Just when you think our collective morality has hit bottom, the floor gives way and you find that we’ve fallen down another floor. I got that familiar sinking feeling once again when I heard about the new reality show on the E! network starring former stripper and Playboy playmate Anna Nicole Smith.

“The Anna Nicole Show,” which represents an attempt by E! to cash in on the success of the hit MTV reality series “The Osbournes,” follows the aging sex symbol around with a bank of cameras in the hopes that she will do something remotely interesting.

Although critics universally panned the show as a poorly done, exploitative freak show (one creative reviewer likened the show to a trip to the “vomitorium”) the viewing public predictably lapped it up. After the premier, E! proudly announced that the debut of the show ranked as its highest-rated program premiere ever and was also the top debut for a reality show on basic cable.

This has become a familiar pattern. A television network comes up with an absolutely horrible idea for a show that appeals to the worst common denominator, critics and other socially responsible public figures rip the show and its producers, and people still watch in droves.

Many alarmed social critics cite the popularity of programs like “The Anna Nicole Show” as stark indications that the United States is a civilization in decline, and I find it hard to disagree with their contention.

You can tell a lot about a culture by how it chooses to entertain itself, and anyone who sits down in front of the television will quickly reach the conclusion that America chooses to divert itself chiefly through a steady diet of sex, violence, and coarse language. It seems that if it’s something that would have made our grandparents blush, it’s what we want to see and hear.

Of course, there are good television programs being made that do not resort to cheap, exploitative stunts to gain an audience but an increasing percentage of what draws good ratings are what we used to quaintly refer to as perverse, and they seem to be growing more so with each new season.

But the fact that some Americans recognize this trend as part of a gradual dissension into a moral cesspool is encouraging, and I think it indicates that there is still a chance we can arrest the decline. (Remember that God would have spared Sodom and Gomorrah if a few good people could have been located in that infamous city.)

I don’t advocate forming a political group to pressure the television industry to censor the content of their product. Jerry Falwell took that road in the 1980s with his Moral Majority, and we can see that such an approach is doomed to failure.

The problem is that morality is not a thing that can be legislated or changed using a top down approach. It begins and ends with individual decisions made every day in the private lives of each one of us. And the only way to elevate our collective moral condition is for all of us to start making different choices.

Stop watching TV shows that exploit and degrade people. Write to the networks that air them and the advertisers that finance them and let them know you don’t care for this trash that passes for programming. The same First Amendment that gives them the right to broadcast this swill gives you the right to tell them how sick of it you have become.

I guarantee you that if enough people stop swallowing the junk they are doling out through that TV screen they’ll stop feeding it to us and come up with something more intellectually nutritious. But the first step in any recovery program is that the patient has to recognize that he has a problem and has to want to get better. Are we there yet?