Valuable.

The root of culture is emulation and, thanks to the screen in the hand, we are learning to emulate what is beneath us.  Traditional culture was about emulating what is above us: the examples and achievements that lend dignity to the social order and which teach us to be proud of it.  The social media are an assault on this culture and on the idea of accountability on which it rests; the correct response to the current abuse therefore is to launch an effort of cultural renewal, through teaching and example, and through dramatizing the abuses, as Shakespeare dramatized the abuse of law in The Merchant of Venice.  We should explain to children the presumption of innocence that lies at the heart of our legal inheritance, and the protection that this offers to ordinary people against all those who would intimidate or exploit them.  We should show why respect for other people involves respect for their privacy, for their secrets, for all that is intimate and of no true public concern.

That is easier said than done, you will respond, and the response is right.  Everything truly valuable is easier said than done.  But we have sunk into a cultural morass, and must extricate ourselves, which we can do only by cultural means.  People are being tempted into a malicious web of gossip, and are becoming trapped in its sticky threads.  To fight against this we have to show, through example, how to live in another way, how to free oneself from the web before being wound into a ball of malice and eaten, body and soul, by the "post-truth" spider.

Teachers should see their principal goal as one of averting their pupils from the spider's new temptations, so that they can face other people with respect.  Such an education is what Plato meant by "the care of the soul," and he regarded it as the indispensable foundation of political existence.  In this matter, I believe, Plato was right, and he defined a task that falls on all of us, the national media included.

Sir Roger Scruton

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