The Moral Basis of Civilization

Friends,

“We are just getting started,” Trump’s secretary of “war,” Pete Hegseth, said yesterday, adding that the attacks on Iran will escalate, with “death and destruction all day long.”

So far more than 1,000 civilians have been killed in Iran, according to human rights monitors, including 180 children, most of them schoolgirls aged 7 to 12 years old who were killed when a missile directly hit their school.

Wars can be morally justifiable if they are necessary to protect a nation’s people, but Trump has failed to make the case that this war is necessary. His allegation that Iran is close to building a nuclear weapon has been rejected by the International Atomic Energy Agency and much of the intelligence community.

As I have noted before, the moral purpose of civilized society is to prevent the stronger from attacking and exploiting the weaker. Otherwise, we’d be permanently immersed in a brutish war in which only the fittest and most powerful could survive.

This moral aspiration lies at the center of America’s founding documents — the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights — although this nation has not always honored the aspiration.

It’s also the core of the postwar international order championed by the United States, including the UN charter — emphasizing multilateralism, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.

But it’s a fragile aspiration, easily violated by those who would exploit their power. Maintaining it requires that the powerful have enough integrity to abstain from seeking short-term wins — and that the rest of us hold them accountable if they don’t.

Every time rich and powerful countries or corporations or people attack and exploit those that are not, the fabric of civilization frays. If such aggression is not contained, the fabric unravels. If not stopped, the entire world can descend into chaos and war. It has happened before.

We now inhabit a society and world grown vastly more unequal. Political and economic power are more concentrated than ever before. This invites the powerful to exploit the weaker, because the powerful feel omnipotent.

The wealth of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Charles Koch, and a handful of others is almost beyond comprehension. The influence of big tech, big oil, and the largest aerospace and defense corporations extends over much of the globe. AI is likely to centralize wealth and power even more. The destructive power of the United States, China, and Russia is unmatched in human history.

Trump — enabled by cowardly congressional Republicans and a pliant majority on the Supreme Court — has turned the U.S. presidency into the most powerful and least accountable agent of American government in this nation’s history.

A direct line connects Trump’s attempted coup in 2020 to his baseless assertion that the election was “stolen” from him, to his bombing of fishing boats in the Caribbean on his unproven allegation that they are smuggling drugs, his arrests and detention of people in the United States on unproven assumptions they are here illegally, the lawless cruelty and mayhem of his ICE and Border Patrol agents, his illegal abduction of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, and now his “death and destruction all day long” in Iran.

All are lawless. All are premised on the hubris of omnipotence. All are morally wrong.

You see much the same in Putin’s war on Ukraine. In Xi’s threats against Taiwan. In global depredation and monopolization by big tech and big oil. In Russian, Chinese, and American oligarchs who have fused public power with their personal wealth. In the swagger and entitlement of the late Jeffrey Epstein and his disgraced friends and accomplices.

But unfettered might does not make right. It makes for instability, upheaval, depravity, and war.

History shows that laws and norms designed to constrain the powerful also protect them. Without such constraints, their insatiable demands for more power and wealth eventually bring them down — along with their corporations, nations, and empires. And they threaten world war.

Trump’s blatant lawlessness will haunt America and the world — and civilization — for years to come. It is our sacred duty, to ourselves and future generations, to peacefully and legally put an end to it.

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