Are we contributing to our moral decline every time we turn on Netflix?

Moral art, bad TV, Sister Wendy

Writing Elsewhere
I wrote for The Critic about what Dominic Cummings’ new political party might be like and for CapX about Sunak and Disraeli.

How to Read a Novel
The next instalment of How to Read a Novel is a today! We’ll be talking about A Room With a View and how novelists pattern their work.

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The moral purpose of art

Erik Hoel followed up his post about fiction having the same function as dreams, with a piece about Karens and the nature of evil. (If you missed it, I wrote about Erik’s first essay last week.) I was struck by this sentence: “what American culture lacks most is an adult understanding of what motivates evil.” Erik links this to depictions of evil in art, which he sees as often being too basic, too much about goodies and baddies and not enough sense of “good corrupted.” The prime culprit is Disney: “Disney’s unwillingness to paint in shades of gray is the early childish form of what Richard Hofstadter famously called the “paranoid style” of American politics.” Erik contrasts the simplistic Disney approach with Studio Ghibli’s more subtle movies. I strongly agree.¹ They understand the complexity of moral life. Villains are often somewhat sympathetic. It isn’t always clear who is good and who bad. Erik says, “I feel strongly that Studio Ghibli films are closer to the truth of how the world works than Disney films.”

There’s a lot more to Erik’s essay. I encourage you to read it. But that summary should be sufficient for me to make the point I want to make. All art is moral art and according to my reading of Erik’s theory of the overfitted brain it matters what sort of moral art we consume. I put this to Erik and he thought you would need a mix of art promoting moral behaviour and not so promoting. Agreed. Johnson’s worry that novels with immoral characters who are not clearly presented as immoral would be corrupting is not the same argument as saying that Disney oversimplifies the nature of good and evil and is therefore less beneficial than Ghibli. But I note that Erik’s own moral views became more subtle through reading literature and having life experiences.

There is no moral neutral in art. Everything advocates something, however weakly. Under Erik’s theory that fiction does for our brains what dreams do—helps them generalise the facts of our life so that we don’t make narrow conclusions from our own experiences—it must surely matter what we generalise from. Putting Erik’s two essays together, I think we can say that poor quality art is a form of immoral art not just because it isn’t very good but because it produces inertia. It’s easy to take this too far. I belong to a generation that grew up watching Disney princesses but has a high rate of women with degrees and professional jobs. Nonetheless, the overall balance of moral and immoral art must matter in an age when there is quite so much Netflix and we are worried about society lacking “an adult understanding of what motivates evil.”

I don’t find this a very comfortable point of view. It verges on being illiberal. (Don’t watch that!) But I do think that Erik’s two essays together suggest that there are moral (and neurological) consequences, be they big or small, to our television choices. George Eliot told us that art is the closest thing to life and can therefore import the lessons of social science more effectively than theoretical writing. That role is taken today by the non-fiction writers while the lackadaisical fiction on Netflix is often the mental equivalent of eating too much chocolate.

Let me phrase this as a question. If we show differences between good and bad characters but without proper moral markers or judgements, or we show simplistic moral behaviour, such as in Disney, and that is the majority of our fiction diet, surely it could it lead to the brain generalising towards immoral or amoral conclusions? Imagine an evil demon got control of our dreams, and made then all temptingly immoral, full of dubiously simple Disney-like lessons—do we believe there would be no deleterious consequences to this? Not specific moral lessons perhaps, but an overall slide towards complacency, a lack of “an adult understanding of what motivates evil”?

Are we contributing to our moral decline every time we turn on Netflix?

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TV isn’t a serious medium

Can anyone tell me what the television canon would include? I understand many people think there has been (still is?) a golden age of television. But it’s too soon to tell if Mad Men and The Sopranos will be canonical. The fact that lots of people really, really like The Wire means very little. Plenty of the most popular books and movies faded quietly away into history. Look at this list of the best television shows of all time. It’s all very modern. I Love Lucy is on there—one of the most popular shows ever, pulling nearly as many people for one episode as Eisenhower’s inauguration did—but who still watches that? And there’s no discrimination. Whole series are listed. No-one thinks every Dickens novel is equally canonical. Why must every season of Frasier be included?

Go to the BFI or the Prince Charles and you are almost guaranteed to see something interesting, provocative, and worth re-watching. Nothing of a similar scale could be maintained for television. Hasn’t it been long enough that something unarguably timeless would have emerged by now? There was a rediscovery of Friends recently, but that’s laughably thin gruel compared to early Hollywood. There might be canonical television in the sense that there are canonical detective novels or canonical adverts—but the argument for television as a serious medium like the movies seems to me to be getting weaker, not stronger.

Let’s check back in twenty years and see what has survived from the 2000s. I’m willing to bet it mostly goes the way of Lucy.

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Sister Wendy, late bloomer

For high-quality television of unimpeachable moral content, may I recommend Sister Wendy? She was sixty-two when she made her first television appearance, having spent the previous decade living in a trailer in the grounds of a nunnery. She became a global star, making seven series about the history of art. She’s especially good when talking about erotic art. Kenneth Clark eat your heart out. (You can read more about my late bloomer project here.)

The next instalment of How to Read a Novel is a today! We’ll be talking about A Room With a View and how novelists pattern their work.

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1. Ghibli shows children taking responsibility, being helpful, talking to adults like equals, doing things they might fail at. When they use magic it arises from and interacts with reality, rather than being an easy alternative to it. They show elderly characters who aren’t ogres, witches, hags or whatever else. In short, Ghibli does not patronise children.