“I’ve seen things that should never be seen,
Too sick to mention, if you know what I mean.”[1]
“Liberal-capitalistic cultures inevitably give birth to ills which undermine their own values.”[2]
Anyone who turns on a television can easily find examples of the moral rot which underlies our culture. Perhaps no better example of this is “reality” television, with some of the worst of it being talk shows with guests who air our their complaints with one another to the public.[3] While there is an artificial disconnect between the audience and the panelist, so that the audience will feel “superior” to the guests, many of the shows, such as the Jerry Springer Show, encourage the audience to participate in the nonsense, demonstrating that the difference between the two is more often than not artificial.[4] Even shows, such as the Jerry Springer spin-off, the Steve Wilkos Show, where the host represents an aggregate moral synthesis of the audience giving criticism to those on stage, the panelists affect the audience and taints them as they watch. To verify this, all one needs to do is see how the audience cheers Steve Wilkos on as he crudely interacts with his guests, showing how united the two really are.[5] Connected as the audience is with the shows they watch, possibly more now than ever before, it is not surprising that societies change and undergo moral decay parallel to what is found on the shows they watch. Societies do not want to watch “reality shows” which demonstrate to them their immorality, they want to see something worse in order to feel they aren’t not really so bad after all. This means networks produce more sensationalistic shows in order to keep up with the demand. Such is as to be expected when television is produced merely to reflect the desires of the viewing audience (which, of course, is how the free market works).
But there is also more going on. These programs not only show the base elements of society, but they often work, subtly or not, to justify their behavior and to question those who would otherwise condemn their actions. The Maury Povich show is a prime example of this. One day you will find shows about cheaters being caught in the act of cheating on their loved ones, the next day you will find a show about cheaters having children needing to know who is or is not the father of a given baby (without any criticism offered to the cheaters themselves for what they have done), and then for the encore, you will have a show about gender-bending where the audience is expected to praise those who have undergone sex-changes to fulfill their sexual fantasies. As long someone goes out to fulfill their desires, one should cheer them on, so why not cheer on the adulterer as well?
On the screen we are shown that everything and everyone have a role in our society. Everyone has desires, and they should be free to fulfill their dreams. Choice is the key. If a particular moral position doesn’t seem to satisfy one’s desires, they should be free throw it out and find another. Morality in a consumerist society will be treated as any other consumer good; when it is seen as old and outdated it will be tossed out so one can make way for something new and exciting. Instead of having one’s character determined by their morals, we are shown that one should determine morality by desires. Nothing else matters. Anything else is an unjust imposition. We are told that we live in a free society, and to keep it free, we can’t have allow anything, even morality, to have any final say upon the free market of ideas. It should be the choices people make, and nothing else, which determines the outcomes of society. Such at least is the system which we have created for ourselves.
It’s quite easy to see how the defeat of communism (as it was called) has furthered this moral decay. Anyone who suggests that the government should enforce market regulations based upon moral considerations are named “socialists” and “communists,” that is, people holding to old, outdated positions which the market has already rejected. Of course, this response comes from the false belief that there are only “communist” and “capitalistic” responses to world problems. Indeed, there is a false assumption going on that if socialism is to be rejected, then we must accept the triumph of capitalism. Pope John Paul II was right in saying that this was unacceptable.[6] Thus, as he points out, capitalism, just as much as socialism, reduces the world to economics:
Another kind of response, practical in nature, is represented by the affluent society or the consumer society. It seeks to defeat Marxism on the level of pure materialism by showing how a free-market society can achieve a greater satisfaction of material human needs than Communism, while equally excluding spiritual values. In reality, while on the one hand it is true that this social model shows the failure of Marxism to contribute to a humane and better society, on the other hand, insofar as it denies an autonomous existence and value to morality, law, culture and religion, it agrees with Marxism, in the sense that it totally reduces man to the sphere of economics and the satisfaction of material needs.[7]
