Piers Morgan, and Why Nothing Ever Gets Better

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's now-famous interview with Oprah

Watching Piers Morgan walking offset on Tuesday, walking out the Good Morning Britain door, and apparently keeping on walking, was deeply satisfying. British TV audiences, or Anglophile foreigners like me, have watched him use his national platform to spout bilge for decades. Co-host Alex Beresford named and shamed Morgan’s history of attacking Meghan Markle, which apparently irked Morgan so thoroughly, he quit the most secure media job in Britain.

Morgan, a master of coded language, has frequently used his highly-rated breakfast news program to pooh-pooh Meghan Markle in ways that aren’t necessarily racist, in isolation. Honestly, watching him from across the Big Pond, I suspect Morgan doesn’t think of himself as racist, despite dedicating thirty minutes on Monday to airing his personal grievances. He’s just mastered navigating Britain’s top-tier media landscape, and doesn’t want anyone changing the map.

We’ve recently witnessed cheap spectacles like Morgan’s walkout frequently. The backlash against America’s Black Lives Matter movement pushed carpetbagger Marjorie Taylor Greene and high-school dropout Lauren Boebert into Congress this year. It took sixty complainants to make law enforcement take the Bill Cosby accusations seriously. And any woman who’s ever tried filing a stalking or sexual assault complaint knows she’ll find herself in the hot seat long before the man.

Why don’t we believe people? We seemingly believe that, if we take women’s and minorities’ accusations seriously, they would lie flagrantly. They’d supposedly falsify information and demonize White, cisgendered men for no reason but cheap thrills and short-term gain. The fact that this keeps not happening doesn’t dissuade anyone. Powerful people keep believing that humans are innate liars and undeserving of trust, especially the chronically powerless.

This manifests primarily in how society regards the “lesser,” the outsider. That is, we generally believe White people over Black people, heterosexuals over homosexuals, and men over women. Given the choice, we’ll bury the outsider group’s narrative until someone of sufficient power comes along and speaks up. Only when someone exceptional says something, the actress who married royalty perhaps, do we give these claims any credence.

Power defends power. Surely nobody reading this will disagree. Piers Morgan has defended execrable human beings like Donald Trump, and the sweat-free moral Shop-Vac that is Prince Andrew, because the existing system treats him pretty well. Maybe he isn’t bigoted; he just doesn’t want to fix the broken system, because its brokenness redounds to his benefit. If things got better, he might need to pound sand with us plebeians.

Piers Morgan quits

That isn’t a great excuse, but still…

People who work hard, follow the rules, and reap the rewards, have a disincentive to fix broken systems. Because doing so acknowledges they’ve benefited at others’ expense. To participate in more than token reforms means admitting they’ve profited from structural injustice, which might, arguably, make them bad people. Nobody likes to admit they’ve done wrong; we react to such challenges similarly to being punched in the nose.

Because I did okay, didn’t I? I followed the rules and won. So anyone else could, hypothetically, do the same. If I’m a good person, and the system did well by me, then good people should profit from the system. But if the system is wrong, it follows that I’m maybe not a good person. That’s a conclusion I can’t stomach, so I have to defend the system.

Religion and philosophy warn us this isn’t necessarily so. The knee-jerk emotional response, modeled in generations of fairy tales and Hollywood blockbusters, tells us character equals merit, which equals ultimate success. But we know that isn’t so. Good people of exemplary character can do everything right and still lose. This doesn’t make anyone “bad people.” But it also means we have to extricate ourselves from the system, even if we’ve profited from it.

That’s why Piers Morgan needed to throw a tantrum, because he knows the system reflects on him. He knows he must either separate himself, or get the lingering stench of rot all over himself. He remains tainted while he stays put, because the system which rewards him is entirely broken. That isn’t his fault, it’s just a manifestation of living in a broken world. It becomes his fault, though, when he remains there, knowing it’s corrupted.

Harry and Meghan exposed a corrupted system; Alex Beresford called Piers Morgan out for participating. Morgan defended himself by leaving, not just the situation, but ITV altogether. Given the opportunity to repent and improve the system, he chose to quit. That happens to everyone who profits from systemic corruption, eventually. As abolitionist William Wilbeforce said, “You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.”

