The New Ten Commandments
And so it came to pass that in the year 2005, Channel 4, in its infinite wisdom, decreed the Ten Commandments a little out of date.
Last week's mini-epic The New Ten Commandments, hosted by the C4-News patriarch Jon Snow, revealed the results of a nationwide survey aimed at creating a new set (this time, of 20) dictums for 21st-century living.
So, how did Moses' top ten fare? Are they still set in stone?
It won't astonish anybody that a society built upon two millennia's worth of Judeo-Christian heritage, when asked to create an entirely new set of commandments, simply ends up regurgitating the originals in paraphrase. Or - as C4 conveniently ignores - borrows from Levitical law located elsewhere in the Pentateuch.
The 'number one' new commandment is: 'Treat others as you would have them treat you.' It sounds strikingly familiar to the maxim Jesus used to sum up the law and the prophets (Matthew 7.12).
And it seems the British public displayed a certain pharisaic zeal for creating two laws when they could have used one. As the Guardian's Zoe Williams points out, the new rules of 'live within your means' and 'appreciate what you have' are simply derivatives of the old rule 'Do not covet.'
As it happens, at least four of the original commandments remain in the new 20: 'be honest', 'don't kill', 'respect your father and mother' and 'don't commit adultery'.
So, although C4 has trumpeted the fact that most of Moses' 'ten' were overturned, the search for contemporary moral mantras begs the question, as asked in the Scotsman, 'Why does a postmodern multicultural society want commandments at all?'
Is it because we're tired of moral ambiguity in today's world? And can we establish right and wrong without the aid of a supreme judiciary? Is being good for goodness' sake enough?
As Gordon Graham (professor of moral philosophy at Aberdeen University) says, 'Strictly speaking, you can't have a commandment without somebody to issue it. People want a clear framework for behaviour, they want strong clear guidelines but they don't actually know how to get them. The truth is they can't get them if they ditch the religious context in which they originally found them.'
Moses' trip up the mountain might not have been a dead end, after all. It looks like C4 fought the law, and the law won.
Jason Gardner
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