Welcome to the moral maze
by Sachin
This blog draws its inspiration from “Moral Maze”, a long-running programme on BBC Radio 4, which demands listening. Here, I offer a summary of the programme and its merits.
Each week, Michael Buerk and a panel of interrogators from across the political and social spectrum quiz a series of witnesses on a particular issue which has been in the news. Contradictions are teased out; worrying moral perspectives are intimated; occasionally, members of the panel may be swayed by the answers they receive from witnesses, who always have a vested interest in the issue. So, for instance, an episode focussing on Iran’s nuclear ambitions1 featured a dissident Iranian academic, the chief of a defence policy-oriented think-tank, and a professor who specialises in the ethics of war.
“Moral Maze” on a good day represents the pinnacle of broadcasting: it allows rational attitudes to rise to the surface, whilst showing up the polarised viewpoints that otherwise shimmy through society. Moreover, though the listener is likely to align with one of the panellists, interesting points are frequently raised by others. I’m an ardent fan of Claire Fox (@Fox_Claire), but that doesn’t preclude me from taking on new ways of thinking from Matthew Taylor (@RSAMatthew), Kenan Malik (@KenanMalik), or even Clifford Longley. Such are the two chief benefits of the format.
1 Buerk, M. (2012), “Iran and nuclear weapons“, in Moral Maze, 7 March, BBC Radio 4.
The Moral Maze is fantastically paternalistic, how can anyone take any of them seriously!! They all have medieval views on society and politics, it is quite simply staggering that they are invited to debate when they are living in a sort of 18th century enclosure!!
I disagree. There are situations where they feel they have to step over their liberal principles and into the realm of paternalism, but these are infrequent. For the most part, they accurately reflect the entire spectrum of public opinion.
How can you possibly say they accurately reflect an entire public opinion? That is blanket thinking par excellence!
Oh dear Emma…another female Radio 4 listener who believes that if she’s not listening to women’s views, it must be dismissed as paternalistic or whatever. If there is a criticism of the Moral Maze I believe to be true, it is that it does not consider all of the possible reasons/drivers around an issue. But really, if you want to complain about sexism per se, why not complain about the fact that there is a program aired for an hour every day, dedicated to the views and perspectives of women. The BBC have no intention of offering an equivalent daily magazine programme for the other half of its listenership…or the British population. I know because I have asked!
Almost every television and radio programme might be accused of stepping out of the liberal values (aka political-correctness) which has increasingly influenced and blighted our lives and institutions, and thank God for that! Yet why is it that those areas which blatantly favour women over men are never subject to complaints by those claiming to want ‘equality’?
Dear Will, The really hilarious thing is that the views were expressed by women NOT men, which just shows how dark ages the UK is!!!
Whilst I obviously stand by my wider comments Emma, I must apologise to you, and admit my shock that it should be women who would espouse such views!
Radio 5 Live. Sunday 21:00. MENS HOUR. There’s your equality. Booyah.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00t32zg
The participants are all middle-class intellectuals and paid handsomely for the half hour of ignorant opinion they think is valuable to the rest of us lesser mortals.
Liberal principals??? Melanie Phillips???
Today, 27 June was on benefits. I have never heard so much ignorant middle-class, provileged babble on a subject clearly none of them knew anything about. Claire Fox particularly is too thick to even understand the answers she was given, but interpeted that as the person’s inability to take on board her argument. Which seemed to be that to accept benefit without working for it is tantamount to a crime and leads to moral dissolution. No mention of the idle rich who spend more on a meal out than the unemployed working class get in a week eh?
These programs give employment and large sums of licence-fee-payers money to the middle-class chatterati who don’t have jobs. Without it they would probably all be on benefits, since they are talentless and unemployable. They appear to have got their ‘knowledge’ of the underclass from watching ‘Shameless’ and, rather than laughing because it is a brilliant comedy, they have been appalled because it upset their tight-arsed, genteel sensibilities.
