Category: Source Analysis > Developing Critical Thinking
OBJECTIVE: "to have students use their developing critical thinking skills to examine the manner in which a successful writer sets up and fulfills expectations. This activity is appropriate for students who are developing critical thinking and reading skills." Computer skill: basic keyboarding.
"On Moral Equivalence" by Charles Krauthammer
from his book Cutting Edges: Making Sense of the 80's
This exercise is designed to show that we evaluate while we read, based on
expectations. Skillful writers can write successfully by framing a discussion in
such a way that they may answer it successfully. Read the first half of the
following article and answer the questions (either on a split screen or at the
end.)
"If he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and
vice," warns Dr. Samuel Johnson, "why sir, when he leaves our house
let us count our spoons." Not that anyone in public life denies that there
are moral distinctions to be made; but there seems to be a growing
unwillingness--or is it an inability?--to make them, even the most simple.
Consider the case of another wise and respected doctor, Dr. Seuss. His latest
epic, The Butter Battle Book, is a parable of the nuclear age. Two
peoples, the Yooks and the Zooks, find themselves in such fierce--and
pointless--confrontation that each is ready to drop the fatal Bitsy Big-Boy
Bomberoo on the other. They are very similar, these Yooks and Zooks. They seem
to differ in only one way: one side takes its bread butter side up, the other
butter-side down.
Yooks, Zooks. East, West. Butter-side up, butter-side down. What's the
difference? cries the good Dr. Seuss in a plea predictably hailed for its sanity
by everyone from Art Buchwald ("must reading") to Ralph Nader ("a
bundle of wisdom in a small package"). Now is it really necessary to
observe that in this world, as opposed to Dr. Seuss's cuddly creation, what
divides Yooks and Zooks is democracy and constitutional government, among other
conventions? The principal reason Yooks insist on arming themselves is that the
Zooks of this planet have the unfortunate tendency to build gulags (for export
too) and to stockpile those nasty intercontinental ballistic Bomberoos.
The allergy to elemental distinctions is not confined to child educators and
their admirers. It also turns up on the political front, even among presidential
candidates. For example, when Louis Farrakhan publicly threatened the life of
the Washington Post reporter who had disclosed Jesse Jackson's "Hymie"
slur, Jackson characterized the episode as a "conflict" between
"two very able professionals caught in a cycle that could be damaging to
their careers."
This is the language of moral equivalence. "Two professionals"--each
guy just doing his job--cleverly places the two men on the same moral plane.
"Caught"--passive victims, both men done to and not doing--neatly
removes any notion of guilt or responsibility. "In a cycle"--no
beginning and no end--insinuates an indeterminateness in the relationship
between the two men: Someone may have started this, but who can tell and what
does it matter? (Nor is this the first time Jackson has pressed the cycle image
into dubious service. Remember his "cycle of pain" in Lebanon, as if
Navy Lieut. Robert Goodman, the flyer for the American peace-keeping force that
had lost more than 250 men to terrorist attack, and President Hafez Assad, who
had at least acquiesced in that attack, were equal partners in crime?) What was
most disturbing about this affair was not the excesses of an extremist, but how
his candidate parsed the problem, and worse, who uncritically that rendering was
received. That Jackson' peculiar moral logic should have gone virtually
unchallenged among his Democratic rivals (they criticized Farrakhan's death
threats instead--a victory of discretion over valor) is an index of just how
unserious about moral distinctions we have become. As conservative economist
Thomas Sowell put it, the inability to make moral distinctions is the AIDS of
the intellectuals: an acquired immune deficiency syndrome. It is certainly not
inborn. Children can make elementary distinctions between say, threatener and
threatened. Moral blindness of this caliber requires practice. It has to be
learned.
Answer each of the following questions, either individually or corporately:
1) What is the article about so far? Is there a written or implied thesis?
What do you expect the rest of it will be about? DO NOT SAY "I DON'T
KNOW! If you are not sure make an educated guess.
