Yes, Virginia, There Is a Right and Wrong

It is fashionable in some quarters—broadly, educated quarters—to condemn moral clarity. Anyone portraying the world, or any particular conflict, as a simple struggle between good and evil must expect ridicule. The real world is not like that; to believe so is simple-minded, prejudiced.

And yet, that is exactly what the world is all about, according to any Christian. And yet, that is exactly what the world is all about, full stop. There were precious few, at the time, ready to condemn German Nazism as evil either—it took a renegade with the moral clarity of a Winston Churchill to call it such, to general condemnation from educated quarters. Yet we take this for granted now; now it is considered morally evil even to suggest otherwise. Similarly, we now surely know unambiguously that Soviet Communism was evil; it killed many more people, in its lifetime, than Hitler. Yet it took a renegade with the moral clarity of a Ronald Reagan to call it such, to call it an “evil empire,” to general condemnation from educated quarters.

We can, I think, go down the list of historic conflicts in this way. More often than not, they are fairly clear cases of one side being in the right, and the other in the wrong. Apple was the good guys; IBM was the bad guys. Microsoft was the bad guys; Netscape, and now Google, are the good guys. The abolitionists were right; the slave-owners were wrong. The civil rights workers were right; the segregationists were wrong. The Tutsis were right; the Hutus were wrong. The Serbs were wrong; the Croats, Muslims, and Kosovar Albanians were right. The Romans and Sanhedrin were wrong; Jesus was right. And so on and on. The conflict in which there is roughly equal right and wrong on both sides is the exception, not the rule. This becomes clearer with historical hindsight, once the political advantage of prevarication fades.

It stands to reason: two parties of good will are unlikely to face serious conflict. On the other hand, it only takes one unreasonable party to make a fight. That means necessarily that two thirds of the time, in case of conflict, only one party will be guilty. This is true regardless of whether the other party is a moral paragon in all respects—as of course nobody is. This is a crimson herring.

The “a pox on both your houses,” pacifist stance, while it pretends to higher morality, is really only moral prevarication, moral cowardice; or worse, a cover for enabling evil in turn on the part of the prevaricator. In his day, Mussolini too masqueraded as the honest broker. It is a convenient stance for those of ill-will to assume.

Now let me say, with this same dangerous moral clarity: the modern left is evil, the modern right good. I’m afraid there is no way around this. The left will charge the right with immorality towards the poor; this is cant. There is every reason to believe, based on current economic theory, that the program of the right will do more for the truly poor than that of the left; at worst, it is not a moral, but a practical issue. On the other hand, the left is in favour of unrestricted abortion. This is, put plainly, a holocaust of the innocent on a scale much greater than Hitler managed. The left is in favour of the systematic enslavement of men in the family courts; yet they themselves maintain that slavery, let alone sexual inequality, is a moral evil. The left persecutes the religious, the prime advocates of morality, as for example in the recent pogrom against the Catholic Church and Catholic clergy for pedophilia.

Indeed, the left condemns moral clarity itself. Surely that speaks volumes.