The program is, in my view, a wind-up, a rehearsal of bigoted views that the invitees try to counter, sometimes well, sometimes badly. And on top of it all there’s the pretentious, measured tones of the arch moralise Buerk, who really fancies himself, but then don’t they all?
On the Mau Mau debate: Kenyans themselves find those traumatic years difficult to interpret, because of the vociferous Kikuyu claims that it was a gallant and glorious struggle for Independence. Many Kikuyu people, among whom were some quite outstanding Christians, and virtually all the other tribes, rejected the awful atrocities and secrecy of Mau Mau (which formed no part of the current TV coverage) while nonetheless looking forward to Independence to be achieved by political negotiation. It is significant that there is no national day to commemorate Mau Mau and very few of those involved were ever rewarded with land or any compensation from the Kenya government since Independence
Clearly you are well informed on this subject. What I find somewhat disappointing is that Mr Buerk, when introducing the questions upon which this programme was based, failed to consider the very real possibility that the causation of the claims against the British government, has less to do with ‘justice’ or recognition, and more to do with monetary compensation. Surely, without attempting to justify any mistreatment on behalf of the British in Kenya, the levels of violence and horror committed by the rebels, must have created an environment starkly different to that enjoyed by those of the liberal elite who today may seek to cast uninformed judgement?
Michael Buerk has written a piece on the Mau Mau debate you can hear it here: http://bit.ly/MtLOrM
Jennie Price is such an impolite person to criticize other countries to be nasty. She is morally unfit for her job in Sport England. She should apologize to those countries she has insulted by her irresponsible words. She should resign from Sport England or people out there will think that it is right to be impolite to criticize others in public. This will damage Britain’s reputation in the sport world.
This program is set to discuss the moral issues in the Olympic games. The invitation of Jennie Price to be a guest speaker in the program by BBC Radio 4 is clearly inappropriate as Jennie Price is a person speaks immorally and irresponsibly in public. Michael Buerk did not stop Jennie Price when she was abusing other countries, so he should also apologize.
The Moral Maze discussion about the role of the BBC failed to get to the point, which is that the BBC is not, and never has been, in the forefront of cultural change. In the past, indirectly, it has made a worthy contribution in maintaining for the present the best of the cultural past. Like the old Soviet Union it believes in culture for the masses provided that culture is monitored by the guardians of what is politically and socially correct. Fortunately for all of us, it has never had the power to send the malcontents to the gulags or in some cases put a bullet in the back of their heads. What the new Guardians of public broadcasting fail to realise, along with those who have a nostalgia for the old BBC, is that culture is like the flow of water, it will always find its own level. Of course you can always put in a few pumping stations to make water travel uphill. That’s what the BBC does, pump up the culture to make it flow where bureaucrats, and producers with particular personal axes to grind, believe it will irrigate the dry fields of ignorance and superstition.
Public ownership of the BBC began because the powerful instrument of broadcasting might otherwise have fallen into the wrong hands so the Establishment wished to keep it in theirs. The intellectuals who first favoured it, male to a man, also feared the encroachments of popular culture and aimed to ward it off, in the first 30 years of its existence, by promoting high art in most cases and where that didn’t entirely succeed by replacing it with a kind of genteel entertainment that would keep the middle classes happy. In the 1960s that changed and popular culture was allowed its head in new channels specifically allocated in order mainly to entertain, a little more than inform and educate, the ignorant masses. From then on, because of the immense changes in social values and enhanced methods of electronic communication, the BBC is at a loss of what its role should be.
It is abundantly clear that the licence fee is an anachronism and will surely have to go. If the BBC, as we now know it, also disappears some people see that as creating a complete cultural vacuum. This is nonsense because if there does exist a strong enough desire to maintain distinct vehicles of broadcasting, that provide outlets for the culturally significant in our society through radio and television, then there will be the right kind of public support to make this possible. We should recognise that the BBC has had its day, time to decide to shut up shop. Once that becomes clear, the various alternatives will also begin to take shape. That’s what we should really talk about and not continue to agonise about an institution that has seen the best of its time.
