Taking Care of Your Own
24th December 2008
Why should the tribulations of distant strangers be as important as those of people near and dear to us? What requires us to care about the sufferings of faraway people whom we will never meet?
The answer is obvious: Nothing.
Neither evolutionary biology, nor tradition, nor common sense would dictate any concern for distant peoples with whom we share neither kinship, language, nor customs.
The imperative to empathize with distant alien peoples is an artifact of our times, a product of the strange and inverted moral structure that has emerged out of the wreckage of the twentieth century.