Timely reminder to rise above the noise and chaos

In our debased culture, where celebrity too often passes for true fame, and fashionable attitudes trump the wisdom of the ages, a few brave men and women still dare to swim against the tide. How bracing to hear Jonathan Sacks speak so clearly on Newsnight last week, and full marks to Emily Maitlis for allowing the former Chief Rabbi to talk without hindrance.

“An individual culture ends in chaos,” he said. “Today anger and noise prevail.” “Britain wore its team spirit with grace.” These are not soundbites, designed to catch the hourly news headlines, but invitations to reflect on what the speaker has said, and contribute to the discussion. Sacks wasn’t speaking in a narrow political sense. He takes a broader view, distilled from decades of serious thought, and a very human need to recognise those secret harmonies which will never be assuaged by the political certainties of Left or Right.

Every society needs such people: sympathetic, intellectually supple, and (in the true sense) disinterested. Too often, we are confined by tribal loyalties. Yet, in our everyday lives, most of us find common ground with those of opposing views.

You don’t have to be religious to

recognise the worth of words such as these, or TS Eliot’s resounding lines from “Little Gidding”: “the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond/the language of the living”. As Hector says in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys: “Hand it on, boys, that’s the lesson I wanted you to learn. Hand it on.”

We would all be better off if we valued the “grace” of team spirit, that very British quality, above the chaos of baser urges. Or, on the other hand, we could carry on flinging milkshakes at one another, and sniggering at how “playful” it is.

“Hand it on” is surely the best definition of education. How sad, therefore, that so many educators are reluctant to fulfil that role. In the world of modern-day teaching, where pupils (or “students”, as they are increasingly called) are held to know as much as those who instruct them, and indulged in case they get bored, “relevance” is all.

There were two barks last week. “Woof!” went a group called Youth Music, which believes that rap should be accorded the respect granted to the great composers of the past, and that Stormzy speaks more clearly to adolescents than Mozart. At the risk of sounding like one of those High Court judges, trapped in aspic, I have never heard of Mr Stormzy but I do know what George Harrison said about rap: “There’s a letter missing.”

Then came another “Woof!” as we heard from educationalists who believe the English literature curriculum in schools is (here we go again) too white and middle class. Instead of reading Dickens and Conrad, and all those other boring dead men, teenagers should be feasting on the gritty modern realism served up by the likes of Irvine Welsh. As another of those boring dead men wrote: “Up to a point, Lord Copper.”

What arrogance! To leave school without reading a great book, or hearing a great symphony, is no less a deprivation than having no shoes. Young people will hear rap every day of the week because popular culture is unavoidable. It has its place, though too often amplifies the kind of anger and noise noted by Sacks.

Exposure to Mozart or Beethoven, however, may open a door that leads from darkness to light. It can be an experience that transforms a life; and the earlier the experience, the more profound the transformation. Do these teachers, and their advisers, truly believe that we can only make sense of the world through today’s sounds, words and images? Oh, well. Mozart, who died in 1791, and was thrown into a pauper’s grave, will remain contemporary when Stormzy and his rappers are ashes under Uricon.

Incidentally, does anybody still read Irvine Welsh?

‘To leave school without reading a great book is no less a deprivation than having no shoes’

We may also turn to the past for an interpretation of recent political events. Aldous Huxley wrote Point Counter Point in 1928, and had some fun at the expense of a character called Sidney Quarles, who was “only a façade, an impressive appearance, a voice, a superficial cleverness and nothing more. Behind the handsome front lived the genuine Sidney, feeble, lacking all tenacity of purpose in important matters, though obstinate where trifles were concerned, easily fired with enthusiasm, still more easily bored.”

Even the cleverness, wrote Huxley, “turned out to be no more than the kind of cleverness which enables brilliant schoolboys to write Ovidian Latin verses or humorous parodies of Herodotus”. A book he published was “shallow and vague, commonplace with an ordinariness made emphatic by the pretensions of an ornate style that coruscated with verbal epigrams”.

Thank heavens the good people of Britain don’t have to suffer such character traits in their parliamentary representatives.