2) How do each of the three examples (Dr. Seuss book, Louis Farrakhan, quote
from Sam Johnson) relate to the thesis? Tell me, in your opinion, which of the
three examples is the most effective? (Or if you prefer, which was least
effective?)
Now, continue reading the rest of the passage and answer the second set of questions at the end of the document:
We learn about it in several ways. One arrives at much of the currently
fashionable agnosticism about the cold war (the inability to tell Yooks from
Zooks because of nukes) through world-weariness. After forty years of long
twilight struggle, one feels one has had enough. And when the easy distinctions
become too much, the hard ones, like choosing one group of guerrillas over
another in a murky Third World struggle, become intolerable. Thus, that facile
evasion now elevated to the status of wisdom, that one man's terrorist is
another man's freedom fighter. "Who goes there, friend of foe?" asks
Uncle Sam of a Central American revolutionary in a recent cartoon. "I am a
rebel trying to overthrow my government through murder, mayhem and
terrorism," he replies. "That doesn't answer my question,"
responds Uncle Sam, the implication being that there is something arbitrary
about supporting one set of guerilla (Nicaragua) and not another (El Salvador).
Is there? Pol Pot, Jonas Savimbi, Eden Pastora Gomez and an assortment of
Salvadoran Marxist-Leninists have taken up arms against their respective
governments. Is there nothing to choose between them? If one is serious about
the issue, one has to ask how they fight: Bombs on school buses? Mines in
harbors? Or attacks on the other side's military? They all differ qualitatively
and--forgive the piety--morally. One is also obliged to ask about goals: to sort
our the totalitarians from the democrats, and when one really encounters them
(Grenada, for example), to call thugs, thugs. The pox-on-all-their-houses
sentiment is not just traditional American isolationism making a comeback. It is
moral exhaustion, an abdication of the responsibility to distinguish between
shades of gray. The usual excuse is that the light has grown pale; the real
problem is a glaze in the eye of the beholder.
And yet the language of moral equivalence has become routine. Calling
something the moral equivalent of war, for example, is a favorite Presidential
technique for summoning the nation to a cause. That metaphor, coined by William
James, was last pressed into service by Jimmy Carter to gird us for the energy
crisis. Before that, we had wars on poverty, crime, cancer and even war itself
(World War I). Now, Mr. Carter knew that turning down the thermostats and
risking lives in combat make vastly different claims on the citizenry. Indeed,
he sought to exploit that disproportion to rally the nation to the unglamorous
task of conserving energy. What went unconsidered was what that kind of
linguistic maneuver does to the idea of going to war. The problem with summoning
a great moral theme in the service of a minor one- the problem with declaring
moral equivalence when it does not exist--is what that does to the great
idea. In a dangerous world Americans might some day be called upon to go to war,
and if that happens, the difference between reaching for a thermostat and
reaching for a gun will become painfully apparent.
The trouble with blurring moral distinctions, even for the best of causes, is
that it can become a habit. It is a habit we can ill afford, since the modern
tolerance for such distinctions is already in decline. Some serious ideas are
used so promiscuously in the service of so many causes that they have lost all
their power. Genocide, for example, has been used to describe almost every kind
of perceived injustice, from Vietnam to pornography to Third World birth
control. A new word, holocaust, has to be brought in as a substitute. But its
life before ultimate trivialization will not be long. Only recently a financial
commentator on PBS, referring to a stock-market drop, spoke of the holocaust
year of 1981. The host did not blink.
Counted your spoons lately?
Now answer the following questions:
1) What is moral equivalence and what effect does Krauthammer feel it has on
a society?
2) Did part two meet your expectations, or was there a shift in topic? How did
the examples in part one (Dr. Seuss, Farrakhan, Johnson quote) prepare you to
understand his argument.
3) Do you agree or disagree with the author's argument. At what point in the
article were you either persuaded or turned off?
Taken From:
URL: http://www.engl.niu.edu/sourcebook/I-1-2.html#FILE:%20I-1-2
Site URL: http://www.engl.niu.edu/sourcebook/INDEX.html