Read Momus yesterday on how the 70s might come back for a second time, but probably won't. Woke up this morning to hear IDS on 'the family' (BBC link here). Well, we've been there before!
So thinking about that made me dig out something Stephen Fry wrote for The Spectator (Diary), commenting on the rise and rise of 'family values' as a core part of the 'agenda' of Conservative politicians:
It has become impossible now to utter a sentence without the barons of the new trendiness insisting on the inclusion of the words 'standards', 'individual', 'values', 'responsibility' and 'family'. It doesn't matter in what order they occur or what meaningless nonsense they denote, the words must dominate what statesmen like to call our 'agenda'. Eight years ago I wrote an article in the Listener wondering at the half-cocked stupidity of politicians displaying such impertinence. The trendy belief in family values had already been going for a good seven years by then and there seems even now to be no end in sight. Nobody minds that the Conservative governments of the last 15 years have contained at least six adulterers and two homosexuals at cabinet level and dozens more on the back-benches. If these men want mistresses, love-children and boyfriends, then good luck to them. The British are a decent, tolerant and friendly people and like to see their fellow citizens enjoying themselves in a kindly, responsible and adult way. What really gets our goat is when these same men and their colleagues stand on podia in seaside towns at Party Conference time and tell us how to behave in private; what causes us pain and indignation is to hear them lecture the nation about the virtues of the family and deride those of us who prefer not to have our moral horizons dictated by the Daily Mail. The Family: that noble institution responsible for 70 per cent of all murders, over 80 per cent of incidents of child abuse and a full 100 per cent of all cases of incest.
Date? 13 November, 1993.
Into this stream of consciousness there came a discussion thread on ORG-discuss, focusing on this, 'Oral Answers to Questions: Home Department' (House of Commons, Monday, 9 July 2007) — on Internet Service Providers. Excerpt:
Patrick Cormack (South Staffordshire, Conservative):
Although I welcome the Home Secretary's comments, does she agree that it is a tragedy that what used to be the place where childhood innocence was protected and preserved—the home—is now often the place where it is corrupted and destroyed?
In the ORG thread, Suw quotes the indispensable danah boyd (quoted in a piece dated from midway through last year):
Unfortunately, predators lurk wherever youth hang out. Since youth are on MySpace, there are bound to be predators on MySpace. Yet, predators do not use online information to abduct children; children face a much higher risk of abduction or molestation from people they already know – members of their own family or friends of the family. Statistically speaking, kids are more at risk at a church picnic or a boy scout outing than they are when they go on MySpace. Less than .01% of all youth abductions nationwide are stranger abductions and as far as we know, no stranger abduction has occurred because of social network services.
Romanticising the past, or an institution, and demonising technology won't help anyone.
