Environmentalism with Dr Feelgood is all bad

"If it feels good, it must be good for you," say some. Not true, says Callum McPetrie.

Basic knowledge teaches us otherwise. Drugs, for instance, feel good, but the effects are not necessarily so. To a serial killer, murder can also feel good-but murder is hardly a good thing.

One needn't even cite serial killers and drugs to find that feelings alone aren't reliable guides to action. An evening in a karaoke bar is sufficient to establish that simple fact. Fact is, emotions are not reliable tools of cognition -- for that, we need reason. Reason tells us that acting only on our feelings is foolish. That's why we frequently wake up after our evening in the karaoke bar hoping no-one was there that we know.

What about other foolish, faddish feel-goodisms? What about environmentalism, for example? Is that good for us? Well, only in small doses. And only if taken reasonably and rationally -- but that's hardly what we see with modern mainstream environmentalism, is it. The appeal of modern mainstream environmentalism (which I would characterise as putting nature before man) is not to our faculty of reason, observes young Callum, but largely to the emotions of the unthinking:

One of the main reasons why Environmentalism is so popular, [a reason] rarely discussed in political circles, is that it is a feel-good system.

The reason for the whole feel-goodism of Environmentalism is that people are falsely made to believe that the movement is actually something good. For many young university ideologues, for instance, what could be better than going out and saving the whales?

But the feel-good Environmentalists fail to see beyond that. They think that, because it feels good, it must be good.

And in the absence of reason, they'd be quite wrong, wouldn't they. Completely wrong. Terribly, terribly wrong.