Austin Bay Blog

In 1998 I joined an online listserv run by a church group. One member raised the issue of Third World debt– how should massive debt loads in the developing world be handled? She’d been reading a lot about “debt forgiveness.” Should the massive debts be forgiven in one fell swoop? She specifically asked me to weigh in on the subject. I discussed “targeted debt relief” and pointed to the host of “local” afflictions in most developing nations (like corruption and tyranny) that keep people in poverty. “One fell swoop” debt relief would benefit the corrupt elites and the lousy bankers who expect a government bailout to cover bad loans. Mass debt relief would contribute to the cycle of pay-off and corruption. “Targeted relief,” however, could be an effective tool for changing behaviors– in this case, bad governments and bad policies that wasted aid. I also said that with the end of the Cold War we had an opporutnity to use this tool effectively.

A couple of very leftish listserv regulars made it very apparent that their “moral base” for judging the debt relief issue –and for that matter, any issue– was “How I feel.” Facts? Forget facts — individual feelings governed their decisions. Why, forgive all the debt– that felt right. To heck with consequences.

I suggested they join the following organization:

Feelings First!
One Circle
Point Solipsist, ME 11111

Motto: “Feelings First! — one-stop solutions for the self-absorbed.”

Columnist Dennis Prager writes this week about the “decline of the authority” (moral authority) in the West. Prager argues religious guidelines have been supplanted by –yup– feelings.

For many millions today, those guidelines are feelings. With the ascendancy of leftist values that has followed the decline of Judeo-Christian religion, personal feelings have supplanted universal standards. In fact, feelings are the major unifying characteristic among contemporary liberal positions.

Prager adds:

Aside from reliance on feelings, how else can one explain a person who believes, let alone proudly announces on a bumper sticker, that “War is not the answer”? I know of no comparable conservative bumper sticker that is so demonstrably false and morally ignorant. Almost every great evil has been solved by war — from slavery in America to the Holocaust in Europe. Auschwitz was liberated by soldiers making war, not by pacifists who would have allowed the Nazis to murder every Jew in Europe.

The entire edifice of moral relativism, a foundation of leftist ideology, is built on the notion of feelings deciding right and wrong. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

As for international conflict:

The liberal preoccupation with whether America is loved or hated is also entirely feelings-based. The Left wants to be loved; the conservative wants to do what is right and deems world opinion fickle at best and immoral at worst.

Read the entire column.