Like a cat chasing a laser dot around the carpet the media is currently fixated on the apparent murder of a Saudi journalist named Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi government agents in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul, Turkey. If the details that have emerged about this crime are true then it is indeed a particularly grisly piece of butchery, but I have a couple of questions about the reaction to it in the American media.
First, murders committed by governments in this part of the world, and other parts as well, are not unheard of. Why is the media so interested in this particular homicide? Surely our media elites know that the Russians, Chinese, and dozens of lesser nations imprison, torture and/or murder dissidents and other problematic citizens with regularity, and yet our journalists show little serious interest in these stories unless the crime is committed on foreign soil such as were the poisonings of Russian citizens in England. The Saudi embassy is not foreign soil, however. It's Saudi territory.
Is the outcry over this crime especially acute because Saudi Arabia is an American "ally"? But so are Egypt and Pakistan our allies, after a fashion, and neither of these countries are particularly squeamish about dealing brutally with their internal dissenters.
In Islamic and communist countries Christians are often horribly persecuted, both by the government or with government connivance and acquiescence, but the Western media merely yawns even though the facts are easily available to them. Why does the Khashoggi affair suddenly arouse their indignation? Is it because he's a fellow "journalist"? Is it because they hope, perhaps, to be able to use his murder to somehow discredit President Trump? Is it because Khashoggi was a Muslim Brotherhood activist?
I really have no idea, but the media's high level of concern for Khashoggi does seem odd considering their general indifference to the murders of other dissidents, especially Christians.
But more than the media's selective outrage, I'm piqued by the moral contradictions in the secularist worldview that this episode spotlights.
For example, we're frequently reminded by our elites, both in the media and in academia, that we in the West cannot judge other cultures, that we have no business imposing Western values on people elsewhere in the world, that what's wrong for us isn't necessarily wrong for others, that right and wrong are relative to the time and culture in which people live, and that it's crass cultural chauvinism for us to hold others to our Western moral standards.
In other words, our elites have for over half a century sought to inculcate in us a moral attitude that philosophers call moral relativism. This is the conviction that moral standards are established by the culture, that there is no universal, absolute morality, and that we should therefore be tolerant of how other people view right and wrong since we don't have a monopoly on moral truth.
Yet in the present case, when agents from a very different culture have done something that would be considered a horrific crime in the U.S., the relativists in our media immediately doff their relativism as easily as a child sheds a Halloween mask and they passionately commence condemning the foreign government for violating Western standards of behavior.
This is a strange reaction, to be sure, for folks who would otherwise declare their fealty to a relativistic view of morality.
Yes, we should condemn the murders of citizens wherever they live. Of course we should insist that it's wrong everywhere for a government to harm anyone without due process of law and certainly to do their citizens harm simply for being a political or religious dissenter.
But if relativism is true we're not justified in doing any of this. We can only make a moral judgment on the Saudis if we reject relativism and maintain that there is, in fact, an absolute standard of right and wrong which enjoins us to treat others justly.
But the existence of such a standard is precisely what relativists deny.
Perhaps one reason for this denial is that one can only hold the belief that there is an absolute moral standard if one also holds that there is an absolute moral authority which transcends human culture and consensus.
This, though, leads uncomfortably close to the conclusion that there's a Divine moral law-giver which establishes that standard, and this alarming implication many of our elites are simply loath to accept.
They'd prefer to continue with an unlivable relativism that makes them look foolish and confused in situations like the Jamal Khashoggi affair than admit that their very condemnation of the murder of this Saudi citizen by Saudi agents is a tacit acknowledgement that their naturalistic, materialistic worldview is philosophically untenable.