The self-righteousness of the “woke” leads to a rigidity that is ultimately life-denying. As Sarah Ditum’s article about John Cleese suggests, it has also lead to the demise of humour and satire in our culture. And now to the demise of fun in the beloved Dr. Who series in service of narrow, arbitrary moralistic belief systems. It has become impossible to watch any current film or TV production without being drenched in this moralistic muck. Netflix is particularly bad. When story is sacrificed to dogma, the art fails. For recent historical examples we have only to look at the Prohibition movement of a century ago in North America. What began as an understandable need for women to bring attention to the negative impact of alcoholism on their families soon morphed into an ugly shadow of itself. This led to a decade or more of alcohol prohibition, actually fostering the crime syndicates that traded in illicit liquor and were enforced with lethal violence.It’s arguable that modern drug empires originated in this historical source. So a moralistic attempt to quash misery led to ten times more misery. Though by comparison to “woke” activists, Prohibitionists were tolerant in the extreme. When compassion turns to activism, it risks becoming a destructive shadow of itself.
The self-righteousness of the “woke” leads to a rigidity that is ultimately life-denying. As Sarah Ditum’s article about John Cleese suggests, it has also lead to the demise of humour and satire in our culture. And now to the demise of fun in the beloved Dr. Who series in service of narrow, arbitrary moralistic belief systems. It has become impossible to watch any current film or TV production without being drenched in this moralistic muck. Netflix is particularly bad. When story is sacrificed to dogma, the art fails.
For recent historical examples we have only to look at the Prohibition movement of a century ago in North America. What began as an understandable need for women to bring attention to the negative impact of alcoholism on their families soon morphed into an ugly shadow of itself. This led to a decade or more of alcohol prohibition, actually fostering the crime syndicates that traded in illicit liquor and were enforced with lethal violence.It’s arguable that modern drug empires originated in this historical source. So a moralistic attempt to quash misery led to ten times more misery. Though by comparison to “woke” activists, Prohibitionists were tolerant in the extreme.
When compassion turns to activism, it risks becoming a destructive shadow of itself.