Burma's Suffering and Ours

Andrew has a roundup of commentary on the possibility of coercive helpy heroism in Burma, meaning Matt Yglesias and Ross Douthat doing one of their good back and forths (as usual) on the matter. I think they’re both right. Idealism and relativism, the two most significant elements of Western thought today, make for a total mess of policy — especially foreign policy — and an incoherent set of attitudes and frustrations about Burma.

Unfortunately, even a coherent set of attitudes about suffering, bad government, sovereignty, and coercive intervention might lead to a frustrating outcome: knowing that thousands upon thousands of people in Burma are suffering and that the ‘international community’ is, bottom line, okay with that.

In fact, more than one coherent set of attitudes might wind up with that frustration. What would really humble the West? An inescapable inability to gratify our desire to act on pity. I say this without trying to score any philosophical points. But it is very interesting as a marker of when and why internationalists might lose faith in international institutions — and whether that alone will cause them to ‘stop coming to church’, so to speak.