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Before we can decide what is right, we must first know what is true. Yet our culture increasingly reverses this order, making moral conviction the starting point of thought rather than its conclusion. Peter Boghossian, the philosopher best known for challenging ideological thinking in academia, once argued that epistemology must precede ethics. The claim sounds abstract, but it describes a very practical problem: when we stop asking how we know, we lose the capacity to judge what’s right.
Epistemology—the study of how we know what we know—deals with questions of evidence, justification, and truth. It asks: What counts as knowledge? How do we tell when a belief is warranted? What standards should guide our acceptance of a claim? Ethics, by contrast, deals with what we should do, what is good, and what is right. The two are inseparable, but they are not interchangeable. Ethics without epistemology is like navigation without a compass: passionate, determined, and directionless.
The Missing First Question
Socrates, history’s first great epistemologist, spent his life asking not “What is right?” but “How do you know?” In dialogues like Euthyphro, he exposes the instability of moral conviction built on unexamined belief. When his interlocutor claims to know what “piety” is because the gods approve of it, Socrates presses: Do the gods love the pious because it is pious, or is it pious because the gods love it? In that moment, ethics collapses into epistemology—the question of truth must be settled before morality can stand.
This ordering of inquiry—first truth, then virtue—was not mere pedantry. Socrates saw that unexamined moral certainty leads to cruelty, because it allows one to justify any act under the banner of righteousness. He was eventually executed by men convinced they were defending moral order. His death, paradoxically, vindicated his philosophy: without the discipline of knowing, moral zealotry becomes indistinguishable from moral error.
Why Epistemology Matters
Epistemology is not a luxury for philosophers; it is the foundation of all responsible action. It demands that we distinguish between evidence and wishful thinking, between understanding and propaganda. To have a sound epistemology is to have habits of mind—skepticism, curiosity, proportion, humility—that protect us from self-deception.
When those habits decay, moral reasoning falters. Consider the Salem witch trials. The judges sincerely believed they were protecting their community from evil, yet their evidence—dreams, hearsay, spectral visions—was epistemically bankrupt. Their moral horror was real; their epistemic standards were not. The result was ethical disaster.
We see similar failures today whenever moral conviction outruns verification. A viral video circulates online; a crowd declares guilt before facts emerge. Outrage replaces investigation. The moral fervor feels righteous because it’s anchored in empathy or justice—but its epistemic foundation is sand. Ethical action requires knowing what actually happened, not what we wish had happened.
When Knowing Guides Doing
When epistemology is sound, ethics becomes coherent, fair, and humane.
Take the principle “innocent until proven guilty.” It is not primarily a moral rule; it is an epistemic one. It asserts that belief in guilt must be justified by evidence before punishment can be ethically administered. That epistemic restraint is what makes justice possible.
The same holds true in science. Before germ theory, doctors believed disease arose from “bad air,” leading them to act ethically—by their lights—yet ineffectively. Once scientific evidence clarified the true cause of infection, moral duties became clearer: sterilize instruments, wash hands, protect patients. Knowledge refined morality. Sound epistemology made better ethics possible.
John Stuart Mill saw this dynamic as essential to liberty. In On Liberty, he wrote that “he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.” Mill’s insight is epistemological but its consequences are ethical: humility in belief breeds tolerance in practice. A society that cultivates open inquiry and debate is not merely more intelligent—it is more moral. For Mill, the freedom to question was not just an intellectual right but a moral obligation to prevent the tyranny of false certainty.
The Modern Inversion: Ethics Before Epistemology
Boghossian’s warning is timely because modern culture tends to invert the proper order. Many moral debates now begin not with questions of truth but with declarations of allegiance—what side are you on? The epistemic virtues of skepticism, evidence, and debate are recast as moral vices: to question a prevailing narrative is “denialism,” to request evidence is “harmful,” to doubt is “bigotry.”
The result is a moral discourse unanchored from truth. People act with conviction but without comprehension, certain of their goodness yet blind to their errors. Boghossian’s point is not that ethics are unimportant but that they cannot stand alone. If we do not first establish how we know, then our “oughts” become detached from reality, and moral judgment degenerates into moral fashion.
