I don’t want to underestimate the need to fight the culture wars but, sooner or later (though probably not by Christmas), they will be over and we shall wake up from the bad dream of wokery. But what will we wake up to? Almost certainly not anything to gladden a conservative. For dislocations and derangements have taken place in English life that both precede wokery and will outlast it, that lie deeper than it does and have made it possible.
I don’t believe that people outside Britain (and perhaps not many inside either) have any idea quite how much Britain has changed for the worse over the last hundred years or so. The really disastrous change is not a measurable one—like inflation or productivity or GDP—but a disastrous and widespread loss of literacy amongst the best, or supposedly the best, educated. If there were any measurements that might suggest it, they would have to be such things as the ratio of text to pictures in the posh newspapers and television adaptations of Dickens and Jane Austen.
The change has to be judged not measured. But where? One good place must surely be what the state’s servants have to say about the language and its place in the national life: what those of a hundred years ago had to say in the Newbolt Report (afterwards, Report) and what their successors have to say in the current National Curriculum (afterwards, Curriculum).
You don’t have to read far in the two documents to form the opinion, which no amount of further reading can change, that three generations or so ago, the British governing class—the class that decides, among other things, how all classes are educated—was much better educated than the present one.
The named authors of the Report (Sir Henry Newbolt, Mr John Bailey, Miss K. M. Baines, Mr F. S. Boas, Miss H. M. Davies, Miss D. Enright, Professor C. H. Firth, Mr J. H. Fowler, Miss L. A. Lowe, Sir Arthur T. Quiller-Couch, Mr George Sampson, Professor Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Miss G. Perrie Williams, Mr. J. Dover Wilson) were, plainly, highly literate and intelligent men and women. You can see it from the way they write and (the two going together) think. To have chosen them, Lloyd George must have had educated men in his Government.
Just as plainly, the anonymous authors of the current Curriculum—however much schooling they have had (and organise for others)—are not themselves literate enough to be read as anything but symptoms—symptoms of the deepest kind of national decay there could be, of the national mind. While the Curriculum purports to be, like the Report, addressed to the nation at large, it is, actually, just addressed by one set of state functionaries to other sets. It is possible to imagine a wide, educated public reading the Report, hard to imagine anyone reading the Curriculum who is not professionally bound to. Of course, that the Report is readable must mean that a hundred years ago there was an educated public to read it. Similarly, it can be no coincidence that the Curriculum is—except for the purpose of diagnosis—unreadable and that no such public any longer exists. But who, in any conceivable 21st century British government, would be able to see that it is so or why it matters? (Richie Sunak, whose idea of education is mathematics?)
It is not a good sign, to begin with, that the authors of the Curriculum are anonymous. It invites us to think of them as somehow escaping the limitations and partiality of the personal, as having been invested with some higher, impersonal authority. But this is a delusion. The state cannot just choose to invest its functionaries with authority. It can choose to invest them with power but not authority. Unless authority is recognised and assented to, it doesn’t exist. It is a gift that lies as much, or more, with the recogniser as the recognised. In English this is classically illustrated by Shakespeare in an exchange between King Lear and, in disguise, the banished but still loyal, Earl of Kent:
LEAR: … What wouldst thou?
KENT: Service.
LEAR: Who wouldst thou serve?
KENT: You.
LEAR: Dost thou know me, fellow?
KENT: No, sir; but you have that in your countenance which I would fain call master.
LEAR: What’s that?
KENT: Authority.
Authority belongs to and only to what has a “countenance”; and if ever a set of authors were without one, it is the set responsible for the Curriculum. It has no countenance and no voice. It makes sounds but the sounds aren’t speech. They are the sounds of the social machinery at work, doing a bad imitation of the human voice and showing that, whether or not the machine can imitate the human, the human can certainly imitate the machine. It is the voice of the State Chatbot, and is as much a fraud as the Voice of Oz the Great and Terrible, telling Dorothy in the Throne Room of the Palace in the Emerald City, “I am everywhere but to the eyes of common mortals I am invisible.” But Oz is invisible only, of course, until a little dog knocks down the screen hiding him, when he is found to be just a little old man with a bald head and a wrinkled face and his Magic Art to be that not of the Great Wizard but the Great Humbug. And the equivalent here of knocking down the screen is just to try to take the Great Chatbot seriously.
The writers confidently use such phrases as “high standards of language and literacy”, “love of literature”, “literature plays a key role”, “rich and varied literary heritage”, “high-quality works from English literature”, “high-quality books”, “high-quality classic literature” and so on. But, of course, to make such phrases tell, they have to display these high standards themselves, to have made that high-quality, classic literature their personal possession, active and visible in their own writing.
But would anybody who did, use that expression “high-quality” as they do? Why not the more obvious “good”? Because, unfortunately, you can’t call some books good (as the Report does) without suggesting that others must be bad (as the Report also does) and that the people who like them have bad taste. You make a potentially offensive ‘value judgement’. “High-quality” has the advantage that, although you’d think the expression “low-quality” must exist, it doesn’t. It’s not an expression ever used. And this is because “high-quality” is a term of the marketing men, not so different from “high-end”. As it is only a commercial recommendation and says nothing about the absolute value of the thing recommended, it is free of offence.
