not see clearly.  That is, our assessment of reality often misses the mark.  It is generally known that the worse time to make a decision is when one is in the throes of rage, precisely because one’s judgment is apt to be fundamentally flawed.  If this is right, then it follows rather straightforwardly that perpetual rage is problematic precisely because this means that a great many of judgments are apt to be flawed.

The pain of which I speak comes from the systematic failure of so many parents these days to affirm their children, where the affirmation is not about material offerings, but involves an abiding investment of the self of each parent with regard to the psychological well-being of their children.

I hold with John Bowlby that each child has an ineliminable need for the affirmation that comes only with an abiding emotional affirmation of her or his parents.

To grow up with out that abiding emotional affirmation from parents is to grow up with an aching sense of emptiness and thus a profound sense of longing.  On my view, this emptiness and longing in a child is what occasions the anger about which I am speaking.

Naturally, every child makes an attempt to fulfill that emptiness and to speak to the eternal longing.  Every child makes an attempt to abate the rage within.  Some, of course, are more successful at doing so than others.  Some, indeed, are quite successful.  Alas, a great many are not.

Now, the hallmark of modernity is that it is always offering something that is supposed to provide one with enormous satisfaction.  It is just amazing how many things come with the promise of changing one’s very life for the better.  If it is not a cell phone, then it is some alcoholic beverage.  If it is not a digital camera, then it is an Ipod.  And on it goes.

It is easy enough to think that this is just the hyperbole of advertising.  I think not, though, if only because way too much money is spent cultivating the impression that the items proffered for sale dramatically change one’s life for the better—as opposed to merely satisfying a present desire.  I mean what else can beer do but satisfy a present desire?  To be sure, there is nothing wrong with that.  However, I take it to be not to at all insignificant that millions upon millions of dollars are spent suggesting that beer does much more than quench a present thirst.

So we have children growing desperately lacking the deep emotional affirmation from their parents that once upon a time was commonplace.  And we have a world that offers these children one thing after another with the promise that they will achieve genuine satisfaction.  Needless to say, this is not a good mix.

Now, another factor is that where we have constant rage, then it will turn out that having sustained self-control is problematic.  And wherever sustained self-control is a problem, the displaying what goes by the name commonsense will also be a problem.

As I have already indicated, everyone knows that deep rage and pain are utterly cancerous, often inclining us to weigh things in quite inappropriate ways.

One can no doubt see how Sigmund Freud has influenced my thought.  John Stuart Mill has influenced my thought in the following way.  Mill grasped especially the well the significance of a social climate.  He understood that what makes the difference so often in life when we are weary is that we are in a morally good social climate.  To take a simple example, what my occasion me to be polite when in a moment of great tension is the simple fact that I live in a culture in which politeness is routinely displayed and expected.  By contrast if I am in a culture—say, this one—in which going ballistic is just what one does, then ballistic behavior is precisely what one is likely to get when things have gotten rather tense for me.  Climate makes a difference because (a) it tells us what the norms and what the expectations are and because (b) most of us do not want to find ourselves too far outside of the norm.  The exceptions, and there are those, prove the rule.

If I am right about parenting and children these days, then guess what: Rage has become the norm and the absence of self-control has become the norm.  Or to put the point slightly more hesitatingly, both are increasingly becoming the norm.  So, for instance, many high school teachers these days are often afraid of their students.  I don’t like excursions down memory lane.  Yet, the contrast is ever so pertinent here: Ne’er a teacher in my high school that I attended was afraid of the students.

On the one hand, the change is certainly not owing to some evolutionary difference between high school students nowadays and those back in the day.  On the other, the change did not just come about.  Something occasioned it.  And it will not do to intone that today’s youth have less respect for their elders and authority.  For the issue, obviously, is not whether today’s youth have less respect, but why that is so.  I have sketched a view that provides an answer.

