What I read in November

The book I enjoyed reading most this month was Moral Education by Emile Durkheim. His understanding of education as passing on culture, knowledge and values from one generation to the next, as a means of adults taking responsibility not just for children in the short term, but for the survival of civilization, feels urgent a century on from its original publication. This assumption of responsibility makes education not a technical enterprise but a moral imperative and when Durkheim discusses pedagogy, the content of the curriculum or the need for discipline, it is with this moral imperative in mind.

Durkheim considers the different roles played by the family and the school in socializing children. Even a century ago, Durkheim noted the waning moral influence of the family on the development of the child:

The center of gravity of moral life, formerly in the family, tends increasingly to shift away from it. The family is now becoming an agency secondary to the state.

Durkheim does not think this is all bad because he recognises that what’s positive about family and home - a loving and nurturing environment - limit the child’s relationship with broader society. When it comes to raising children to be part of society, institutions outside the family have a crucial role to play. He writes:

The school is the only moral agent through which the child is able systematically to learn to know and love his country. It is precisely this fact that lends pre-eminent significance to the part played by the school today in the shaping of national morality.

Love of country was not an end in itself, but a means by which children are helped to feel a deep sense of commitment to a shared community that pre-dates their existence and will continue after their death. For this reason, Durkheim places importance on the teaching of history. He notes:

Thus, the child and later the adult will understand that rights accorded him today, the liberties he enjoys, the moral dignity he feels—all this is the work not of such and such an individual or of such and such a generation but of that being, personal and impersonal at the same time, we call France. In other words, it is all of society, going back to its most remote reaches, that prepared his emancipation.

This sense of education as a social - and, because social, moral - project is entirely lacking in today’s focus on relevance, exam results and skills.

Many of Durkheim’s themes are also taken up by Roger Scruton in Culture Counts, another book I very much enjoyed reading this month. Scruton’s concern is Western civilization, “a project which grew from great events in the Mediterranean basin two millennia ago, and which now engages the aspirations and the antipathies of all mankind.” For this project to endure, in order to “create the deep attachment on which the future of our civilization depends,” Scruton argues, we need to affirm “our right to exist”. Culture, “a source of knowledge: emotional knowledge, concerning what to do and what to feel,” is central to this affirmation: it is through art that people develop a “relation of belonging.”

Scruton is an unashamed elitist. It is high culture that is his concern. But, as he notes:

This does not mean, however, that culture has nothing to do with membership or with the social need to define and conserve a shared way of life. Although an elite product, its meaning lies in emotions and aspirations that are common to all.

For Scruton, Western civilization is synonymous with the Enlightenment, with its “aspiration towards universal truth”. For this reason, he is scathing of postmodernists who trace belief to “the power of those who uphold it” because this undermines its claim to objectivity. Scruton insists that Western culture is a “repository of knowledge” and not a form of ideology. This understanding means he sees that Western culture as being “already about as multicultural as a culture can get,” given that it has been shaped by 2,000 years of global interactions. And, like Durkheim, he sees education as being about far more than relevance and skills. Its aim, he contends, is to “open the pupils’ minds and feelings to the underlying oneness of the human condition.”

Orientalism, by Edward Said, stands in stark contrast to work by Scruton and Durkheim. Said is not looking to defend Western culture but to expose its contradictions and prejudices. He wants to de-centre its historic significance and relativise its greatest accomplishments.

Said’s work is absolutely worth reading as it is a canonical text, central to shaping today’s decolonize movements. Said posits Orientalism as a discourse which constructs the East as the perpetual ‘Other’ to the West. This is, he suggests, entirely to the detriment of the East which is misunderstood, stereotyped, degraded and exoticized all to the ends of shoring up a Western sense of cultural superiority. Orientalism is, he argues,

a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient that it does with ‘our’ world.

As such, it becomes inescapable, hegemonic, existing as much in ways of thinking as in individual works of scholarship: “Orientalism is better grasped as a set of constraints upon and limitations of thought than it is simply as a positive doctrine.” The problem with this understanding - which has, since Orientalism was first published in 1978, become the dominant form of analysis in the arts and humanities - is that it is entirely negative. We are reduced to looking at art, music, literature and philosophy simply as cynical expressions of power. Rather than forming attachments to a nation, a culture or the human condition, we are left on the outside, disconnected, nihilistically pointing the finger at interests and influences.

Finally this month, I read Israelophobia by Jake Wallis Simons. I cannot recommend this highly enough for anyone looking to understand the changing nature of anti-Semitism and the reasons for some in the West opting to march in defence of Hamas rather than stand with Israel. Indeed, all the books I have read this month help show how we have failed to lead successive generations towards a sense of attachment to Western societies and culture and have, instead, nurtured only cynicism and alienation. Yet both Scruton and Durkheim point to ways in which this can be turned around through education and culture. The question is whether we are up to this urgent task.