I just didn’t have a lot to say at the Montclair Socrates Café meeting this week. The topic of the evening was suggested by Kon, who always comes up with interesting topics. His topic on Tuesday was whether the US and western Europe have the right to criticize and judge inhumane practices that occur in the Muslim and underdeveloped nations (e.g., stoning adulteresses, chopping off the hands of theifs, female circumcision, criminalizing homosexuality, etc.).

So the topic had potential; a spin-off from the classic tension between relative and absolute views of morality. But after a while the discussion bogged down into a tear-session about how terrible our so-called civilized society is. Let’s just say that the people that attend these meetings are generally educated, well-off, and have a “liberal” political bias; they don’t stray too far from what they read or hear from the Huffington Post, the Nation, and NPR. So they decried our nation’s history of prejudice, poverty, slavery, male dominance, economic inequality and military action. Even today, we make war. We still have soldiers out there shooting bullets and killing people. Our economy distributes wealth, power and privilege in highly unfair ways. One fellow at the meeting decided to lecture us about Abraham Lincoln, claiming that Lincoln only issued the Emancipation Proclamation so as to prevent British aid to the Confederacy. He was clearly implying that Lincoln, who has been held up as the American Gandhi, was not against slavery in principle; in fact, our lecturer concluded that if Lincoln could have held the Union together without ensuring African Americans their rights as human beings, he would have taken the lesser path. (There is a more nuanced analysis of this question on Wikipedia).

I usually don’t jump into the conversation at Socrates for the first hour or so;  »  continue reading …