Hannah Arendt, reflecting on the moral collapse of ordinary Germans under Nazism, described this as the banality of evil—evil committed not from monstrous intent but from thoughtlessness. For Arendt, the failure was epistemic before it was ethical: people stopped thinking critically about what was true, deferring instead to the slogans and appearances sanctioned by authority. Their moral passivity was the fruit of epistemic surrender.
This same danger confronts us whenever ideology replaces inquiry—when images and narratives dictate belief before evidence is examined. To act justly, we must first see clearly; to see clearly, we must learn how to know.
The Cave and the Shadows
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave captures the enduring tension between knowledge and morality. Prisoners, chained since birth, mistake the shadows on the wall for reality. When one escapes and sees the sunlit world, he realizes how deep the deception ran. But when he returns to free the others, they resist, preferring the comfort of illusion to the pain of enlightenment.
We are those prisoners whenever we take appearances for truth—when we confuse social consensus with knowledge or mistake moral passion for understanding. The shadows dance vividly before us in the glow of our screens, and we feel certain we are seeing the world as it is. But unless we discipline our minds—testing claims, questioning sources, distinguishing truth from spectacle—we remain captives.
The allegory endures because it teaches that the pursuit of truth is not an abstract exercise but a moral struggle. To turn toward the light is to accept the discomfort of doubt, the humility of error, and the labor of learning. That discipline is the beginning of both knowledge and virtue.
Truth as the First Kindness
Epistemology precedes ethics because truth precedes goodness. To act ethically without first grounding oneself in what is true is to risk doing harm in the name of good. Socrates taught us to ask how we know; Mill reminded us to hear the other side; Arendt warned us what happens when we stop thinking; and Boghossian calls us back to the first principle that makes all ethics possible: the honest pursuit of truth.
In an age that rewards outrage over understanding, defending epistemology may seem quaint. Yet it is precisely our only defense against the moral chaos of a world that feels right but knows nothing.
Before we can do good, we must first be willing to know.
Truth, as it turns out, is the first kindness we owe one another.
References
- Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press.
- Boghossian, P. (2013). A Manual for Creating Atheists. Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing.
- Boghossian, P. (2006). “Epistemic Rules.” The Journal of Philosophy, 103(12), 593–608.
- Mill, J. S. (1859). On Liberty. London: John W. Parker and Son.
- Plato. (c. 380 BCE). The Republic, Book VII (The Allegory of the Cave). Translated by Allan Bloom, Basic Books, 1968.
- Plato. (c. 399 BCE). Euthyphro. In The Dialogues of Plato, translated by G.M.A. Grube. Hackett, 1981.
- Salem Witch Trials documentary sources: Salem Witch Trials: Documentary Archive and Transcription Project. University of Virginia, 2020.
- Socratic method reference: Vlastos, G. (1991). Socratic Studies. Cambridge University Press.
Author’s Reflection:
This piece was drafted with the aid of AI tools, which accelerated research and organization. Still, every idea here has been examined, rewritten, and affirmed through my own reasoning. Since the essay itself argues that epistemology must precede ethics, it seemed right to disclose the epistemic means by which it was written.
Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil remains one of the twentieth century’s most incisive dissections of moral failure. Published in 1963, the book emerged from Arendt’s firsthand reporting on the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, a mid-level Nazi bureaucrat whose role in orchestrating the deportation of millions of Jews to death camps defined the Holocaust’s logistical horror. Expectations ran high for a portrait of unalloyed monstrosity, yet Arendt delivered something far more unsettling: a portrait of profound ordinariness. Eichmann was no ideological zealot or sadistic fiend, but a careerist adrift in clichés and administrative jargon, driven by ambition and an unswerving commitment to hierarchy. From this unremarkable figure, Arendt forged her enduring concept of the banality of evil, a framework that exposes how systemic atrocities arise not from demonic intent but from the quiet abdication of critical thought.
