Our cultural revolution !

Are we forgetting our literary heritage >???

Excellent article - worth reading fully..

From FT - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b1c7a2f0-40dc-11de-8f18-00144feabdc0.html

A few years ago I got to know a Chinese woman who had studied classical performance at the Beijing Conservatoire at the time of the Cultural Revolution. Her story was less terrible than many; she had been exiled to Mongolia and deprived of any contact with her beloved piano. Then she had been faced with the hazardous business of getting out of the country, trying to start a new life, but with a career in pieces that could never be properly reassembled. We have all heard far worse tales: parents publicly denounced, humiliated, beaten up by their own children, and teachers by their pupils, many of them ending up committing suicide.

Of course, nothing like that could ever happen in a country like Britain or the US, we think. We are free of such crazy ideological zealotry. We are not in the business of exiling pianists to Mongolia. We are tolerant, culture-loving people.

I wonder. Not long ago I got into conversation with a young British couple on the Tube who had never heard of Adam and Eve. When I recounted the creation story told in the Book of Genesis, one of them said: “Oh, it sounds like some religious thing.” I began to think that we had undergone a cultural revolution of our own, less dramatic and obviously violent than the one in China, but no less far-reaching in its effects.

Actually, our cultural revolution and the Chinese one have common roots. Both are rooted in the Enlightenment – or perhaps more accurately in Bacon’s epoch-making repudiation of large parts of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology, which paved the way for the Enlightenment. In scientific terms this was immensely powerful, of course; freed from atavistic prohibitions on knowledge, science could boldly go further than the ancients could ever have imagined.

Of course, reconsidering old literary, philosophical and religious traditions carries the danger of a return to reactionary pigheadedness. Here in multicultural Britain, education rightly stresses the diversity of traditions (none of which would endorse ignorance of their own founding principles). But this should not happen at the expense of the founding traditions of the society, the traditions of Greco-Roman thought, art and literature and Judaeo-Christian religion and theology; without knowledge of those, very little else in the cultural and literary history makes sense. Ignorant of those things, a young person will walk through the great gardens of our culture, the Uffizi or the Prado or the National Gallery, the works of Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Goethe, without being able to name any of the flowers.