January 22, 2005

• MORAL VALUES

  I'm really worried about the direction of our foreign and domestic governmental policies. I grew up in a country where certain basic values included:
  Liberty
  Equality
  Individualism
  Freedom
  Democracy
  Honesty
  Valuing Life
  These and others were defined in an agreed upon way and there was little debate. Equality was re-defined to include all Americans on a much broader scale than it had been, but Freedom, for example had an agreed upon definition which included not just freedom from restraint and permission to do something, but also a feeling that it was an inalienable right and could not be limited except by law and those laws had to be constitutional. In our foreign affairs we espoused to "Good Neighbor Policy" which essentially meant we would try to be helpful but would not impose our ideas on other countries. We even fought a rather large war to free some other countries from tyranny.
  We, or at least most of us, felt that individualism was a good thing. We encouraged our children to be individuals and tried to respect the beliefs of others, even when we did not share them. We expected our public officials to be honest and were pretty hard on them when they proved to be dishonest. Democracy was generally defined as the will of the majority with consideration of the rights of the minority. If we didn't like a political leader, a president for example, we tried to keep our political differences in the political realm and didn't seek specious excuses to impeach him.
  Of course those "Good Old Days" were far from perfect but one thing which seems to now be in eclipse was the idea that major government actions should be done only with general consensus and in an open and legal manner. Most politicians even occasionally took some responsibility.
  We abided by international laws - we were among the first to propose most of them and demanded that others do the same. We founded the United Nations as a forum to rationally debate and resolve those hassles that led to two World Wars. We sought world opinion and abided by it. This was probably a reaction to our isolationist policies of the '20s and '30s and it more or less worked. While war was not completely eliminated, at least it was limited and almost the whole world enjoyed a fifty-year period of prosperity unequaled in modern history.
  I'm not sure what the "New Conservatives" have in mind, but it seems to me that it is NOT a return to a time when differences of opinion were tolerated, when law was respected and limited, when truth was admired, and rationality was considered a good thing.

  • 10:19 pm
  • 3 Comments