We did not just become more bellicose, as if a genetic mutation occurred.  We are more bellicose because the conditions that have kept bellicosity in check have been slowly disappearing.  And it is not just that parents have been steadfastly not providing the kind of emotional affirmation that their children need, it is also the case that parents have not been modeling the kind of behavior that turns children into good citizens.

Like language, much social behavior is learnt imperceptibly as we witness the behavior of our parents.  But parents are not there to provide emotional affirmation, then certainly they are not there to model moral excellence for their children.  This point, of course, comes from Aristotle’s thesis that moral excellence requires habituation.  One might very well note that if the claim held true in Aristotle’s day, then it holds all the more so nowadays, given that there are far more distractions nowadays than in time’s past.

I end with an important illustration.  Time was when a great many parents illustrated the virtue of self-restraint before their children.  Every child saws her or his parents set aside satisfying their desires, on various occasions, in order to what was good for the family.  Such behavior on the part of parents was seen as something that decent and mature parents naturally do—a routine part of parenting well.  But what extraordinary lessons that were being modeled before the children time and time again.  A lesson about self-control.  A lesson about evaluating desires.  Above all, a lesson about not giving into desires in order to do what is right.

Now, it may or may be not be true that adults should have the right to live their lives as they choose.  And it may or may not be true that no adult should be required to sacrifice her or his own successes for the moral excellence of her or his children.  Just so, there is no gainsaying the reality that parents cannot possibly model moral excellences before their children when they (the parents) are too busy to be present.  Parenting in abstentia is but a form of non-parenting.

The difference between human beings and animals is we who are human beings can affirm our capacity for excellence.  This, alas, cannot be done in absentia.  Unfortunately, so many have of us have managed to convince ourselves otherwise.  A consequence of this ignoble lie—perhaps this deliberate self-deception—is that we find violence and threats of violence where once before nothing of the sort existed.  Something changed.  This blog-entry sketches an account of the way in which that that something is us with regard to parenting.  The question, then is this: Will we have the courage to admit our mistake here?  This is the challenge of modernity.  I would that I were confident that we will meet it.

If racism is the unwarranted belief in the inferiority of another, whether the inferiority be moral or intellectual: then there is nothing whatsoever that conceptually precludes blacks or Muslim Arabs from being racist.  Indeed, the belief that all whites are racist is, itself, manifestly racist, since the view that all whites are racists is no more tenable than the view that all blacks are just.  Again, the belief that the life of a white person or a Jew is, in virtue of being such, less valuable is manifestly a form of racism.  If this is right, then racism is rampant both among blacks and Muslim Arabs.

If liberals, I dare suggest, have been unwilling to name the behavior for what it is.  Or, more charitably, liberals initially allowed misplaced compassion to get in the way of naming the racism of blacks and Muslim Arabs for what it is.  And now we have blacks and Muslim Arabs holding the observed view that they cannot be racist.  But even if we conceded that, they most certainly can be murderers; and that, last time I checked, is a much worse moral wrong.

My reflections on the murder of Illan Halimi in France starts with a poignant truth, namely that the term “racist” has come to be one of the most invidious expressions in modern times.  Whereas the term once signaled genuine wrongdoing, it has essentially become an excuse for wrongdoing.   Blacks in the United States and Muslim Arabs in France use the term as a noose around neck of whites.  A white person who disagrees with a black or Muslim Arab or who criticizes one or the other is automatically deemed a racist.

I do not know how long this modus operandi will continue.  But one thing that I do know is that this strategy ensures that there will be a lack of respect between blacks and whites or Muslim Arab and whites.  It is just a matter of time before whites simply conclude that enough is enough.  In the absence of mutual respect, there can be no genuine social equality.  And both in France and in the United States, I can sense the resentment growing.  I turn now to France.