The Trial That Shattered Expectations
Arendt arrived in Jerusalem as a correspondent for The New Yorker, tasked with chronicling the prosecution of Eichmann, the architect of the Nazis’ “Final Solution” in practice if not in origin. What she witnessed defied the trial’s dramatic staging. Eichmann, perched in his glass booth, projected not menace but mediocrity. He droned on in a flat, bureaucratic patois, insisting his actions stemmed from dutiful obedience rather than personal malice. “I never killed a Jew,” he protested, as if the euphemism absolved the machinery he oiled. This was no Iago or Macbeth, but a joiner par excellence: shallow, conformist, and utterly unable to grasp the human weight of his deeds. Arendt’s revulsion crystallized mid-trial, in her notebooks, where she first sketched the phrase that would redefine her legacy. The banality of evil was born not from Eichmann’s depravity, but from his incapacity for reflection—a thoughtlessness that rendered him complicit in genocide without the depth to comprehend it.
Unpacking the Banality: From Demonic to Mundane
At its core, the banality of evil upends the romanticized view of wickedness as inherently profound or radical. Evil, Arendt contended, often manifests as banal: the work of unimaginative souls who drift through conformity, failing to interrogate their roles in larger systems. Eichmann exemplified this through his linguistic sleight of hand. He evaded the raw truth of extermination, speaking instead of “transportations” and “processing,” terms that sanitized slaughter into spreadsheet entries. Hatred played little part; obedience, careerism, and social inertia sufficed. The terror lay in his normalcy. As Arendt observed, evil flourishes not among isolated monsters but in societies where individuals relinquish moral judgment to rules, authorities, or routines. This banality, she later clarified, arises from an active refusal to exercise judgment, transforming ordinary people into cogs of catastrophe.
Arendt wove this insight into her broader philosophical tapestry, where thinking emerges as the essential moral safeguard. In the Socratic tradition, genuine thought demands we question the rightness of our actions, bridging the gap between knowledge and ethics. Eichmann’s failure was not intellectual deficiency alone, but a willful suspension of this faculty—substituting slogans and protocols for scrutiny. She identified thoughtlessness as totalitarianism’s hallmark, a regime that trains citizens to obey without asking why, eroding the pluralistic dialogue vital to human freedom. Against this, Arendt posited “natality,” the human capacity for birth and renewal, as a counterforce: each new beginning compels us to initiate thought, disrupting entrenched banalities.
The Firestorm of Controversy
Arendt’s conclusions ignited immediate backlash. Critics, including Jewish intellectuals like Gershom Scholem, accused her of exonerating Eichmann and scapegoating victims by critiquing the Jewish councils’ coerced cooperation with Nazi demands. Her dispassionate tone struck many as callous, diluting the Holocaust’s singularity into a lesson in human frailty. Yet Arendt sought neither absolution nor minimization; her aim was diagnostic. Evil in bureaucratic modernity, she argued, stems from collective complicity, not just from fanatics. The ordinary enablers—those who obey without question—sustain the system as surely as the architects. This polemic endures, with debates persisting over whether Arendt undervalued antisemitism’s visceral role, but her thesis has proven resilient, outlasting the initial fury.
Philosophical Stakes: Redefining Moral Agency
Arendt’s innovation lies in relocating moral responsibility from sentiment to cognition. Agency begins not with feeling but with thought: the deliberate act of judging actions against universal principles. This aligns her work with deeper epistemic concerns, where unexamined beliefs pave the way for ethical collapse. Without the courage to probe “Is this true? Is this right?”, reasoning devolves into rote compliance. The banality of evil thus warns of disengagement in any apparatus—state, corporation, or ideology—where “just following orders” masks profound harm. In an age of institutional sprawl, her call to vigilant judgment remains a bulwark against the mindless perpetuation of injustice.
Lessons for Our Fractured Age: Thoughtlessness in Ideological Currents
Arendt’s framework offers stark lessons amid the ascendance of critical social constructivism, woke Marxism, and gender ideology—movements that, in their zealous conformity, risk replicating the very thoughtlessness she decried. Critical social constructivism, with its insistence that reality bends to narrative power, echoes Eichmann’s euphemistic detachment: truths are “constructed” not discovered, fostering a relativism where evidence yields to doctrinal fiat. Proponents, often ensconced in academic silos, propagate this without interrogating its epistemic costs, much as Arendt saw totalitarianism erode pluralistic inquiry. The result? A moral landscape where dissent is pathologized as “harm,” inverting Socratic dialogue into inquisitorial purity tests.
