By Eugene Narrett*
February 1996 – With liberal Democrats in the White House, the Northeastern media have taken to cheering on the pop culture that the Clintons personify. Yes, the counter culture has mated with multinational consumerism and the results are ugly.
Late last year, for example, the Boston Globe offered a front-page perspective on the global appeal of our contemporary tastes. “In Egypt,” a reporter assured us, “the most popular television program is The Bold and the Beautiful. In Amman, upscale teenagers wear baseball caps backwards, listen to rock ’n roll and watch our television shows.…In the more fashionable neighborhoods of Tehran, women are barely inside their front doors when their robes are abandoned to reveal miniskirts. Cigarettes are lit and homemade alcohol consumed. The latest Hollywood films are rented [out] by door to-door salesmen.” Some pundits insist such developments are evidence that American visual culture is more free, more global than ever. But many citizens remain troubled that the American advertising and entertainment industries export a seamy caricature of the United States.
Some conservatives who worship the market uber alles [above all] have joined this misguided celebration. Writing earlier this year in National Review, one European correspondent applauded the opening of glitzy stores and Japanese restaurants in Prague. He tied American influence to Stephen King and Danielle Steele. Shall we be of good cheer now that “Czechs shop at Kmart, eat at Little Caesar’s and watch Baywatch and Beverly Hills 90210”? The article’s author found in such developments a triumph of “America’s sense of freedom and openness.” But America’s vitality still resides in a moral sense that derives rights from responsibilities – including the duty to regulate nonpolitical public speech.
There appears to be broad public consensus for such reform. Polls after the 1994 elections showed that most Americans are concerned primarily with cultural and social issues rather than economic ones. More recently, the 1995 Family Issues Survey of the Family Research Council reports that 77% of respondents believe “businesses have a responsibility to society not to make violent or pornographic materials.” Writing for the Catholic News Service, Antoinette Bosco agrees “we have to make the [TV] industry accountable for allowing itself to degenerate into a cesspool.”
Critics of citizen-imposed restraints often argue there is no proof of a causal link between televised violence or depravity and bad behavior by viewers. There are two problems with this argument. For one thing, research from British, Canadian and American universities suggests that violent film and videos do in fact prompt aggressive behavior among viewers. While there is no way to prove a strict causal relationship, the influence is clear. The environment may not determine, but it certainly affects, behavior. As Robert Bork explained in the June/July issue of First Things, whether you watch unsavory films or programs, “You will be greatly affected by those who do. The moral environment in which you and your family live will be coarsened and brutalized.” And Bork cautions us against confusing support for free markets with the idea that everything should be on the market. Concerns about the effects of film, television programming and recorded music are valid because private behavior inevitably has public consequences.
Utilitarian quibbling about the difference between cause and influence ignores the issue of moral authority in the public square. As with choices of sex roles, family structure or cultural identity, this kind of relativism undermines all value judgments. It makes community impossible, leading to the tyranny of the lonely, terrified self, to a moral chaos that can be policed only by a tyrant state.
Some say all we need is less offensive talk shows. Oprah Winfrey, yes; Ricki Lake, no. No doubt this would be better rather than worse, as it would be better if the embattled moral conservatism of Americans were respected and fostered rather than mocked. But the reason films even as splendid as High Noon are not Sophocles has less to do with differences of intelligence and purpose than with the medium itself. Unlike, say, a town meeting, which requires that one truly confront, hear and respond to other people, the flow of packaged information from screen to viewer is not a model of democracy. Seeing is, too readily, believing, especially for those born and raised in the screen’s blue glow. Regardless of explicit content, our visual culture teaches habits of voyeurism and passivity.
Pop culture today is more a cause for concern and resistance rather than self-congratulatory applause. Even worse, some suggest that Americans who strongly criticize pop
culture are “trashing America.” He compares them to “limousine liberals” or elitists eager to impose government regulations.
To best understand America’s ideals and purpose, we can turn to John Winthrop’s great sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” with its evocation of “the city on a hill.”
In 1629, the year before Winthrop penned that great lay sermon in Massachusetts Bay, he defended the Puritan removal from England by noting that “Besides the unsupportable expense [of schools], the fountains of learning and religion are so corrupted that most children… are perverted, corrupted and utterly overthrown by the multitude of evil examples of the licentious government.” As so often, he describes our own condition precisely, not least, the fact that corrupt institutions corrupt people. This was a key issue for Winthrop and his flock, who recognized the community’s influence on and responsibility for its individuals. In deed, Puritan understanding of scriptural “covenant” linked faith with responsibility as the basis of rights and prosperity. This, to put it mildly, is not the “democracy” of the super market.
“If we seek great things for ourselves,” Winthrop wrote, “the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us.” In words that would be echoed by the founders in drafting and commenting on the Constitution, Winthrop went on to state that we could avoid this ruin only by “walking humbly with God,” which he defined to mean caring for each other “as members of the same body.” Then “ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand” he concluded, and “we shall be as a city upon a hill.”
Against those who cheerlead our pop culture, let us oppose Winthrop’s vision of mutual concern and care, obligations that require the establishment and enforcement of values. To see most clearly the direction that takes us, we should recall the meaning of culture itself.
In ancient Rome, long before its morals rotted with imperial arrogance and sensual titillation, two senior statesmen called censors were entrusted with evaluating and enforcing standards of public conduct. The root meaning of censor – to assess or judge – indicates that the early Romans understood that a culture cannot cohere without making and enforcing value judgments. Likewise, the root meaning of the word culture is a shared area of work and worship.
In an age of rampant hostility to Judeo-Christian worship and heritage, we must revisit the core meaning and purposes of censorship. Having starved public life of religion and the sense of mutual obligation at the heart of covenantal principle, we and our children are drowning in an anti-culture that glorifies moral disorder and mocks natural law.
Opinion surveys and box-office receipts both show that Americans resist government censorship of sex and violence. But the fact is we already have censorship today, an unhealthy confusion of repression and license. “Speech codes” and special categories of “hate speech” – limit and punish honest criticism of feminists, lesbians, gays and all the acolytes of the anti-culture. Meanwhile, grade school children are proselytized about perversion and condom-clad license. In terms of judgment and standards, we have put things backward.
Do we, then, want censorship of sex and violence, including parental rights to restrict pandering in schools? Emphatically we do. Television, films and advertising are going to have to clean house, or citizens must do it for them. Explicitly political speech must be protected, but we must cease offering its protective umbrella to hucksters and to bacchantes of unnatural lifestyles. The market is not democracy, appetite is not virtue, staring at a screen is not a covenant of responsibility.
It often is argued that censorship would do little to stem America’s cultural rot, but in truth it would do a lot. It is not a question of demonstrable cause and effect – pop culture is as much symptom as cause of our problems. But the fact is that, as Winthrop understood, institutions either teach well or they corrupt. So we need to teach, and to be seen by the young as teaching good and natural standards, not only for the norms themselves, but because in doing so we also teach the young that we take them seriously. Responsibility must be modeled. It is neither taught nor learned well by isolated consumers staring at a screen. We will learn that, or lead the world into the abyss. 
* Eugene Narrett is a professor of English at Framingham State College in Framingham, Massachusetts. This article was originally published in Insight magazine. It was been adapted by Prof. Narrett for the AFA Journal.
