I finally got around over the last several weeks to watching the Netflix series Designated Survivor. I very much enjoyed season one despite the persistent liberal preachiness and the obeisance toward political correctness. There was lots of drama, action, and interesting plot twists, the obligatory sex was minimal and relatively understated, and there was no egregiously offensive language. You could almost call it family friendly.
However, at some point during season two all that began to change, and by season three the action had waned, PC preachiness had morphed into irritating, self-righteous hectoring, the producers evidently felt it their artistic duty to display both male and female buttocks, to show us two men concubitio, and to insert an abundance of insultingly foul language into the script. It may have gotten even worse before the season ended, but I couldn't watch any more, so I don't know.
I don't know why the people responsible for the series thought those changes were important to make, maybe they thought their viewers were a bunch of imbeciles who needed to hear an f-bomb dropped three or four times an hour in order to be induced to watch the show. Whatever, the degeneration of the show into tasteless sleaze was very disappointing.
But be that as it may, complaining about another instance of our culture's slide into the sewer isn't what I intended this post to be about. Rather, I want to focus on one of the early episodes in season three (episode two) that offered a good illustration of our society's moral confusion.
In the episode, a member of the (presumably) Saudi royal family, in the company of a girl of about thirteen, does a photo-op with the president in the White House. The girl turns out to be the man's wife, and everyone is aghast. They all express their indignation as they pillory the Saudi for marrying a mere child. The practice is resolutely adjudged by everyone in the show to be abominable, but then it turns out that child brides are legal in many states in our own country under certain conditions, so the cast's moral outrage is redirected toward getting domestic legislation passed that would prohibit this abhorrent practice.
So why did all this strike me as confused, especially since I certainly agree that the practice of coercing a girl into marriage when she's too young to make an informed decision is loathsome? Two reasons:
The first is that the same sort of liberal progressives as those depicted on Designated Survivor in high moral dudgeon over the practice of parents offering their child daughters to older men are telling us today that there's really nothing wrong with parents having their underage children put on puberty blockers and even, in some cases, having irrevocable sex transition surgery.
The president's nominee for Undersecretary of Health refused at a senate hearing to even answer the question as to whether this practice was acceptable. Indeed, our local paper ran a frontpage headline declaring that to even raise the question was itself "transphobic," i.e. hateful.
So, why is it wrong for adults to exploit a child by marrying her off to an older man, but it's not wrong for adults to exploit a child by trying to change the child's biological sex? What's the significant difference? Why should it not be illegal for parents to change forever the bodies of their children, but it is illegal for those same children to smoke e-cigarettes or drink a beer?
The second reason for the moral confusion on display in this episode of Designated Survivor is that for the last fifty years or so progressives like those who produce shows like Designated Survivor have been preaching that morality is all relative to the time and culture in which people live, and that to disagree with this is to reveal oneself to be an intellectual dolt or a religious fanatic.
We've been taught that it's wrong to judge others, to be intolerant of other cultures, to impose one's values on others, that all cultures are equally valid, and so on, but now we're being told by the self-righteous folks at Designated Survivor that all that is suddenly no longer operative.
The progressive relativism, at least as it's portrayed on my television, has evidently morphed into moral absolutism, harshly intolerant of the Muslim fondness for child brides and horrified that sub-cultures in our own country consider marrying underage girls acceptable.
What happened to their sophisticated moral relativism? What brought about this sudden transformation? Have our social betters had a Damascus Road experience in which the scales have fallen from their eyes and they of a sudden realize that there really are objective, non-relative moral truths after all?
Nah.
It'd be nice if that were the case, but in order to embrace objective moral truths they would, if they were at all consistent, have to also recognize the existence of some transcendent standard of moral goodness, a personal being capable of holding us accountable for our moral choices. The only such standard that exemplifies these qualities is the Judeo-Christian God, and I doubt very much if any of the cultural lights at Designated Survivor have really opted to abandon their secularism for theism.
Faith in general, and Christianity in particular, are, in the estimation of our entertainment elites, weird. They're fodder to be misrepresented, distorted, ridiculed and misunderstood. They're hardly something to be lauded and embraced.
No, it's more likely that the folks who wrote and produced Designated Survivor are simply oblivious to their moral inconsistency. Their judgments aren't based on any rational principle so much as they're based upon an attitude, a feeling or a social fashion. They just feel strongly, perhaps because their social set feels likewise, that coercing a child to marry someone twice her age is just wrong and therefore merits all the condemnation they can fit into the script.
They're unaware of how silly - or, less charitably - how hypocritical it is to deplore "judgmentalism" in others while simultaneously manifesting it themselves.
Nevertheless, watching the moral confusion unintentionally depicted by almost everyone in the cast of the show, made for amusing, if irritating, viewing. At least for a while.