For quite some time, the moral leaders of the world have been the vocal, dissident left.
It was Yiddish-speaking socialists who protested America’s involvement in the meaningless imperialist slaughter of World War I (and were subsequently jailed by the U.S. government for saying so).
It was the followers of Rosa Luxembourg, a socialist martyr killed just after the Russian Revolution, who knew that, in her words: “Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.”
It was the left that spawned the greatest moral thinkers and writers produced in that century from George Orwell to Hannah Arendt to Frantz Fanon.
These men and women, more than anyone else, are the moral tutors of our burgeoning century.
So, the only question we must ask now is: how did such a proud tradition of intellectual seriousness reach its current sorry state?
The people who have taken on the mantle of the left have abandoned the search for the truth in any given situation and have given into the gut-level thinking that once characterized the reactionary right.
The most relevant example: it is now almost universally accepted by leftist thinkers that the U.S. is responsible for the atrocities in almost every other country in the world, period.
Everything can be traced back to the western world, even the actions of other nations, non-governmental organizations and individuals.
(This is no straw-man argument. If you’re interested, the New York Times’ comment section is the best place to look for the particular kind of mental atrophy.)
It is a sad situation, but it is also an ironic one. In attributing every evil action in the world to the U.S., this mewling bastard-child of the liberal tradition robs every non-western nation or group of responsibility for their own actions.
It is a type of liberal imperialism. This way of thinking reduces the rest of the world to a series of whiny children who are mad whenever we meddle in their designated playpen.
“Of course,” the underlying, secret thought runs, “religious extremists would attack us for trying to protect the freedom to satire their religion. They are simple creatures that are driven by desperation and fury and don’t know any better. For this reason, it’s our fault if we get attacked by them.”
Blaming the U.S. for every evil is, in effect, another method of saying that only the U.S. has a responsibility in the world, and that everyone else is a cardboard cutout of human beings.
Of course, colonialism and racism on the right side of the isle will always exist and the U.S. has committed more atrocities in the past hundred years than we could conceivably count.
But the reason we know so much about racism and imperialism, and of their inherent nature, is because they were chronicled and discussed by people like Orwell, whose first commitment was to the truth above all.
And if those of today’s left can’t find such a truth in the events happening around us, it will not be because truth no longer exists, but because they have no need of it any longer.