Moral Self-Confidence and the Western Way of War: Part II

"If some “pacifist” society renounced the retaliatory use of force, it would be left helplessly at the mercy of the first thug who decided to be immoral. Such a society would achieve the opposite of its intention: instead of abolishing evil, it would encourage and reward it."
--Ayn Rand, The Nature of Government, The Virtue of Selfishness

NOTE: This entry is Part II of a two-part series on what has gone so terribly wrong in America's wars in Iraq and in Afganistan. Part I dealt with the concepts involved in the "Western way of war" and the problem we have now that we do not use it. Briefly, the Western way of war can be defined as war that is an agressive, all-out frontal assault intended to bring about a decisive conclusion as quickly as possible. It is total war fought for the purpose of winning. The problem discussed in Part I was defined as the the inability of the United States to actually fight such a war in either of wars in which we are currently involved, and the endlessly dragged out war, replete with military and civilian casualties that result. Part I can be found here . In this part, I will discuss what I believe to be the reasons why the United States has been brought to this point.

In my last post on this topic, I ended with a quote from Carolyn Glick's article "The Western Way of War". In order to begin to address the topic of this post--the reasons why the United States refuses to fight a decisive, total war aimed at the unconditional surrender of the enemy--I think it good to begin with the same quotation:

"For years, citizens of free nations have willfully ignored or dismissed the significance their enemies' gruesome goals and ideology. They have claimed that what these people stand for is insignificant. At the end of the day, they say, the only reason there are wars is because the nations of the West provoke them by being strong. And so, when they have fought wars, they have fought them with strategies that can bring them nothing but defeat."

Why would a nation or the nations that make up Western Civilization do this? Why would the United States or any nation ignore and dismiss the significance of "their enemies gruesome goals and ideology"? Why would it blame the cause of such wars not on the enemy's agression, but upon the virtue of it's own strength? Although there are many reasons why a nation might choose to fight a war in one way rather than another, that a nation would actually go to war with any other goal than to win the war bespeaks a philosophical problem at the highest level. Such an action indicates a profound lack of moral self-confidence. This lack of a sense of moral rightness can only come from the evasion of reality that emerges from a confused and irrational philosophy; one that rewards what is evil and punishes what is good.

Although the lack support for America's wars in Afganistan and Iraq may indeed emerge from the fact that these wars have not been properly declared, and that the people of the United States have been urged directly and otherwise to pay no attention to the ideas that support a weak foreign policy that has brought us to this turn, the only reason for such a profound lack of moral confidence must reside in the ideas that have replaced the "Western way of war."

In his essay entitled "The Balm for a Guilty Conscience: Moral Paralysis, Appeasement and the Causes of WWII" (The Objective Standard, Summer 2007), the historian John David Lewis writes:

"During the 1930s, men stood at a cusp in time, a point of momentous decision, watching the growing power of Germany under its screaming, malevolent leader. Their failure to confront Germany—and the devastating consequences of that failure—demonstrate the power of ideas, both to motivate aggressors and to undercut defenders from taking the actions needed to protect freedom." (Emphasis mine).

Ultimately, Lewis says in his essay, it is the power of ideas that create confrontations that lead to war, and that create the will towards victory; or that cause a nation to get mired down in endless skirmish after skirmish, carefully planned to create not victory, but equity. This leads finally to a quagmire that is never decisively won, but merely declared over, while the problematic behavior of the enemy remains and is exacerbated by the weakness of his opposition. The idea that leads to such self-defeating behavior in war is the lack of moral self-confidence; the lack of a sense that individuals have a right to self-defense, and may thus band together to defend their people against an agressor.

According to Lewis, with respect to the origins of WWII, the fault lay with the leadership of the United States and England, especially President Woodrow Wilson, who refused to allow the allied forces to invade Germany and demand unconditional surrender at the end of WWI. This lack of a decisive defeat, together with a "peace" treaty designed to maintain the European status quo, allowed Germany to imagine victory and then claim victim status under the provisions of the peace treaty. That together with a peace treaty that imposed goals of equity, national self-determination, and the concept of "collective security"--the idea that all nations must be equally disarmed regardless of which nations had been the agressors--guaranteed a bigger and bloodier war to follow. And it did. Fifty million people died in WWII.

