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Now and then the moral universe finds two wholly different things, sets them side by side, and says, “Look at this amazing connection!” Last week, for me, the connection centered on the ethics of reality television.

On Thursday morning I heard Refik Hodzic, a Serbian Muslim filmmaker, talk about his new documentary on the war in the Balkans. That evening, amid a burst of ethical concern from the punditry, the latest installment of “Survivor,” the CBS reality-TV series, oozed across the nation’s screens. To set Hodzic’s insights against the pop psychology of “Survivor” risks blurring the trenchant with the inane. But each raises concerns about the media’s manipulations of ethnic issues, and each shows how dangerous television can be without the restraint of a shared moral purpose.

Hodzic’s documentary traces a father’s search for his 16-year-old son, who disappeared and was murdered during the family’s panicked flight from Serbian soldiers intent on ethnic cleansing. But the filmmaker also probed the ways in which the Balkan past has been squelched, twisted, and reformulated. Commenting to a small group of us on how such horrors had grown so suddenly virulent in the early 1990s, he leveled a passionate blast at Serbian television, which in the months before the war had deliberately used ethnic stereotypes to lather up mistrust and fear and to engender violence against neighbors of different ethnicities.

By contrast, “Survivor” is thin gruel. To their credit, its producers addressed earlier criticisms that the show was inattentive to racial diversity. In its latest cast of twenty, only five are white. But they then went on to announce, with more than a hint of relish for the controversial, that they were grouping the latest cast into ethnic “tribes” — whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians — and then turning the four tribes loose upon one another.

Despite sharp protests from commentators, that’s a far cry from ethnic cleansing. But that’s the point: In the cheerfully insensitive world of prime time, we’re encouraged not to see any connections at all between interpersonal “reality” and the big-picture realities of international warfare. To keep us from making those connections, “Survivor” indulges a chain of manipulative reasoning that begins innocuously. That reasoning moves through four steps:

• It begins by inviting viewers to focus on racial differences rather than on human commonalities — on what separates, rather than unites, the members of the cast.
• If we accept that invitation, we’re then open to the suggestion that a single five-person tribe can stand in for an entire ethnic culture — much the way an all-star baseball team represents the whole sport for a few games.
• We’re encouraged next to identify ourselves with whatever tribe looks most like us, and to feel vaguely disloyal if we find we actually like, say, the black team better than “our own” white or Hispanic or Asian team.
• Finally, we’re urged to see the relationship between the races as a battle for survival, and to cheer for “our side” as one race seeks to triumph over the others in the program’s grand finale.

But isn’t this just ratings-mad TV — silly and insipid, perhaps, but not dangerous or subversive? That might be so, were it not that some of humanity’s most destructive behaviors — in the old American south, in the apartheid days of South Africa, and in Rwanda and Darfur and Liberia — arise from just such simple roots. They take shape first in language and imagery. Along the way, they generate such unfortunate comments as those from “Survivor” producer and host Jeff Probst, who described the new program as “a social experiment” around “this theme of ethnic pride” — language that, intentionally or not, echoes eerily of Nazi eugenics and xenophobic nationalism.

In our pragmatic age, however, there’s a final argument, which is that programs like “Survivor” really do draw viewers. So, apparently, did Serbian TV before the Balkans war. So does the bigotry and rant on some of today’s talk radio. True, watching the thrills and anguish of “Survivor” isn’t the same as watching with fascination and horror as nationalist leaders churn up ethnic pride to produce a social experiment. But even if “Survivor” is only the little cousin of racism’s big brother, it deserves to be watched carefully. I can’t think of a major war today that hasn’t begun with a heightened sense of ethnic difference and tribal competition.

©2006 Institute for Global Ethics