When people really do value things, they always value some examples above others. Discriminating is inseparable from valuing. And the Report recognises that, recognises that a genuine education in English must include “getting acquainted with the best books”, “to discriminate between inferior work and the best”, “show some power of discrimination”, “books worth reading”, “the taste for good reading”.
And you can’t doubt that reading matters to the writers of the Report, matters to them in their own lives. You can’t doubt that the habit, taste, love of reading they want for schoolchildren is one they know for themselves. They don’t want reading to be “a mechanical trick”, books to seem as if written in “a dead language”, Shakespeare approached “in an attitude of artificial solemnity”; they want children to have a “real interest in reading”, not to have responses “imposed by the teacher but to come from within”; “If they are to love literature, they must feel that it is a thing not artificial, but homely and made out of the same stuff as the tragedy and comedy of their own surroundings”; “should have been penetrated by the power of some great writer, should have made something of him at least a part of themselves, and should have acquired insensibly an inner standard of excellence”. Throughout, the Report values the sincere and the real, in both taught and teacher. You can’t doubt that they have been penetrated by the great writers, have made them part of themselves, are capable of speaking of them from within.
But not in the Curriculum. There …
Pupils should be taught to maintain positive attitudes to reading and an understanding of what they read, by continuing to read and discuss an increasingly wide range of fiction, poetry, plays, non-fiction and reference books or textbooks.
Can anyone, who has himself been successfully taught to maintain positive attitudes to reading and an understanding of what he reads, hold back from asking whether this sentence itself belongs in that increasingly wide range of things pupils should continue to read and discuss and be taught to maintain positive attitudes to? (Could any range be wide enough?) ‘Positive’, in all its vague positivity, is another term, like ‘high-quality’, that ought to be confined to commerce. (A firm called Positive Waste Solutions shows the way.)
Taken seriously, the sentence comes to bits. Taught to maintain positive attitudes to: what does that recommend but artificiality and insincerity, as if children should adopt a pose? What, in a classroom, could it translate into but, “Be positive, regardless.” And what sense at all can be wrung from, maintain positive attitudes to an understanding of what you read? ‘Prefer to understand rather than not’? or something like its opposite, ‘Prefer your own understanding to any other, no matter what’? Who could take that plural, attitudes seriously, offer to list and name them? The least objection is that they are redundant. And isn’t it obviously false to suggest that everyone can be ‘positive’ about pretty well anything, including bywords for what everyone knows to be dull and lifeless, reference and text books, as if schoolchildren ought to be no fussier about the books put before them than the dinners? And is it true that the range of pupils’ reading should become “increasingly wide”? Isn’t it as true or truer that it should become increasingly narrow, as they refine what they read in the course of discovering what they like?
The practical disbelief in the national literature accompanies, unsurprisingly, a practical disbelief in the nation. The words ‘nation’ and ‘national’ are common in the Report but absent from the so-called National Curriculum. There, all that the word ‘National’ means is ‘Everyone’s got to do it’ but what that ‘Everyone’ comprises—for the writers, for government, for the entire educated class—is not a nation but a (how could this not be the word?) society. The word ‘nation’ has become a national embarrassment. The advantage of the word ‘society’ (not unlike that of ‘high-quality’) is that it denotes something no one cares much about. It arouses no loyalties or enmities. No one can love (or hate) it, no one will kill (or be killed) for it. It is, inoffensively, the mere object of ’ologies’.
So, although the Curriculum does grant that English is “pre-eminent” (which is big of it) what it is pre-eminent in is not the nation but, of course, “society”. If it were the nation, some uncomfortable truths (uncomfortable I mean for the governing class) might seem to follow, that a command of it was necessary for citizenship or residence or to obtain welfare benefits or use the NHS. It might be made a test of immigrants’ willingness to put off the nationality of the place they have come from and take on that of the place they have come to. It might make a version of Norman Tebbit’s once notorious ‘cricket’ test. (It might give us an English Hyman Kaplan.)
The style of English the National Curriculum is written in is common in all sorts of public utterance but it is, all the same, weird. No one talks like it in, or out of, his daily life, when saying things he means, when he isn’t being paid to behave like a mere sentence-parroting machine.
And its style is no ‘mere matter’ of style. The woke (perhaps the Left generally nowadays) recognise that what they need to control are not the commanding heights of the economy but the even more commanding heights of the language, to make some things hard to say and to think, others hard to avoid saying and thinking. Conservatives need to learn that displacing them from those heights requires the displacing of more than the obvious wokeisms and leftisms, like all those pronouns that are supposed to fit all those newly-discovered ‘genders’; it requires the displacing of a mode of speech now near-universal among the university-(mis)educated, one that is abstract and pseudo-technical, that has no roots in anybody’s daily life and that makes a good growing medium for all things woke and left. Conservatives need to learn that you can only think conservatively in a conservative style and that that means retracing our steps, going back.
Duke Maskell writes on Substack, which can be found here.
If you enjoy The New Conservative and would like to support our work, please consider buying us a coffee – it would really help to keep us going. Thank you!