Woke Marxism, blending identity politics with class warfare rhetoric, amplifies this banality through performative allegiance. What begins as equity advocacy devolves into bureaucratic rituals—DEI mandates, cancel campaigns—that demand uncritical adherence, sidelining the reflective judgment Arendt deemed essential. Critics from leftist traditions note how this mirrors the “administrative massacres” she analyzed, where ideological slogans supplant ethical scrutiny, enabling everyday cruelties under the guise of progress. Ordinary adherents, like Eichmann’s clerks, comply not from malice but from careerist inertia, blind to the dehumanization they abet.
Gender ideology presents perhaps the most poignant parallel, transforming biological verities into fluid “affirmations” via sanitized language that obscures irreversible interventions. Global market projections for sex reassignment surgeries, valued at $3.13 billion in 2025, anticipate reaching $5.21 billion by 2030, underscoring this commodified banality: procedures framed as “care” evade the long-term harms to minors, much as Nazi logistics masked extermination. Voices like J.K. Rowling invoke Arendt directly, highlighting how euphemisms prevent equating these acts with “normal” knowledge of human development. Shallow conformity here—fueled by fear of ostracism—propagates misogynistic erosions of women’s spaces and youth safeguards, all without the depth to confront consequences.
Arendt’s antidote is uncompromising: reclaim thinking as moral praxis. In our screen-lit caves, where algorithms curate consensus and ideologies brook no doubt, we must cultivate epistemic humility—the willingness to question, to pluralize, to judge anew. Only thus can we arrest banality’s creep, ensuring that goodness, radical in its depth, prevails over evil’s empty routine. Thoughtlessness is not fate; it is choice. And in choosing reflection, we honor the dead by fortifying the living against their shadows.
References
Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press.
Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (For concepts of natality and action.)
Berkowitz, R. (2013). “The Banality of Hannah Arendt.” The New York Review of Books, June 6. (On ongoing debates of her thesis.)
Mordor Intelligence. (2024). Sex Reassignment Surgery Market Size, Trends, Outlook 2025–2030. Retrieved October 5, 2025, from https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/sex-reassignment-surgery-market.
Rowling, J. K. [@jk_rowling]. (2024, December 28). “This astounding paper reminds me of Hannah Arendt’s The Banality of Evil…” [Post]. X. https://x.com/jk_rowling/status/1873048335193653387.
Scholem, G. (1964). “Reflections on Eichmann: The Trial of the Historian.” Encounter, 23(3), 25–31. (Open letter critiquing Arendt’s portrayal.)
Villa, D. (1996). Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (For connections to Socratic thinking and totalitarianism.)
We need a media we can put more trust in. Let’s start with this.
“The psychopath’s response to people who suffer indicates that what we recognise as morality might be grounded not simply in positive, prosocial emotions but also in negative, stressful and self-oriented ones. This is not some cuddly version of empathy, but a primitive aversive reaction that seemingly has little to do with our caring greatly for the humanity of others.
Yet what exposes our common humanity more than the fact that I become personally distressed by what happens to you? What could better make me grasp the importance of your suffering? The personal part of empathic distress might be central to my grasping what is so bad about harming you. Thinking about doing so fills me with alarm. Arguably, it’s more important that I curb my desire to harm others for personal gain than it is for me to help a person in need. Social psychology research has focused on how we’re moved to help others, but that’s led us to ignore important aspects of ethics. Psychopathy puts personal distress back in the centre of our understanding of the psychological underpinnings of morality.
The last lesson we can learn concerns whether sentimentalists or rationalists are right when it comes to interpretations of the moral deficits of psychopaths. The evidence supports both positions. We don’t have to choose – in fact, it would be silly for us to do so. Rationalist thinkers who believe that psychopaths reason poorly have zoomed in on how they don’t fear punishment as we do. That has consequences down the line in their decision making since, without appropriate fear, one can’t learn to act appropriately. But on the side of the sentimentalists, fear and anxiety are emotional responses. Their absence impairs our ability to make good decisions, and facilitates psychopathic violence.