A great many Jews in France are Sephardic Jews who hail from North Africa.   Many, in fact, actually speak Arabic.  I am personally acquainted with many Jews who, in terms of appearance, could just as easily Arabic.  For more than a dozen years, I have been close friends with a Jewish family that lives in a neighborhood that has a considerable Muslim Arabic population.  Notwithstanding all of many conversations Jews in France, I have never heard a Jews speak ill of Muslim Arabs.  The only exception has been in the context of fear on the part of Jews for their safety.  Indeed, some members of the French Jewish community, with whom I have a strong friendship, did not seem to think that anti-semitism was on the rise in France, although there appeared to be palpable evidence to that effect all over the place just a few years ago.

What people say when they feel entirely free to speak their mind is a very clear indication of their feelings, fears, and concerns—even their hopes.  So it is hardly trivial that I cannot recall any hostility on the part of Jews towards Muslim Arabs.  The only exception has been the concern on the part of Jews for their safety; and as I have indicated not every Jews expressed that concern, though from where I stood every Jews in France was justified in having that concern a year or so ago.

Now, the truth of the matter is this.  Were French Jews to express their hostility towards Muslim Arabs, using whatever means available to them to demonize Muslim Arabs, such behavior on the part of Jews would be immediately characterized by Muslim Arabs as racism against Arabic Muslims.  And, of course, if as of tomorrow gangs of Jews were to circulate about in Paris and target single Muslim Arabs, and then torture and kill them, just as the gang of Arabic Muslims tortured and killed Illan Halimi, the outcry of racism would be utterly deafening.

Illan Halimi was tortured over a period of several days, and then left tied naked to a tree.  A ransom fee of more than 300,000 euros was demanded of his family, and then of Jews in general.  Why?  Because the hoodlums held that Jews by nature have money.

I have no interest in denying that Muslim Arabs in France have known injustice at the hands of the French people.  What I despise, though, is the use of this as an excuse to wrong innocent people.  Likewise, I despise the absence of outrage on the part of the Muslim Arabic community in France.  Enough is enough.

Moral maturity and decency require that we not use the wrongs against us as an excuse to perpetuate evil.  And the failure to be mindful of this truth will not result in a world of greater justice for blacks and Muslim Arabs.  Quite the contrary, it will result in a world that is ever more vicious.

Evil is rapacious.  And when there are no more whites and no more Jews to murder, then evil will turn on members of the very communities who could not see (that is, who failed to acknowledge) the evil done to whites and Jews.

We must distinguish between the reality that war can give rise to people and the quite different reality that violence for the sake of violence will not, because it cannot, give rise to peace.

The real problem to moral progress is not the evil of the past, but the invidious moral profiteering of the present by those whose claims to insidious racism is a more a function of their imagination than their reality.  The cloth of goodwill is continually being torn asunder.  The murder of Illan Halimi is a reminder of something very profound.  One is that evil never just goes away.  Nor is it ever appeased.  The other is that misplaced compassion is but a footstool of evil.

Many blacks in the United States and many Arabic Muslims in France (and Europe generally) want equality without accountability.  That is rather like wanting to swim without getting wet.

How we name things is hardly trivial.  I could be merely expressing my informed opinion about something.  Or, I could be launching a full-fledged verbal attack.  Now, what exactly am I doing when I express my disagreement with your views?  Offhand, it would not occur to me to think that I am attaching you.  Although it might be that I am attacking you, that most certainly need not be the case.  Nor am I attacking you if I present arguments and reasons for why I disagree with you.  This is so even if you have counter-arguments to my arguments.

So it came as quite a surprise to me to run across a blog-entry entitled “When Colleagues Attack!” In my blog entry, I confined my remarks to the issue; accordingly, it would not have occurred to me to think that I had attacked the writing professor whose students had criticized her on the website Facebook.Com.  I did not call her names.  I did not make allusions to her character.  What I did do, however, was defend the view that the University did not handle the situation properly and that what the students said was protected by the First Amendment as free speech.   Unless I am missing something, this does not constitute attacking her—at least not unless you hold the view that expressing views at odds with hers thereby constitutes an attack.