Unregulated capitalism dehumanizes the human person just as much as socialism. Economics, while important, should not be seen as the primary foundation by which a society is to be regulated, especially because economic interests remain abstract and impersonal. Instead, society should be guided by a higher principle, that of love. “Love for others, and in the first place love for the poor, in whom the Church sees Christ himself, is made concrete in the promotion of justice. Justice will never be fully attained unless people see in the poor person, who is asking for help in order to survive, not an annoyance or a burden, but an opportunity for showing kindness and a chance for greater enrichment.”[8] Economics should help us understand how we can manage the world, but the world suffers when economics becomes the sole means of management, and everything is read in the heuristic light of its methodologies. It should be readily apparent that a free-market system cannot be the foundation for society, because its grounding and desires is for the production of capital, not justice. Its ethics is the ethics of production; whatever produces the most and best will be the most acceptable. “Modern market societies tend to be secular, relativist, pragmatic, and materialistic. They are this by virtue of what they do, not just of what they believe. As far as these attitudes go, they do not have much of a choice.”[9] Anything which gets in the way of production, such as moral quandaries, need to be dispensed, and dispensed they are – through pragmatic and consequentialistic means. Whatever is best at production will be given a chance, and if anyone questions how production is achieved, they will be shown the outcome and be asked, “Isn’t that good enough for you?” Terry Eagleton is right in saying that agnosticism and atheism are the products of the later stages of capitalism.[10] This is because anyone who tries to limit their capitalism through morality will find themselves being beaten by those who forgo such limitations. It is not hard to see that it is nihilism, not religious belief, which allows for this. Nonetheless, this is not to say capitalists will ignore religion and religious faith; rather, it will work as a parasite, turning religion into another consumer good, to be taken in one day, junked the next when something better comes along.
Footnotes
[1] Die Happy, Talk (Speak Your Mind).
[2] Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 74.
[3] When talking about reality television, I mean anything which purports to show or discuss people in real world situations, and so can be anything from talk shows, court room television, or the news. Reality television is contrived. The best examples of the genre are edited in such a way as to give the illusion of “being there” with those on the screen. But what gets edited out are factors which can change the overall impression of what one has viewed. The editor controls what is broadcast, and in this way, manipulates how we see and interact with the “reality.” Often as a consequence of this, how people view things on the virtual world of the screen becomes the means by which they interact with the actual world they live in. Reality television in this way might begin as an illusion, but it certainly can end up becoming real.
[4] In many ways the audience on Jerry Springer is the show, and not the guests. Just passing by the show and stopping to watch it for a few minutes, one will notice the audience cheers on some panelists, fights with others, and some – seek to divert Jerry’s attention by flashing their body on the screen, to get Jerry’s greatest reward, a set of “Jerry beads.” The audience, and with it, the “normal” people of the world, are encouraged in this way to lower themselves to the level of the panelists, instead of encouraging the panelists to raise themselves up to a higher standard.
[5] Steve chooses something so fundamentally flawed as lie detector tests as the means by which he can level out his moral outrage to the panelist, encouraging the audience to join in with him with his dehumanizing attitude towards his guests. But one wonders how real the outrage is: if the person on the show is guilty of the charges leveled at them, one wonders why Steve would give them a platform to defend such behavior on television?
[6] Cf. John Paul II. Centesimus Annus. Vatican Translation, par 35.
[7] Ibid., par. 19.
[8] Ibid., par. 58.
[9] Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, 143.
[10] “The advanced capitalist system is inherently atheistic. It is godless in its actual material practices, and in the values and beliefs implicit in them, whatever some of its apologists might piously aver. As such, it is atheistic in all the wrong ways, whereas Marx and Nietzsche are atheistic in what are by and large the right kinds of ways. A society of packaged fulfillment, administered desire, managerialized politics, and consumerist economics is unlikely to cut to the kind of depth where theological questions can even be properly raised, just as it rules out political and moral questions of a certain profundity. What on each would be the point of God in such a setup, other than as ideological legitimation, spiritual nostalgia, or a means of private extrication from a valueless world?” Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, 39-40.
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