Last week, I left you with a question:
I overheard two American veterans talking about their time serving in one of our recent wars, and one of them said that the people there, in that place where we were defending democracy, “have no values.” The question was, “What values do you think he meant?”
He could have been talking about several common examples of poor behavior that I have heard, anecdotally, from returning veterans. The foreign forces we are there to train often prove to be full of corrupt or incompetent people. The population we are there to protect suffers from the same social problems you expect to see in places where food, water, and bodily security are scarce. And, of course, countless religious and cultural differences test the tolerance of everyone involved.
Here Is What He Said
This section is going to repeat some disgusting things. If you know what they are, and don’t want to read them, please skip to the next section.
The specific accusation almost doesn’t matter - in the case of the conversation I overheard, that particular veteran was hinting strongly that the local men he was there to train kept young boys in their camp to provide services. And yes, they meant sexual services, even though the actual, more official reason those boys are in camps like that is to perform housekeeping and scutwork.
I have been hearing this accusation for decades. One of the first things I learned from students studying Arabic at the Defense Language Institute was “Over there, girls are for breeding, and boys are for pleasure.” Any time I went out drinking with Arabic students, somebody was bound to bring up a version of this rumor, and then everybody else would share what they had heard to reinforce it. Allegations of bestiality, incest, trafficking of children or women - and this was in 1994, years before the attacks on New York that brought all of our collective, latent bigotry against the Muslim world to the forefront of American culture.
Here Is What He Meant
The problem with what he said is that it is probably not true.
Do I think he was lying? Not exactly - I think he saw things that looked unsavory, and I think if he had pushed to learn more, he might have uncovered something illegal that might have been prosecuted. If he had seen what he claimed to see, I strongly suspect something would have been done about it. More likely, though, he would have thrown unfounded accusations at someone outside of his commander’s jurisdiction and caused an international incident.
Right or wrong, he couldn’t have stopped whatever he thought he saw, and that lack of control is frustrating. But now, safely back home, he has his own story to feed into the already large body of rumor and outrage that divides our world from that of the people in whatever part of the world he was in.
His story is now part of the immortal tapestry of prejudice that uses moral outrage over a perceived injustice to justify our presence over there, and to explain our failure to achieve our mission - we aren’t exactly sure what that was supposed to be - as a failure of their culture.
A Superior Culture
In America, we are taught from the earliest age that our civilization is uniquely founded upon a strong moral foundation. Since my youth, this has been increasingly referred to as a tradition of “Judeo-Christian values”. The phrase itself (as you can see at that link) grew out of a response to the rise of antisemitism in the 1930s - and it was meant to be inclusive and acknowledge the common values of American Christians and Jews.
But the problem with this lies in the unquestioned belief that Christian values, or Judeo-Christian values, are somehow unique. That also assumes that those values are somehow defined. But they aren’t.
As Jim Wright of Stonekettle Station put it in 2017:
A quarter of a million people follow me every day across various social media platforms. Jews. Christians in various and assorted flavors. Muslims. Non-believers. Sort of believers. Atheists. Some that don’t fit well into any category. So, I asked. What are Judeo-Christian Values? What are they? Give me a list. It doesn’t even have to be exhaustive, just give me the top three.
Now, you’d think that a quarter of a million people could come up with something.
If you read that whole piece, Jim carefully shows what “Judeo-Christian” means to the people using that phrase, and asks for a “value” unique to that philosophy - and in response he gets nothing. The most common response was some version of the Golden Rule, but that “value” - do unto others as you would have them do unto you - can be found in every human culture.
And if it is common to every human, then it is not unique because that is how that word works.
Whence Superiority
Author Brian Klass recently posted a rather long and interesting article about the relationship of “Big Gods” to the development of complex human societies. “Big Gods and the Origin of Human Cooperation” explores the history of how and when the idea that omnipotent powers are watching our behavior began to arise. Did a belief in these kinds of gods come first, leading humans to build cities and complex societies built on trade and power? Or did humans begin to build those societies and then use the stories of Big Gods to affect the behavior of individual citizens?
That’s an interesting question to consider when you are confronted with a veteran spreading a common slander against the people he was sent to liberate and protect. He clearly thinks that he holds a value - for children, for human life, for individual liberty - that the target of his slander does not. He clearly thinks that his Big God (whether that’s an actual deity or the U.S. military) would take his side in this moral judgment.
When he says, “those people just have no values,” he probably knows who “those people” are, and what values he thinks they lack. But if you question him about that, will he have an answer that he can give you? The point of the accusation is not to correct the problem - it is to create a definition of our values that doesn’t already exist.
Most likely, he will not engage with your question. Instead, he will make your question about the outrage itself: “How can you defend the disgusting behavior that I saw happening?”
You see, you weren’t there, and you don’t know what he saw. So you have no basis to challenge his story. You have no context for disproving his claims - and even if you point out that the culture he is impugning prohibits the behavior he is describing, you’re still taking the side of the accused molester. And somehow, if you point out how frequently we see examples of Christian priests, Christian youth pastors, and Christian church leaders across the spectrum of American society, you aren’t going to convince him that the problem is not a matter of the offender following the wrong god.
Because the point of a story like this is not to correct the problem or save the children - the point is to establish that we share values that those people do not. That lack of values makes them so bad, they don’t even deserve to be called “people” - and they deserve whatever fate is coming.
And if you’re on their side, so do you.
I didn't know you were heading to this particular "here" in your previous post.
Your post identifies a tangled mess - arguably an emotional mine field that is fundamental to the human experience all the way back to our pre-human origins, as I alluded to privately.
Having read and re-read your postseveral times now, I will offer this:
"If he had seen what he claimed to see, I strongly suspect something would have been done about it."
He saw what he saw. I have no reason to doubt it. I have witnessed child soldiering. You have nothing more than my assertion. Did he invent it out of whole cloth? Am I?
Clearly, nothing was done about what he witnessed. Objective reality informs me nothing has been done about child soldiering.
"..he couldn’t have stopped whatever he thought he saw, and that lack of control is frustrating."
What if he actually saw what he claimed? That he couldn't stop it is traumatic to him. His reaction to it is a psychological response to that trauma. "frustrating" is a long way from the very real horror of the experience as a witness, let alone as a victim.
In this case, "..those people just have no values.." is his psychological generalization of a specific traumatic event. It's a coping mechanism.
The rest of your post creates an inescapable logic loop. It's a tacit dismissal of his claim, his reaction to it, and I would suggest his humanity. There's no path through the loop that does not involve dismissal.
Did he generalize the specific to an entire group of people? Absolutely. Did he actually witness it? More likely than not. That he was wrong to generalize does not negate the truth of the event causing the generalization. He is, after all, human.
Thanks for the post. It has prompted me to revisit the excellent PBS series, "Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth" (available in its entirety on YouTube)