Diana and the
Human Conscience.
By JONATHAN POWER
LONDON-- Stripping off all the layers--the drunkenness of
the driver, the tortured ambiguity towards the press of the
victim--the death of Diana still deeply challenges those in
the media courageous enough to face up to the moral and
philosophical dilemma with the same scrupulousness and
sanity that Einstein applied to the invitation to
participate in the Manhattan project. You can say "no."
The human conscience is the most supreme and sublime
element in creation. It embraces and embodies the impulses
of both the animal and the divine. This is the switching
mechanism that determines whether the individual will
advance towards civilization or regress towards barbarism.
It is the spring, the tension, that everyone lives with
every day, in small things and in big.
Ideology that allows the individual conscience to be
subsumed into a greater collective cause simplifies the
individual's choices, hence its attractiveness, particularly
in a time of turmoil, ultra competiveness, stress and
anxiety. Unemployment and national humiliation drove Germany
and much of Europe into the arms of National Socialism and
the world's single most destructive war. Poverty and its
bed-fellows, greed and gross maldistribution of income,
drove Russia into Bolshevism and the dictatorship of the
proletariat, a soul-destroying form of governance that still
in China dominates the lives of one fifth of humanity. In
America, an ideology of national hubris allowed the "defense
of liberty" to be taken to the extremes of Armageddon. The
Manhattan project's atomic bomb, while perhaps shortening
the war with Japan by a couple of months, left humanity with
a legacy whose evil consequences hover over us every moment.
Nuclear war with the Soviet Union may have just been
avoided, but we know that accident and misjudgement nearly
triggered it half a dozen times. For the future the chance
of nuclear war between Pakistan and India or between Israel
and an Arab nation or, more likely, the deployment of a
terrorist nuclear device in a major western city is a
terrible danger we both inherit from our parents and
bequeath to our children. Yet America, Britain, France and
Russia still hang on to, and therefore legitimize, this
Promethean fire because the western conscience is still
unable to rise above the petty notions of power and prestige
and say "no."
This is the human animal--pulled always towards the
abyss, yet saved time and time again by good men and women
who pull it back. We are progressing. Late twentieth century
liberal society is, on balance, more successful than its
predecessors. There is less poverty, greater life
expectancy, more democracy, a greater application of the
rule of law and less war than any previous generation has
experienced. The liberal, civilized, impulse has never been
more in the ascendancy than it is today.
The danger, as the millenium's midnight approaches, is
that this prevalent ethos becomes too captivated by its
success, too beholden to the creation of free-wheeling
liberty, to the point when the national preservation and
conservation of ancient time-tested core values becomes
secondary.
Liberty of speech and the liberty of the market have
indeed brought us bountiful rewards. There have been those
on the left, in particular, who have waged a tireless battle
to constrain the market place. That battle has been largely
lost. Most of us now see that Adam Smith's perception of the
golden hand was largely right. But the battle against
liberty of speech continues. Powerful vested interests of
government, business and even the professions resent the
intrusion of questioning, doubting, journalists who expose
their judgement to a critical eye and are all too ready to
reveal their inconsistencies, hypocrisies, not to say
malevolences.
This battle for liberty of speech, however, is not to be
as easily won as that for the liberty of the market, for one
very good reason. It is still very unclear if this total
freedom, especially when combined with the might of the
market, is always a very good thing. Both the free market
and free speech on their own are sanctionable. Together,
however, they are a combustible, often destructive, mixture,
as we have now witnessed in all its highlights.
If there is one great outstanding liberal dilemma this is
it. It involves not just privacy, but child pornography and
the incitement to violence too. The conscience of the media
and the entertainment industry is now pricked by great
tragedy to think at last of saying "no."
The media and the entertainment world have a choice. They
can listen to their own conscience. Or society can do the
job for it, by law, preferably international law, sufficient
to make sure that media cultivation of pornography, violence
and sensationalism no longer can be rewarded in the market
place.
September 3,
1997, LONDON
Copyright © 1997 By JONATHAN POWER
Note: I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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