Consensus Is A Battle Cry For The Left

George Jonas on Louise Arbour and the Arab Charter on Human Rights: A moral relativist par excellence

Posted: February 02, 2008, 4:00 PM by Dan Goldbloom

Family legend tells of my Victorian grandmother being urged to vote for a certain chief of gendarmerie in her district.
“He’ll be impartial,” the campaign worker cajoled her.

“Impartial is nice,” my grandmother replied, “but when I catch someone stealing a chicken from my yard, I want a gendarme who is on my side.”
Many years later, when Canada abstained in the United Nations on some issue or other during the Cold War, I made a disapproving remark. “How can you be an honest broker,” someone said to me, “if you take sides?”

“Why would you want to be an honest broker between right and wrong?” I asked, remembering grandmother’s dictum.
“Because” he replied triumphantly “you can’t tell which is which.”

Drums. Fanfare. This turned out to be the grand legacy of our experiment in world government. After a few years of membership in the UN, we could no longer tell right from wrong. Or a gendarme from a thief from a chicken. When little old ladies called the cops, we sent them mediators.
Some believe that moral leadership requires strict neutrality between good and evil. Not only individuals but entire countries, even epochs, labour under this illusion. Canada has long been such a country, and our ”non-judgmental” times are such an epoch — in the West only, I hasten to add, because elsewhere the times are anything but non-judgmental.