It’s all so utterly convenient, isn’t it. Tyranny rears its head, women and children are slaughtered. We are not man enough to buck up, take responsibility, and send an army down to impose our will, or to simply admit, honestly, that the events do not concern us, and that the time and money are better spent at home. This would be—gasp!—imperialistic, or it would be callous. It would not be easy, and we need it to be easy.
And so we make it seem that we are doing something, anything; we pat ourselves on the back, consciences assuaged, and we watch as intelligent Harvard undergrads go on to write impressive doctoral dissertations on peacekeeping at the Kennedy School. The words of Weber, although taken from a different context, are perhaps appropriate: how sad, that “this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”