And why did England stand by while Germany rearmed itself under Hitler, and began to threaten war? Why did Chamberlain appease, and appease again, right up to claiming "peace in our time" as the Nazis marched into Sudetenland? It was not economics, nor the horrors of war alone that caused the majority in the West to stand idly by while war was being prepared; at the root of it all was lack of a sense of moral self-confidence. In England, as in the United States, progressives carefully inculcated the idea that all nations are equal with respect to ideas, civilizing principles, and action; that no nation or civilization is morally superior to any other. These ideas were in direct contradiction to the political reality that the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles was designed to address. As Lewis puts it:

"Wilsonian idealists, egalitarian British socialists, and so-called “realist” conservatives—who disagreed about almost everything else—generally agreed that they could not abide the language of the Treaty. Many British politicians and intellectuals were divided, torn between Wilson’s ideals and the reality of Germany’s complicity in the war—split between theory and practice. . . . Morally, many British thought that Germany had a right to determine her own national destiny. Politically, they knew this would be a disaster. In the clash between the political reality in Europe and their unreal moral ideals, their ideals won."

Although the United States cast off these Wilsonian Ideals and went on to win WWII by fighting a total war that ended only in the absolute defeat and unconditional surrender of both Germany and Japan, the progressive idea of multiculturalism was not defeated in the United States. Rather, they remained dormant until the Consciousness Revolution of the 1960's, when with the United States mired in an undeclared war on foreign soil, engaged in despite the best interests of the country, and with no clear plan for victory, these ideals were brought back by the careful work of progressives of all political stripe in order to advance their cause and draw the United States away from its own ideals of individualism and liberty.

And since WWII, the United States has not engaged in any war that was declared in order to protect the rights of Americans, nor has she fought any war with the goal of total victory and the unconditional surrender of the enemy power.

Although there were various terrorist attacks by Islamo-fascists on American assets in foreign lands, most Americans did not wake up to the new enemy that had risen against them until they witnessed the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and on the Pentagon. And the politicians' reaction to go to war was done with a similar curious mix of the unreality of the Wilsonian Ideals and the political situation created by the very real ideology of the Islamic Jihadists: the destruction of the Western way of life in Europe and America. Therefore, within three years the United States went to war in two different countries, only one of which was justified by self-defense, and both of which were undeclared. No specific goals for victory were made for either war, and there was no thought that the enemy must be totally defeated and brought to unconditional surrender.

Thus, as Bush--and now Obama--fiddled while our liberties were destroyed--our blood and treasure have been spent in order to set up a corrupt secular government that is rapidly being defeated by Islamo-fascists in Afganistan, and a nation divided against itself in Iraq. Meanwhile, the real menance to peace in the Middle East, and to the world, is growing Persian-style, as the madman Achmadinnerjacket (see Deut. 25:19) closes in on the goal of obtaining nuclear weapons to wipe Israel off the map and to defeat America.

And we evade this reality by mouthing the multicultural pieties of Wilsonian Idealism: that the United States should not engage in any action for the sake of our own self-interest; that all nations have the right to self-determination (apparently except Israel), regardless of proof of past agression and threats of future destruction; that in the face of the threats of madmen, the right and moral thing to do is disarm all nations (apparently except Iran); and that principled self-defense in the face of those who wish to defeat us physically and spiritually in order to destroy our culture and values and assimilate us into the "world caliphate" is immoral.

At the heart of this idea is a great contradiction: that somehow all nations have the right to self-determination--except the United States; that all cultures and civilizations are equal in values and outcomes--except Western culture and civilization. In other words, to paraphrase Orwell: All nations and cultures are equal; but some are less equal than others.

A blog friend of mine and an Objectivist has reminded me that when faced with a contradiction, one should "check your premises" because one or more of them is wrong.

