Imposing My Morals On the Rest of the World

Cool. The Internet is back here at Cambridge Dorchestire Apartments. Now I can get back to cultivating a few ideas and offering them up for mass consumption.

I've been very focused on both work and working out for months now. Philosophy has had a seat at the very back of the bus during this period and that's a shame. I really enjoy going over issues of morality, religion, knowledge, perception, etc, etc. But my mind has been elsewhere, so it'll take some exploring around before I find out where I left off.

Something that's been in the news lately caught my attention. A law was just signed into affect by the president of Afghanistan that, as one of its provisions, grants a man the "right" to have sex with his wife a minimum of once every four days. People are rightly shocked and outraged with this law as they view it as effectively legalizing the rape of women who say no to their husbands.

The law is abhorrent for sure; but what really gets me is the simple fact that there exists societies wherein women are treated as property or slaves, to be raped or violently punished if they do not behave according to custom or religious law. Even if the controversial law signed by the president of Afghanistan (a U.S. ally) never was written, women today would still be raped or tortured or forced to live behind a veil or compelled to produce children like they were cattle.

Why does this happen? And ultimately, how can it be allowed to continue in the year 2009?

You know, the thirties are a period in every person's life when he starts to take what's going on in his community, his country, and his world a little more personally. I'm 33 and I'm beginning to feel like what's happening around me in some way represents me. My generation is just moving into positions of power for the first time. I like to think that my generation (and the similar 20somethings) got Obama elected. He represents us, our standards, our values. If he fucks up, I'm going to feel a slight tinge of responsibility. I'll feel like I fucked up as well. And because I feel as though my generation is now at the age in which we are taken more seriously and given more direct control over all aspects of society (we become fathers/mothers, move up to positions of seniority/management at work, gain adequate knowledge and experience to begin participating more in political/social/economic institutions, are looked up to as examples by nearly half the people on the planet, etc), I feel doubly annoyed by things like this law in Afghanistan. I may sound like a megalomaniac identifying myself as part owner and manager of the world at large; but dammit, this sort of shit is unacceptable in MY world, in MY generation's world.

I know that the entire world does not subscribe to progressive "Western" or "European" values. And I understand that parts of the world are not ready to secularize their governments and their ways of life-including their treatment of free individuals. But I do believe that there exists a base-level value for both human life and human freedom that the world has historically sought to preserve and uphold. The United Nation's list of human rights defines what the term means very well. I don't understand why world leaders cannot more aggressively combat human rights violations, including some ideologies/religions traditional oppressive treatment of women, even if that treatment is tied up in a web of culture and beliefs. Even if it is something that those who are being oppressed or victimized would excuse or subscribe to willfully.

This is the somewhat bold idea I'm interested in exploring-that societies should forcibly disallow or stop other nations from committing human rights violations that are culturally/historically grounded. It's not an entirely controversial or original notion. Presidents Bush and Obama both have expressed the sentiment that while we are not at war with Islam, we are opposed to those who practice extreme, violent, and oppressive forms of that faith (just as we are opposed to similar practices within Christian fundamentalist sects). President Clinton took military action to halt genocide in Bosnia (apparently). And of course there was World War II.

But from everything I've learned, it appears as though our government has rarely intervened in other nation's affairs for purely humanitarian reasons. The Civil War was not just about freeing the slaves. World War II was not just about saving the Jews. And if one were to look at the history of major and costly foreign policy actions taken by the U.S. government, one would discover that protecting corporate/capitalist powers-that-be was our counties overriding goal in the vast majority of the events.

I'm a proactive sort of guy. And I'm a moralist in the sense that I believe strongly in a set of values, as simple as they are. So, as much as I hate to condone a similar approach to the one adopted by neoconservatives in the Bush administration (though it's different, because I don't believe we invaded Iraq for moral reasons), I'll state for the record that I support increased, but more targeted intervention in the world for the explicit purposes of upholding human/individual rights.