Professor Rachel Collins maintains a blog.  I maintain a blog.  She is absolutely entitled to express her opinion about my views regarding the situation.  She has not in fact attacked me.  But just as I do not suppose that she attacked me, I am at a loss as to just how it turns out that I have attacked her—unless disagreement thereby constitutes an attack.  But since I assume that she rejects that view in her own case, I am going to allow myself that possibility in my own case.

Now, I stand by my initial assessment even as I take seriously the difference in standing between me and Ms. Collins.  I am a male; I am a full professor.  She, as the pronoun would suggest, is a female; she is a graduate student.  This is not a trivial difference at all.  And I am quite mindful of the fact that she is vulnerable in ways that I am not.

Let me also be unmistakably clear that I most certainly hold that the remarks made by the students were utterly distasteful.  Many of those remarks were in fact mean-spirited.  Here are four such comments made by students on Facebook.Com:

• I’d rather watch my brother masturbate to midget porn with my mom than go to your class
• I’d rather be eaten out by a monkey than go to your class
• I’d rather eat all the hair stuck in the drain of the showers than go to your class
• I’d rather scrape the discharge off your vagina from your yeast infection than go to your class

Are these remarks utterly vulgar and distasteful?  Absolutely.  Are these remark threatening, harassing, slanderous, and libelous?  I do not see that they are.

Would it have been better had the students not have made such remarks?  Obviously it would have been better.  I am no fool.  I can see the horrendous indecency of the remarks.

But the indecency of these remarks is not the issue.  The issue is whether or not these remarks ought to have been protected as a form of free speech; and is it relevant that Ms. Collin’s is a female graduate student.

Well, I do not see the relevance of being male or female here.  For I can think of equally disgusting sexual allusions that might be said regarding a male.

I also think it quite interesting that Ms. Collins rather nicely passed over my claim that I accept, in the name of free speech, the right of black students on the Syracuse University campus to regard me as an Uncle Tom.  I have always accepted that view.  I have not always been a full professor with a long list of publications.  Yet, Ms. Collins masterfully passes over that reality.

Now, calling a black an Uncle Tom is obviously not parallel to making disgusting sexual allusions.  But as far as a black insult goes, the label “Uncle Tom” pretty much defines the nadir of things.  Yet, I accept that black students should be free to have this opinion of me and to express it on a public website such as Facebook.Com.

And if we are going to move into oppressive-trump card mode, let me just say that no non-black on this campus has a clue as to how painful that appellation is.  The depth of alienation that I often feel walking across campus is extraordinary.  I might as well be a spirit or something, as there is an utter sense of invisibility that I have in the eyes of so many black students.  No recognition; no greeting.  Worse, most of my white colleagues and most of my Latino colleagues are utterly oblivious to the depth of that pain.  Nay, I would dare say that some think that I deserve it.   If it were not for my publication record, it is not at all inconceivable to me that many a white and many a non-white on this campus and perhaps among members of the administration would have found a way to dispose of me.   I have dared to have the courage of my convictions.  And liberals on the Syracuse University campus have had more than a little difficulty with that, their undying committment to open-mindedness notwithstanding.

It would be one thing if I were talking about minority students whom I have taught.  But not so.  I am talking about minority students to whom I have never ever said a word and who have never heard me say anything.  Would things be worse were such opinions of me expressed on a public website?  This is hardly obvious to me.

So I know something about pain on the Syracuse University campus.  Noting that I am a male, Ms. Collins blithely passed over the issue of pain to which I drew attention.  How is the argument supposed to go?  Is it that tenured males are in no position to say anything about moral pain?  The problem, undoubtedly, is that no one thinks of me as an underdog, though I am visibly and unmistakably black; accordingly, my being considered an Uncle Tom by black students was conveniently passed over.

This brings me to the issue of status.  It would be bothersome if the amount of free speech which students had turned upon a professor’s status with the university.  This is especially so if an instructor’s actually standing with the university is not impacted by the remarks.

