A HOMESCHOOLING MOTHER writes:

Would that Oprah and Bill Gates would concern themselves with their own families and people in their local neighborhoods. Of course, they are historically common, the plutocrats who seek to incline the hearts and minds of our children toward their universal schemes (which is generally away from the traditions of their parents). 
 
The classicist Thomas Fleming discusses this and how to deal with it in his 2004 book, The Morality of Everyday Life: Rediscovering an Ancient Alternative to the Liberal Tradition.  I give but a fragment.

“The classic modern statement came from E. M. Forster, in a controversial passage of Two Cheers for Democracy. In afirming the priority of personal relationships and the need for trust, Forster descried the rise of movements and causes: 

‘I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose beween betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. Such a choice may scandalize the modern reader…It would not have shocked Dante, though. Dante places Brutus and Cassius in the lowest circle of Hell because they had chosen to betray their friend Julius Caesar rather than their country Rome.’  

“Forster’s statement has sometimes been taken as evidence of the “treason of intellectuals,” when, in fact, he was defending rooted loyalties against the claims of universal and abstract political philosophies. His novel The Longest Journey gives a better idea of his position. When a Cambridge student makes the case for loyalty to “the great world,” his friend delivers the argument that might serve as the thesis for the book: 

‘There is no great world at all, only a little earth, for ever isolated from the rest of the little solar system. The earth is full of tiny societies, and Cambridge is one of them. All the societies are narrow, but some are good and some are bad–just as one house is beautiful inside and another ugly… The good societies say, “I tell you to do this because I am Cambridge.’ The bad ones say, ‘I tell you to do that because I am the great world, –not because I am “Peckham,” or “Billingsgate,” or “Park Lane,” but because I am the great world.” 

“Since Forster’s time, the great world has been making headway against Cambridge and Billingsgate.” 

Rather than concentrate on the great world, we would be grateful if Mr. Bill Gates were to focus on his own little Billingsgate.

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