"Moment of Truth:" revealing the decline of American cilivization

I recently saw a terrible show called "Moment of Truth." It was a bit like watching a train wreck -- gruesome but you can't look away. The premise: Ask a person who has something to hide a bunch of progressively more personal questions in front of their family and friends. If they tell the truth all the way through, they can win a pile of money. They are pre-asked the questions using a lie detector in order to create a control answer set.

After watching it, the show haunted me and upset me for days. And I think I finally figured out why. It's because it shows, very clearly (and disconcertingly) a fundamental shift in American (dare I say North-American) life towards the privileging of truth over ethics. Case in point: A woman who was ashamed to admit on the show that she fantasized about a professional baseball player because she didn't want to hurt her husband (significantly, when she did admit it, she was booed by the audience), readily and almost proudly admitted that she would "without hesitation, rob a bank to pay off her family's debts if there was no chance of getting caught." Where is the ethical dillema? She clearly has none. The same woman admitted to repeatedly lying about her credit card charges to her credit card company to avoid paying for purchases.

After trying to work out this seemingly screwed sense of ethics, (WHAAT?) I realized that I couldn't reconcile her ethics, because she didn't have any. To clarify: morals I see as those innate feelings that stop you from, say, cheating on a game with friends or yes, even cheating on a spouse. Ethics, I see as a pertaining to a bigger picture such as respecting laws and authorities that may be faceless, but keep civilization in order, like not cheating on your taxes (or robbing a bank or defrauding the credit card company). And while this woman's morals were questioned, and her ethics revealed to be fairly non-existent, the show seemed to say that it doesn't matter! We don't care as long as she tells the truth. We will reward her (in cash) for her truthfullness.

This will never, I promise, be a political blog (I don't know enough, or even care enough), but the treatment of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush I think is a prime example of this new shift. In his little-picture world, Bush's morality tells him to help out his family and friends, even if it means the death of nameless, faceless people across the world. His funding of war is simply not ethical, but for him, the morality behind it all stays solid. The bible after all says love thy neighbour, and says nothing about people on the other side of the world. If your circle thrives, civilization be damned! (Sidebar: Isn't it great how the word"civility" is connected to the word "civilization"? It spells it right out!) (Sidebar 2: I also think that "civility" is being confused with "politeness" these days. Eg: you can tell someone to fuck off politely, but you can never do so with civility). In sharp contrast to how George W. Bush was let off ("gee... he's just a nice man from Texas who "truthfully" didn't know how his dealings would affect the rest of the world"), Bill Clinton was skewered for having an affair with Monica Lewinsky and not really admitting to it. Perhaps his was an act of lapsed morality, (not ethics, I would argue) but it was a lapse that didn't affect much more than his family and friends (for whom I did truly feel sympathy).

At the risk of sounding too . . . well, ethical, I'm just feeling nostalgic for a time before this media-saturated one (of which I am taking full-advantage, I realize) in which ideas, ideals and ethics and not dalliances and moral slip-ups held our attention and in doing so, helped hold together our civilization.