The truth of the matter is this.  Syracuse University requires anonymous teaching evaluations and it claims to take these very, very, very seriously.  Students are free to give the instructor any ranking that they please.  I could be missing something.  But next to anonymous teaching evaluations, stupid unsavory remarks on Facebook.Com have next to no impact at all upon an instructor’s university standing.  Yet, there is no accountability here at all.  Students can evaluate professors as they please.  And yet, the University trips all over itself attaching importance to teaching evaluations.  Given how the University carries on about them, one would think that teaching evaluations represetend some form of Platonic truth that descended from the heavens.

So let us see.  On the one hand, we have (a) stupid and nasty and distasteful comments on a public website that the University does not take into account in when assessing an instructor (where no slander or harassment or threat or libel is involved).  On the other, we have (b) anonymous teaching evaluations where, without any accountability at all, students can give a professor any ranking that they please and which are accorded enormous weight by Syracuse University.  Whether one female or female or white or non-white, which leaves one infinitely more vulnerable in terms of one’s university standing?  The answer is too obvious for words: (b).

Given the truth that one’s vulnerability as an untendured instructor lies with (b) and not at all with (a), I can consistently hold that the view that I hold about the ACLU.  I do not deny that the psychic pain of (a).  In fact, I have spoken to the psychic pain quite personally, though that was ignored.  However, I hold that in the absence of very special circumstances psychic pain alone does not suffice to limit free speech, which is why I hold that the ACLU did the right thing in supporting the right of Nazis to march through Skokie (IL), a town with a great many Holocaust survivors.

Three final comments: (i) The University could have and should have handled the matter in a more constructive manner rather than in the ex post facto and ad hoc manner in which it did.  (ii) I do not mean to discount the psychic pain that Ms. Collins has endured.  I commiserate with her in this regard.  But I consistently hold that psychic pain alone does not warrant limiting free speech.  If I thought for a moment that her standing with Syracuse University would be adversely impacted by those stupid Facebook.Com remarks, I would be an unfailing ally.  There are undoubtedly cases where it is not at all clear whether a person’s university standing will be adversely impacted or not.  Not so in this instance.  I know somethng about being treated unfairly by students.  And it is both that knowledge and pain that informs the position that I have taken in this blog-entry.  (iii) In the oddest of ways, freedom of speech did the professor a favor.  Or so it is, given that the students could have anonymously turned in teaching evaluations that gave her a completely negative rating; and these evaluations would have been taken seriously by Syracuse University.

A very common expression in the English language is that one cannot have it both ways.  It is a way of saying that there are limits imposed by the framework of our endeavors.  The classical example of this has to do with the way in which people carry themselves.  For example, a member of the clergy who wants to be respected as such cannot spend all of his time hanging out with the boys and doing what they do.  He cannot have it both ways.

Here is a different example.  As a professor, I cannot hang out with my undergraduate students, attend their parties and social functions, get drunk with them, flirt with them, and so on, and then really expect them to respect me in the classroom as their professor.  They have their space and I have mind.  That is the way it should be; and that is the way that it has to be if I want my students to respect me.  I cannot have it both ways.

There is no end to examples of this sort, which brings me to Islam and the cartoons published in a Danish newspaper.

The history of Islam is full of claims about holy wars.  Indeed, even now one holy war after another is declared against the West, especially the United States.  Foremost among those who have declared a jihad against the United States is Osama Bin Laden.  In any case, the point is that these wars are declared in the name of Islam, and so in the name of the Prophet Mohammed.

Endless suicide bombings and killings of individuals known to be innocent, such as children on a school bus, have justified, and continue to be justified, in the name of Islam, and so the Prophet Mohammed.

Well, the problem is simply this: Radical Muslims cannot have it both ways.  They cannot invoke Islam, and so the Prophet Mohammed, whenever they wish to justify an act of violence without inviting caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed as a purveyor of violence.

