There is nothing preachier than media made for kids. Every now and then some Big Brain Liberal notices this, and in a paroxysm of cartoonish idiocy rivaling the object of his scorn, types out an expose of the “misogynistic, conservative authoritarian fantasy” that is—let me see now—Paw Patrol.
I’ve never seen Paw Patrol. I have chosen, instead, to absorb it by way of cultural osmosis; noting, in a perfunctory sort of way, that a cop-dog is selling fruit gummies and cereal to my children. But I imagine I understand the show better than the author, who weeps that “its depiction of gender dismisses women’s position in the workplace and government” and that “it is everything Trump’s Republican Party [was] pushing on the United States.” Such critiques—Thomas the Tank Engine is fascist! A white Mayor tells all the trains what to do!—miss the point so spectacularly that their authors should easily find work as analysts for a news network of their choice.
When you think of it, it is odd that we spend so much time moralizing to children, seeing as, by and large, we are preparing them for a life of meaningless wealth accumulation and selfishness. The same culture that encourages the dissolution of all integrity into a life of pornography, online shopping, and therapy can’t think of a better plot-line for a cartoon than one in which an anthropomorphic dog or tea-kettle learns some truth of the moral cosmos, be it Sharing, Tolerating Difference, Being Brave, or Not Giving Up.
On the one hand, this is because TV is a replacement for parenting. Writers moralize to children in order to assuage the consciences of parents who are too busy with work (or with drinking to recover from it) to moralize to children themselves: “At least she’ll learn about sharing, or whatever.”
On the other hand, the tethering of most media production to the goals of greed has transformed plots into convenient engines for producing as much money from a set of characters as nature will allow. For a bunny to “learn a lesson” is a great way of wringing another drop from a dry rag. Greed, in its insatiable need for more, produces far more morality plays than Medieval Christendom in its insatiable need to condemn the sin of greed.
But neither explains the oddity away. Not merely the same culture but even the same companies that would have a mouse preach to toddlers against the evils of avarice repudiate their moral lesson in some other show. The importance of family becomes the importance of the individual, over and against his family, just a few rungs up the age-appropriate ladder. As to any one writer’s intentions, who can tell? We forgive them all. But casting children into a moral mold that we fully intend to smash later on is such a broad, social practice as to deserve a broad, social explanation.
A broad, social explanation
Liberalism is best compared to its enemy, the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church can be roughly described as an entity that authoritatively answers the question, “What is the meaning of life?” with, “To know, love, and serve God.” Liberalism can be roughly described as a worldview that answers the question, “What is the meaning of life?” with the non-answer: “Decide for yourself.”
Liberal societies can be roughly described as people who attempt to have peace by formally declaring themselves agnostic on those Big Questions (like “what is man,” and “what ought he do?”) that might otherwise lead to disagreement and war: “If we prescind from answering the question of man’s destiny,” thinketh the libs, “we will create a society where no totalizing goal is forced on anyone, but all are free to pursue their individually determined ends.”
Consider any and every attempt to synchronize radical antagonism into liberal hogwash:
Person A: Abortion is murder.
Person B: Abortion is not murder.
Liberal: What’s wonderful about America is that, despite our differences, we can all agree to dialogue and live together in peace, knowing that everyone is free to make their own decisions on the meaning of life.
Obviously, the liberal is asserting a universal goal that all people must pursue: namely, that no one should assert a universal goal that all people must pursue. People can have radically opposed beliefs insofar as they all fundamentally agree with liberalism, and do not hold beliefs as for-everyone rather than simply for-me.
This is why liberalism is essentially negative: what it means to be a liberal is to oppose that which is not liberal, namely, any tradition that purports to deliver an authoritative meaning to all of human existence.
This makes liberalism radically attractive to the American psyche: we were forged in a revolution. The American individual must repeat, in some melodrama of Coming Out, Leaving Home, Going West, or Breaking Free, his country’s original break with Europe and the Church. What Real American does not know himself to be a righteous rebel opposed to all that would bind him, breaking free from all that precedes him?
The rejection of some given, authoritative answer to the Point Of It All, in favor of some individually chosen Point of It All, is the sign of adulthood within a liberal society. It is the subject of all our movies. How do we know that people are authentic? Because they have repudiated the religion of their parents. How do we know they are righteous? Because they are not a part of the crowd. How do we know that they are good? Because they are not fascists. How do we know that they are mature? Because they think for themselves. Obviously it cannot matter what they think for themselves. If it did, “the mature” would be limited to those who think true things for themselves while excluding those who think false things for themselves. Rather, it is precisely their thinking for themselves, and by themselves, without bothering anyone else (except those who don’t think for themselves) and without being bothered by anyone else, that they thoroughly adhere to the liberal ideal, and so become worthy of unanimous praise.
