The Death of Moral Outrage

by Paul Eidelberg

In today’s post-modern democratic world, lack of moral outrage may largely be attributed to the moral relativism propagated by our colleges and universities.

Ahmadinejad's V for Victory

Contrast the Western media’s cover-up of Nazi atrocities in the 1930s to today’s conspicuous exposure of atrocities inspired by Islam via Internet, Cable TV, to name only two. Why haven’t these atrocities—whether perpetrated in New York, Jerusalem, London, Madrid, or Bali—aroused and infuriated civilized mankind?
Has the world become conditioned to this age of atrocity? Are we witnessing what has aptly been called the “death of moral outrage”?
Since I live in Israel, I ask: How should we compare this global meltdown of moral outrage to the virtual indifference of Israel’s governments to the murder and trauma of their own citizens by Arab terrorists during the past two decades?
How is one to understand the self-restraint Israeli government has displayed toward the enemy since the 1993 Israel-PLO Agreement, to the extent of rewarding the villain with Jewish land, lives, and liberties? Has violent death become so much the norm that human life has become worthless?
Capital punishment has been all but eliminated in the West. Conversely, live-birth abortion—infanticide—does not arouse more outrage than “pulling the plug.” Are we living in a democratic world suffering from moral schizophrenia? Does the idea of human dignity have any consistent, rational, and metaphysical meaning? Does secular society have any moral compass?
Hardly anyone raises a brow when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad screams “Death to America” or vows to wipe Israel off the map. No one proposes to have Iran expelled from the UN even though its Mullahs sacrificed tens of thousands of Iranian children to explode Iraqi landmines. Why does the State Department allow this Islamic Hitler to enter the United States as if he were a rock star from Great Britain!
Manhattan, the business capital of democratic America is also the domicile of the hundred despotic regimes represented in the United Nations. This speaks volumes of the moral framework of “Western Civilization.” Indeed, that America provides much of the financial support for this multicultural monstrosity arouses nothing more than the outrage of a yawn. The Tower of Babel was a monument of human decency compared to Manhattan’s haven of international villainy and hypocrisy, where evil is called good and good called evil.
No parent would allow their children to consort with such scoundrels. Our spiritual leaders warn us to distance ourselves from insincere people lest we become unconsciously influenced by their dishonesty and hypocrisy—the modus operandi of UN representatives. The innocents in that house of iniquity aside, pity it escaped the fate of the World Trade Center.

In today’s post-modern democratic world, lack of moral outrage may largely be attributed to the moral relativism propagated by our colleges and universities. There’s the source of that effete academic doctrine of “conflict resolution”—which sees no evil, hears no evil, and speaks no evil. It is also the source of the emasculating combat doctrine of “proportionality,” bandied about even in a war against Muslims for whom peace means the extermination of Israel and the West.
Underlying the death of outrage is the academic reluctance to face evil as evil, and not simply some troublesome ideology or religion. Three centuries of the European Enlightenment—meaning, three centuries of atheism—has spawned countless men without chests. Some become presidents or prime ministers, some too soft, some too stupid, some too sophisticated, to be animated by moral outrage.