The rape of a Teddy Bear next door

That blog headline is misleading. But it conveys the correct summary of this blog.

Careful readers of this blog will know that I never delete a blog.  But I deleted a blog about the Sudan Teddy Bear incident last month. I wrote the blog in haste and realized, after my son pointed out the logical flaws, that I hadn't thought the issue through.

Then I saw a press conference in which a journalist asked the President of the United States to condemn the Saudi Arabian government, in person, for a court decision about a rape in Saudi Arabia. A rape judicial decision that nearly all Americans found offensive.

That made the point to me.  The world is much too small for the current level of technology and the current level of human moral understanding.

It is obvious that technology now lets us know the daily stories of the thousands of tribes in the world today, on an immediate basis.  We can know the stories in high tech visual and audio levels and we can often have our fellow citizens on the scene commenting and interpreting for us.

The trouble is that our moral apparatus is wholly inadequate for this high tech world.  I'm not going to mince my words.  Nine out of ten Americans haven't the vaguest idea what cultural differences are.  I know that number 9 out of 10, because I've talked to and tested several thousand people about this subject.

Modern humans and 9 out of 10 Americans believe that our moral values are universal among human beings.  If someone has different moral values they are either primitive, backward, wrong or inferior.  And much too often, when they are no threat to us, we intend to correct them.

I am not going to explain cultural difference.  You either know it in your gut from experience or you don't.  My concern is the correct moral position to take in a world that is too small.

The correct position is to (1) confidently express your disdain or outrage over the behavior of the non-Americans and (2) to leave the non-Americans alone. 

In the Saudi Arabian case the President of the U.S. did exactly that.  He expressed his personal outrage and said 'the Saudi's know our strongly held beliefs about this matter.'  Meaning at the international level every state department knows that every other country is sovereign and has its own domestic values and institutions.

In the Teddy Bear case, which involved a Brit, the country of Sudan deported her out of harms way; appropriately.