Why Morality Shouldn't Be a Matter of Fetishes

Morality is a means to create a better world, but too often we make a fetish out of some past event such that the future is made worse. The simple moral narratives we tell are more often wrong and outdated than not. As an example let's consider the media's decision not to make front page news out of three muslims who were beat up at Guilford College in North Carolina and their alleged assailants were charged with ethnic intimidation. This would appear to be the sort of news that the mainstream media loves. What could be more delightful to them than a story in which they can cast white Southerners as bigots? After all, didn't white Southerners have terrible, bigoted laws in their past? And isn't that Pat Robertson fellow from somewhere in the South? And what could be a better display of a reporter's moral purity than to portray muslims as victims? Sadly for the mainstream media, they couldn't make a Duke rape case out it. USA Today covered it in their college football section. Tragically, the alleged assailants were racially mixed.

I'm not trying to make a point about the bigotry of the mainstream media against the Southern Whites--though it certainly exists. I'm trying to say we need to move on from the crimes of now mostly dead Southern white men and stop fetishizing the historical South. This is not to Southern White Men or rednecks aren't without their faults. The anti-environmental ethos of NASCAR disgusts me. Rednecks haven't caught on how to defend deer hunting in this century, and I would be glad to give them some rhetorical advise about the issue: the environmental arguments for deer hunting are overwhelming. But let's compare these contemporary redneck moral issues of NASCAR and deer hunting to the heinous cruelty of foie gras production in France or Muslim mutilation of girl's genitalia or the anarchy in Somalia or Sudanese slavery or Chinese prison camps or random abuses of people in Nepal or countries enslaving people to go to the UN and listen to deadly boring speeches and so forth. (I'm so glad that John Bolton was emancipated!) We must get beyond the moral stories we tell ourselves and think about the world as it is and how it could be. Nothing is helped by making a moral fetish of the wrongs of the South over half a century ago.

Nor are our moral fetishes particularly accurate. I harbor the suspicion that the worst crime by whites against another people was what the Belgians did in the Congo, but someway that never gets mentioned. Nazism is name of evil in the 20th century. Yet, if one looks at the actual killings, the actual torture and so forth, the Communists were far worse.

Since our moral fetishes are both out-dated and inaccurate in their historical account of evil, I suggest that we shelf them and talk earnestly about what type of world we'd like to have using the facts of the world we see today. I think two facts in particular need addressing: an imperialistic religious cult that is obtaining more and more nuclear weapons and the destruction of our natural eco-systems by human overpopulation--global climate change or no global climate change due to greenhouse gases. (Greenhouse gases are quite likely to have serious effects on the Earth's climate, but if someone wants to doubt them, there is a smörgåsbord of other environmental risks we are taking.)