the one into the many and the many into the one

While Doris Lessing laments that books and reading no longer seem important to us, the chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, is lamenting the loss of a common culture - the "canon" people would be reading, if they were reading. (I put it in scare quotes because I don't really like the word - and in the article I get all this from the religious origins of the word are much gone into, which may be helpful to some but I feel is a distraction from the matter at hand.) He recently wrote (according to Richard Jenkyns in Prospect magazine), "'Until recently, national cultures were predicated on the idea of a canon, a set of texts that everyone knew. In the case of Britain they included the Bible, Shakespeare and the great novels. The existence of a canon is essential to a culture. It means that people share a set of references and resonances, a public vocabulary of narratives and discourse.' This shared inheritance, he argues, is now being destroyed by multiculturalism and technology, satellite television and the internet in particular."

There it is again: the internet in particular. Everything is now available everywhere, all the time. But the fact is that, even without the internet's free instant downloads of any episide of Seinfeld you want (if you know where to look), there are now several canons (cana? canards?), at least in terms of keeping up with contemporary culture. No one can nowadays be well-informed in science, drama, film, fiction, current affairs, history, poetry, critical theory, the new series of Scrubs, fashion, contemporary cooking and local politics. Gone are the days when you could read The Spectator and The Times, and listen to Radio 4, and pass. In poetry alone the difference beetween, say, LANGUAGE and New Formalism is enough to make two distinct fields.

But it's not just reading: Jenkyns, discussing Rabbi Sacks' premise, goes on to say: "...at the start of the 21st century... we live in a world without heroes.... The middle of the last century saw men such as Churchill, Mao and De Gaulle who, for better or worse, were big figures. Two decades ago there were leaders like Thatcher, Gorbachev and... Mandela. Today, on the other hand, it appears that not one of the nearly 200 nations of the world is led by a person of truly exceptional quality. Perhaps we are fortunate to live in an age that calls for technocrats rather than titans, but something has been lost."

He goes on: "We lack cultural heroes... Isaiah Berlin used to say in his last years that there were no geniuses left in the world: no great novelists, poets, painters or composers... On the surface there is a good deal of chatter about young British artists or brilliant novelists and filmmakers, but deep down we feel that nothing very large is coming to birth... I remember in the 1970s a distinguished person passing the Listener to me and saying, about The Old Fools, "There is a poem that will last for 500 years": it was Philip Larkin's latest. It is a sentence that one cannot easily imagine being spoken today."

Now, I'm asking: is it that no great work is being produced, or that we now think of it differently? We've lost the ability to value things for what they mean - I think we no longer know what they mean. This is what relativism is: precisely that we no longer think our own social baggage is any more important than anyone else's, even though it is more important to us. We can't even value ourselves more than anyone else, any more. I said three days ago, apropos Lessing's Nobel speech, that we'd lost our sense of significance. I think this is what Martin Amis is (however cackhandedly) going on about. When he notoriously asked an auditoriumful of people in Manchester last week to raise their hands if they felt "morally superior to Al Qaeda" he was asking them to take a stand: what do you think is significant, meaningful, right? And few people did put their hands up. I know I very likely wouldn't have put mine up, and the reason doesn't lie in moral equivocacy. It's something deeper than that, a sort of existential diffidence. We're just really not sure.

Jenkyns goes on (of course I am very partially quoting; please do read the whole thing): "The chief rabbi is right to say that multiculturalism has been a disaster. For one thing, it is actually monocultural: it is the demand that all countries should be like America (though without America's devotion to nation and constitution). For another, it inhibits the robust and confident expression of the majority culture, although such robustness and confidence provide the best conditions for minority cultures also to flourish. The millennium dome has been so ridiculed that it may seem cheap to drag it up again, but its utter vacuity has been instructive. It would have been more popular and enjoyable, as well as more worthwhile, if it had celebrated high culture, taken pleasure in our history, and not tried to conceal whose two-thousandth anniversary was actually being marked. We should indeed assert the importance of historical memory, of ancestry and rootedness. This is something which immigrants do not share, but the answer is not to pretend that it does not matter, but to offer new citizens a kind of historical memory by proxy. That is more or less what happens in the US."

Can we get back to where the children will know Bible stories? (Or even fairy tales! I forbade all modernised, sanitised, girl-rewritten,* happy-ending fairy tales in our house; but the kids did get given them. Ugh.) I know a lot of people are atheists and don't want their children even to think of Christmas as a religious festival - really! - but this always seems a shame: all those children, cut off from our old shared story. Already in daily life I meet loads of people, many educated, with no frame of reference except a local, contemporary one (Lessing mentions this too) and it is - aside from anything else - really quite boring.

(Hat tip, as so often, to 3 Quarks Daily for the link.)

* Fairy tales have quite a few extremely clever heroines, if the boring people only knew it.

(nb. I do sometimes thank God I only write this tosh & don't have to read it. It's all so partial.)