Morality Redux; A Minor Rethinking of My Earlier Post on Doomsday

Where are we going? Do we really want to know?

For a variety of reasons, I have been thinking about this elastic and ever changing thing we call "morality." After a spirited discussion with a church friend, I decided to elaborate on some things that have been weighing heavily on me.  This was the catalyst that sparked it. 

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I watched a movie called Doomsday(2008).  It takes place in the United Kingdom in both the present and 30 years in the future.  As succinctly as possible, Glasgow and Edinburg are struck with a deadly virus called "Reaper."  Finding no cure and no hope, the British government does the only (inhumane and stupid) thing it can do:  builds a 60' containment wall along the Scottish border (a modern rethinking of Hadrian’s Wall), mines the waters around Scotland and let the virus take its course.  This is where I should have turned it off...a storyline based on such cruelty and idiocy...but, no.  I kept watching.  

Fast forward 30 years into the future- the virus reappears, only this time in London.  The Prime Minister and his cronies approach venerable old policeman, Bob Hoskins with a secret and a task.  They reveal that Scotland is not, as the government has been telling the English people, an unpopulated wasteland.  British satellites started seeing people on the streets of the cities three years earlier.  Ergo, their demented logic concludes, there must be a cure.  “Someone” must lead their crack team of British commandos to find this cure and bring it back to London.  The PM charges him with finding someone to lead the team.  He approaches one of his prodigies...the deadly but beautiful Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra)...who, as revealed earlier in the film,  grew up in Scotland and only barely escaped before Scotland was sealed off.  Think of a futuristic Laura Croft -but no “Lady” title.  She becomes the reluctant leader.

The team goes in...when they reach the Glasgow, they encounter Group of Scottish Crazies #1.  Imagine the punk rock scene in New York circa 1978 (but with less charm) with Sol (Scotland's answer to Sid Vicious)ruling through terror.  These guys make the people from Max Max look like the ladies in Dolly Parton's beauty parlor in "Steel Magnolias."  Most of the team is killed save Eden and the doctor, who are captured, and another two soldiers who escape into the city.  

Insert predictable action, brutal and animalistic violence...and throw in a little cannibalism for good measure.  The doctor become dinner at a ritual that could have come out of “The Walking Dead.”  

Being awesome, Eden escapes after decapitating Sol’s...Nancy.  She and the last two soldiers escape into the country with Sol’s sister to find the pair’s father- Kane-the doctor who tried to (and maybe did?) find a cure for the Reaper virus three decades earlier.  Kane is played by Malcolm McDowell in a truly detestable role.  Since “A Clockwork Orange” in 1972, it’s been pretty much downhill for ole' Malcolm...but I digress.    When they find him, he is the leader of Group of Scottish Crazies #2...who saved themselves from any originality and simply gone back to the Middle Ages.  Holed up in a castle, Kane lords over his subjects with iron fisted cruelty.  The four allow themselves to be captured and brought before Kane.    Eden must, in predictable and violent fashion, dispatch Kane’s massive armored knight-the aptly titled “Executioner.”  

In a totally irrelevant sideline, it turns out that there is no cure for the Reaper virus-some people are just immune to it. 

The remainder of the film is just plain silly and if you want to know what happens, either rent it (which I wouldn’t advise), find it on HBO, or read the synopsis on IMDb.

The movie has little originality, glorifies cruelty and trashes a perfectly good Bentley.  After watching, I found that I was deeply, surprisingly disturbed.  While the premise of the story is stupid, it provided an interesting opportunity.  Take Western society at its modern and civilized best...and remove all political authority, constitutional freedoms and technology, and what do the people do?  How do they survive?  The storyline provided 2 different and equally morbid outcomes.  Both I found very troubling. 

 I understand that there were extenuating circumstances.  They were decimated by an unthinkable biological agent and abandoned by their leaders in the most inhumane manner.  In al reality, such action on behalf of the British government would incur the indignant wrath of the rest of the world.  But, forget that for now.  I think, in the final analysis, this facts is irrelevant.  When they lose literally everything, the survivors embrace the absolute worst aspects of their humanity; unspeakable violence, rank tyranny and cannibalism.  

