Let�€™s talk about moral relativism. Awhile back I wrote a post about moral relativism after the new Pope Benedict XVI warned, �€œWe are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one�€™s own ego and one�€™s own desires.�€�

If you want some good examples of what His Holiness was talkin�€™ about, head on over to the Right Blogosphere. They�€™re havin�€™ Moral Relativity Roundup over there, wagons circled to defend all heinous, callous, and shameful acts perpetrated by our government because, you know, other people do worse stuff.

Take this cartoon, for example. It seems to argue that, because some Islamic terrorists killed 3,000 Americans, it�€™s OK for the U.S. to detain people at Guantanamo without trial or access to a lawyer. Never mind that innocent people have been detained, and never mind that it�€™s highly unlikely any of the guilty ones had anything to do with 9/11. What we do is OK, because other people are worse.

By an outrageous noncoincidence, U.S. Marines in Iraq recently found four Iraqis who had been tortured by the insurgents. The righties seized this report and promptly began an orgy of moral territorial marking around it. Marc at USS Neverdock wrote

All the lefties, anti-war types and the Democrats should be made to to read this so they can tell the difference between real torture and the discomfort the Gitmo prisoners are given.

When marines burst in, one of the captives was lying under a stairwell, badly beaten. At first, they thought he was dead.

The others were emaciated and battered. Mr. Fathil had fared the best. The other three were taken by medical helicopter to Balad, a base near Baghdad with a hospital.

But he still had been hurt badly. Marks from beatings criss-crossed his back, and deep pocks, apparently from electric shock burns, were gouged in his skin.

The shocks, he said, felt “like my soul is being ripped out of my body.” But when he would start to scream, and his body would pull up from the shock, they would begin to beat him, he said.

And dimwit Durbin calls our guys Nazis.

Senator Durbin didn�€™t call �€œour guys�€� Nazis, of course, but we can�€™t expect righties to be constrained by anything resembling facts, can we? Anyway, here�€™s the passage from an FBI report that Senator Durbin quoted:

On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold….On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees….

By rightie logic, the practice described above is perfectly acceptable because what the insurgents do is worse. It�€™s all relative, in other words.

Not too many of us ever voluntarily maintain a fixed position for long stretches of time except on the sofa. You�€™d be surprised how excruciatingly painful this can be, especially if you can�€™t mark the passage of time and don�€™t know when it�€™s going to end. (Women who have experienced many hours of labor stuck at 5 centimeters dilation can appreciate this also.) Not knowing when (or if) you�€™ll be able to move can play with your mind in frightening ways, which makes sitting long hours of zazen a challenge.

What the insurgents did to the four Iraqis was cruelty. What was done to the chained detainees at Gitmo was cruelty. One cruelty doesn�€™t excuse the other.

For those who are unconvinced that being left chained and foot on a hard floor and left for many hours is really all that bad, let�€™s review some of the other acts committed in our name:

Like this:

Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.

Or this:

The men had been hung by their arms from the ceiling and beaten so severely that, according to a report by Army investigators later leaked to the Baltimore Sun, their legs would have needed to be amputated had they lived. The Army�€™s Criminal Investigation command launched an inquiry, but few people outside Afghanistan took notice.

And, you know, I could go on.

The righties are still pitching fits over use of the word gulag. David Gelenter wrote a much-linked-to op ed in the Los Angeles Times in which he cited the large numbers of people who died in the gulags and other death camps. He appears to be saying that atrocities aren�€™t so bad if you keep the numbers down.

Jeanne d�€™Arc of Body and Soul asks:

Since Charles Manson is still around, shouldn’t we give ordinary killers a break? Is it really fair to put them in prison, too, since some who kills only one or two people isn’t in the same moral swamp as Manson? Or is there a threshold crossed, at which point it becomes useless to parse and quantify evil?

I say that a person of compassion and conscience cannot torture another human being. Not one. A person who can torture one other human being is capable of torturing a million. And a nation that can justify atrocity on any scale is a dangerous nation.

In the earlier post on moral relativism, I argued that the notion of a fixed, perfect, absolute moral code written in the sky somewhere is a delusion. Moral codes are social constructs, and these constructs are always in flux, changing from society to society, generation to generation. Within one lifetime one might not see the change, but if we could go back a couple of centuries to meet our own ancestors, their moral codes would be strange and alien to us.

Pope Benedict and others who insist that morality consists of following fixed codes downplay the importance of conscience and compassion. But without conscience and compassion there is no morality. Because where morals are nothing but legalisms, people will find loopholes. Without conscience and compassion, �€œmorality�€� becomes an exercise in making excuses for one�€™s own cruelties. Throughout history, the most horrific atrocities have been committed by people who believed their acts were justified, even righteous.

Doing unto others as we would have them do unto us is a better guide to morality than lists of rules. However, the truly compassionate person is one who cannot do otherwise.

There are plans to build an International Freedom Center adjacent to the World Trade Center memorial. The IFC is intended to host permanent and temporary exhibits about freedom, as well as present seminars, films and lectures. Righties are outraged. They are rallying today to �€œtake back�€� �€œtheir�€� Memorial (in fact, the Memorial will be a separate structure). They are certain the IFC will promote �€œmoral relativism,�€� which is, of course, bad.

But they needn�€™t worry about the International Freedom Center. It�€™s the American Right that carries the flame of moral relativism, and proudly. They have no compassion, they have no conscience, and they aren�€™t even much constrained by the rules any more. Whatever America does is correct, because we�€™re America. We�€™re the good guys. And we know this is true, because other people are worse.