So here we are again. The Western intelligentsia, having exhausted their capacity for moral outrage over statues and pronouns, have now turned their gaze to a South African television programme. A 'hit show', no less. And what has it done to earn the breathless attention of the UK media? It has dared to portray polygamy as a viable lifestyle choice. The horror. The absolute horror.
Let us set aside, for a moment, the sheer absurdity of a British news outlet – a nation whose own family structure has been systematically dismantled over the past fifty years – presuming to lecture anyone on the sanctity of marriage. The British divorce rate hovers around 40%. Cohabitation without marriage is now the norm. Children are raised in a dizzying array of fragmented households. And yet, a fictional depiction of a man with multiple wives is somehow the line in the sand? This is the intellectual decadence I have been warning about.
But let us examine the show itself. It is, by all accounts, a fairly standard melodrama: love, jealousy, ambition, set against the backdrop of contemporary South Africa. The polygamy element is handled with nuance, exploring the emotional and practical complexities of such an arrangement. It does not, as the hand-wringing pundits suggest, 'glamorise' the practice. It simply presents it as a reality for many South Africans. And that, apparently, is too much for the delicate sensibilities of the metropolitan elite.
The debate, as framed by the UK media, is a perfect microcosm of our current condition. We have replaced genuine moral reasoning with a shallow aesthetics of 'progress'. Polygamy, they argue, is inherently patriarchal, a tool of oppression. Never mind that in many traditional societies, polygamy was a means of ensuring the economic survival of women and children in the absence of reliable male providers. Never mind that, for some, it represents a consensual, negotiated family structure that defies Western assumptions about romantic love. No, it must be condemned because it does not align with the approved narrative of gender equality as understood by a Guardian columnist in Islington.
What this controversy truly reveals is a profound provincialism. The UK media, and by extension much of the Western commentariat, cannot comprehend that other cultures might have different, equally valid, ways of organising human relationships. We have become so insufferably parochial that we mistake our own prejudices for universal truths. The Victorian missionaries, at least, were honest about their desire to civilise the savages. Today's cultural commentators wrap their sanctimony in the language of liberation, but the function is the same: to impose a narrow, secular, Western orthodoxy on the rest of the world.
The historical parallel is almost too perfect. The late Roman Empire, in its final decades, was consumed by a peculiar moralising fever. Intellectuals debated endlessly about the proper roles of the sexes, the nature of marriage, the corruption of youth. Meanwhile, the barbarians were at the gates. We are not so different. While we obsess over a fictional polygamist in Johannesburg, the real institutions that sustain our civilisation – the family, the nation, the church – are crumbling around us.
I do not write this in defence of polygamy per se. I have no particular desire to share my household with multiple wives; one is quite enough, thank you. But I do defend the right of a South African television producer to tell stories that reflect his or her own culture, without being subjected to the smug tut-tutting of the British commentariat. If polygamy is indeed a flawed institution, let the South Africans themselves work that out. They do not need our lectures.
In the end, this brouhaha tells us far more about the UK than it does about South Africa. It tells us that we have become a nation of moral hypochondriacs, forever diagnosing imaginary ailments in others while ignoring our own putrefaction. It tells us that we have lost all sense of perspective, that we mistake a soap opera for a social crisis. And it tells us, most damningly, that we have forgotten how to think. We have memorised the approved talking points, but we have lost the capacity for genuine discernment.
So by all means, let us debate polygamy. But let us do so with humility, with historical awareness, and with a recognition that our own domestic arrangements are hardly beyond reproach. Perhaps, if we are very lucky, the South Africans might deign to watch our reality television shows and offer us some advice. I am sure they would have plenty to say.
