We're living in the middle of an epic, it's being written around us, only you may not know it because it's barely being reported in the British media. Following the tradition first laid out by Homer's double bill of the Iliad and Odyssey and just two millennia on since Vergil premièred his Aeneid, the allegorical blockbuster about the downfall of Rome, we have the Leveson Inquiry. This is our epic, the story of our civilisation which will doubtless be studied by phalanxes of undergraduates in centuries to come as the backdrop to the collapse of monetary currency, the infertility of nations, and the plague of super-bugs.
Vergil's "Arma Virumque Cano" is an electric, all-embracing opening sequence announcing his epic's terms of reference as arms and the man, or rather war and the new Emperor, giving us, the reader a couple of thousand years later, as good an insight as we're ever get to what was really going on behind the new Caesar Augustus' spin-doctors' façade. Lord Justice Leveson's clarion cry of inquiring into culture, practice and ethics in just one, but probably the most illuminating, arena of modern life, the British press, reflects what now ails our civilisation as we turn the page of another millennium.
Leveson presides with patrician authority over his court at the Royal Courts of Justice with trademark lightness of touch and steely eyed gravitas. You can just tell that his avuncular gaze has been honed by having seen it all, and that is more than most of us can ever dare to imagine, in his some 40 years experience in the English criminal justice system. He's democracy's Dickie Bird, Cricket's perennial umpire of umpires: a spiritual guide and moral compass of what's right for the game, only here it's the game of life.
Leveson's constant companions on this voyage of discovery are the main counsels to the inquiry while the remaining dramatis personae are witnesses called to give evidence in one off appearances. If Leveson himself reminds me of Homer, scratching his head at how to preserve for time immemorial the universal lessons and themes unfolding before him, then Robert Jay QC, the lead counsel, is more of the hero in the mould of Aeneas: erudite, wittily dry, impeccably dressed with brazen-armed designer spectacles, supported in his blockbuster band by David Barr and Carine Patry Hoskins. Do not be fooled into thinking that D Barr Esq is just the school swot and Ms Patry Hoskins the token womanly presence. All three of them are glinting spear throwers of precision questions and painfully obvious observations of bar-humbug. Through all the evidence given by 184 witnesses, and some 40 written submissions, we glean a portrait of our society, what makes it tick, what questions we ask, what we value and treasure and at what price we pay for a press unfettered by statute for the cost of our daily paper. The Greek Chorus of the Great British Public remains firmly off stage, never called to say why they buy newspapers or believe what they read; the Leveson Inquiry is our trial in absentia of who we are individually and collectively.
Series I, which has been looking at the relationship of the press with the public, phone-hacking and potentially illegal behaviour, ended on a cliff hanger. The eminence grise of Fleet Street (the Monopoly board stakeout of the press, most of which now has relocated to a different postcode), the PR par excellence Max Clifford, a man responsible for about a third of tabloid front page splashes, delivered his verdict on an industry he's been at the forefront of - no, correction, his clients have paid him to be in/out of - for some 40 years: "it's the most savage, and the most free, press in the world".
Underlying this inquiry, behind the veneer of its stated intention, is the quest for truth. Truth on oath sometimes appears inconsistent with being in the pay of a corporate hierarchy or on the deadline of a frenzied newsroom. The wildcard demon Amnesia plays her hand far too regularly, enshrouding many blindingly obvious facts in a mist of obfuscation. "I can't remember exactly" is a refrain akin to a liturgical chorus, not least when confronted with the possibility of elaboration or fabrication of facts and fantasies. There's also been a sizeable shift in what is considered to be acceptable behaviour. Blind Eyes, the handmaidens of Amnesia, were turned not even ten years ago on practices which now look tawdry, nasty and contemptuous.
Truth emerges from the dignity of those who have been exposed, savaged, hounded, exploited by the press in its ignominious pursuit of the mercurial increased circulation and anticipated commensurate profit. The inner strength of those who have lost everything to the public gaze speaks volumes of what they have learnt matters in life - aka the truth - compared to their deluded pursuers who want us to believe in others' hypocrisy but not theirs. Leveson is exposing that universal truth that others see that which we do see in ourselves. We are left wondering how many of the press actually dare look inside themselves rather than others' lives, and why they don't encourage their readers to reflect on their own behaviour rather than delight in others' lives.
Book IV of the Aeneid is about the destructive power of gossip. Nothing has changed then in 2,000 years. What for the majority of the public buying newspapers passes for news it emerges is not only gossip or hearsay but unsubstantiated exaggeration or tittle-tattle. Rome knew that with its bread and circuses policy to keep the plebs at bay it needed to feed a daily dose of sensationalism and on feast days to provide spectacular entertainment where people were fed to the lions like lambs to slaughter. Or Celebs to the red-top front pages. Again and again, in Leveson I we are seeing how this human urge to distract from the daily grind of unconscious life fuels a whole industry.
Media is the means by which a message is delivered to a market. Back in the day, the main material media for conveying information were Chinese whispers, proclamations read out in the marketplace by town-criers, and hand written scrolls passed around. As the centuries have rolled on these have morphed to newsprint, printed books, landlines, radio, television, satellite, cable, mobile phones and the internet.
When the media industry was a man and his papyrus, life was simple. The message was from above, from the divine, it was sacred. Hence the word was God and hierarchy was born. Hieros means sacred; archos means rule. But rule doesn't mean control. Rule is that against which you are measured, the gold standard to which you align yourself and therefore your community. A set of standards which maintain the rule are accepted by all and those who deviate from them are dealt with accordingly. There is no need to implement a method for enforcing rule; merely knowing that the rule of the game is enough. The hierarchy becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of communal expansion through awareness and kindness to all. Most of the global spiritual traditions share at their essential core the same universal concepts of a minimum requirement for a society to function, which though seem a gargantuan task for humans to live by: don't kill, don't covet someone else's wife, and so on.
