I must be one of the few who don’t have a smart phone. I don’t need one and I can do without. Millions can’t.
Much has been written about the harm social media can do to young minds, particularly adolescents who are going through huge physical psychological, emotional and intellectual development. It is easy for the unscrupulous or irresponsible to influence them using uncensored social media.
Weird ideas have been promoted, particularly in regard to growing up. The “manosphere” proclaims male supremacy rooted in the belief of the innate superiority of cisgender men and their rights to subjugate women. The “manosphere” comes in many forms, including men’s rights activists, “pick up artists”, and “men going their own way”. An “incel” is an involuntary celibate man who is excluded from sexual gratification because they are taught women are superficial and highly selective, only having relationships with a small percentage of the most desirable men. Misogyny and envy are at the heart of the Manosphere.
The TV drama “Adolescence” highlighted this and raises the question of what we can do to stop the harmful impact of this misguided material on young impressionable minds.
You cannot turn the clock back. It is not possible to uninvent social media. However, it is possible to help young people to distinguish what is harmful and what is not. The answer is education.
Not so many decades ago, we had a strong protestant working ethic which was rooted in religion. The Ten Commandments were prominently displayed in most churches and provided a simple moral code, and people’s behaviour, including what they said or published was judged against it.
Society’s higher echelons may not have had strong religious beliefs, but they were taught a similar set of ethical principles through the Greek and Roman Classics.
The result was strong bonds which bound families and communities together, resulting in increased commercial innovation and prosperity nationally which grew a great world-wide empire.
Now these old certainties are gone. The Christian religion is dying in this country and not many schools teach Latin or Greek – not even in the private sector.
There are no longer fixed rules and ethics have become relative, and, if all values are relative, where are the standards which help us to judge whether ideas which are presented to us are harmful or not?
This has left social media wide open to abuse. This has come at a time when family life has been devastated by a huge increase in single parent families where single parents commonly experience extraordinary challenges such as depression, anxiety and high levels of parenting stress, which are bound to detrimentally affect, at least to some extent, the mental health and intellectual development of their children. So, should we be surprised if so many more children seem to suffer from mental health issues today than in previous generations, or if children now should be so susceptible to bad influences on social media?
Social media is new, but the social and ethical issues are not.
Two and a half millennia ago the old polytheistic religions of the ancient world began to lose their credibility, and society began to break down as the old values became outdated. So, people began to search for a rational basis for ethical behaviour which did not depend on religious sanction. Like the proponents of today’s “manosphere” they asked themselves what makes a good man or a man, good. Is it physical strength, wealth or power? Is it natural or right for a powerful man to oppress the weak and helpless? What is true happiness? Like the proponents of today’s “manosphere”, many of them reached absurd and weird answers to these questions. Their views were challenged and refuted by a man called Socrates and Plato and Aristotle taught and published systems of ethics based on reason which have been the foundation of western civilisation ever since.
So, what is the answer to the malign influences on social media? It is education. I suggest all children should be taught ethical philosophy. They don’t have to be brainwashed into agreeing with any philosophy. All they need to know is what the various philosophers thought and why. The study of philosophy should be rigorous. If from an early age they are taught to rigorously discern what each philosopher thought was harmful or not and why, they should be well placed to distinguish what is harmful or not on social media today.
This should encourage impressionable young men to realise that women are not semi-intelligent creatures to be subjugated or controlled, but beautiful, clever people whose love and affection men should strive to deserve.