Fear, then, straddles the divide between emotion and reason. It plays the dual role of constraining our decisions via our understanding the significance of suffering for others, and through our being motivated to avoid certain actions and situations. But it’s not clear whether the significance of fear will be palatable to moral philosophers. A response of distress and anxiety in the face of another’s pain is sharp, unpleasant and personal. It stands in sharp contrast to the common understanding of moral concern as warm, expansive and essentially other-directed. Psychopaths force us to confront a paradox at the heart of ethics: the fact that I care about what happens to you is based on the fact I care about what happens to me.”
We’ve all experienced the inner hardening, and turning away when faced with another human being in need. Of course it isn’t indicative of us being a psychopath, but the ability to realize that ethical distance is trait we all share. I realize the pain and suffering of people who are starving, but they are far away and I can turn away and ignore their suffering and get along with my life.
Seems kinda shitty once you think about it, and the fact that most people do it doesn’t lessen the gravity of this particular ethical failure. Yet, the behaviour will persist, a dubious solution to the real life situations that run up against our moral understanding of the world.
This sort of ethical dilemma is illustrated in the series Breaking Bad. I’m almost done (two episodes left) watching Breaking Bad, and the moral path Walter White chooses to walk seems to illustrate the how muddy ‘good ethical behaviour’ gets once it hits the real word.
“To be clear, a moral injury is not a psychiatric diagnosis. Rather, it’s an existential disintegration of how the world should or is expected to work—a compromise of the conscience when one is butted against an action (or inaction) that violates an internalized moral code. It’s different from post-traumatic stress disorder, the symptoms of which occur as a result of traumatic events. When a soldier at a checkpoint shoots at a car that doesn’t stop and kills innocents, or when Walter White allows Jesse’s troublesome addict girlfriend to die of an overdose to win him back as a partner, longstanding moral beliefs are disrupted, and an injury on the conscience occurs.”
What quality makes people bounce back from a moral injury, or turn further toward questionable moral choices? We’d all like to think we belong to the class of upstanding, moral citizens – but how long does that last once the unkind vicissitudes of life go into overdrive?
In Defying Hitler, Sebastion Haffner’s disturbing 1939 memoir chronicling the rise of Nazism, the author, a law candidate, describes the insidious day-to-day changes in attitudes, beliefs, politics, and prejudices that began, for Germans, the slow descent into a “trap of comradeship” in which this culture of cruelty flourished as many of them become “owned by it”. “Comradeship” as the Nazis meant it, became a “narcotic” that the people were introduced to from the earliest age, through the Hitler Youth movement (Hitlerjugend), the SA, military service, and involvement with thousand of camps and clubs. In this way, it destroyed their sense of personal responsibility and became a means for the process of dehumanization:
‘It is even worse that comradeship relieves men of responsibility for their actions, before themselves, before God, before their conscience. They do what their comrades do. They have no choice. They have no time for thought (except when they unfortunately wake up at night). Their comrades are their conscience and give absolution for everything, provided that do what everybody else does.’
Haffner goes on to describe how this comradeship, in just a few weeks at camp, molded a group of intellectual, educated men into an “unthinking, indifferent, irresponsible mass” in which bigoted, derogatory, and hateful comments “were commonplace, went unanswered and set the intellectual tone.” The Nazis used a variety of psychological stimulations and manipulations to this end, such as slogans, flags, uniforms, Sieg Heils, marching columns, banners, and songs, to help create a dangerous, mindless “group think.” One of the most disturbing aspects of this comradeship was how the men in the camp began to behave as a collective entity, who “instinctively ignored or belittled anything that could disturb our collective self-satisfaction. A German Reich in microcosm.” This collectivity is the “and” in Arthur Eddington’s mathematical formula. The bullies and the bystanders become a deadly combination that is more than the sum of its parts.