The wrong premise here is that all values and all cultures are equal; that is they all equally promote human life and human happiness.

For nearly a century the progressives among us have worked to blur the difference between institutionalized rape and the abuse of women in Muslim countries and the difference in compensation between men and women in the West; they have worked to blur the difference between a fundamentally just court system based on the Rule of Law in the West, and a fundamentally unjust system based on Sharia law in Muslim countries. Further the progressives have deliberately planned to set different groups of people against one another in the West, on the basis of the faulty concept of "group rights", in order to sow dissension among us and bring chaos to our lives. They do all of this in the name of those same Wilsonian Ideals, which are really the ideals of collectivism. In the name of those ideals, they have murdered and starved--or encouraged others to murder and starve millions upon millions over the course of the bloody 20th century.

All values, all cultures, and all ideas do not equally promote human life, liberty and happiness. Some values promote the opposite--death, enslavement and misery. Ideas are important--they are acted out in the real world and they have real consequences. Collectivist ideals fly in the face of the nature of human individuals even to the level of our basic biology. They promote a morality that is incompatible with human life, and which is thus inescapably evil.

This is why the pretense we have engaged in in the West, that as Caroline Glick puts it, causes us to willfully ignore or dismiss the significance of our enemies' "gruesome goals and ideology", is downright deadly to ourselves and to our way of life. In order to break out of this trap of quagmire and endless war, it is important that we value our way of life highly, and demand that we fight our wars in the Western way, to total victory and unconditional surrender of the enemy, and only then engage in the American way of compassion to build up our former enemies.

We can win this battle, says Professor Lewis, but we cannot put the cart before the horse:

"Only after we understand that we should defeat these enemies, can we ask how. This point is vital, for the question of moral rightness is logically and psychologically prior to any question of strategy or tactics. If we do not understand that we should defeat them—if we think that we are as bad as they are, or that they have legitimate grievances that justify their attacks, or that we have created a situation that morally demands that we compensate them—then our lack of moral self-confidence will undercut our motivation to fight. But the facts do not warrant such a conclusion. We are morally right and the Islamic Totalitarians are evil—not merely in their methods, but, more fundamentally, in their values and goals. We have a moral responsibility to defeat them—if we want to live. We can and must approach this war with the moral self-confidence of those fighting for civilization itself—for the basic conditions on which human life depends—because that is precisely what is at stake."

A Holocaust survivor that I knew, a very thoughtful woman once asked me in bewilderment why we refuse to believe a dictator who tells us exactly what he will do, and then proceeds to do it. I told her that I thought that many people have difficulty accepting that such a person exists--one who is fundamentally messed up that he does not value even his own life.

And I still think that is true. But now I also know that it is not only that visceral reaction against the existence of evil; it is also about the inculcation over nearly a century of multiculturalism and the idea that it is moral to act outside of rational self-interest, to reward the bad and punish the good. This can only lead to an evil outcome: death and destruction, slavery and misery.

But we have a choice. As Caroline Glick said at the end of her article:
" . . . it also reminds us that there is another choice that can be made. The Western way of war needn't remain the path of defeat. That still is for the people of the West to decide."

True. And may that choice to defend our lives and freedom come soon and in our own day.

The Value of a Life

In a free-wheeling discussion with a friend the other day, I was broadsided by a comment that did not seem to fit with his libertarian views. The subject had wandered around to the controversy about the Tebow ad during the Super Bowl. And he asked me what I thought about very late term abortions.

I said that I had real moral issues with that, because I could not imagine a situation in which delivery could not be attempted, with the hopes of saving the life of both mother and child. And I had looked but found no information that contradicted my conclusions. I pointed out that I had developed severe pre-eclampsia late in my pregnancy with the Boychick, a condition that required induction of labor in order to save my life and that of the Boychick. Fortunately for me, it was not a difficult decision because the delivery would be less of a risk for me than continuing the pregnacy would have been, and we were so close to term, the Boychick and I, that delivery was not likely to be risky for him either. As it turned out, with the help of modern medicine, we came through the delivery fine, both of us and the neonatal team that was standing by filed out of the room without making any interventions. That said, I told my friend, I would not have wanted a government official interfering with such a potentially life-altering decision. I would not want some bureaucrat to require me to undergo an induction of labor. However, I would expect that doctors would be rightly reluctant to perform late-term abortions.