God, Drugs, and Loneliness

Hungarian-Canadian addiction specialist Gabor Maté, describing one of his patients, wrote one of the saddest sentences I’ve ever read. Referring to an HIV-infected sex worker under his care, he quoted her saying: “The first time I did heroin… it felt like a warm, soft hug.” This sentence has haunted me for years after reading Dr. Maté’s book. Imagine feeling so alone, so bereft of contact with something satisfying, that you find solace by driving a spike in your vein.

Dr. Maté writes about addicts suffering the lingering traumas of childhood abuse, while researcher Bruce Alexander, another expatriate living in Canada, describes addicts facing the consequences of loneliness. Both share one underlying realization, that people consume drugs because they lack something. Their souls feel so desolate, they’re desperate for some connection. For diverse reasons, they believe they’ll only get it by stuffing their bodies with foreign substances.

As humans, we’re acutely conscious of our innate solitude. Even surrounded by people, we feel alone, bounded by our material finitude. Wild animals and plants don’t need to ask what role they ought to pursue, what choices they should make; they fit into their ecosystem and pursue their instincts. Humans can’t do that. We make choices daily, and often spend years reckoning with consequences for our bad or poorly-considered decisions.

Yet we want something more. We’re aware the world exists, and we’re somehow part of it, but we don’t know what that means in any particular way. In times past, humans found meaning through two chief means: religion and war. Both give us roles and responsibilities, defined by something greater than ourselves, something into which we can immerse our beings. We can stop being finite, and become part of something vast, something meaningful.

Religion offers people deeper unity. The mystical impulse promises us the ability to know God innately, or become one with the Brahma, or understand and embrace our place in society. Religions offer humans the ability to not be alone. Despite the well-intentioned promises of secular scholars who claim all religions are paths to salvation (which is an innately Christian concept), all religions aren’t identical. They do, however, offer a matching promise:

Dr. Gabor Maté

You don’t have to be alone.

Except that, in a religiously plural age, we no longer experience religion as oneness. Answers aren’t clear-cut. We have to make decisions, knowing the high likelihood that our decisions are wrong, which possibly explains why religious people seem constantly at war with one another. To embrace religion today doesn’t assuage our loneliness, as our ancestors experienced; if anything, it makes us more acutely conscious of natural human solitude.

So we turn outside ourselves seeking unity. People define their identities through volunteer activities or political parties, through immersive hobbies or evangelizing secular values. We seek unity with something greater which, without religion, must be something within the world. That something is always outside ourselves, it can never be us. To seek meaning internally inevitably reminds us how alienated and alone we necessarily are.

Some people feel this pain, this isolation, so acutely that they just want the pain to go away. For them, the issue lacks nuance or complexity; the pain is so overwhelming that it has to stop. Whether through substances or the ecstasy of religious transport, they need the pain to stop now. Faith or drugs numb them to trauma and suffering long enough to feel normal, but not long enough to actually heal.

Not all religious people behave thus, of course, just as not all recreational drug users are addicts. People’s unique circumstances reflect the way they seek the union of souls. If they didn’t, we’d never feel lonely. We’d be finite and alone, sure, but we’d be finite and alone in the same way, and nobody would suffer distinctly. To be human is, on some core level, to remain constantly lonely.

The human desire to bandage our loneliness manifests in ways that people behave. We seek company, even to our own detriment; we embrace people we don’t necessarily like. How many “friends” do we have, whom we need to consume alcohol or drugs to stand being around? We numb ourselves to others because we need them, their company, their continuity. Sometimes we numb ourselves with substances, other times with liturgy.

Such maudlin meanderings seem superficially hopeless. Nobody likes to think that loneliness is tied to human nature. Yet thinking about it, I gain great comfort: everyone else is as estranged and isolated as me. I’m not alone in my loneliness. And that’s profoundly consoling.

Some Thoughts on Isaac Asimov and Robot Police

The NYPD's first robo-dog, built by Boston Dynamics, on patrol last week

Isaac Asimov’s 1950 novel I, Robot is most famous today for introducing the world to his influential Three Laws of Robotics. Less famously, it introduced Asimov’s early justification for robotics: he believed technology was a manifestation of science. And science, unlike humans, is wholly rational. The more of society we could entrust to robots, which Asimov saw as more rational forms of humanity, the better he believed society would be.

