So the Daily Mail, that bastion of all that is best – as most clearly exemplified by their pro-Nazi policy in the 1930s – is once more trying to traduce contemporary British politicians through guilt-by-association and muck-raking. How very depressing. I tend more and more to the view that anybody who is genuinely a seeker after truth will have as little to do with that appalling publication as possible. Perhaps it should only be sold with a plastic bag wrapping, to ensure that the vulnerable and easily influenced do not come upon the contents unprepared, whilst those who have hardened stomachs and souls and a taste for the darkness can pursue their tastes in private.

Does that sound harsh? Offensive even? Well, I follow a man who was executed by politicians for being offensive, who described his opponents as being not much better than ‘whitewashed tombs’ – that is, pretty on the outside, but on the inside nothing but rotting bones and decay. He had a gift for pithy language, did Jesus. There is a particular culture of accusation and blame, of shaming and scandal, which our newspapers generally, and the Daily Mail specifically, cultivate assiduously. This is evil; this is what has traditionally been called – in Christian circles – ‘the work of the devil’. That is because the devil, the Satan, in many contexts is simply the power of accusation, of pointing fingers, of saying ‘look at that, did you hear what so and so did’ and so on. It is the cult of gossip, in which the currency of social approval is earned and spent. Jesus is pretty clear that it is this process of condemnation – of judging other human beings – is what leads to hell, whereas the opposite approach, of mercy, forgiveness, being non-judgemental and so on – that is what leads to the Kingdom of God. “The measure that you give will be the measure that you receive” and so on. So, as I say, if anyone is genuinely a seeker after truth, it would be an aid to that process to steer clear of the Daily Mail.

Of course, it’s not just the Daily Mail, it is part of our media culture generally – just look at the appalling revelations about phone tapping by the (now sadly defunct) News of the World. What makes things worse is that we have lost any sense of what ‘truth’ is, and why it matters. Our culture is dominated by the convenient notion that ‘all truth is relative’, the consequence being that everyone has the right to their own opinion, and feelings are triumphant. Finding the truth is hard, living according to the truth is even harder. It is so much easier to nurture our own prejudices, and seek out all that confirms them, whilst ignoring everything that goes against them. It is a part of human nature – statisticians even have a posh title for this tendency, it is called ‘confirmation bias’ – and moving past this tendency in order to gain a little more understanding of the truth is one of those ‘difficult but worth it’ exercises that used to be considered both normal and desirable in our society, but which are now seen as archaic, quaint, ‘square’, boring and all the rest. To say ‘discerning the truth about this situation is going to take a lot of hard work’ runs the real risk of inviting the response ‘whatever’.

So what might help in the search for truth? In a word, virtue. Virtue is what we call those aspects of character which develop from having done the hard work. The discernment of correct values and virtues is essentially the study and development of wisdom, sometimes called emotional intelligence, what Aristotle called phronesis – practical judgement – and that centres upon an awareness of, and education of, our emotions. Our decisions are based around our notions of what is good – for ourselves, for our families, for our friends and neighbours, perhaps, in the most enlightened, for humanity as a whole. Those notions of what is good are informed and shaped by particular traditions and histories, particular ways of teaching values and virtues. In most societies the passing on of wisdom is conducted through the rites and practices of religious faith, the telling of stories and sharing of rituals that embody and express a particular way of viewing the world and asserting a particular pattern of value. Sadly, in our decadent culture, that telling of stories and sharing of rituals now seems to be done through the media. Whereas we once had a culture in which truth, honour, discernment and discretion were widely admired, now we have a culture where the building up and tearing down of human beings has been turned into a highly profitable industry.

Whereas the virtues describe the building up of positive character traits – the honest, the noble, the courageous – we describe as vices those traits which are opposed to them, the mendacious, the hypocritical, the cowardly. Where there is a human institution which exemplifies and practices what is vicious – such as with the Daily Mail – here we have what Christians call the demonic. In other words, here is an organisation which cultivates certain practices which have as their endpoint the destruction of our common humanity and the victimisation and blaming of particular individuals. There is a culture of unaccountable accusation, power without responsibility, the washing of hands in public.

A right discernment of the truth depends upon an awareness of our own foibles and follies, and, indeed, a compassion for them, in ourselves and others. We are none of us perfectly virtuous, nor consummately vicious. We do seem, however, to have certain institutions which are more obviously on the side of the angels, and some which are otherwise. As I say, anyone who genuinely wishes to seek after truth needs to take a step back from such darkness. There are reasons why Scousers never buy the Sun; perhaps we need a broader movement saying something like ‘British never buy the Mail’.