Consider history.

The Middle Ages were the greatest period of human ingenuity in history. After the fall of Rome, Europe reverted to agrarianism and feudalism cemented together with Christianity.  In their abject poverty, the people of medieval Europe became master craftsmen and created an astonishing variety of inventions to aid the toil and drudgery of medieval life. Following the Middle Ages, the Renaissance embraced a new vision of art and culture. As the Renaissance faded into the Enlightenment, humanity discovered and embraced free will, popular government and the planted the seeds of human restraint that would find expression in the English Civil War and the American Revolution.  Much of these revolutionary ideas came from England and Scotland; men like David Hume, Edmund Burke, John Locke, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham were just a few from the UK.  There were dozens more on the continent.  

So, why don’t the survivors elect leaders, create political associations, plant crops, hunt...do the things that their educations had told them that their earliest ancestors had done?  Were they soooooooo angry at the government that civility was impossible?  Were they just really, really lazy?  Were this the exception (albeit the monumentally ridiculous exception) to this question, that would be one thing.  But this is just another in a long line of worst-case scenarios that literature and film have offered to the public.  

Have we not evolved at all?  

We are so dependent on technology and an environment that is sagging under the weight of questionable sustainability that the collapse of global power grids and the loss of the global political community is not such a fantastical flight of science fiction fantasy.  Moreover, terrorism, biological, chemical and nuclear weapons coupled with the rise of nations who do not embrace popular government creates possible scenarios of global war, pandemics and the threat of nuclear holocaust that are bone chilling, to say the least.  

The Middle Ages were the ultimate example of the vacuum created by the loss of power.  When Rome fell, all order fell with it.  War was supreme and the nobility and the clergy rode the back of a population so oppressed that it is truly staggering.  The one thing common to the west in the Middle Ages was their faith in a benevolent and forgiving God who assured an eternity in Heaven if they kept faith with His church and faith.

Where are we now in regards to a collective faith to bind us beyond the trappings of political associations sure to one day collapse.  Modern society has relegated national faith (with the exception if Islam) to the ash-heap of history.  God is an antiquated relic-a charming monument to a less evolved people.  Our modern gods are global economy, political correctness,  techno-gadgetry en mass, and a belief that there is, ultimately, no real distinction between right and wrong.  Pornography is art and protected speech.  Marriage is forever...until someone gets bored.  Moral ambiguity is the opiate for people who “believe that abortion is wrong, but would never tell someone what to do with her body.”  The sanctity of life is, for the first time in all of human history, no longer our most cherished belief.  

Today, those of us who choose to pray for God’s grace and forgiveness are called bigots and religious radicals. Christianity perpetrated the  Spanish Inquisition, the Salem Witch trials, and decimated the Native American civilizations in the New World...therefore, Christianity is invalid.  Islam perpetrated 9/11, but only because of American greed and a new colonialism that seeks to gain control of the Middle East for a Zionist agenda.  

We send our children to bastions of social engineering and political correctness called public schools.  We call this building their future and then, when they need it the most, we rip their faith from them like a festering leg is torn from the body on a battlefield.  And, like dunderheads, we allow it to happen...celebrate it...call is progress.  We have become fools in the most titanic sense.  
History proves one thing time and time again...nothing lasts forever. 

If...when...our modern society falls (and it will) under the weight of its own greed, moral cowardice and rank stupidity, will we start again.  But, will our modus operandi be based on moderation, wisdom and a determination to learn from our mistakes.  The God of Abraham, Moses and Jesus Christ has been replaced.  We put our faith in the very worst of our modern selves...greed, greed and more greed.  Is one or both of the scenarios portrayed in “Doomsday” that far fetched?  Can we Westerners, Americans and champions of every ignoble cause and in the absence of all political restraint, be expected to rise above;  to not be reduced to violence, tyranny and cannibalism?

I am utterly terrified to truthfully answer that question.