But this leads to a risk: that each generation might rebel into the Church, might mount an American Revolution against the King—where the King is liberalism. If the only way to become an adult in a liberal society is to reject a given, totalizing, and authoritative goal in favor of the pursuit of some other goal, what is to stop liberal children from rejecting the given, totalizing, and authoritative goal of liberalism: namely, that there shall be no totalizing goals? If we all must think for ourselves, what is to stop independent thinkers from thinking that they should not, in all things, think for themselves, but should trust the teachings of the Church? Wouldn’t the purest rebel be the one who rebels against liberalism and thus becomes—Catholic? Wouldn’t the one truly who breaks with tradition be the one who believes in a common destiny for all men, over and against the wisdom of his liberal fathers? What will keep the youth liberal?
What will keep the youth liberal
Within liberal societies, culture is oriented toward the production of self-realizing individuals pursuing their individual ends, infinitely malleable to market demands by having been removed, as much as possible, from anything worth dying or killing for—land, home, family, friends, gender, Christ. It is precisely because of this, and not despite it, that liberal children are given a televised education that preaches the love of family, presumes the girl/boy binary, lauds holding goods in common, encourages sacrifice, and so forth. Early childhood entertainment is a garish, cartoonish glimpse of life in the Church; too bright and stupid to convict, too moralistic to teach, but repetitive and constant enough to form an eventual target for teenage rebellion. Children are granted a pre-modern, moralistic education precisely for the sake of breaking with it. That adults come to disdain the entertainment they consumed as children is not an accident resulting from some profound difference between the two: it is the point.
This is why television can be immediately understood as being for an older or a younger audience to the degree to which it begins to advocate a rebellion against those very notions it once preached; this is why, at its peak of sinfulness, television is simply called “adult.” It is an apt name: within liberalism, the adult cannot be the one who most perfectly attains the proper end of his nature; he can only be the one who most thoroughly repudiates any claims to having any ends beyond those pleasures he sets for himself. The adult is the anti-child. The child is deliberately produced for the sake of destruction by the later adult, who knows he is an adult only by this ritual of repudiation, having done away with any possibility of becoming an adult by a positive path, that is, by way of growth towards a common goal held by all and enforced by law and custom.
The clever critics of kids’ cartoons, in their puritanical tweezing-out of whatever conservative rot festers in the flesh of Peppa Pig, neglect the fact that we do not live in a society in which lessons given to a boy blossom into the wisdom expected of the man. We live in a society in which the only coming of age ceremony left is to kill whatever generation preceded us. Not manners, but ritual sacrifice maketh the man.
The big brain liberal recommendation to solve the “problem” of fascist, Christian TV is always, only, and ever the same: maintain the money-making structure but change the characters, or, as one author recommended: “Ryder [of Paw Patrol] and Sir Topham Hatt [of Thomas] retire and are replaced by their equally domineering sisters. This, in turn, boosts the social status of all the non-male characters. Children would still get the satisfaction of immersing themselves in an orderly universe where rules are rules, and everyone is in his or her place. Just without the white guy on top.”
“Just without the white guy” seems to be the modus operandi of basic, Democrat politics, which remain constitutively incapable of imagining a world outside of this one, albeit with a casting switch. War—without the white guy on top. Endless accumulation of capital—without the white guy on top. Empire, eugenics, technocracy—all purified and made holy by the lack of a white guy on top. But in applying this vapid politics to children’s entertainment, the Big Brains got too big. They have seen a white, authoritative, moralizing guy “sitting on top” and have demanded his immediate removal and replacement—but the guy is Guy Fawkes, and the only thing he is on top of is a bonfire.
Progressivism does not succeed despite the moralizing education of children’s entertainment but, in a large part, because of it. What, precisely, would the rhetorical strength of second-wave feminism have been if it did not have a cast of conservative enemies, of Disney princesses and Prince Charmings to reject with so much pizazz, and in a manner so fitting, so convincing, and so thoroughly American? (Indeed, the late rejection of cartoon royalty by the women of our revolutionary republic seems a bit on the nose).
The production of a children’s propaganda “just without the white guy” will produce, and indeed, is already producing, a new object of ritual sacrifice for the production of mature adults—just not the one the liberals want. There is no better way for liberals to produce the fascists they fear than to make the goals of progressivism a part of that vessel which liberalism sets aside for destruction—the child.