With this as a jumping off point, my friend commented that he wondered if a murder should be prosecuted if no one cared about the death of the person who had been killed. After all, he said, the dead person would be dead, and if no one was left to be devasted, then it was if the life of the person was unimportant.

I was speechless. One can know a person reasonably well and still be surprised.

I probed. I asked, then does that mean if the parents of a six-month infant murder him, and there is no one else to be outraged, does this mean it is not murder? He said he would have moral concerns about such an action, but that it should not be illegal since no one was injured by the action except the child--who would now be dead.

Immediately, images of concentration camps and gas chambers began to roll across my mind's eye. My argument was that certainly someone has been harmed, and that is the person whose life had been taken unjustly. My friend argued that people die all the time.

Of course, we are mortal, I argued, but there is a difference between dying of disease or accident, and the purposeful taking of a life. Certainly, the person who is murdered values his life. And as we were speaking, I realized that my friend had wandered into a collectivist view of the value of a life. His value of liberty was not completely based on the principle of individual rights. Because if his values were firmly rooted there, he would realize immediately that the value of a life is not based on how useful to society, or how precious that person is to another. The value of a life is the ultimate value to person himself.

I was so disturbed that I stopped the discussion when I realized that all of my attempts to elucidate the principle had not penetrated my friends mind; that to him this had become a sophist's argument--made for the sake of continuing the discussion.

For me, the inheritance of the Holocaust makes these discussions more than argument for the sake of argument. As we spoke, the biblical injunction about the responsiblity of the nearby towns to adjudicate the death of a stranger on the road kept coming to mind.
Even the taking of the life of a stranger for whom no one cares must be treated with justice.

Ready for Tomorrow!

I went with the big signs and lots of red, white and blue!

The Engineering Geek went for smaller signs. He may be wiser as we will be holding them up for approximately three hours!

The Boychick is the only one of the three of us who got his picture making signs on the Albuquerque Tea Party website. (He's in one of pictures sitting at the head of the table wearing a white jacket. In another, you see his face as he is standing). He did not bring any signs home, he is going to pick one up there. Or he will wave the flag.

Now, as we put the signs on the pickets, we are rocking out to the Tea Party Song by Lloyd Marcus. Enjoy!

Making Ready: Cross Quarter, the Election, and Saecular Winter

Christine over at The Thinking Mother made the following suggestion in her post Election Outcome a few days ago:

"Now that we have elected a new President I have an idea. How about if we all write down our thoughts about our futures and our hopes or worries?"

In her post, she says that is is not necessary to blog it, but just to write it down for our own future reference. I am going to blog it, though I certainly understand why Christine and others might want to be more circumspect.

I have not been paying much attention to the news since Wednesday. The Engineering Geek and I have both caught rather bad colds for the first time in three years. We believe it is a function of the Boychick's return to school and my return to work. More contacts with random people means more viruses we haven't yet had.

But I have been paying attention to the light and the turning of the season. Winter is coming to Sedillo, and Thursday night was the last cross-quarter day of Common Era 2008. Friday morning, the temperature at 5:45 AM was 16 degrees F.

As the sunrise appears to move south of east, the meadow grasses are dried and waving in a cold north wind.

And just as we go through the seasons of the year, our civilization goes through cycles and seasons: summery seasons of civic and economic growth, and winters of civic and economic crisis. In their book The Fourth Turning, Strauss and Howe predicted that at about this time in our history, we'd be entering another winter in the cycle, another crisis in our history, comparable to others such as the American Revolution, the Civil War, or the Great Depression-WW II.

