privileges while getting a report for generosity of spirit,has made the social engineering of supposed equality the aim of nearly all public endeavour. Hospitals are not to treat ill people as best they can, but to end the gap between the healthiest and least intelligent classes of society; schools are not to school children, but to insure that all children are educated, or at least miseducated, equally. And so forth.
Needless to say, we are no nearer equality than ever we were; indeed, on some measures we are further off from it. The decision to be worn from this, however, after more than 60 years of strenuous endeavour, or at least of the use of really large bureaucracies, is that more must be tried. You dont make no for an answer, even when the no emanates from the nature of things. Like heaven, equality can be stormed.
In one important matter, however, the egalitarians have succeeded: in the mores of society. One has but to looking at a photo of the new prince Harry, for example, to hold that this is so. He is often caught on camera with the gestures and way of a standard British lout out on a Saturday night, utterly indistinguishable either in clothes or facial expression from somebody who has come from the whip of housing estates.
He is, moreover, no Prince Hal, and his companions are no Falstaff; rather, he is a distinctive product of a civilization that equates sympathy for, and identification with, "the people", with behaving in the crudest possible way. Nowadays, there is no deeper aspect of virtuous democratic sentiment than to brawl drunkenly or cast in the street.
The obsession with family and its attendant emphasis on social engineering as the main aim of all human activity insinuates itself into surprising corners. For example, last weekend I found it in the long cover story, titled The Death of the Critic, in the recapitulation section of The Observer newspaper. Under headlines such as "We're all critics now" and "The death of cultural elitism", the wonder was considered whether the power of nearly everyone to state his judgment about nearly everything, and to carry it in a public place (the internet, Facebook, Twitter, etc. meant that there was no place left for the professional critic.
As person who, in his time, must have reviewed, and been paying for reviewing, upwards of five hundred books, this was a wonder that concerned me more than a little. Is the notion of the man of letters, the specialist, the scholar, the musician, the art historian, etc. in brusque the practised critic, more valuable than that of the vulgar reader, the casual listener, the occasional viewer? To this question, I can make but a very limp answer: it depends.
My care was caught by the part of John Naughton, a professor at the Open University and the newspaper's technology columnist, in detail the next paragraph: The wearing of social deference had a cultural impact because until the 1960s professional criticism was also, if not a toff's preserve, certainly a highbrow, Oxbridge-dominated enclosure. The nation opened its heavyweight newspapers every Sunday to see what Raymond Mortimer (Malvern and Balliol), Cyril Connolly (Eton and Balliol) or Philip Toynbee (Rugby and Christ Church) made of the latest books In the circumstances, Geoffrey Madan's description of the British cultural elite as "an arboreal slum of Balliol men" sounds peculiarly apt.This sounds like watered-down Zhdanov, according to which a man's work is not to be judged by its merits but by the social origins of its author. Four legs good, two legs bad. What I find peculiarly dispiriting about this is that there is no judgment of the rate of the study of the men cited in the paragraph; for the generator of the article, it appeared not still to record his idea to ask the question, let alone to do it.
Of course, had he written that "Cyril Connolly was a really bad writer, with no literary ability or opinion at all but, because of his social background was able still to obtain prominent positions as a critic," he might have had a sociological point (but his description of Connolly would have been absurd, for Connolly is however worth reading many days later his death, which is unlikely to be the event where most authors of literary criticism on Twitter and Facebook is concerned). One power as well object to nineteenth-century Russian literature because none of it was written by peasants, and rather a lot of it by aristocrats.
The source of the article goes on: It couldn't last, of course, and it didn't. Rupert Murdoch arrived and made vulgarity respectable.This seems to throw what is good with what is widespread. One power as easily say "Hitler arrived and made anti-semitism respectable". Again there is a dispiriting absence of mind as to the deserving of, say, Murdochian vulgarity, and the products of the "arboral slum of Balliol" (a phrase that I personally find neither descriptively apposite nor even witty as an insult).
If social radicalism appears, can snobbery be far behind? When the writer says that "The land opened its heavyweight newspapers every Sunday", he is clearly using the word "state" in the le tout Paris sense of the word. The heavyweight newspapers never reached more than a minority of the nation; far more people open the News of the World and the People every Sunday than ever opened Connolly's Sunday Times or Toynbee's Observer.
I think as a minor trying to get my hands on the News of the World and the People in the level of my grandparents (whose Side was never more than rudimentary), but they were not deemed suitable - respectable - publications for nippers to read, even though I did not full see their import. Later, I read Connolly and Toynbee in my father's house.
The British intelligentsia - I talk in generalisations - is ineffective or unwilling to differentiate between cultural elitism and social exclusivity. Of course, in our imperfect sublunary world there is some overlap between the two; but the wilful failure to see the distinction explains a good lot around the unutterable mediocrity (to put it no stronger) of contemporary Britain.
Theodore Dalrymple is a writer and worked for many days as an interior city and prison doctor.
