Robert A Silverstein
In the Eastern Mirror of November 16, 2016, a speech was printed. The paper describes the event thus: “This speech was delivered by the theme speaker, Akum Longchari, Editor of the [sic] Morung Express on the occasion of the celebration of National Press Day by the media fraternity of Nagaland on November 16, 2016[.]”(Disclosure: I met Longchari this past July in Kohima, we have exchanged e-mails since we met, and his paper, The Morung Express, has published a number of my articles.)
The speech is titled, “Ethics and Professionalism,” and addresses the ethical conflicts and obligations that journalists confront on the job. The speech is an important one, because it makes clear that the credibility of the media is critical to a free society, and the decisions that working journalists make can either move a society toward greater freedom or away from such freedom, based on the truth or falsity of the reporting that they do.
But the topic I want to briefly discuss is one Longchari barely touches on, one which, for a variety of reasons, is a sensitive one for me, and should be for you too. In the article, Longchari is explaining why “Fairness and Impartiality are imperative in order to attain high standards of professional journalism.” But, later in the paragraph, he cites an exception to his rule: “...objectivity is not always possible (in the face for example of brutality and inhumanity)....” And this exception is what I want to discuss. Actually, not so much the exception, but the way we rationalize the exception.
Further on in Longchari’s speech, he refers to the effectiveness of propaganda in contributing to the slaughter of literally millions of people. The two examples he gives are the slaughter in Rwanda in the 1990s and the extermination of millions of Jews and others by the Nazis in World War Two. He gives one propagandist in particular “the greatest responsibility for the holocaust.” The word “holocaust,” in the lower case, has one definition that fits this discussion: “a thorough destruction involving extensve loss of life esp. through fire.” But when the word is capitalized, as in “Holocaust,” it is the term used to describe the slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis in World War Two.
One definition of “Moral Equivalency” is, “...a term used in political debate, usually to criticize any denial that a moral hierarchy can be assessed of two sides in a conflict, or in the actions or tactics of two sides.” This definition is from Wikpedia, and is fine as far as it goes. But it is my contention that it does not go far enough. To me, moral equivalency is used by all of us in our every-day lives as a psychological device to rationalize doing something immoral, to another person or group of people. It allows us to live with an act that we know to be wrong; it allows us to sleep at night.
To go back to the most extreme example used much of the time, the Holocaust, many who participated in the slaughter of Jews did not have to rationalize their participation: they hated Jews so thoroughly that there was no need to rationalize their acts. But in many of the countries where the Jews were shot on the spot or rounded up for shipment in cattle cars to the extermination camps of Poland, the native population, necessary to the Nazis for support, did not have the hatred that the Nazis had, and they felt compelled to rationalize their participation in the slaughter. Many of them thus rationalized that the Jews loaned money at usurious rates, lived in isolated groups looking down on the rest of them, manipulated others in order to accumulate great wealth, etc. These were all viewed as acts that earned them their death sentences, that is, these wrongs by the Jews were, to them, as serious as the death sentences that were now being imposed on them.
This is false moral equivalency in action. The non-Jewish community may have wanted the houses and businesses of the Jews, which they got upon the death or departure of the Jews to the death camps, but they needed a reason to allow themselves to move forward to take the Jewish property. To sleep in someone’s bed whom they just assisted in sending to their death, they needed a reason, and the reason had to be as serious to them as would justify participating in the person’s death.
Prior to the building of the extermination camps in Poland, the Nazis invaded the USSR and killed as many as one million Jews, simply rounding up all Jews in a village or town, taking them out to a field, demanding that they dig a ditch, and then shooting them at the edge of the ditch. In all of these cases, in hundreds of towns, the non-Jews had to determine, for their own reasons, that the Jews deserved what was happening to them, otherwise they would have had to admit that they were cowards, too terrified to stand up to the Nazis. It was much easier to rationalize that the Jews got what was coming to them. They used the psychological tool of false moral equivalence.
But one need not use the most evil examples of moral equivalency to understand its usefulness and see how we can all rely on it to allow ourselves do something that we know to be immoral. I have a simple example from almost 40 years ago. I was getting a graduate degree in Politics at New York University in Manhattan and a fellow student used to go into the NYU bookstore, switch price tags on books (putting cheap tags on expensive books), and walking out with an expensive book at a cheaper price than was the actual price of the book. As an attorney at the time, I knew that what she was doing was larceny, a crime. But she viewed herself as a radical, and rationalized that NYU was a private capitalist university, one she decided was part of the decadent capitalist system and deserved what she was doing to it by in effect stealing expensive books for cheaper prices. To her, there was a moral equivalency to her act and NYU’s participation in the evil capitalist system.
How many of us rationalized stealing something from someone and rationalizing that it was okay because their family had a lot of money, they could afford to lose what you were stealing, and anyway, the person was spoiled and flaunted his or her wealth in your face. This is another day-to-day example of false moral equivalency.
Now let us turn to the more sensitive, yet more relevant, subject of corruption and violence against Nagas by Nagas. How do those who are corrupt or violent rationalize what they must understand is immoral? Some are just evil and do not need to rationalize immoral acts. But the vast majority of those who do these acts must say things to themselves that allow them to sleep at night.
Let me give a powerful example. The NSCN(IM), in Manipur not long ago, ordered a man not to run for a certain office that the NSCN(IM) determined, for whatever reasons, should remain vacant. That man ran, and won, and shortly thereafter was murdered. Was it the NSCN(IM)? Who knows? No one will have the courage to come forward and testify. But you can be sure that the next time the NSCN(IM) tells someone not to run, that person will certainly not run!
But the interesting question is, how did the killer rationalize the murder of an innocent man? It has to concern that the person running for the office was very selfish, not thinking of the movement and the fight for a nation, etc. The disobedience of the command not to run was the moral equivalence of his death, at least to the killer.
Here is one test of whether you are relying on the crutch of false moral equivalence to commit an immoral act. If the act you are committing in the name of moral equivalence benefits you, you should be suspicious of the truth and logic of your act. You must have the integrity to look into your heart to judge whether you are making a false moral equivalence for selfish reasons.
(Robert A, Silverstein, is from Albany, New York. He can be contacted at silverstein@nycap.rr.com)