I have just heard Michael Buerks trailer for the moral Maze on Radio 4 where he made a personal, offensive and completely sensational and hysterical character assasination of the late, I repeat THE LATE Jimmy Saville. Now I knew no more about this celebrity than anyone else and if he was guilty of what he has been accused deserved to feel the full force of the law. Mr Buerks comment gave no new information on the topic except to show, surprisingly, what a sensationalist hack he really must be. Please, Mr Buerk consider returning to the high standards I associated with the moral maze and leave your comments to the gutter press.
I think I’ll gloss over Ken Lloyd’s comments above!
My main beef with the Moral Maze is that is is so desperately old fashioned and out of touch.
Many of the moral issues of our times are deeply affected by science and technology and there surely can’t be a discussion that would not benefit from a bit of the evidence-based scientific method.
At the top of the piece we read “. . . Michael Buerk and a panel of interrogators from across the political and social spectrum . . .” Hardly. political spectrum possibly but as for the rest!
I believe I heard a (laughable) defence of this on Feedback once with the producer saying that whenever there was a scientific issue they got on a panellist with a scientific background. By that logic Michael Portillo should only be on programmes relating to politics and possibly history and Melanie Phillips would only feature on programmes relating to the Media. .
Tonight’s programme on drone strikes was marred by this solidly arts-based bias. Not only the panellists but the witnesses too, as far as i could tell at least. Where was a psychologist to properly examine assertions made about drones making it ‘easier to kill?.’ Where was the technologist to discus the accuracy of these drones or perhaps the games player to discus the ‘reality’ of the ‘game’ situation.
Shame on you Moral Maze.
ps – why, on a BBC site is the spell check set for American spelling? (It likes program but not programme)
Very good discussion but I’m concerned that it missed the point regarding drone strikes. Yes; they are clinically effective and good for those deploying them and no; they are not intrinsically more morally repugnant than sending a bomber over an area but their current use by the west is morally wrong when not used in a war zone.
I am sure that the rules of war have been broken regularly over the years and countries including us have sent military personnel into countries, with whom we are not at war, to kill people who are felt so dangerous to our country, that they warrant violating other countries borders without their permission.
The problem with drone attacks against people in a country with whom we are not at war with is not their accuracy. It is that a citizen of that country can walk outside and look at the sky and feel afraid that there are invisible agents that could kill them hovering above; and be right.
We have all heard from our elders the terror of being under bombing attack in the second world war but I personally cannot imagine being in a country where you are not at war but another country can still kill you with missiles from the sky without a single person being present from that assaulting country.
Drone attacks may be effective but I cannot imagine a more powerful reason to fight against the developed world than if the developed world is waging a random (from the civilian casualty point of view) air war by remote control.
An indiscriminate response that “we will set a bomb off in London” might well be an expected response against such an adversary and is fairly logical if we feel civilian deaths in countries we are not at war with are an acceptable outcome.
I have the luxury of walking to work in safety. It is not moral to remove that right from other civilians and expect them to view us as a benign power.
Bill
I just heard the moral maze and I was staggered that a person like Melanie Phillips, who clearly has very opinionated and biased views of her own, was part of the panel. I’d have expected a programme like this to invite people who argue their case based on sound reason and logic and not from personal prejudices and hatred. I found her very offensive and would not wish to listen to this programme again if this is the poor calibre of people that they invite. I think an average person on the street has more common sense than this woman.
I wish to contribute to tonight’s programme ‘Should lifestyle choices mean that users of the National Health pay for health issues brought about by their lifestyle choices?’ – Basically, yes. However one example given is that of the rugby player getting free treatment for his injuries – well I received many treatments over my rugby playing career of twenty years or so – but virtually no other treatment or medication because my rugby kept me fit and healthy. Now in my sixties, I am possibly one of the healthiest of all my friends – mostly non-athletic friends and when I had a wee scare a couple of years ago – the good old NHS gave me a thorough check and advised me to keep on doing whatever it was that kept me so healthy! In other words the health benefits of playing rugby (or other athletic activity) far outweigh the resultant costs the NHS may have to bear.
Cheers