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CULTURE
- gone down
the drain!
K.J. Mortimer
In Britain one hears about the “yob”
culture, decried by Prime Minister
Tony Blair. What does it mean? It
means drunken hooliganism, football
riots and a hatred of education
and of everything that improves
mankind. In the nineteen-eighties
they spoke about the “yuppy” culture,
the culture of Young
Upwardly-mobile People, social
climbers in business and the professions,
thinking only of smart dress,
flashy cars, cocktail parties and
noisy, drunken all-night raves. Can
these be called cultures?
Once upon a time the word culture
was used in the meaning of refinement,
good taste in music and art
and literature, a code of politeness
and good manners, a certain intellectual
life. A cultured person was one
with a certain elevation of mind, one
formed by the classics in his own
language and also in Latin and
Greek and therefore formed to
habits of clear, logical thinking,
speech and writing. Students at
Harvard University used to debate
in Latin. When Queen Elizabeth the
First visited Oxford University, after
listening to the pompous speeches of
welcome in Latin and Greek, she
answered them fluently and without
preparation in the same languages.
In Victorian times one could rightly
speak of culture, because despite certain
absurdities, there was a general
upward movement among all classes
of the population. There was a
strong sense of individual duty in
the public and national interest.
Education was steadily extended to
the poor so that they could improve
themselves and they did improve
themselves. There can be no comparison
between the material and
moral condition of the working class
in Britain in the mid-twentieth century
and its condition in the early
nineteenth century. People appreciated
and wanted education.
At the same time it was being
realised that tribal peoples were not
“savages”, as they had previously
been called. Therefore one could
legitimately talk about a Mousterian
culture, a Neolithic culture, a Bantu
culture, an Inuit (Eskimo) culture, an
Australian Aboriginal culture or
American Indian cultures. All these
peoples who had survived over
many thousands of years had techniques,
highly complex and logical
languages (see Levi-Strauss La Pensée
primitive), amazingly sophisticated
art and song and oral literature, a
common background of religion,
philosophy and good manners, and
a certain social cohesion.
Now, to be frank, it is hard to talk
about Anglo-Saxon culture in the
same way as one can talk about la
culture française (but has that started
to go down the drain as well?) The
French have long cultivated what
they call l’esprit. The English word
spirit hardly translates it, but one
may say that it refers to the disciplines
of the mind and of intellectual
life. In French, as in Latin and
Greek, the word philosophy implies a
discipline of exact thinking, whereas
in English-speaking countries, outside
certain university circles, it is
generally taken to mean woolly
speculation. In passing, we may add
that the Scottish mentality in these
matters is closer to the French than
to the English. In France to say of
somebody C’est un intellectuel is a
high compliment, whereas to call
somebody an intellectual in Englishspeaking
society is almost an insult,
like using the word egg-head, which
has no common equivalent in
French.
Now a fundamental element of any
culture is a common language, a
common means of communication.
Therefore it is most remarkable that
in the English-speaking world the
English language is not studied in
schools. I met a graduate in English
Literature from the élitist Cambridge
University who told me that until he
took courses in teaching English as a
foreign language to be a British
Council instructor, he had never
learned either the names or the use
of the English tenses of verbs. This
did not matter so much when people
used to spend much of their time
reading good books and informative,
well-written newspapers and
magazines, and when the middle
and upper classes had done at least
some basic Latin, when a radio presenter
of popular music would speak
good English. I still possess a couple
of letters written to me by workingclass
women who spent perhaps
four or five years in a poor village
school towards the end of the nineteenth
century, just over one hundred
years ago. The grammar, syntax,
punctuation and capitalisation
are impeccable and the interesting
content is really a pleasure to read.
But now the results of failing to
teach grammatical, lucid, logical,
economical, reasonably elegant and
internationally acceptable English
are disastrous.
Disastrous? This is no exaggeration.
There was a disastrous fire in a
London railway station which
spread simply because the instructions
for the railway staff in the even
of a fire were so badly written and
confused that they could not understand
what they were supposed to do.
Regional dialects are delightful;
dialect, what the French call patois, is
a traditional variant, often centuries
old, of the generally received national
language. Slang however is an
adaptation, often in constant flux, of
the “official” language. It too can be
delightful. I still enjoy memories of
58 NNU SPIRIT