We have elected a new president, and his election is historic, not only because he is the first black president of the US, but because he has been elected at a crucial moment in our history. It is a time of war and economic uncertainty, and a time when our Constitution is in peril. The problems that he has inherited are grave, and they are not the result of the trends of the last eight years, as the campaign rhetoric would have us believe. the man we have elected to this office is relatively inexperienced: he has no executive experience and served in the US Senate for less than one full term. His campaign rhetoric about foreign policy was naive at best, and his progressive economic ideas are unseasonal and out of step with the reality that the Federal government is not only broke, but the valueof the dollar is in question due to the printing of billions, and the economies of developed nations across the world are in trouble. He is, however, a good orator, and he gave a good speech in Chicago on the night of his election. In it he said:

"And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn – I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your President too." (B. Obama, Nov. 4, 2008).

I am one of those Americans whose support Obama has not yet earned. I am waiting to see whether this high-flown rhetoric is real, or whether the nastiness of his supporters towards those who disagree with them is going to be the order of the day. I hear the words, but I am waiting to see how well Obama can work within his own party to quell the "partisanship and pettiness . . . that has poisoned our politics for so long", (ibid.) as well as how readily he will reach across the aisle to work with those who have different ideas. Will they be supressed or will debate be allowed? The Democrat majority in Congress has, during the last two years, been every bit as willing to supress debate as have the previous Republican majorities. And we are going into this new administration with the same leadership, only more so, of the most disapproved of Congress in the history of the United States.

Here, I need to clearly state that my concerns and views have not been represented in this election by either major-party candidate. The disenfranchisement that I feel comes from the fact that other voices were shut out by the press and the major parties, and that many important issues were not discussed. We got sound bytes and debates in which the argument was about who did not vote or did vote for specific bills, but with no indication of which earmarks or unrelated language decided their votes. Thus the trading of accusations was meaningless. And I was further unimpressed by the treatment that Sarah Palin received from the Obama supporters. Although I disagree with Palin on many issues, I was apalled by this kind of behavior. It makes me wonder what Obama means by the word 'unity.' Does it mean forced, lockstep agreement, or does it mean bringing consensus from varied viewpoints and within the mandate of the Constitution? I hope for the latter, but given the vituperative nature of the campaigns, I am prepared for the former.

As an American who loves and respects the Constitution of the United States, I accept Obama as the Constitutionally elected President of the United States. However, my loyalty must be to the US Constitution, not to his person, or the person of any president or government official. Government is our servant, not our master; the duty of government is to protect our rights, not to save the world. I am uncertain as to whether Obama and his supporters understand this. (I am certain that his predecessor did not). I will know by what he does and not what they say. At his inauguration, he will swear to preserve and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in this duty I wish him success and resilience. The Presidency is an awesome job and a great responsibility, and so I wish him health, long life, and good courage. But I do not promise him unquestioning loyalty or unwavering support. That would be inappropriate. I am a citizen, not a subject.

I believe that the crisis that is coming could not have been averted no matter who had won the presidency. As I said in response to a comment on a previous blog entry:

"Sooner or later you have to pay the piper; he is at the door, bill in hand."

The longer we try to stave off the pain, the worse it will be when we finally face it. So, just as the birds are gathering their seeds for the coming winter, we have been preparing for the coming hard times. Not with panic, but with purpose. We have stocked up reserves of food and other necessary items, in case the current printing blitz at the US Treasury leads to inflation. We have moved investments out of the country, because Obama has promised much higher capital gains tax rates. Such high tax rates have historically supressed investment, profit-taking, capitalization, and trade. We have also purchased a hunting rifle and ammunition for the Boychick, because Obama has promised to raise taxes on them. Hunting is a good way to supplement the food supplies if the recession deepens or a depression comes. The Boychick has passed his BSA badges for the rifle and the shotgun. The Engineering Geek, being a veteran, already has a rifle and a side-arm.

Frankly, I remember the Carter years, and his economic policies (which were a deepening of Nixon's and Johnson's) led to stagflation and misery for the middle class and working people. Obama's economic plans are very similar to Carter's. So I am expecting an economy like the '70's or worse.