I couldn’t help remembering Asimov’s principles last week when a video began circulating on social media. The NYPD, a bureaucratic agency not known for restraint and forbearance, had purchased a robo-dog to patrol New York streets. The video portrays this as cute and upbeat. It’s surely mere coincidence that the NYPD has deployed its robo-dog in the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn, the boroughs most populated by Black, Hispanic, and immigrant populations.

Dr. Asimov believed technology was morally neutral, excluding human prejudices. Relying on technological algorithms would exclude human weakness from running common society. Freed from the burdens of morally fraught decision-making, humans could relax, letting robots automate everything. Anyway, he believed that in 1950. Throughout his career, his writings increasingly dealt with moral conundrums created by his purportedly neutral laws, which he constantly rewrote and tweaked.

As often happens with myth, from the Laws of Moses to Star Wars, early contributions obscure later revisions. Asimov’s early robot stories, written in the afterglow of post-WWII optimism, often get remembered more fondly (if vaguely) than his more nuanced later stories. I know I often forget his later stories. Boston Dynamics has learned from this; their early mythology foregrounds robots dancing to Motown, hoping we’ll forget they’re primarily a defense contractor.

Machines, Asimov ultimately concluded, can never be morally neutral. They reflect the desires and prejudices of those who built them. With Boston Dynamics, we might add those who pay to build them. Their limits always reflect their programmers’ ideal. The robo-dog, a prototype for Asimov’s robot detective Olivaw, was programmed to enforce NYPD goals, which, we now know, often privilege order over justice. The robo-dog will do likewise.

Isaac Asimov

Artificial intelligence algorithms, written by an industry that’s remarkably White, famously have difficulty recognizing Black faces. This has already created problems with deploying facial recognition software. Algorithms inevitably reflect the biases of those who wrote them. Technology enthusiasts might counter that we could write learning heuristics so robot police could overcome their limitations. But the machine will only ever learn within that heuristic. What if the heuristic is also wrong?

Put another way, what makes humans capable of changing our minds? What makes it possible for us to determine that long-held beliefs in politics, religion, national identity, and other deep-seated domains, are wrong, and abandon them? Philosophers and theologians argue this extensively, with no definitive answers. We fall on what philosophers call epistemology, the study of origins of knowledge.

Though epistemologists agree humans know things, we cannot agree how. Recent developments in the discipline suggest our knowledge is always positional, that is, we know from our origins, which is why people who move to other countries, or rise or fall on the economic ladder, have difficult periods of transition. Knowledge, and the metaphysical ideas which arise from knowledge, is conditioned by race, religion, language, economics, and the kitchen sink.

We also wander perilously close to religion. Reading the Hebrew Tanakh, I’ve struck something uncomfortably familiar: Moses wrote a law to govern a poor mountain-dwelling nation during the Late Bronze Age. Then kings and priests began enforcing that law inflexibly, dare I say robotically, without consideration of circumstance. The prophets then inveigh against mindless obedience. The Law of Moses demands compliance; the prophets demand mercy and justice.

Sound familiar?

The NYPD robo-dog’s algorithms reflect the NYPD’s enforcement priorities, which we’ve seen automatically presume Black and Brown people are incipient criminals. Because it enforces its algorithms without ill feeling, courts could construe this enforcement as morally neutral. But clearly it isn’t. Just because the algorithm programmer isn’t present, doesn’t make that person less culpable for malicious enforcement of pre-programmed laws.

Though atheist himself, Dr. Asimov’s later novels turn toward a theological concept, eschatology. Laws written as geometric algorithms never compass the complexity of human interaction. His virtually immortal robots struggled with this limit, never reaching a satisfactory answer. This reflected a conflict within Asimov himself, because he considered science trustworthy, but ultimately realized it wasn’t sufficient. Morals, with all their ambiguity, persist.

That’s something the robo-dog, programmed to enforce the law mechanically, can never adequately handle.

