On Loving thy Enemies

Robert C.J. Parry's post here intrigues me, as he considers the case of liberals who get mugged.

I used to be a peacenik, one who naively believed that we could achieve lasting peace through kindness. I used to look at Jesus' words in the Sermon on the Mount and see a bold declaration that loving an enemy will pay more lasting dividends than crushing him.

I later became a realist. I realized that, while doves believed that kindness would bring peace and hawks believed that ruthlessness would bring peace, human beings kept fighting all along. We are fighting animals, though each of us has our own view of what will stop the fighting. Even so-called doves find themselves wanting peace in Iraq but revolution against oppressive regimes in Central America.

Robert expresses a hope that the British schoolteacher in Sudan, accused of blasphemy by teddy bear, "will join those of us who recognize the enemy for what it is, and stop coddling the irrational with feelings."

Perhaps. But this brings up problematic issues. Is Sudan our "enemy" as such? This sort of thing happens in my native Pakistan and in Saudi Arabia, but we Americans treat those countries as friends. And some would say that we've done some fairly Sudanese things ourselves to the native Americans in our country. And when our enemy Saddam was gassing his people, he was being coddled by the Reagan and Bush I loyalists. Later we would use such gassings as a rationale for regime change. "Who's on first...?"

It gets a bit complicated in terms of when humans should coddle bad guys and when we should be crushing them, especially in light of our own failings. As a realist, it seems obvious to me that we unleash our tribal need for crushing foes by casting them in the worst possible light when we decide it's time to fight -- yet we also ignore that group's immorality if we think they can aid us.

Getting back to the plight of the schoolteacher, Ms. Gibbons, I sport an admiration for both the unwavering conscience of the conservative and the heartfelt passion and decency of the liberal. The Gregory Pecks of the world are more potent in their impact when they champion the little guy at a real personal cost. A liberal doesn't start being a liberal until he's been mugged, and still chooses not to view the residents of the troubled ghetto with revulsion.