In the aforementioned Viewpoint discussion between Christina Hoff Sommers and Camille Paglia, the latter suggests that “progressivism” ultimately places its faith in the unsubstantiated and incredibly naive principle that if you’re nice to other people they will be nice to you. It’s clearly a reference to the sort of pseudo-scientific drivel served up by Saul, Pearce, Haidt, Rifkin, etc. If only the Armenians had been nicer to the Ottomans who slaughtered more than a million of them, or the Jews to the Nazis who attempted to wipe them from the face of Europe, or those who bled into the killing fields of Cambodia to the armies of the Khmer Rouge, or the hundred thousand or so murdered Bosnians and Croations to their Serbian neighbors, or the Tutsi of Rwanda to the genocidal Hutu, or the citizens of Darfur to the forces of the Sudanese government, or the Rohingyas of Myanmar to their Buddhist tormentors who up until recently and perhaps still are burning their villages, raping their women and beheading their men. If only they had been nicer!
The mind given to such naivete, the “progressive” mind, is incapable of confronting reality with any degree of integrity or effectiveness. While my generation’s revulsion for what was happening in Vietnam was understandable, the anti-war movement offered no practical alternative to the American invasion. Was it the consensus of the Generation of Love that the West should simply allow the Vietcong to overrun the people of the South? Were those tie-dyed “scholars” of the 60s and 70s who insisted that Communism was no worse than Capitalism willing to overlook the tens of millions who died in China and Russia as a result of that ideology? More recently, was it Obama’s conviction that being nice to the religious fanatics in control of Iran would move them to discontinue their pursuit of nuclear weapons? Might the same approach work on the members of Boko Haran given to strapping bombs on young girls and sending them out to slaughter the innocent? Is my abhorrence both for that portion of the species capable of such behavior and that portion of it willing to simply look the other way, typical of what Ralston Saul denounces as the unwarranted negativism of “conservatives,” or ought every human being, however compromised by circumstance, however motivated by a spirit of forgiveness, to know that the taking of a human life is the ultimate, inexcusable, moral abomination?