This obviously, is not just a point against Islam.  Violence has also been committed in the name of Jesus, as the Crusades remind us.  And if the overwhelming majority of Christians had continued to commit violence in the name of Jesus, it would be perfectly natural for there to be the appearance of caricatures of Jesus as a purveyor of violence.

Nowadays, of course, one does not speak of Christianity and violence in the same breath.  Accordingly, radical Christians who kill abortion doctors in the name of Jesus are readily seen for what they are: lunatics who are at the fringes of Christianity.

The simple truth is that there is a very real sense in which the image of Jesus is inescapably tied to the behavior of the major figures in modernity who present themselves as Christians.  From Martin Luther King, Jr. to Mother Theresa to Pope John-Paul II, the ambassadors of Jesus have in modern times have presented themselves as strong and courageous—but never violent.  Most certainly not individuals who were quick to find an excuse to kill.

With Islam, things seem to be the exact opposite.  At the drop of a hat, a holy war can be declared over something or the other.  For all I know, this may be an abuse of the religion of Islam.  But this does not change the fact that an awful lot of well-placed imams seem to declare jihad over one thing or another, where this is thought to justify taking the other’s life even if the other is a mere child on a school bus.

What can I say?  Islam cannot have it both ways.  It goes without saying that the picture accompanying this paragraph is disrespectful of the Prophet Mohammed.  And I do not want either to justify or to excuse it.  Yet, insofar as we pass around blame here, then I fear that adherents of Islam must shoulder some of the blame as well.

Non-Muslims will have no more respect for the Prophet Mohammed than the adherents of Islam have for him.  And when non-adherents continually see key figures of Islam invoke Mohammed as a justification for violence whenever Muslims do not have their way or they do not like an outcome, then the Prophet of Mohammed, far from being presented to non-Muslims as a pillar of righteousness for all, is presented to the non-Muslim as none other than a puppet for violence whose strings are pulled at will by Muslim leaders.  The point of the image the camel, then, is not that the Prophet Mohammed is the backside of a camel, but that in view of the way in which Muslims invoke him it is as if he were.  At least, this is a very plausible interpretation of the image.

Fear is one thing.  Moral respect is another.  If Muslims want the Prophet of Mohammed to be respected, then they need to re-make his image.  If at the slightest provocation by non-Muslims, the Prophet Mohammed can be invoked to justify murder and mayhem against these unbelievers, then the Prophet will be seen as he has been fashioned.  Feared, perhaps.  Respected, no.   On the other hand, if non-adherents of Islam see time and time again that the Prophet of Mohammed is invoked to garner restraint and good will, then he will be regarded accordingly.  Islam cannot have it both ways.  No religion can.

I am frequently told that Islam is a peaceful religion.  Funny, I cannot seem to remember the last time I heard that Muslims went out of their way to give in order to help those who are suffering, be they Muslims or not.  Regrettably, Muslims have been masterful at exploiting blacks in the United States.  However, I do not recall ever hearing talk about a Muslim equivalent to the Salvation Army in Europe or Asia or Africa.  On the other hand, the image with which I led this blog entry strikes me as common enough: Threats and more threats whenever there is something disliked.  And that makes all this talk about showing respect for the Prophet Mohammed seem awfully disingenuius.  More like: Do as I say and pay no attention to what I do.  And that, alas, is just the problem.  Presumably, the Prophet Mohammed did not teach that violence is the solution to every problem.  But a great many of his visible adherents are teaching just that lesson.  So if I may mockingly ask:  Given all their talk about violence in the name of Islam, what on earth could they expect us naive infidels to infer about the Prophet Mohammed?  That he is the Prince of Peace?  I think not.

You want me to see your Prophet, be he Moses or Jesus or Mohammed, as righteous?  Well, try being righteous yourself ! ! !