[…]
In all three genocides [Armenian, Jewish, Tutsi], it was found that if one person (or small group of dedicated people) refused to go along with the genocidaires, some others who were potential witnesses actually became witnesses, defenders, and/or resisters themselves. This group readily admitted that if it were not for those who took the lead in desisting, they probably not would have had the courage to do so themselves. In his research in “atrocity producing situations,” Robert J. Lifton came to the conclusion, “There’s no inherent human nature that requires us to kill or maim… We have the potential for precisely that behaviour of the Nazis …or of some kind of more altruistic or cooperative behaviour, We can go either way. And I think that confronting these extreme situations is itself an act of hope because in doing that, we are implying and saying that there is an alternative. We can do better. ”
‘It is immensely moving when a mature man [or woman] – no matter whether young or old in years- is aware of a responsibility for the consequences of his conduct and really feels such responsibility with heart and soul. He then acts by following an ethic of responsibility and somewhere reaches a point where he says: “Here I stand; I can do no other.” That is something genuinely human and moving. [Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation]
-Barbara Coloroso. Extraordinary Evil – A Brief History of Genocide. pp. 85 – 87
My undergraduate University days were nothing like what is routinely described as the ‘University Experience’. It was a much more utilitarian experience – go to class, take notes, and then rinse and repeat the next day. Add review said notes and study as test time rolled around. The social aspect of University was pretty much all but lost on me at the time as the group of friends I had at the time did not attend. In hindsight, not having friends doing the same thing made focusing on my studies much more difficult and it extended my stay at the lovely U by a few years. Lessons learned and what not.
So, my Uni days were, to oversimplify, just highschool but harder. My real learning started or at least the path to intellectual maturity started after I earned my degree. It also helped that my partner was smart af and pushed me to become more rigorous in developing and defending my thoughts and arguments. So when I read this essay I could understand what they where saying, but couldn’t really relate to what was being said of the state of university/college campuses regarding the moral/social development of their students.
For me, finding my moral and ethical centre was quite independent of the educational process, such as it was, during my tenure at the U. Granted, of course, I was being exposed to and learning about topics that would, in the future, inform my ethical-self and boundaries, but nothing on the level which seems to happen in the US college scene. So then while reading this quote intrigued me:
“It is entirely reasonable, then, for students to conclude that questions of right and wrong, of ought and obligation, are not, in the first instance at least, matters to be debated, deliberated, researched or discussed as part of their intellectual lives in classrooms and as essential elements of their studies. “
What? Isn’t inside the classroom where the great arguments and debates should happen? I mean, it is in the university that you can hash out and grapple with the big problems with the help of professors and the knowledge that they bring and provide of the big thinkers that have grappled with these questions in the past. The university is where you can make mistakes and get nuanced feedback that will sharpen your intellectual faculties and better equip you to lead the examine life, right?
(It’s funny – none of this really happened for me – sit in class, get taught stuff, regurgitate stuff – was the order of the day). But yeah, in the formal sense, if you’re not going to university to grapple with the right and wrong questions, then why go? Getting a degree for job is nice and stuff, but attending higher education is supposed to be more than that.
Here is an excerpt from Wellmen’s take on the the state of the university experience in the US:
“The transformation of American colleges and universities into corporate concerns is particularly evident in the maze of offices, departments and agencies that manage the moral lives of students. When they appeal to administrators with demands that speakers not be invited, that particular policies be implemented, or that certain individuals be institutionally sanctioned, students are doing what our institutions have formed them to do. They are following procedure, appealing to the institution to manage moral problems, and relying on the administrators who oversee the system. A student who experiences discrimination or harassment is taught to file complaints by submitting a written statement; the office then determines if the complaint potentially has merit; the office conducts an investigation and produces a report; an executive accepts or rejects the report; and then the office ‘notifies’ the parties of the ‘outcome’.
These bureaucratic processes transmute moral injury, desire and imagination into an object that flows through depersonalised, opaque procedures that produce an ‘outcome’. Questions of character, duty, moral insight, reconciliation, community, ethos or justice have at most a limited role. US colleges and universities speak to the national argot of individual rights, institutional affiliation and complaint that dominate American capitalism. They have few moral resources from which to draw any alternative moral language and imagination.
The extracurricular system of moral management requires an ever-expanding array of ‘resources’ – counselling centres, legal services, deans of student life. Teams of devoted professionals work to help students hold their lives together. The people who support and oversee these extracurricular systems of moral management do so almost entirely apart from any coherent curricular project.
