Not Anymore

I love nostalgia as much as the next person, I indulge in it quite often.  Whenever you talk about old TV shows however, there is always one or two that crop up which people inevitably remark "you can't say that anymore" with regard to dialogue from the shows or jokes that were made which would solicit a backlash today.  I take issue with the people who say this because they seem to be operating under the illusion that what is offensive today wasn't offensive before - it always was, the only difference is the people who it made light of now have a strong enough voice to be able to levy criticism upon you for it.  They were offended by it before, they just didn't have the platform or the presence to be able to challenge you and ultimately that is what you're upset about, suppression, not freedom of expression.

There are a lot of TV shows which were commissioned decades ago that would never get commissioned today.  Whilst you may criticize that fact, I am willing to bet if I was to go back several decades prior to those shows I could find other shows which would never have been commissioned even at the time you claim TV was supposedly free, most of which you would not challenge.

To put dates on these figures, I see many people younger than me today who are experiencing some TV shows from the 90s through streaming services and take issue with the humour and the subjects of that humour.  There are those that will defend those 90s shows and say it was a different time and will even go so far as to criticize the fact that TV in their view has become too politically correct.  Yet in the majority of cases those people who defend the 90s shows will fall silent or will object entirely to the suggestion that you return to the type of content that was commissioned decades previous in the 50s and 60s.  They are content with the level of cultural victimization present in 90s shows but not with the level that existed in the 50s and 60s because that is too extreme for them.

What is actually being played out in these discussions is the concept of moral relativism.  In other words you morality is relative to what you perceived as normal when you were raised and what you experienced.  Subjectively you view what happened in the 90s as acceptable because you deemed it acceptable at the time and don't want to admit you found humour in something unacceptable, this leads you to continue defending it today even though you know it wouldn't be commissioned today.  Likewise what came in the 50s and 60s was acceptable to those who watched it at the time, but to you in the 90s it was considered unacceptable which is why you're unwilling to go back to that extreme.

There comes a question you have to answer in order to settle the argument that is being played out and that is whether or not you believe morality is a scale.  Is it possible to be a little bit immoral, or is immorality something that is black and white that either is, or is not?  If you posit the former then you must accept that different people will perceive different things as immoral and their position on the scale will be determined by their tolerance.  If you posit the latter then you must accept that there needs to be a criteria defined as to what is and is not immoral and that will inevitably be applied to the things you liked, and there will sooner or later be something you liked which will be classified as immoral under that definition.

I think a better resolution to this conflict would be to simply accept that the things that you deemed acceptable in the past belong in the past, and if you intend to bring them into the present you should fully expect it to be judged by present day standards.  You don't expect archaic hardware to be able to perform at modern levels and be able to withstand everything you throw at it, so why do you expect the level of criticism today to be as accommodative?  This doesn't just apply to content it can apply to production value too.  There's a lot of content from decades passed which under a modern eye, in HD, looks absolutely abysmal.  There's an understanding with these examples at least that things moved on, so why is there no understanding with morality that society has moved on, and that the thought processes of the past are no longer fit for purpose?