On the other hand, if Muslims keep telling all the world that suicide bombers have 70 virgins awaiting them in heaven,  then Muslims shall have to understand that the thought embodied in the adjacent cartoon is apt to cross a great many minds.  Notice that it does not occur to Christians to make a similar claim on behalf of martyrs, of which there have been many.  And no one thinks to conjure up an image of Jesus making such a claim.  This is no accident, as there is nothing about Christinianity and the interpretations of its adherents that would incline anyone to have such a thought.  There is another expression in English that is very apt here: One reeps what one sows.  It is time for Islam to take a reality check.

In the early 90s, hope was in abundance.  The Berlin Wall fell and Nelson Mandela was freed.  And while these things are now just a part of our social backdrop, they are events that stunned the world, giving rise to unprecedented jubilation—and hope that the world could indeed become a better place.

But here we are just over a decade later; and it would seem that anyone who thinks that the world will become a better place has to be delusional.  In fact, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the world is poised for World War III.  Many will rush to blame the foreign policy of the United States.  However, I am sure that the root of the problem does not lie there.  The point here is not that U.S. foreign policy is flawless.  Hardly.  But that its flawed foreign policy, does not serve up World War III.

The lightening rod, of course, is the Middle East.  Iran wants Israel blown off the map, and challenges the very reality of the Holocaust.  Neither of these can be considered a reaction to the foreign policy of the United States.

Then there is the simple reality that Iran is determined to become a nuclear power.  There is no reason whatsoever to think that Iran is going to back down, owing to pressure from both the European Union and the United States.  And when Iran does become a nuclear power, there is little reason to think that it will not target Israel.  As an aside, the hatred of Israel has little, if anything, to do with the Palestinian people.

Now one scenario is that Israel will sit by and wait for a nuclear attack from Iran.  Another is that Israel will launch a pre-emptive first strike.  True, this latter approach may still mean the demise of Israel.  All the same, this beats passively waiting to be blown to smithereens.  And if Israel launches a pre-emptive first strike, her Arabic neighbors will surely attack.  After all, the newly elected Hamas also has as one of its aims the destruction Israel.  And if these things do not give us World War III, then nothing will.

Quite simply, nuclear weapons in the hands of a leader driven by pure hate is utterly problematic.  This observation points to one profound difference between then and now.  There has always been hatred in the world, as even the most cursory glance at world history makes abundantly clear.  The difference, though, is that there has not always been the means to act upon that hate with utterly devastating consequences.  Surface-to-air missiles, land mines, and explosive devices of every sort have all made it possible for anyone to participate ever so easily and readily in the act of destroying others.

Before continuing, I should note that I have taken a rather informal survey regarding whether or not we are on the verge of World War III.  For you see, I honestly thought that I was just being silly.  The surprise is that everyone to whom I have mentioned this possibility has concurred.  Ordinary folk who are just trying to get on with their lives sense that something horrendous is in the offing.  Worse than that: People have the sense that it will happen much sooner than later.

Of course, this is all rather informal.  Yet, I am struck by the fact that not since the late 60s has the possibility of World War III seemed so utterly real either to me or to folks with whom I have an occasional chat.

Returning to the issue of hate, I should like to draw attention to one of the most important lessons to be learnt from Nazi Germany.  The lesson is that excusing hatred invariably produces a social catastrophe of major proportions.  Excusing hatred is a case of being too clever for our own good.

On my view, we sit at the brink of world disaster because the nations of the world have found a multitude of excuses for excusing hatred.  And we shall surely reap what we are sowing.

A few years back, I made the following remarks to someone:

1. Neither Muslim Arabs nor Jews are perfect
2. The loss of innocent Arabic life is wrong; the loss of innocent Jewish life is wrong
3. We have problem if either Muslim Arabs or Jews lose sight of the truth of (1) and (2).

I thought that I had presented a set of incontrovertibly true.  Alas, the person became angry.   You tell me: How could any morally decent person disagree any of the above claims?

World War III shall occur because the nations of the world have found one excuse after another not to present a united front with respect to the truth of claims (1) – (3).

So if I am right, then the hatred of Israel is but part of the problem.  The other part is our cultivated moral impotence.  Literally, we are excusing ourselves into oblivion.