There is something so dark and sad about PBS, a broadcast network that has long outlived its original mission—to provide an oasis of cultural uplift amidst the “barren wasteland” that television became under the dominance of three profit-driven networks. Those of us who grew up in the 1970s, who weren’t lucky enough to have prosperous and cosmopolitan parents, remember when PBS was the one place where we might encounter Shakespeare, Roman history, or the music of J.S. Bach. Such shows were a window into the way the “other half lived,” the children whose parents listened to classical music and could afford to provide piano lessons. Each program was a ticket to Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
Now that even poor people typically have cable, and the Web provides a million alternatives to broadcast television, it is hard to see why the taxpayer should be funding a network that caters to the elite. The viewer demographics of PBS viewers have skewed, and now it caters mainly to older, richer viewers—people who don’t need public subsidies to grant them access to higher culture. And the programs have gotten dumber, with retrospectives of Broadway musicals and concerts by “Celtic women” and “The Three Countertenors” in place of classic programs such as Sir Kenneth Clark’s Civilization and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man. Do we really need the federal government to serve us up glitz and kitsch?
{mosads}The executives at PBS surely realize that the niche they used to fill no longer exists, and that they must manufacture other reasons for congressmen to vote for their subsidies, and wealthy people to send them tax-deductible donations. And so they are skewing the network to a starkly political purpose: To assert and reinforce the ideology of America’s self-appointed elite—the self-identified secularists whom Richard Dawkins has taught to call themselves “the Brights.”
Without any God to worship, or any code of conduct deeply rooted in human dignity, most “Brights” guide their decisions by a short-sighted, brittle calculus of pleasure-and-pain called Utilitarian Hedonism. As we explain in The Race to Save Our Century, its creed is stark and simple, amounting to the “pursuit of the largest number of chipper, happy moments for the greatest number of people before they die.” Human beings have no intrinsic dignity or worth; they simply bundles of pleasure and pain, stumbling through their lives like lemmings headed over a cliff. So it’s our job to make them happy, rather than sad.
And according to PBS’ latest program offering, some of the heroes in this dogged struggle for transient happiness are abortionists. The network is airing a show that lionizes the late Dr. George Tiller, who aborted pre-born babies who were in the eighth and ninth month of development—in other words, who were exactly like other children in the same hospital whom doctors were dutifully keeping alive. Children with names and Social Security numbers, whose rights were protected by the laws of the state of Kansas. How were those children different from the ones whom Tiller cut up with surgical scissors? Their parents wanted them, and keeping them alive would make those parents happy. But the children whom Tiller “treated” would make their parents very sad. So they had to die.
On this view of life, George Tiller was a brave and devoted provider of “women’s health care,” and the zealots who condemned him were spoilsports and busybodies, fanatics whose antiquated ideas about human dignity need to be swept away like cobwebs, or flattened out like speedbumps on the road to the Brave New World—where no one needs to suffer much since we admit that life is meaningless and that those who sacrifice themselves are suckers.
There is nothing “elite” about this vulgar, cynical view of human life. It is common to a certain kind of jaded teenager, especially among embittered children of divorce. It is the voice of a dying, exhausted culture, whose denizens cannot be bothered to reproduce themselves—except in occasional spurts of hopeful narcissism, in vain attempts to engineer a perfect copy of one’s self. Expressions of such despair do not deserve taxpayer support. They are pathological symptoms, or cries for help. George Tiller’s contemptible life and meaningless death should not be celebrated but studied. His corpse stinks to heaven. It’s time for an autopsy.
Jones and Zmirak are co-authors of The Race to Save Our Century.