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college campuses was captured in a letter to the local newspaper writ–
ten by a Smith College student:
On the moral issues of war and peace it is important to real–
ize that the United States is not perfect and the Soviet Union is
not evil. American citizens ... therefore have no right to take a
moral stance against the USSR....
Until our country is perfect, we should refrain from pro–
claiming ourselves judges of "human rights" in other countries.
It is blatant hypocrisy.
E.
L.
Doctorow's version of moral equivalence also has been
frequently heard since the 1960s:
Each of the superpowers has the demonic
other
to justify its
espionage, its assassinations, its interventions and its invasions.
We and the Soviet Union have actually created an unholy alli–
ance, a gargantuan intimacy, in which, by now, our ideological
differences are less important than the fact that we think the
same thoughts, mirror each other's responses....
The belief in moral equivalence is not limited to a handful of
academics or literary intellectuals .
In
a survey of 3 ,500 readers of the
magazine
Psychology Today
conducted in 1984, the researchers were
led to "the conclusion that a 'mirror image' exists between Soviet and
American military conduct and posture." They also found that "for
every man or woman who said that the Soviet Union had been more
aggressive, four others pointed the finger at the United States ."
While libraries could be filled with the impressionistic and
qualitative reflections and recent examples of social criticism among
American intellectuals, these statements and a widespread receptivity
to them are supported by the findings of opinion research among
American elite groups.
Reviewing studies offaculty elites since World War
II,
Seymour
Martin Lipset reached the conclusion in 1982 that they "have been
disproportionately critical of society, and more disposed than other
strata to support forces that reject the status quo." He also found–
and thereby disposed of the notion that failure or frustration explain
the social critical disposition - that "the higher the achievement, the
more liberal faculty members are politically" and that "the more suc–
cessful are the most left-inclined."
