Liu Xiaobo and Moral Relativism

Liu Xiaobo

I don’t normally do this, but the Times Book Review recently had an essay about Liu Xiaobo that I could not improve upon, so I’ll just point you to it (click here). Liu was the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize Winner who remains imprisoned in China for his advocacy of democracy and human rights. (Click here for my own blog essay about Liu.)

The Times piece, by Jonathan Mirsky, was very inspiring to me. China’s intellectual landscape is a grotesque hall of mirrors due to six decades of contorted ideological logic and repression. That anyone can come out of such an environment able to see straight seems almost miraculous. Yet Liu Xiaobo does have a shining clear vision embracing the highest human values. Plus the courage to endure a life of privation and pain in service to those ideals.

This is an answer to all-too-prevalent misanthropy. Heroes like Liu Xiaobo make me proud of the human race.

*   *   *

My recent posting about Charles Pierce’s Idiot America has been published as a book review in Moral Relativism magazine. I had met the editor, Tucker Lieberman, at last year’s Humanist congress, and was intrigued by the publication’s title! It is indeed a very interesting mag; check it out by clicking on the link.