But even though I am expecting hard times, I am not unhopeful about the future of the country. My hope does not rest upon the president, nor upon the leadership of the government; rather it rests in the wisdom of our forefathers and in the Constitution. As Thomas Jefferson said:

""It would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights... Confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism. Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence. It is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power... Our Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no further, our confidence may go... In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution." --Thomas Jefferson: Draft Kentucky Resolutions, 1798. ME 17:388

And so, as we pass the fourth cross-quarter, and move into this year's winter, I believe we are also passing into the Saecular Winter, a time of testing and crisis. The Spirit of America has been there before, and has come forth stronger.

As Judy Aaron says in the sidebar of her blog, Consent of the Governed:

"The answer to 1984 is 1776. Teach your children well . . ."

Our Constitution is in peril. If we are to emerge from the hard times ahead with our values in tact, our children must know what the Constitution says, and they must see us prepared to act upon threats to it. The greatest threat to it is the unqualified trust we have put in our government of late. We must let them know who is the servant and who is the master. It may be that the historic nature of this election can be useful for teaching our children more carefully about their rights and the proper way for Americans to secure them.

Proud to Claim the Title

There has been much discussion in recent months about the California ruling that might have required all homeschooling parents in that state to obtain a teaching license in order to teach their own kids. That ruling was decertified.

However, I just learned over at Corn and Oil that the California Teacher's Association filed an Amicus Brief that claimed, among other things, that allowing homeschooling would cause "educational anarchy" in the old Bear Flag Republic. This assertion is discussed further at Principled Discovery.

Now, I am a certified teacher in my state. I also hold an MA in Special Education, alongside advanced degrees in Biology, and I am currently teaching reading programs for IRD, a private company founded expressly to help people of all ages become absorbed and proficient readers.

However, given the state of public education today, I am proud to claim the title of Educational Anarchist. Public education in the United States has become a political boondoggle in which the interests of those who gain power and treasure through the Educational-Industrial Complex are paramount, and the interests of those being educated counts for very little. As in many other areas of life in these United States, the Federal Government has claimed for itself the power and authority that ought to be held by citizens making decisions for themselves as to what constitutes the good life.

According to dictionary.com, the word anarchy is derived from the Greek word Archon, which means an absolute ruler, a tyrant. I am opposed to tyranny in all forms, and bow to no earthly absolute ruler. I believe that the increasing centralization of power in public education is destructive to the very idea of education, and I have written extensively about that on this blog.

I am a proud educational anarchist!

Long live liberty and the freedom of thought that made this country great!

The Educational Anarchist logo above was designed by Imperceptibility and was found at Principled Discovery.

Moral Courage and the Flawed Human Being

As I mentioned last week, one of the excellent keynotes at the New Mexico Summer Institute on Gifted Education, was the very last one: Elizabeth Nielsen and her husband, Dennis Higgins, who gave the presentation on Moral Courage.

Elizabeth is a professor of Special Education at UNM. She is my 'doc' advisor. Dennis is an adjunct professor at UNM, as well as the teacher of a twice-exceptional (gifted/with a disability) program in the Albuquerque Public Schools. They are both national speakers and experts on gifted education. Elizabeth coined the term "twice-exceptional" or 2X, as it is called around here. (My research interest for this doctorate in Special Ed/ Neurospychology is in the area of the neurospychology of visual-perceptual differences in gifted people and gifted people with Autism Spectrum Disorders).

As I said in my post Catching Up!, I saw the Moral Courage keynote before-- last year at the 2006 ALPS conference. But this is one of those rare presentations that is worth seeing several times because the issues it addresses are profound ones for those of us involved in any way with the education of children. At a time when moral relativism has become the norm in the secular education of children, Elizabeth Neilsen's insistence on the importance of teaching moral courage--what it is, how it is made manifest, and the cost to the individual--is an important contribution that, in itself, is a demonstration of moral courage. And more, it is a challenge to us, not only as educators of all sorts, but as human beings, to examine the example we set for each other and for children in our professional, social and personal lives.

