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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.