The response to the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah and his confederates tells a great deal about a person’s moral position.

At Harvard, I had many opportunities to pass by the MIT campus. On one such occasion, someone asked if I saw the massive flagpole in front of the school. Unless you had your eyes closed, you could not miss it. “That flagpole is the zero point for all American nuclear missile mapping systems.” While there were several MIT people involved in the Manhattan Project, I have no idea if the venerable flagpole actually served as the coordination point for what were then thousands of nuclear warheads and delivery systems.

As people, we need our own moral coordinate systems. In the past, when there was greater religiosity, people tended by default to have similar views of good and bad, evil and holy, right and wrong, and the like. The many problems in Europe today come from the internal and external destruction of what were once relatively homogeneous societies. It did not take any convincing from the American people to know that the Japanese and Germans were evil. Their actions in China and Europe were enough to convince people who had working moral systems that these two people were evil incarnate. When the US finally entered the war, it sent millions to fight and lost over half a million soldiers. All knew that the Axis had to be destroyed, and while the price paid was steep, the alternative of Hitler and Tojo winning would have been far worse.

When people and societies jettison their moral systems, whether religiously based or........

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