A social conservative credo - Thirtieth Anniversary Issue

Public Interest, Fall, 1995 by Charles Krauthammer

We have, for example, a quarter century of psychological research on the relationship between exposure to television violence and aggressive behavior. The findings are summarized by the 1972. Surgeon General's Commission report, the 1982 National Institute of Health Ten Year Follow-up, and the 1992, report of the American Psychological Association's Committee on Media in Society. To quote Leonard Eron, a longtime student of media and its psychological effects, on the question of the relation between television and increased violence, the scientific debate is over." One could, of course, have done without the social science and simply reasoned, as Irving Kristol did in 1971, that if the unquestioningly held view that good art can elevate is true, then it must be equally true that bad art can degrade.

The defenders of the culture argue that their art merely reflects already existing social changes. One could, for the sake of argument, concede that point and still note that, by constantly validating and confirming disintegratory social trends, these cultural purveyors are legitimizing them and establishing a feedback system that only serves to reinforce, amplify, and accelerate the chaos.

Mainstream films aimed at young people, for example, specialize not just in glorifying violence but in trivializing it. Cruelty as camp is a staple of the PG-13 movie. MTV is a festival of misogyny, a sourcebook on the degradation and objectification of women. And ordinary prime-time television is a laboratory of "alternative lifestyles." It has been pointed out, for example, that the typical sitcom family (with one or two notable exceptions) is what in the 1950s was called a broken home. And these homes - Murphy Brown's, most famously - are not generally depicted as unfortunate accommodations to the sadder consequences of social disintegration but as self-affirming choices worthy of not just admiration but celebration. What is forgotten about the Murphy Brown episode is that real, live television anchors from NBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN went on the show to toast Murphy's motherhood.

Dan Quayle's attack on the breezy, brazen amorality at play here restarted the current national debate about the cultural causes of social decay. Even the most established liberal voices had been coming to grudging acknowledgment of the fact that much of the rampant deviancy in society is learned, and learned mostly from the mass media. Take, for example, the National Commission on Children, chaired by Senator Jay Rockefeller, liberal Democrat from West Virginia, and generally given to the standard establishment analyses and recommendations. It acknowledged that "pervasive images of crime, violence, and sexuality expose children and youth to situations and problems that often conflict with the common values of our society," and even ceded that "the media, especially television" might actually be "a cause" of "our society's serious problems."

The medicalization of vice

Liberals have a serious difficulty dealing with this reality, however. It is hard for them - note the commission's pinched, bureaucratic formulation - to say the obvious: the culture's art is bad, its messages morally wrong. Why? Because having promoted "value-free" education and a self-validating moral relativism, they have forfeited the language of morality.