It is entirely reasonable, then, for students to conclude that questions of right and wrong, of ought and obligation, are not, in the first instance at least, matters to be debated, deliberated, researched or discussed as part of their intellectual lives in classrooms and as essential elements of their studies. They are, instead, matters for their extracurricular lives in dorms, fraternities or sororities and student activity groups, most of which are managed by professional staff. “
It seems less of an organic process, and more of a ritualized ‘thing ya do’ to start making the bucks in society. It seems like such a waste that we have strict qualifications to get and to graduate, but at the same time that we’re not challenging people, making them stretch and reform their assumptions about the world. Where else can we have the space to do such important life work?
Given how the world works, I find it hard to believe that Canada is taking a principled stand on human rights in Saudi Arabia. Western democracies certainly try to own the rhetoric when it comes to democracy, peace, and freedom – but their realpolitik is quite similar to the nations they routinely criticize for being autocratic dictatorships that are terrible to their people.
My skepticism aside, this is the tweet that started the diplomatic furor between Saudi Arabia and Canada:
Well, the powers that be in Saudi Arabia didn’t like that one bit:
“We consider the Canadian ambassador to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia persona non grata and order him to leave within the next 24 hours,” Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Ministry said on Twitter.
“Any other attempt to interfere with our internal affairs from Canada, means that we are allowed to interfere in Canada’s internal affairs,” it said.
“Saudi state television later reported that the Education Ministry was coming up with an “urgent plan” to move thousands of Saudi scholarship students out of Canadian schools to take classes in other countries.”
“Saudi Arabia said it is also freezing all new trade and investment transactions with Canada and “reserves its right to take further action.” Saudi Arabia is one of Canada’s largest export markets in the region, and some 10 per cent of Canadian crude oil imports come from Saudi Arabia.”
“Of course the major worry for Canada will now be the fate of a $15-billion contract for almost 1,000 light armoured vehicles between the Saudi government and London, Ont.’s General Dynamics. The controversial deal, struck in 2014 and approved in 2016, called for the vehicles to be delivered starting in 2017, but it’s not clear how many have already been sent as Ottawa refuses to release the “commercially confidential” information.”
“The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is reportedly selling off its assets in Canada and will stop buying Canadian wheat and barley, in the latest escalation in the sudden diplomatic dispute between the two countries.”
“The national Saudi Arabian airline, Saudia, said this week that it would suspend all flights between the country and Canada, starting next week.”
I think I speak for many Canadian when I say. “WTF just happened here?”. The Saudi record on human rights isn’t a particularly deep dark secret and to call for a what seems to be a bit of leniency in one specific case doesn’t seem as beyond the pale as the Saudi’s seem to think it is.
Would Canada recall its ambassadors and impose sanctions if Norway made light of our decidedly horrible treatment of our First Nations people? I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t. Most likely some diplomatic hand-waves and some impassioned statements about how we’re working hard (we’re not) to improve the lives of all Canadians and then the issues would pass.
What is more intriguing is that despite the Saudi backlash, Canada’s government isn’t backing down:
“Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland says Canada isn’t backing down from its position that led to diplomatic sanction from Saudi Arabia.
Freeland made the comments Monday afternoon in Vancouver a day after Saudi Arabia announced it would cease new trade deals with Canada and expel the Canadian ambassador.
“I will say Canada is very comfortable with our position. We are always going to speak up for human rights; we’re always going to speak up for women’s rights; and that is not going to change,” she told a news conference.
“Canadians expect our foreign policy to be driven by and to embody Canadian values, and that is how we intend to continue our foreign policy.”
On Friday, Global Affairs Canada had tweeted, “Canada is gravely concerned about additional arrests of civil society and women’s rights activists in Saudi Arabia, including Samar Badawi. We urge the Saudi authorities to immediately release them and all other peaceful human rights activists.”
This is post is just full of WTF’s. Freeland seems to be articulating a values based position on a foreign policy issue. It makes little sense has Saudi Arabia is clearly demonstrating their willingness to go full-trump and punish Canada economically for having the ‘bombast’ to ask them to release a blogger they have detained and are torturing (sorry folks, flogging is torture any way you want to slice it.)
It’s sad that I’m feeling so cynical about this particular story, and continue to look for the angle that the Canadian government is not sharing with the press. Like, since when do nations actually take ethical stands on any issue these days? It just isn’t good for business.
I’m going to continue to follow this story folks, because something just isn’t adding up.
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