Mr. Biden's Silly Question

In his speech announcing the sanctions that the U.S. and its allies will be imposing on Russia for their incursion into eastern Ukraine President Biden asked, "Who in the Lord's name does Putin think gives him the right?" The right, that is, to invade another country:

This is, unfortunately, a very silly thing for our president to have said. In a secular world there are no rights except what the strong deign to grant to the weak. In the world of Vladimir Putin, might makes right. Mr. Putin may well answer Mr. Biden with the riposte that he gives himself the right, and what would our secular leaders have to say in reply?

They might respond that Mr. Putin is violating agreements and U.N. rules and whatnot, but Mr. Putin would doubtless reply, "So what?" Why can't he break those agreements if he has the power to do so? Who will hold him accountable?

The fact is we live in a secular world, a world in which there's thought to be no relevant transcendent ground for human or legal rights. If God exists in this secular world, He doesn't matter. Only what happens in this world matters. Indeed, that's the meaning of the word secular.

In such a world the state becomes the arbiter of rights and the stronger states get to impose their will on the weaker. To do so isn't "wrong," it just is. We may not like it, but unless we believe rights, like the right not to be invaded by another country, are granted by God, we just have to recognize that there's really no use asking the question that Mr. Biden asked.

To someone like Mr. Putin the question is risible. He has stolen millions from the Russian people and murdered hundreds of his countrymen along his road to power. He's not likely to be impressed by President Biden's implicit protest that he had no right to invade Ukraine.

Right and wrong, human rights, ultimately reduce to a question of who has the power. Only if there's a God who grants people rights and holds accountable those who violate them can it be otherwise.

I'm reminded of a passage in a book by the mathematician David Berlinski. The book is titled The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions and in it Berlinski describes a scene in the early years of WWII. An elderly Jew is being made to dig his own grave while an SS officer stands by holding a rifle. At length the Jew stands erect, faces the German, looks him in the eyes and says, "God is watching what you are doing." With that the SS officer shot him dead.

Berlinski goes on to say that,

what that officer did not believe, what Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe and what the NKVD did not believe and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals, Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did not believe was that God was watching what they were doing.

And as far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either. That is, after all, the meaning of a secular society.

And I doubt that Putin believes it either.