The presentation itself consists of three parts:

• an analysis of morally courageous action based on the work of business ethicist, Dr. Rushworth Kidder (Wikipedia article here).
• methodologies for teaching moral courage through books, film and music
• live demonstrations of some of these lessons

But the power of the presentation is really the music and slide shows that are used throughout to engage the audience through real-life examples of moral courage. This is teaching that engages the intellect and the heart and (dare I say?) the soul.

Part of the power of this presentation for me is that it caused me to begin the examination of my own ethical behavior. According to Dr. Kidder, there are five universal core moral principles. They are:

• honesty (a.k.a. truthfulness, integrity)
• fairness (a.k.a. justice)
• respect (tolerance and respect for self, family, others, and respect for life itself)
• responsibility (a.k.a. self-discipline)
• compassion (a.k.a empathy, mercy, love, generosity)

In order to behave ethically, a person must demonstrate all five of these. If even one value is not being practiced, a person cannot be said to be ethical in practice. This certainly gives me room for pause. If even one of these is absent? Whoa! I can see that there is definitely room for continual self-examination. Complacency and moral courage appear to be mutually exclusive. And I expect I have some work to do within myself as the Jewish world enters into the month of Elul, a time for reflection and repentance.

Further, to demonstrate morally courageous action, a person must uphold these principles by taking action in the face of significant personal risk. Actions of moral courage, then, are not for the faint of heart. In fact, the very word "courage" comes from the French word "cour" which means "heart" and implies strength of heart.

As I was watching the presentation and thinking about the examples provided, I noticed that one discussion of importance was not made, using the very human examples provided. That discussion was that no person is perfectly ethical all the time. We are, all of us, flawed human beings. In the context of the presentation, this is understandable because the aim of the talk was to present the definition of moral courage most straight-forwardly and in a small period of time, and then to present ways to begin a discussion with children.

But, but, but...!

Popular culture has a really superficial way of dealing with moral absolutes. In the time of my public education, it had become fashionable to dismiss the moral dimension in the historical analysis of individual action because each exemplar was flawed in some way. In plain English, we were not allowed to have heroes. For example, if a student expressed admiration of Abraham Lincoln as 'the Great Emancipator', s/he was told that Lincoln expressed ambivalence about freeing the slaves. That Lincoln was actually discussing his primary responsibility as president to protect and preserve the Union was dismissed as too subtle for us. Or maybe it was too straight-forward?

We see the same kind of refusal to see moral exemplars anywhere in the way people are treated in the press. There seems to be an urge to bring a person down at any cost, almost as if to say that since every person is flawed, there can be no action at a higher moral level. In this way, we can evade our own moral responsibilities. This way of thinking brings the idea of moral relativism to an absolute low. (Sorry, I could not resist the oxymoron).

It is precisely because of this penchant that we should talk about the fact that flawed human beings can, with great effort and at great cost to themselves, face their flaws and become determined to act on their moral principles anyway in a situation in which they face considerable risk. In fact, one of these risks is of exposure of one's personal flaws by people who wish to discredit the act of moral courage. It seems to me that a significant part of moral courage is the ability to see oneself as flawed, the examination of one's own moral weaknesses, and the personal resolve to take a stand despite it all.

Certainly, when educating young children about moral courage, we must allow the children to have heroes. And we are likely to present the moral actor in a more unidimensional way e.g. Martin Luther King was a hero because he spoke up for justice in the face of oppression. Period. (He was a hero. He did stand up). But when we are educating older children, we can and should present exemplars with more complexity. This can be done using biography and literature both. For example, Oscar Schindler, who saved lives during the Shoah, had many flaws. He was a shady dealer in business, he was a womanizer, etc. And yet, he stood for the value of life itself at a time when many people who were less obviously flawed remained silent.

By having these kinds of discussions, we innoculate our children against the terrible cynicism out there. The cynicism that tells us not to stand out, not to act, because we are not perfect ourselves. And they give us a sense of hope that, despite our flaws--maybe even because of them--if we have the courage to face our own weaknesses, we can do something important in the world.