And they accuse a virulently chauvinist Buddhist monk called Wirathu of telling rural voters that an NLD victory would turn Myanmar into a Muslim country.
"An election looms in Myanmar: Divided we stand," The Economist, October 3, 2015, Accessed on October 2, 2015, http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21670078-campaign-takes-shape-fragile-young-democracy-divided-we-stand?frsc=dg%7Ca
Other than learning that there is such a thing as a virulent chauvinist Buddhism, I was also struck by this passage and how it contrasted with something else I had read this week in Andy Weir's The Martian:
If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search. If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies. This is so fundamentally human that it's found in every culture without exception.
Weir, Andy. The Martian. New York: Broadway Books, 2014, 369.
Such a charming sentiment. But it may be an overly optimistic estimation of human morality. Such sentiment of universal human brotherhood is probably more likely to be produced within a rich and secure society than without it. The norm of human morality is in all likelihood closer to the out-group hostility of Wirathu, our virulently chauvinist Buddhist friend.
Mankind may be less giving and more Gibbon, who reminds us that, "our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery*."
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*Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J.B. Bury with an Introduction by W.E.H. Lecky (New York: Fred de Fau and Co., 1906), in 12 vols. Vol. 8. 10/3/2015. http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1376#Gibbon_0214-08_164
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