Wednesday, May 16, 2007

"Moralizing to beat the band"

Reflecting on the decision to consider smoking one of the justifications for rating a film "R," Andrew Ferguson observes that moral judgmentalism hasn't disappeared among Liberals - they aren't relativists about everything. [via Betsy's Page]
Some conservatives complain that we live in an immoral age, or an age that's at best indifferent to moral judgment. But this isn't really true. ....

It's certainly true, as traditionalists say, that the objects of the old censoriousness - promiscuity, divorce, abortion, infidelity - have been removed from moral categories altogether and elevated to the status of "lifestyle choices," where no one but the chooser himself is allowed to render a moral verdict (and then only on himself. And the verdict, by the way, is pretty much always "not guilty."). But keep looking. An acquaintance a few years ago urged me to read the New York Times Magazine Ethicist column, describing it as unintentionally comic because the writer could never bring himself to cast a strict moral judgment. "A weak-kneed relativist," is what the columnist was, my acquaintance said. So I started reading the column and was surprised to find that my friend was wrong: This columnist was moralizing to beat the band. And on Sunday morning! Times readers must be disgusted, I thought, until I noticed what it was he was getting moralistic about. One morning someone wrote in with the eternal yuppie dilemma: Should she buy an SUV?

"There's no way to justify endangering others just so you can play cowboy," the columnist thundered. Anyone who bought an SUV, he said, would be "driving straight to hell." And so on, week after week, I became alert to the ways in which our pop culture is shot through with moralism: sulfurous condemnations of homophobia, smoking, guns, junk food, fur, big cars, and - this is the big one - judgmentalism. The new Church Ladies simply will not tolerate intolerance.
Source: Weekly Standard: Puritans in Hollywood

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