I have a shameful weakness for trashy Netflix-style revenge movies. The premise is always roughly the same. The film begins with some terrible act of violence committed against the hero or, more typically, his (sometimes her) family. The hero then goes on to visit bloody retribution against those who have wronged him. Think of Liam Neeson’s righteous fury in Taken.
What is especially troubling about this genre, though, is its disturbing use of morality. The initial act of savagery is there to provide a moral justification for the otherwise cruel and immoral things the protagonist goes on to do. And it justifies our Schadenfreude. Or, to put it another way: morality is dangerous. It can easily exist to exonerate great harm.
Which brings me, slightly obliquely, to Jeremy Kyle and his now cancelled TV show. I absolutely share in the moral condemnation of the programme: putting poor people on trial, holding them up to public ridicule, exposing their faults and family grievances, all for the titillation of a baying audience. The psychological damage the show did to contestants was long-ignored. And I choose the word ‘contestants’ deliberately – because not only was the show all about contestation, but also because it adopted the format of a game show, recycling private misery into the financial gold of light entertainment.
But the really terrible thing about the show is how it allowed itself a veneer of moral justification. It sought ‘the truth’ – hence its routine use of lie detectors. And under the pretext of this moral justification visited great harm upon those foolish enough to submit themselves to the cruelty of Kyle’s hectoring interrogations.
Perhaps Jeremy Kyle saw himself as performing a public good. That by exposing the truth at the centre of a dysfunctional family he was bringing about some much-needed restitution. That he was the righter of wrongs. But as I said, morality can be dangerous. Here, it quickly became an alibi for bullying.
The relationship between truth and cruelty is a long and complicated one. In their brilliant little book, On Kindness, Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor chart the history of kindness from its Christian and pre-Christian roots, through a radical transformation at the end of the English Civil War, and especially through the massively influential work of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes.
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