The National Anthem and the Search for Someone to Blame

Sailor Sabol, trying to sing the Star-Spangled Banner

It’s difficult to identify just one problem with this weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) meeting in Orlando, Florida. The caricatured statue of former President Trump, half Golden Calf, half Bob’s Big Boy, comes immediately to mind. So does the stage that looks clearly like a Waffen-SS lapel pin. Yet I’ve found myself made uncomfortable by the attention which has gathered around vocalist Sailor Sabol.

You perhaps don’t know Sabol’s name. The teenage mezzo-soprano, apparently an undergraduate at the University of Central Florida, sang the national anthem to launch CPAC 2021. Within hours, recordings of Sabol turned up throughout social media, most decrying her awkward, off-key singing. Her vocal difficulties were compounded by her a cappella performance, making it impossible to find the right note once she’d lost it.

Unfortunately, judging by many comments her performance received on FaceTube and InstaTwit, this wasn’t just a case of an unprepared youth singing something beyond her range. The name-calling and abuse I’ve seen directed at Sailor Sabol has ranged from simply calling her amateurish and cockeyed, to accusing her of moral failings. I argued with one commenter who insisted she must’ve slept with someone to get the coveted opening-night slot.

I’m reminded of Rebecca Black who, a decade ago, became the nexus of Internet hatred because she sang a silly pop song. People blamed her, individually, for the decline of American Top-40 pop. The abuse Black received was even worse than that heaped upon Sabol, and included threats of murder or sexual violence. At the time, I blamed this on people hiding behind YouTube’s cloak of anonymity, and I still partly believe this.

But something worse happened with Sabol. She became the emblem, not only of artists without firm cultural background and rigorous training, but of American conservatism’s moral failure. Commenters, most using pseudonyms, said she proved the cost of defunding arts education in public schools, or that she was personally disrespectful and unpatriotic, or that she sounded the death knell of American democracy. All for a girl barely out of high school.

I’ve noticed this desire to blame individuals before. Faced with the manifold moral failings of the former administration, a massive dogpile of media pundits chose to harp on how the former President had trouble drinking water. The problems America, as Earth’s predominant socioeconomic power, faces currently, are so vast that it’s difficult to wrap our heads around them. So we look for an easy shorthand to make the problem comprehensible.

The other lingering image from this weekend: half Golden Calf, half Bob's Big Boy

The problem, though, is that these shorthands say as much about us as about who we blame. Jeering the former President for needing two hands for a water glass, serves to normalize ableism, a major problem in America today. And holding one teenager responsible for the moral septic tank that is CPAC, reveals that the organized Left has no better answer than base name-calling, like kids on a playground.

Watching recent politics, I notice an ironic gap between what the sides believe, and what they do. Conservatives believe in individualism, and see all groups, including nations, demographic subsets, and even families, as comprised entirely of individuals. Therefore, when millions of people do something—undocumented immigrants crossing the border, say—these are millions of individuals making the same bad moral decision. Which, paradoxically, makes it easier to blame the group.

Leftists, however, see human decisions as conditioned by systemic circumstances which individuals can’t control. We’re beholden to pressures of race, economics, sexuality, gender, nationality, and the kitchen sink. We aren’t necessarily helpless, but we’re limited. Therefore Leftists look for someone to fix the system, or someone to hold responsible for its brokenness. Which, paradoxically, means leftists heap praise and blame on individuals.

The very fact that Leftists often don’t bother to vote, except in Presidential years, speaks volumes. They want one superhero to fix everything—or, if everything turns to shit, one supervillain to blame. Entire systems, plagued with habits that cause the same mistakes to repeat, get boiled down to one individual. The President, or Betsy DeVos, or William Barr. Or a teenager trying to sing the national anthem.

The Star-Spangled Banner is notoriously difficult to sing. Better vocalists than Sailor Sabol have butchered it far worse. But the condemnation descending on her now isn’t about her pitchy, discordant performance. Leftists want some individual to blame for CPAC and its tarnishing influence on politics. But the group is too big and vague to blame. So they turn their wrath on one struggling girl. And reveal their own moral undercarriage.

Myth and Counter-Myth on Battlestar Galactica

Anyone who calls themselves the Messiah, pretty clearly isn’t the Messiah. This statement seems so obvious that it almost doesn’t bear repeating; satires like The Life of Brian have made this truism a joke. But considering the history of self-proclaimed Messiahs and their ultimate defeats, from Simon Bar-Kochba and Sabbatai Zevi, to Sun Myung Moon and David Koresh, anyone who calls themselves the Messiah should be considered immediately suspect.

