Publisher's Note: This post appears here courtesy of the The Daily Wire. The author of this post is Ben Shapiro.
One of the dumbest things we can do is flatten all ideologies and pretend all human beings think the same way.
Every time someone does this, you end up with the worst possible policy.
If you say, for example, all human beings have a yearning in their human heart for freedom in the same exact way, that can very easily lead you to the policies pursued by the George W. Bush administration, in which the president declared that the goal of the United States was to end tyranny on planet Earth.
Of course, that is not a sustainable goal, because it assumes that everyone has the same priorities that you have.
In the same way, when you suggest that all acts of violence are equivalent, when you abstract terrible things happening to the level of the general, when you say,
"Okay, there's a specific terror act directed at whites or Jews or blacks" - instead of looking at the specific cause that is being pursued, instead of looking at the specific ideological matrix used to justify and foment violence, you simply say
"Violence is bad, and all human beings should just know that violence is bad," you are preventing the actual solutions to those problems.
That's because if you refuse to face up to the fact that certain ideas are worse than other ideas, certain cultures are worse than other cultures, certain ideological frameworks are worse than other ideological frameworks, you're missing the motivating factor in human action.
Instead, what you end up with is a blunderbuss foreign policy that differentially strikes groups in an unfair and stupid way.
The other day, Sunny Hostin of The View did a signal version of this. She was commenting on the mass shooting in Bondi Beach in Sydney against Jews by two Islamists.
Here is what she had to say:
I used to think that gun violence was just an American phenomenon. And now we see this sort of anti-Semitic attack in Australia on the first day of Hanukkah, which is so disgusting and disturbing. And then, you know, kids going to college at Brown in the middle of finals getting murdered. What those families went through? Why all of this sickness and hatred going around the world?
"Why all of this sickness and hatred going around the world?" That's fine on the level of a two-year-old.
But let's be very clear. Different ideological groups commit different types of crimes. Some commit no crimes. Some actually promote peace. Some ideologies promote vast terror attacks, such as radical Islamism.
But when you reduce everything to
"It's just an act of violence," or to the tool, such as a gun; when you look at the Brown University shooting, where we still don't know the motive, and then you look at what happened in Sydney, Australia, where you absolutely know the motive and you flatten that out and pretend they are both the same, you're preventing the implementation of policies that would actually prevent shootings.
That's because there actually are ways to target radical Islam in, for example, Sydney, Australia: Don't import more radical Muslims. Surveil radical mosques. Create a better security apparatus. Have a government that does not grant credibility to radical Islamists and their arguments.
There are many ways to fight particular ideologies or particular ideas.
But when you flatten that all out to the idea that it's all just
"gun violence," you are preventing a solution.
That is often the core of the debate between the Right and the Left, the traditional Right and Left.
I always have to clarify this because there are people who exist on the so-called political Right who are not in any real way conservative; they just don't like some of the elements of the Left.
But traditional conservative thinking suggests that human beings are motivated by the ideas and ideologies they carry, and also that human beings are deeply flawed. They're not inherently good; human beings have the capacity for greatness and also the capacity for sin.
All of this is embedded in Federalist 51, in which James Madison argues that if human beings were angels, you wouldn't need a government in order to govern them because they would be angels.
Once you recognize the reality of human flaws and nature, once you recognize that people change their behavior based on the ideologies that they hold, then it makes it possible to look at the outgrowth of particular ideologies and then fight those ideas.
Otherwise, what you end up with is a very bad and stupid public policy.
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