The Moral Equivalent of...

By Charles Krauthammer

"If he does really think that there is no distinction between I virtue and vice," warns Dr. Samuel Johnson, "why, sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons." Judging by the recent pronouncements of some of our leaders, it is time to start husbanding 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 elementary 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?) Having framed the issue in these terms, Jackson proceeded to the logical conclusion: he proposed a meeting between Farrakhan and the reporter, offering himself as mediator.

What was most disturbing about this affair was not the excesses of an extremist, but how his candidate parsed the problem, and, worse, how uncritically that rendering was received. That Jackson's 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 certainly is not inborn. Children can make elementary distinctions between, say, threatener and threatened. Moral blindness of this caliber requires practice. It has to be learned.

We learn 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 40 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 or 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 guerrillas (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 out 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.

Another mode of unlearning moral distinctions is through an excess of empathy. The claim is that we must not judge before we fully understand. "Context," protested Jackson, arguing that one must first put Farrakhan's threats in the context of the Black Muslim's apocalyptic language and his history (like his good deeds combating drug abuse). But this is to confuse moral analysis with psychotherapy. Treating people seriously, that is, as adults--whatever their history, their culture, their unconscious drives--means judging what people do and say, not what they intend or feel. To defer judgment pending full understanding is to ensure that we will make no judgments at all.

Not that psychological insight and moral judgment are mutually exclusive. John le Carre is extraordinarily skillful at showing the psychological affinity between the British master spy Smiley and his KGB nemesis Karla. But in the end, there is no mistaking Le Carre's view of the worthiness of their respective enterprises. One can understand and still judge, so long as one is not tempted to understand everything.

Finally, perhaps the deepest cause of moral confusion is the state of language itself, language that has been bleached of its moral distinctions, turned neutral, value-free, "nonjudgmental." When that happens, moral discourse becomes difficult, moral distinctions impossible and moral debate incomprehensible. If abortion is simply "termination of pregnancy," the moral equivalent of, say, removing a tumor, how to account for a movement of serious people dedicated to its abolition? If homosexuality is merely a "sexual preference"--if a lover's sex is as much a matter of taste as, say, hair color (or having it butter-side up or butter-side down)--then why the to-do over two men dancing together at Disneyland? But there is a fuss, because there is a difference. One can understand neither with language that refuses to make distinctions.

Using unflattened, living language does not commit one to an antiabortion, antigay or antiwelfare position. One can argue forcefully for free choice in abortion, rights for homosexuals and aid to fatherless families without pretending that the issues here are merely clinical, aesthetic or statistical. They are moral too. But to make, or even follow, moral arguments, we need language that has not yet obliterated any trace of distinctions.

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 have had wars on poverty, crime, cancer and even war itself (World War I). Now, Mr. Carter knew that turning down thermostats and risking lives in combat make disproportionate claims on the citizenry. Indeed, he sought to exploit that disproportion to rally the nation to the unglamorous task of conserving energy. The idea was to make the notion of conserving energy more important. 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 Viet Nam 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 last month 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?

-- By Charles Krauthammer