Bill Maher, Moral Panic, And The Problem Of Agnostic Collapse

The late-night comedian Bill Maher the other day made one of his routine critiques of politicall;y-correct society:

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher lamented that “woke kids on campus decided to be all the worst parts of a Southern Baptist,” and the left has become “the party of speech codes and blacklists and moral panics and demanding some TV show had to go.”

. . . After listing some examples of people on the right being more permissive on sex and drugs, and other examples of the right being morally strict, Maher stated, “We need to restore the natural order of things. I don’t want to live in a world where liberals are the uptight ones and conservatives do drugs and get laid. Once upon a time, the right were the ones offended by everything. They were the party of speech codes and blacklists and moral panics and demanding some TV show had to go. Well, now that’s us.

I don't normally follow Maher, so I looked him up on Wikipedia. It turns out that Maher was raised Catholic, but "Owing to his disagreement with the Catholic Church's doctrine about birth control, Maher's father stopped taking Maher and his sister to Catholic church services when Maher was thirteen." Since Maher was born in 1956, he would have been 13 in 1969, when the collap;se of unexamined or agnostic religious faith was well under way.

The incongruous thing about Maher's regular attacks on political correctness is that he's generally aligned with all the elites' received causes. He's been on the board of PETA since 1987, for instance, and he supports legalizing marijuana. In many ways, he's a kind of secular Protestant, substituting private judgment over individual points of liberal doctrine, an agnostic's agnostic. He's decided certain aspects of current cancel culture are moral panic, but he doesn't want to try to tease out the full extent of the panic, or its underlying causes.

So his program is basically a wink and a smirk, which means he's nobody's friend. The underlying reason for the moral panic in polite society, it seems to me, is fear of the plebs, its actual cultural influence as reflected in the popular cable shows, and its growing power at the ballot box -- they ousted Trump in 2020, but they're terrified he'll return in 2024. Maher is clearly just as terrified of this as anyone else in his social stratum.

But this reflects a bigger problem: nain line Protestantism and other mainstream agnostic religious outlooks -- Reform Judaism or Kennedy Catholicsm, for instance -- collapsed beginning in the postwar period. The result has been moral ambiguity and increasing social chaos. These are things that Catholic thinkers from Frederick Kinsman to Paul VI anticipated.

The challenge is to rebuild the social and cultural consensus on a Catholic basis, which hasn't been tried in the modern period. I think this is the project Bp Barron recognizes needs to be undertaken.