Broadway musicals are not renowned for their satirical bite, but 2018’s The Prom is a welcome exception.

In the show, five unemployed New York actors latch on to the cause of a young queer woman in Indiana, forbidden from taking her girlfriend to their high school graduation dance.

Cliched Broadway belter Dee Dee Allen crashes a parent-teacher meeting because “I read three-quarters of a news story and knew I had to come”. She warns the “bigoted monsters” before her: “Stealing the rights of a girl who is an LGBQ teen/I’ve been far too angry to Google what those letters mean.”

Her song – It’s Not About Me – sets up the show’s theme: the human cost of our modern-day culture wars. As delivered by Meryl Streep in the Netflix film adaptation, the song is an anthem to what German philosopher Philip Hübl calls the “morality spectacle”.

Morality is a society’s way of categorising intentions, decision and actions into those considered right and proper or improper and wrong.

Supercharged and scrambled by social media, however, very real and very serious tragedies, injustices and grievances are dropped into a hyperreal hall of morality mirrors.

We’ve no shortage of recent examples: Je suis Charlie, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter and Trans rights. Morality spectacles flatten important and complex arguments, says Hübl, then drench everything in emotional, judgmental morality-speak.

Serious wrongs are rarely righted, he writes, but co-opted instead “as a symbol of status and group membership; as a weapon to exert power and influence; or to protect oneself against attacks and pressure of others”.

Hübl, a Berlin-based academic, struck a nerve with his bestseller about how self-serving morality spectacles are dangerous if they cause people to tune out of important issues.

The costs of expressing an opinion in this social context are so high — German philosopher Phil