The problem with trashing western civilization
A culture that denies the gains of the past cannot take responsibility for the future
I never dreamt I would live in Canterbury for 25 years. When my husband and I first moved here, along with our baby son, I did not like the place. After growing up in Middlesbrough, and then living in Birmingham, Canterbury felt small. It felt stuck in the past. The old buildings, along with the cathedral and all the churches, felt stifling.
But, a quarter of a century later, Canterbury has changed and so have I. Now, I marvel at the medieval architechture. The beauty of the cathedral fills me with awe. It is inspiring to think that so many people, over the course of multiple generations, worked to build something they would never live to see completed. They were driven by a belief in God, and a commitment to their present society, to create a legacy for a distant future.
When I visit the cathedral, I love to see the stained glass windows and the Martyrdom that marks the spot where Thomas Becket was murdered. But I also like to see the centuries-old graffiti carved into the stonework by long-dead naughty choir boys and the way the stone steps down to the crypt dip in the middle thanks to the feet of millions of visitors.
Visiting Canterbury cathedral connects me to the past but also makes me think about what it means to have a commitment to the future. I want the cathedral to be preserved, not by sealing it off, or covering it with dust sheets, but by encouraging more people to visit and appreciate the history of this special place.
Last week, Canterbury cathedral hosted a silent disco. Hundreds of late-night revellers, with headphones and glowsticks, danced in the nave. The cathedral became a nightclub. The organisers argued this was good for raising money and it attracted a new audience to the cathedral. It comes off the back of cathedrals in other parts of the country installing helter skelter slides or hosting Harry Potter film-music evenings.
Honestly, I love helter skelter slides. And, after a few drinks, I’m still up for a bit of disco dancing - even if I would prefer the music to be played out loud. Yet call me old-fashioned but I prefer my helter skelters to be at a fairground and my discos to be in a club.
Turning cathedrals into venues for slides, discos and Harry Potter evenings in a bid to get visitors through the door smacks of desperation. It suggests that the custodians of centuries-old, sacred buildings have given up on preserving the legacy of the past. They think it is impossible to get people through the door either by talking to them about God or the astonishing potential of people to create something so enduringly beautiful.
In a never-ending search for relevance, they don’t just ignore the past, they trash it. Forget the stained glass windows, here’s a glitter ball. Ignore the gargoyles, here’s a picture of Harry Potter. Don’t look at the carvings around the alter, whizz down a slide. The message to children is not just that the past is dull but that the legacy of western civiliastion is embarrassing, a little awkward, best not lingered on in the search for fun.
This week I attended a conference on the need to revive classical education organised by MCC Brussels. We discussed declining educational standards, the politicisation of the school curriculum, the problem with the therapeutic classroom and the obstacles to transmitting the legacy of the past.
The starting point was Hannah Arendt’s 1954 paper, The Crisis in Education. Arendt argues that ‘the essence of education is natality, the fact that human beings are born into the world’. In other words, because children join an already-existing society, which will one day become theirs, teachers need to pass on to them their intellectual birthright. Schooling is the formal means of intitiating newcomes into a conversation between the generations, ‘to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.’ Arendt tells us:
Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable.
What strikes me is Arendt’s focus on ‘the world’. She is not asking us if we love children, but if we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it. By transmitting the legacy of the past we preserve the best that has been thought and said, not on dusty bookshelves, but embodied within people’s minds. We allow a new generation of adults to strive to make the world their own, and, in turn, pass on all that is worthwhile to their own children.
If it is not the world, but simply children we love, then we might indulge them by letting them learn some basic skills through play. Or we might train them up so they can get paid work in the future. Or we might look to recruit them to a political cause so they can be good citizens. Or we might encourage them to safeguard their mental health by avoiding stressful challenges.
Of course, all this happens in schools right now. Little of it can be described as education. And, in reality, it is not driven by love for children either. It does not introduce children to the world, as and when appropriate. Instead, it indulges adults’ desires for sentiment, activism and fads.
Sadly, it seems that the answer to Arendt’s challenge is ‘no’. We do not love the world enough to assume responsibility for it. Most especially, we do not love western civilisation. Rather than preserving it in the minds of children, we trash it with cathedral discos and a politicised, therapeutic, skills-focused school curriculum. We create a society of barbarians, alienated from the past and unable to build a beautiful future.
It is vital we start defending the legacy of the past and preserving the gains of western civilisation. It is hard for schools to play this role in the context of a broader culture that has little regard for knowledge of the past or knowledge from the past. But schools, as institutions, are specifically designed for education, and education’s unique focus is knowledge. If we are to assume responsibility for the world, we must revive classical education.
This commercial trivialising has been developing for a long time. It was over thirty years ago that I dismayed in Laycock Abbey to see huge displays of Harry Bloody Potter (to give him his full name). On business trips, I went through the County of Shakespeare and the County of Robin Hood. The Scottish prefer to use the disgusting Braveheart film to attract tourists, ignoring their great record for doctors, writers, composers, scientists, inventors, and at least one great explorer. London has the Jack the Ripper Experience (or tour). A couple of days ago, I read that Ancoats, for many years one of Manchester's worst slums (and there were plenty of competitors) is now 'a happening neighbourhood'. Attempts to find accurate history of this or any other city district are always bogged down in the perpetual complaints about the poor people of the past. Peterloo is a popular one in Manchester, along with the poor Irish. Bristol has no history now but slave trading, and perhaps for good measure, tobacco.
But it isn't just this sort of puerile opportunism that is damaging history. As a child, I knew that Alfred the Great burnt some cakes. Very little, if anything, else. Every child knows of Henry the Eighth, but only because he had six wives and executed some of them. How many children know about Henry the Seventh? We have books and films about Robin Hood and King Arthur, who didn't exist; and nothing about Willikin of the Weald, who did. We need to go back, not just to teach history, but to learn it, by trying to unravel the truth from the lies. History has been written by churchmen, victorious royalty and their supporters, by unscrupulous politicians, and by moralisers. Thus, Oliver Cromwell has been the subject of disgraceful lies, by priests, Restoration monarchists, and, as I recall, by Arthur Mee in his Encyclopaedias. We need collectively to study history without the caricatures, the propaganda, and blatant ignorance. We need to avoid assessment, but if not, to base assessment on the proper criteria, not on wars won, passing popularity, or on our political prejudices. The greatest figures of the nineteenth century were not Gladstone, Disraeli and Palmerston: they were Lord Shaftesbury, Michael Sadler, Richard Oastler; and many others. We need to study poverty, and the horrors of mill, mine and factory working without class-driven propaganda. We need to study great women without its being propaganda of feminism. We need to stop treating history as matters of good and bad, of rich and poor, of oppressor and victim. We need to make ordinary matters interesting, which they were.