Gaius Baltar gets the rank of Messiah foisted upon him. Baltar’s role on the rebooted Battlestar Galactica of the 2000s is neither heroic nor villainous, a distinct break from the strict black-and-white morality of the original 1978 series. Where Count Baltar was a quisling and a villain, Gaius Baltar demonstrates divided loyalties, profound survivors’ guilt, and an overwhelming sense of purposelessness. He falls ass-backward into the role of Messiah.

More important than how he became Messiah, however, is what message he purveyed. Speaking to his crowd of mostly-female acolytes, like a more sexually voracious Mary and Martha, Baltar preaches a very extemporaneous, and often contradictory Gospel. God (singular) wants peace, but also for adherents to defend themselves. Resist the authorities, but not with violence, except when violence prevails. I found the contradictions familiar from Sunday School.

I also found the motivation familiar from reading religious theory. Throughout the first three seasons, the story highlighted a singular, state-focused religion. Despite the nominally democratic government, power received its imprimatur from the priesthood, and the priesthood received protection from the state. Sectarian divisions existed, but were easily ignored. In the Twelve Colonies, righteousness and lawfulness were essentially equal… for three seasons.

Series co-creator Ronald D. Moore states, in DVD commentary, that the rebooted vision wasn’t originally about religion, but became so after a throwaway comment in the pilot miniseries. The pilot contained stray references to religion; President Roslin was sworn into office by a priest, for instance, and Caprica Six name-dropped God. The miniseries used these items as set-dressing, though. Only in the ultimate open-ended series did religious themes become dominant.

James Callis as Dr. Gaius Baltar

Twelve Colonies religion was polytheistic but showed no sign of mystery cults, unlike the ancient Greek religion(s) upon which they were modeled. Perhaps such divisions existed before the destruction of the Twelve Colonies, and were simply never mentioned. By the mass exodus depicted, their religion had one motive: preservation of the state as the expression of human survival. Guard the state, so it can guard us against anarchy and extinction.

After a cadre of mostly bereaved women anointed Baltar their Messiah, his message became strictly counter-authoritarian. It ratified that God had sanctified the desperate and despised who now lived in Galactica’s below-decks (“Blessed are you poor,” Luke 6:20). Though Baltar’s Gospel, like the Christian Gospel which loosely inspired it, looks contradictory to anyone seeking a moral checklist, it’s actually remarkably consistent: God supports those downtrodden by worldly authorities.

Religious historian Bruce Lincoln, in Discourse and the Construction of Society, postulates the process of organizing society. Powers of Earth, and their counter-authorities, create narratives that explain why people should, or shouldn’t, support the status quo. These narratives, Lincoln calls “myths.” Consider the mythological, almost religious nature of stories we tell about society: Betsy Ross giving figurative birth to an American flag, or the martyrs at the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

The official state religion aboard Galactica supports authority. Our gods have literally appointed President Roslin to guide us into the Promised Land. Their myths of a lost, Edenic homeland, justify power structures in society. Holy scriptures contain the narrative that justifies state authority, and state authority stratifies the narrative of religious belief. Like the Books of Moses, the Laws of God are literally synonymous with the Laws of the Land.

The series positions Baltar as Jesus, but I prefer comparing him to Hebrew prophets. Like Jesus, the prophets didn’t consider themselves breakaway, but their message often directly contradicts Moses. The prophets seldom condemned private sin, a favorite issue of state-sponsored priests; rather, they inveighed against kings and the organized priesthood, who used their nominally God-given authority to oppress the people. Jesus was simply the culmination of the prophetic tradition.

When Baltar challenges Roslin’s state religion, he offers what Bruce Lincoln might call a counter-myth. His narrative, he claims, better explains a just society dedicated to the Promised Land. Those who follow him believe his postulated society better serves the despised masses.  His counter-narrative remains unresolved in the final battle, maybe because the counter-myth doesn’t exist to solve anything, really. The fight is just worth fighting.

On a similar, but not identical, theme:
God, Man, and Battlestar Galactica