Democracy and Moral Equivalence
One adult/one vote is of course a democratic principle. Shocking as it may seem, this principle implies that contradictory opinions are politically equal—in principle! The consequences are enormous.
Because democracy is very much based on the rule of quantified opinion, it is not necessary to examine an opinion’s validity but only the number of those who express that opinion. Nor is it necessary to examine whether an individual’s opinion is the result of reflection or of impulse, an abiding conviction or a passing fancy. Thus, wherever the quantification of opinions rules, people are less apt to take opinions seriously. Which means they will be less likely to develop the habit of critical thinking or of making logical and moral distinctions. Feelings or the emotions will thus tend to supplant logic. People will then become more susceptible to emotionally appealing and simplistic solutions to complex problems on the one hand, and to moral equivalence on the other.
For example, the Arab-Israel conflict is commonly portrayed as a political-territorial one, when in fact the conflict—certainly as perceived by Arabs—is nothing less than a clash of civilizations. Yet the political formula “territory for peace” is bandied about as the key to solving this dilemma. Not only are the parties to the conflict deemed morally equal, but to compound this obscurantism, a psychical and variable reality, “peace,” is made equivalent to a physical and invariable reality, “territory.”
Moreover, those infected by moral equivalence (lacking conviction in the justice of their cause) tend to believe that right cannot remain right when invested with force, that the use of force on behalf of justice makes one morally suspect. (This partly explains Israel’s self-restraint vis-a-vis Arab terrorism.) People of this soft-headed persuasion usually identify justice with benevolence. Democracies, they believe, should display good will to all nations regardless of their political or ideological character. This attitude requires democratic countries like the U.S. and Israel—ostensibly good—to hobnob with dictatorships like Saudi Arabia and Egypt—ostensibly bad. Here moral equivalence is cause and consequence.
The soft-headed tendency of democracy is more prevalent among its educated than its less educated citizens. The ordinry man does not usually identify justice with benevolence. Nor does he deplore the application of might in defense of right. He has no use for dictatorships, and lacking the sophistication of a university education, he disdains “looking at things from the other fellow’s point of view.” He is far less susceptible to moral equivalence than the more educated, as I will now show.
Let us go back to the Cold War era and consider the findings of professor Samuel Huntington:
The more educated people are, the less likely they are to think that Communism is the worst form of government … In line with this belief, the more educated are less likely than the less educated to believe that the United States should be stronger than the Soviets: in a 1979 poll, for example, 35% of those with a college education thought that it was necessary for the United States to be stronger than the Soviet Union, as compared with 47% and 59% of those with high-school and eighth-grade educations. Consequently, those with more education are much more favorably disposed to cutting the defense budget than those with less education: in 1974, for instance, 60% of those with post-graduate educations and 28% of high-school graduates supported a defense-spending cut.
These results may be attributed, in part, to the doctrine of moral relativism that has long dominated higher education in the democratic world. Relativism is virtually indistinguishable from moral equivalence, since it denies that one way of life is intrinsically superior to another. Left-wing intellectuals deem relativism a mark of cosmopolitan sophistication.
This is well illustrated by George Orwell’s insights into the attitude of England’s left-wing intelligentsia. Writing during the Battle of Britain, Orwell saw that these intellectuals tended to be “pacifists” and “defeatists” in “marked contrast to the common people, who either had not woken up to the fact that England was in danger, or were determined to resist to the last ditch.” England’s leftwing intellectuals, writes Orwell, “take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.” This perfectly describes Israel’s leftwing intellectuals who wish to abrogate the Law of Return because it smacks of “national chauvinism”!
Returning to Orwell, the author of ‘1984’ saw in England’s intelligentsia palpable evidence of moral relativism: “When I first read D. H. Lawrence’s novels, at the age of about twenty, I was puzzled by the fact that there did not seem to be any classification of the characters into ‘good’ and ‘bad.’ Lawrence seemed to sympathize with all of them equally, and this was so unusual as to give me the feeling of having lost my bearings. Today no one would think of looking for heroes and villains in a serious novel, but in lowbrow fiction one still expects to find a sharp distinction between right and wrong … The common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which intellectuals have long since escaped.”
Such intellectuals have dominated Israel’s foreign policy. I have especially in mind three leftwing Ph.D.s. Was it not Yossi Beilin, who, in 1992, sent Ron Pundak and Yair Hirschfeld to hold talks with the nefarious PLO—talks that led to the Oslo agreement to which these intellectuals still genuflecft despite its toll of more than 1000 Jewish lives?
Is not the Israel-PLO agreement a consequence of the moral equivalence typical of democracy? What is even more disturbing, the fact that the Beilins of Israel, despite all the suffering they have caused, remain in public life and vie for the highest offices of the land—does this not signify democracy gone mad? Does it not mean that the Oslovian opinion of the Beilins, notwithstanding its bloody consequences, remains as politically valid as its contrary—signifying the utter irrationality of democracy in Israel?
Oh for a statesman who will usher in the breath of reason and truth in this God-forsaken country!
