Moral discernment
Over the last week, the President of the United States made two comments that illustrate the destructive force required to protect US imperial interests. He told reporters that he would continue blowing up fishing boats in the Caribbean. He hinted at the possibility of an invasion of Venezuela. He said, “I don’t think we’re going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war. I think we are just going to kill people who are bringing drugs into our country, OK? We are going to kill them, you know? They are going to be, like, dead.”
Not long after that comment, the US military expanded the attacks on small boats to the Pacific Ocean, killing another 14 people. At least 57 people have been murdered in these illegal operations.
A few days later, the president announced that he had directed the Pentagon to resume testing nuclear weapons. Trump wrote on Truth Social, “Because of other countries' testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately.”
No one is quite clear what Trump is talking about here, since other countries are not testing nuclear weapons. The US has not exploded a nuclear bomb since 1992. This is largely because of the massive, sustained, global outpouring of people demanding that nuclear powers move towards arms control. Many of us believe that only the complete elimination of such weapons will make life safe.
Each of these statements is startling in its starkness. Each reflects a willful ignorance of the death and destruction caused by the actions that flow from them.
But as startling as these are in their crudeness and consequences, it is their casualness that is most telling of the level of depravity in the governing of this country.
This casualness to cruelty has a long history. It is clearly explained by our gifted writer and thinker, Toni Morrison. In her work, The Origin of Others, she explores the complexities of race, identity, and belonging. She confronts the brutality of slavery and asks how it is possible that white people refused to see the humanity of those they enslaved. She writes that this reflected “an ignorance so vast, a perception so blunted, an imagination so bleak that no nuance, no subtlety, no difference among them can penetrate". She explains, this is not only a failure of intelligence but of “moral discernment,” as it prevents a full and complex view of others' humanity. This lack of moral discernment precludes the capacity to know what is “just and what is mean-spirited.”
For much of our history, this lack of moral discernment enabled the genocide of indigenous peoples, the enslavement of Africans,and the cruelties critical to capitalist development
Now embodied by Trump and all those who enable him, it threatens all that we value in our common lives together, all that human beings have struggled to protect and cherish.
At the height of the threat of nuclear annihilation, Martin Luther King warned we were a nation of “guided missiles” and “misguided men.” It took nearly 30 years after that insight for the US to agree to stop exploding nuclear weapons.
In his speech on the triple evils of racism, materialism, and militarism in 1967, he explained.
“When scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men. When we foolishly maximize the minimum and minimize the maximum, we sign the warrant for our own day of doom. It is this moral lag in our thing-oriented society that blinds us to the human reality around us and encourages us in the greed and the exploitation that creates the sector of poverty in the midst of wealth.”
In this, King is offering us a way forward, in calling us to forge a moral power based on our connections to each other, the best in our past, and \the deepest aspirations we hold for our futures. These are sources of real power. Such power in damaged land will not be easy to create. We should have no illusions about the struggle we face, or the necessity of engaging in it to bring about the world we wish to see.