What to do about Libya ought to be a no-brainer. An odious dictator with a long record of sponsoring terrorism is now clinging to power in the face of popular revolt by mowing down unarmed demonstrators with jets, tanks, and machine guns. The Libyan people, who want to get rid of him, are facing the possibility of a protracted and bloody civil war because pussyfooting U.S. and European politicians don’t have the balls to send an international military intervention to topple Gadhafi, which with sufficient force could be done almost overnight with far less bloodshed than will occur if he is allowed to fight it out with the Libyan rebels.
In 1939, a shipload of nearly 1,000 German Jews aboard the S.S. St. Louis was turned away country after country (including ours). They were the vanguard of millions of European Jews who ultimately had no place to go except into Hitler’s gas chambers.
We live in a crummy world, and what’s crummy about it often results from the deliberate actions of governments and politicians. The above are just two examples of how leaders, across the board in all societies, almost without exception subordinate morality to expediency. We tolerate wholesale moral abdication in the private sector, too. Here in the U.S., under our capitalist system, we don’t expect ethical behavior from Wall Street, bankers, or mortgage brokers; so, unsurprisingly, we don’t get it. We get unbridled greed, chaos, and collapse instead.
What’s with this broad abdication of moral responsibility afflicting our world? Most of the world’s population is religious, and virtually all religions teach moral principles to their adherents. Here in the U.S., we supposedly teach ethics to our children in our homes and schools. How does it happen that humanity collectively pays so much lip service to moral and ethical concepts, and then so willingly and completely disregards them? I think the answer is that doing the right thing is nearly always harder than doing the expedient thing, and it’s human nature to do what’s easiest.
It should be obvious that the only way we’ll ever get a better world is by imposing on ourselves — and on each other — moral and ethical expectations that are not enforced now. This clearly isn’t happening. The only way it will happen is if common humanity — the public — demands ethical behavior and holds leaders accountable for ethical performance of their duties. As always, it is young and idealistic people — e.g., today’s college students who will become tomorrow’s opinion makers and leaders — upon whom we must rely on for this kind of change. The older entrenched generations, who have vested interests to protect, are largely useless for this sort of thing.
Presently, morality and ethics don’t have much effect on the decisions of governments, ours or theirs, or of businesses. Everywhere you look, politics and governance are practiced on the level of expediency. We see this, for example, in the efforts of Wisconsin’s governor to take the easy way out of a difficult budget problem by taking away the rights of workers. But this approach to things leaves us with, at best, an amoral world; and, as history keeps teaching us, an amoral world is not a very livable world for the vast majority of us.
Until we fundamentally rethink what values should drive the leadership of human societies, it’s not going to get better.