When a hierarchy is fuelled by greed, lust, anger, pride and attachment expressed through control and money its innate cooperation and unity is tainted with mistrust and fear. The hierarchy morphs into a pyramid structure with proprietors at the top to whom those at the bottom of the pile report or buy into. The individual no longer considers his own personal alignment to the Golden Rule. His sacred - sa is truth, cre is what is manifest - is no longer a universal concept filtering down but a corporate one, of the body to which he now is bonded through subtle, and not so subtle, forms of bullying and reward to make him compliant. His reference point is no longer the universal truth for the well-being of community. He checks out his own compass and accepts the lowest common denominator behaviour as his maximum standard not as his minimum. He becomes out for himself within a polluted structure which is self-serving. His fear of ejection and rejection from that which he has given his life to makes him malleable to make a habit of exceptions to gold standard, decent behaviour. The wand of that little demon Amnesia has made him forget who he was before he was employed.
Big conglomerate pyramid structures with the modern day misnomer of hierarchy appear to be nothing more than self-serving. The message delivered by the media therefore determines the nature of the body and what it serves. You are ruled by the message in the media. You become the market and the moment that you give up your birthright to choose what message you listen to, you have become part of the system.
Now do you see why the Leveson Inquiry is so fascinating? Why else is there such concern about the media and who controls it? It controls us. What we're seeing now is not so very different to the challenges faced by the Church over the last couple of millenia: what you fill people's minds with matters.
Much of the evidence presented at the Leveson Inquiry is mere detail in a much bigger picture; it's all who knew what when, did it happen, was it how it was or how it was imagined to be. To look at this epic unfolding in such minute terms is the same as reading the Aeneid line by line with a dictionary and footnotes trying to make sense of it paragraph by paragraph. That's not what epics are about.
The News of the World's expose of Max Moseley is a case in point. What made it such a salacious story was the tarnishing of his activities with those of his black shirt parents. There simply was no gossipy story to report when the Fascist element was found to be a fantasy of the media. These were all consenting adults who understood and respected that trust is build on discretion and a bond of silence not secrecy. Does the voyeuristic judgement of the reporter and those who bought the paper bear scrutiny? Surely the real story here is of a man, now in his 70s with a hearing aid, seeking some sort of therapy, which works for him, for traumas inflicted on him as an innocent child? Cheeking for lice and prison uniforms are surely a harking back to his infantile upbringing in Royal Holloway Prison where his parents were incarcerated during World War II. Isn't the response required here not exposure and titillation but compassion for the obvious suffering he has been through, hidden even all these years from his golden wedding anniversary wife, to find solace for something which he innocently suffered? Is there not a lesson here for us all in how we treat children in war situations and that every action has a reaction, sometimes played out out of our sight? Nothing is ever what it seems.
What needs to change is our atttitudes to each other, to develop our tolerance of each other's behaviour and find a way to include people back towards the Golden Rule of communal living and for our communication through the media to reflect that truth. The days of exposing hypocrisy of public figures, human weaknesses for short term gratification, and the Humpty-Dumpty approach of turning celebrities into semi-gods are soon over. We'll know all this for what it is. We'll see it in a bigger context.
The words internet, blog, online, instantaneous news are appearing in Court 73 with a certain amount of trepidation. They are the future of which many are fearful. The internet though represents something which is inherent in rebuilding a hierarchy based on transparency of truth. Yogis have always known that all thoughts and deeds are indelibly recorded in subtle vibrations for time immemorial in a universal filing system called the Akashic records. The issues of privacy and public will no longer be applicable because everything is recorded somewhere anyway. With a clear mind and an intuition devoid of curiosity those records are accessible through what we now call telepathy. The internet is merely one stage in our regaining our ability to know it all, we still need wi-fi but soon that will be a thing of the past too. Idle gossip and conjecture will have no place; we will know what the truth is. If we have a clear mind. That's the key: a clear mind. Otherwise you're just going to be drowned in information, overloaded and weighed down by it all, in a state we now call depression.
So we won't need a British press which is both, equally, savage and free.
But we're not there yet, and we still have to reconcile what messages are the media we as society, the marketplace, want to hear. The internet has breached the ramparts of exclusivity the print media previously enjoyed to welcome in a new age of communication. But in so doing it has opened up a whole new challenge to our culture, practice and ethics. We now have to be responsible for who we are, we can choose what we read, we can choose what we believe in. It is our own experience which will tell us where the Truth is and how we get there, not some broadsheet, red-top or book.
At the end of the trilogy - Series II starts on 27th February 2012 and Series III is due to finish in the summer - Lord Justice Leveson will deliver our end of term report with recommendations on how best to legislate, mitigate, arbitrate for a free press. He's obviously going to need to make a structural suggestion but, from the evidence given so far, a substantive one, impossible to deliver of course, might be far more on point. This ethical health check will make for uneasy reading. This is the mirror on who we are, the dissemination of our culture not just the press. Downton Abbey and Frozen Planet are simply our observations on our make-believe social and natural world. Leveson's Inquiry is the raw truth of our Paradise Lost. The bottom line is that it seems that our culture, practices and ethics have lost the plot of common sense and decent behaviour.
There's a yogic phrase which best sums this up: when an individual is aligned, no rules are required; when an individual is not aligned there are no rules which will make him so. All perhaps Leveson can do is ask us daily to consider how closely aligned to Truth we are; all else will ultimately be circumvented.
