While world obsesses on Indonesian disaster, Indonesia shops

Powerline quotes an item from Diplomad on the different responses to the tsunami disaster by the West and the non-West. In America, government and private assistance of all kinds has been pouring in, to such an extent, in fact, that the UN has become irrelevant. But Asian countries, including the ones directly affected, are rather disturbingly, as the French might say, degagés:

In Jakarta, aside from flags at half-staff, we have seen no signs of mourning for the victims: while employees and dependents of the American embassy spent their holiday loading trucks and putting together medicine kits, the city’s inhabitants went ahead with New Year’s parties; nightclubs and shopping centers are full; and regular television programming continues. At least 120,000 of their fellow countrymen are dead, and Indonesians hardly talk about it, much less engage in massive charitable efforts. The exceptionally wealthy businessmen of the capital—and the country boasts several billionaires—haven’t made large donations to the cause of Sumatran relief; a few scattered NGOs have done a bit, but there are no well-organized drives to raise funds and supplies.

Begging the pardon of the cultural relativists, but might we not be allowed to raise—ever so gently, of course—the possibility that these differing reactions to human suffering, show Western civilization as the best we have on the planet? Maybe, just maybe Western civilization is morally superior.

I think that’s probably true. At the same time, our supposed moral superiority contains a strong component of altruism that dooms us. These Asians countries, which lack our universal sense of morality and humanity, also don’t keep their borders open to millions of cultural aliens, as we do. In a hundred years, Indonesia will probably still exist in recognizable form. Will America?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 11, 2005 06:37 AM | Send