Morality, the Media, and the Mindless Ones.

So, a tearful Tiger Woods has broken his silence and apologised to the world for his wayward libido. Half of me wants to ignore this as simply too silly to take seriously, but there are issues involved which are nagging at me.

Even the BBC TV news ran this as ‘today’s top story.’ What!? I’ve been going off the BBC for some time, but this clinches it. Even they now seem prey to the spurious opinion that celebrities are somehow public property whose private life must be an open book on which every Tom, Dick and Harry has a right to pass petty judgement. Let’s remind ourselves that it’s the public who create celebrities to fill a void in their otherwise uneventful lives. Or at least, it used to be; these days it’s mostly the media who create them on the public’s behalf in order to have something to sell to the mindless masses. That doesn’t give the public a right of ownership, any more than it would be right to breed puppies in order to torture them.

Then they come out with the second excuse: these people are public figures and therefore role models to the young. No, this argument doesn’t hold water either, because if the media kept its nose to itself, a celebrity’s private life would remain private and the role model issue wouldn’t arise. This is just a repugnant form of self-deluding sophistry.

Of course, it would be different if the celebrity was behaving badly in public, but the public and the media are remarkably hypocritical on this issue. British footballers frequently behave violently on the pitch and in public places. Sanctions are placed on them, but they don’t receive anything like the vilification that sexual indiscretion arouses. Why? Because violence isn’t a moral issue; sexual indiscretion is. And then there are the celebrity super models who promote an ideal of super thinness and lead countless young people into eating disorders. They receive no sanction at all, because that isn’t a moral issue either. And isn't it interesting that a prostitute is villified for being an 'immoral woman,' whilst the arms dealer is an upstanding citizen? It seems that getting rich by making the means for people to kill other people isn't a moral issue either. That's just good business.

I’ve long been coming around to the view that morality is a measure of mankind’s weakness. Morality is a loose concept. It varies from culture to culture, from time to time, and is usually based on each culture’s interpretation of one religion or another. It has no fibre, and is often manipulated to suit the interests of the moralist. At that point it becomes gratuitous. I wonder why Christians are often the ones baying the loudest for the blood of a moral transgressor, when Jesus himself instructed his followers not to judge – or so the Gospels tell us. The human being is born with an inbuilt sense of ethics, and that’s something that is far more universal. If only we would mature to the point where we took this as our guiding set of principles, we wouldn’t have to rely on an arbitrary set of ever-changing rules strutting their self-righteous notions under the guise of 'morality.' Good behaviour would be automatic.

As for Tiger Woods, the only thing that annoys me is that he doesn’t have the courage to tell everybody to mind their own damn business. But then, he’s rich, and maybe he has to follow the advice of his agent in order to stay that way.