Modern Morality Has No Answer for Bonnie Blue
Bonnie Blue - adult content creator best known for sleeping with 1,000 men in a day - recently shared her plans for a baby shower. While this created quite the online kerfuffle, modern ideas actually cannot judge her desired celebration.
Ms. Blue expressed the following plan for her baby shower in a recent interview with LBC. She said,
“I have a baby shower on Saturday … and I’m inviting the public to turn my baby shower into a golden shower … I’ll be having sex with the people as well. It’s going to be a mixture of wholesome baby shower games like the traditional trying different baby food, along with other fluids added in there.”
The interviewer responded,
“Now I’m uncomfortable. This is your baby. This is your child.”
To which Ms. Blue replies,
“Yeah, again. My body. This is what I’m choosing.”
Modern culture cannot judge Ms. Blue
While this caused a flood of judgements, modern culture does not have the language to condemn Ms. Blue. Even worse, her planned baby shower is a logical consequence of modern ideas. To name a few,
The idea that morality is subjective.
The idea that you are free to do what you want unless you hurt others.
The idea that the goal of life is to chase/gain pleasure.
The idea - that Ms. Blue uses herself - that it’s her body, her choice.
However, the online brouhaha shows that people have a moral instinct. And while this instinct is dulled by a culture which consistently upholds moral relativism, it shows up when confronted with such an extreme example. People said,
“I hope this poor innocent child is removed immediately as soon as it takes its first breath.”
“She should be arrested.”
“Not trying to be funny or anything, it really has seemed like a very long manic episode to me.”
“If this isn’t as clear a case for safeguarding you’ll ever see then I’ll be the next pope”
“I hope her baby gets taken from her and she gets clocked”
Such judgements, however, cannot be rooted in modern culture. They are actually opposing contemporary mainstream ideas. They signal a borrowing of moral language from a time long gone.
Religious morality in the modern world
In a culture that has done away with moral judgements - except for the rather vague “hurting someone else” - religious language is useful for those who are still interested in living a good life.
Christianity, for example, brings a rich culmination of hundreds, if not thousands of years of thinking about good and evil, vice and virtue, and how to live a good life.
Without this language, it would be impossible to aim at anything good. The extreme case of Ms. Blue shows us that people still recognize something as bad or evil. That must mean there is also its opposite.
A return to religious morality?
Perhaps people are already halfway to going back to religion when they use religious language. However, people might not recognize the language they use. They might think it comes from the United Nations, laws, democracy and all such things.
Most - if not all - modern moral language is built on religious ideas about morality. Its now just cut it from its religious roots. Divorced from God. And when people just “made it up”, it is easy to regard it as subjective and subject to change.
But a morality rooted in people brings issues. Such a morality cannot protect you from smart people with bad intentions. Evil can be framed as “moral” in the moment.
Also, a morality rooted in God keeps a culture from abandoning moral rules that seem to make little sense in the moment. Single moral failings rarely topple a culture, but an immense accumulation of vices surely will.
In other words: it took a long time after Nietzsche killed God before we ended up with Ms. Blue’s baby shower.
Which is not to say that a culture in which religious ideas about morality are mainstream does not produce evil. The difference is that modern culture’s evil is its logical consequence. In the Christian religion, evil is the consequence of human failure.
Don’t fix Ms. Blue, change the culture that produces her
The playwright Terence wrote the following words
“homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto”
Which means: I am gay, and not humans, but aliens are whores (This is misinformation)
It actually means:
“I am human, nothing that is human is alien to me”
When we look at Ms. Blue, it is easy to judge her harshly and move on. Framing her as an individual moral failing absolves us from having to look both at the culture we inhabit, and the vices that are within ourselves.
Yet Ms. Blue grew up in a culture that rewards lust, greed, gluttony and pride. And surely all of us, in our individual ways, fall victim to vices incited by modern ideas. Are we not all sometimes lazy, lustful and greedy? Jealous and gluttonous.
I sure am.
What I dislike about modern culture is that it inspires these moral failings. It turbocharges them. And perhaps Ms. Blue got the biggest turbocharger of us all, but she isn’t fundamentally different from us. She’s merely gone further. Quite a bit further.
That should worry us, because it means we are behind her on the same path. Not on a different path. Ms. Blue is glimpse into the future, not one into a different world.
Perhaps Ms. Blue is a blessing in disguise because she shows us the wickedness that awaits us all when modern culture is left to run amok. Without moral rules, all of us are vulnerable to being taken over by the vices that inhabit our souls. And we could do with some Higher Power that inspires us to follow the virtues that we are also capable of.
But in a culture that denies the existence of a God, and of a moral order, it is impossible to aim at anything good. The greatest trick of evil would be to confuse people about good and evil. To make them applaud the vices, and abhor the virtues.
The way of Bunkerized Christianity
The Bunkerized Christian tries to distance him- or herself from modern culture for exactly this reason. It’s a moral dead end. We might all end up at Ms. Blue’s baby showers because modern culture does not provide the language to judge them.
To save his or her own soul, the Bunkerized Christian tries to live according to the Christian virtues, and tries to stay away from the vices. Not in a spirit of perfection and harsh judgement, but of forgiveness, love and daily improvement.
It is hard to fix a culture. I wouldn’t even know where to start. But perhaps the best starting point is your own soul. To connect to the ideas that can make it flourish, and to bunkerize it against the vices that modern culture cannot judge.