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Niceness as goodness
Makes perfect sense: the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the leading UK charity dealing with child protection, has been spending its money on campaigning to outlaw parental smacking rather than protecting actual children. So they join the American Catholic bishops, who would rather pronounce on racism, foreign policy and social justice than deal with the horrors they are actually responsible for cleaning up. And with reason. It’s both more glorious and more pleasant to make grand public pronouncements in respectable settings among nice people who show you proper respect than to deal with the sickos and lowlifes who abuse children. Besides, you’ll get more credit for being a good and heroic person by going after the middle class and parents who are trying to do their job than by going after abusers, who tend to be marginal types in one way or another. So who, given the choice, would act differently? Posted by Jim Kalb at February 25, 2003 10:40 AM | Send Comments
“It’s both more glorious and more pleasant to make grand public announcements in respectable settings among nice people who show you proper respect than to deal with the sickos and lowlifes who abuse children.” This reminds me of something said by Rowan Williams in a collection of his sermons that was being discussed at a monthly reading group at my church a few years ago. In one of the sermons he talked about the problem of evil in the modern world and gave the Holocaust as an example. I said to the group: “What does the Holocaust, this long ago event that took place in Europe, have to do with the evils that we’re doing in our own lives? When Williams uses the Holocaust as his example of moral evil, he’s implying that we, his listeners, are perfectly fine, that evil only lies elsewhere, while we congratulate ourselves on the fact that we’re not like that.” (Yet, ironically, it seems I spoke too soon about the Holocaust not being relevant to our lives. With the massive rise of anti-Semitism in Europe and America during the last couple of years, it would seem that the sophisticated Western world is embracing the very thing it had made the touchstone of evil this past half-century.) Posted by: Lawrence Auster on February 25, 2003 11:16 AMAlongside the resurgence of active anti-Semitism, there is the passive acceptance of anti-Semitism, the unwillingness to oppose either the Muslim jihadists of today or even (as can be seen in the following letter to the editor of the Weekly Standard), the Nazis in the past. To the editor: I attend graduate school at Carnegie Mellon, home to a large international population of French students (Fred Barnes, How Many Frenchmen Does It Take …). In fact, my best friends are French. Recently, we had a discussion about the Iraq situation and mostly it involved their surprise that I would have no problem serving in the military campaign against Iraq if my service was needed. Their sentiments were so alarmingly pacifistic that I asked a very telling question: surely, I said, they would have taken arms against Germany in World War II? They answered, “Maybe … it depends.” I couldn’t make this up. —Jason Thornton http://www.theweeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/285idxen.asp Posted by: Lawrence Auster on February 25, 2003 12:42 PM |