Afew 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.

But the effect on culture and, more specifically, on language and literature of this kind of Enlightenment thinking seems more dubious. Because classical and Biblical science (Bacon would have called it natural philosophy) was lacking, the logic of Bacon’s more zealous followers was to throw out classical literature and the Bible itself – the baby with the bathwater.

Nowadays it is the exception rather than the rule for children in the west to be conversant with the Bible and the classics. New generations of literature teachers consider the Book of Job and the works of Homer and Horace to be old hat – in the most extreme cases, the work of dead white males that can happily be consigned to the dustbin in favour of literature of a more progressive bent.

They have a point. When I arrived at my rather old-fashioned secondary school, more than half the teachers were classicists; more relevantly, many of them were happy to pass on a traditional version of the classics, which appeared to have little bearing on life in the late 20th century. Of course, knowledge and pedagogy must move on: modern languages and sciences are essential ways of navigating the world. As a teenager, I joined in the call for a cull on classics and a rejuvenation of the curriculum. Perhaps I wasn’t so different from those Chinese children who publicly humiliated their teachers.

But it turns out that what holds for science does not work with literature and language, or with music. Science is comfortable with the ideology of progress – new theories supplant old ones; Copernicus and Galileo confound the geocentrists; Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection trumps all earlier ones. But literature and music do not progress in the same way. Much of 19th-century Romantic literature in Britain, Germany and Russia consists of rewritings of Hamlet. Two or three scenes from King Lear contain the whole of Beckett. Chopin and Schumann, revolutionaries in the best sense, spent their time studying the works of JS Bach.

For quite a long time now, it has been fashionable in the west – though not in China – to denounce the excesses and cruelties of the Cultural Revolution. There are signs in China now, for the first time in two or three generations, of a renewal of interest in traditional religious and philosophical systems; the stock of Confucius is rising and that of Mao falling. Peter Head, director of global planning at Arup, told me recently that part of the work Arup is doing in China on sustainable building and development has involved workshopping philosophical ideas from Taoism.

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.

harry.eyres@ft.com
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