A viral Christmas in the moral maze
With the pandemic still raging, do people have a right to celebrate the festival together?
Michael Buerk, in the chair on Moral Maze
On this week’s edition of BBC Radio’s Moral Maze, the last in the current series, we struck a seasonal note by asking whether people have a right to celebrate Christmas in whatever way they choose.
Alarmed by the risks of Covid-19 infection rates rising as a result of Christmas festivities, the government has tried to reach a compromise by lifting certain restrictions for the holiday period while retaining others. This has managed to annoy just about everybody.
Some say that, regardless of the holiday, it’s still important to take personal responsibility to keep others safe and that it would be wrong to let our guard down for a few days of partying if that’s going to cause more deaths or serious illness. Others say that getting together with family, especially the old and lonely, should take priority at such a time and it’s down to individuals, not the state, to decide where the balance should be struck.
And then there’s Christmas itself, and whether it still has meaning, or the right kind of meaning. Has its materialism and hedonism got out of hand, submerging its religious and spiritual aspect? Or should we merely celebrate it as the secular mid-winter celebration of companionship and merriment that it used to be before the Victorians re-invented it?
My co-panellists were Tim Stanley, Andrew Doyle and Nazir Afzal. Our witnesses were Linda Bauld, professor of public health at Edinburgh university; Laura Perrins, co-editor of Conservative Woman; Dr Steve Taylor, senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett university; and Ronald Hutton, professor of history at Bristol university.
You can listen to the show on BBC iPlayer here.
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