| Nov. 23rd, 2005 @ 10:09 am On the Cthulhu Mythos and Multiculturalism |
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Greetings, dear reader. Grab a mug of your favorite winter beer, make yourself and home, and wax philosophically with me about a topic that we all know and love. I come to you today to speak of the ins and outs of moral equivalence and its affect on all things: life, current events, and this mage game I just joined. Humor me for a moment while I conjecture (or is that rant?) -- it seems the only way I will quiet my raging inner monologue.
I joined a game of Mage the Awakening a couple of weeks ago with a few acquaintances from the last campaign. In it, we are explorers of truth and warriors against the corruption inflicting our society by the sinister hand of the Hierarch. Or at least so we believe.
Our adventures took us under the depths of the Pacific to a small (and entirely fictional) town by the name of Antonio(a?) Bay, north of San Francisco. It was there that we came across beings we would come to know as Deep Ones -- their city guarded with weapon-wielding warriors and a trio of submarines made from coral.
"Give us human sacrifices or take an oath that pledges your fealty and obedience to our kind and our gods," we were told. Their gods Dagon and the Hydra. Just so we're clear, I mean these things:
And then I was told that these creatures were not "evil," because from their point of view what they do is part of their religion and culture, and to them it's okay. But, and here is the point that I am trying to get across -- I am not them, and I don't care if they think that what they do is okay or not -- that if we say it's okay to sacrifice humans to dark gods in hopes of heralding their return to lord over the world is okay, then we've completely lost any sense of self. It's an argument of moral equivalence -- that is, because from their point of view they aren't evil, we shouldn't judge them. It's nonsense, and yet so popular these days with the church of multiculturalism.
But I can appreciate the art, history, people, cuisine, and spiritualism of another culture without accepting and agreeing with everything they believe. That does not make me "narrow minded!" as I was repeatedly accused of, or a bigot; it makes me alive and sane. If you agree that humanity has the right to eat chickens for food, or that prey has the right to fight back and win to survive against predators, then it should not be wrong for anyone to defend their lives or their values in such a manner.
But they're not evil? Of course not - no one considers themselves evil. But that doesn't mean that they're not wrong, or that they should not be killed for the betterment of society. The insane serial murderer is not "evil": he's mentally ill. But that doesn't mean that we're better off without him. It's survival of the fittest. All things work to their best interests - countries work toward the interests of their people, and people work to better themselves and things that they care about.
We must not, however, simply say that all beliefs are equally justified and morally okay. It's not okay to stone gays to death in the name of god, to bomb abortion clinics, to beat women, or to execute rape victims for "not putting up enough of a fight" (with the only evidence of that being that she got raped). Our society believes at its core that all men are equal, and that everyone is entitled to humane treatment, and to live and let live so long as you allow others to do the same.
But if you simply allow the zealots of the stone age to run rampant because "they don't believe that they're evil" does not make you open minded and it does not make you enlightened; it makes you a coward that is afraid to fight for what you believe in because you are afraid that you might get hurt, and it makes you rely on everyone else to keep your utopian "live and let live" society free and open on your behalf.
Think about moral equivalence the next time some lunatic blows up a bus full of civilians overseas, and question why the only outrage the world shows is what form the retaliation might take. Are the racists not the very people that take the mentality that "these little brown savages can't be expected to know right from wrong?" that claim the moral high ground and self-enlightenment?
And so I conclude with what we all learned as youth: there is such a thing as right and wrong, and if we as a people lose our ability to defend our good values, sometimes by force if necessary, then we are but bodies without an immune system, and lambs to the slaughter of those who have no time for such idealistic tripe. |
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