Earlier this month I had a post directed against the quaint and preposterous notion that 'we' shouldn't give critical attention, and more, to political wrongs in faraway places when our own societies aren't free of them. Ophelia at Butterflies and Wheels quotes an excellent passage from Martha Nussbaum spelling out the same point:
It is wrong to insist on cleaning up one's own house before responding to urgent calls from outside. Should we have said 'Hands Off Apartheid,' on the grounds that racism persists in the United States?... It is and should be difficult to decide how to allocate one's moral effort between local and distant abuses. To work against both is urgently important, and individuals will legitimately make different decisions about their priorities. But the fact that a needy human being happens to live in Togo rather than Idaho does not make her any less my fellow, less deserving of my moral commitment. And to fail to recognize the plight of a fellow human being because we are busy moving our own culture to greater moral heights seems the very height of moral obtuseness and parochialism.The funny thing is, there was a time when you wouldn't have needed to make this argument on the left. Internationalism and solidarity were taken as elementary values. What happened? By one route and another 'we' came to be seen as the worst malefactors.