Cultural Literacy

One thing David Cameron has got right is his diagnosis of what he calls "the broken society". It is broken. And he is almost right when he says we must look for means other than economics to fix it. Had he not set his face like flint against tax cuts, he might see how returning money to people not only spreads prosperity, lifting people out of poverty, but also creates a sense of individual responsibility and empowerment that helps a society cohere. But the pursuit of materialism is not, I would be the first to admit, the whole answer.
A society needs to encourage not just the wealth and physical well-being of its members, but needs also to have a care for their intellectual development, too. It is what Matthew Arnold, writing 140 years ago in Culture and Anarchy, called the need for "sweetness and light". It is the civilising process. We used to be good at it. We were especially good from about the time Arnold wrote - the Education Act, with compulsory schooling for children, was introduced three years later - up until the 1960s. Then something went wrong. Arnold superscribed his book with the Latin tag Estote ergo vos perfecti: "Be ye therefore perfect". Perfection, and the ambition that went with it, have slipped from the agenda. And they have gone because of a hatred and a fear of elitism.
Sitting down the other day with the rock star, poet, constitutional reformer, Englishman and patriot Billy Bragg, I learnt a striking fact. The Bard of Barking was en route to a women's prison where he was delivering, as rock stars do, six guitars. As part of the rehabilitative process, these women are being encouraged to make music. It is a brilliant idea.
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Some of us may struggle to comprehend popular music, but there is a qualitative difference between having the wireless on as wallpaper and imbibing one song after another, and actually seeking to acquire the skills to make music. To do it anything like properly requires not just skill, but commitment. It is creative, and it stimulates further creativity. And creativity is central to the civilising process. It is easy to become idealistic about such things, but I imagine there might be fewer of those women in prison if, some years ago, they had had their creativity stimulated in a cultural fashion rather than in a criminal one.
The problem now is that most people, especially when younger, have precious little access to or encouragement in the creative and civilising processes. In schools, music is a Cinderella subject. Teachers who might want to encourage an interest outside the curriculum in books, or poetry, or the past often meet with blind resistance from the parents whose role it would be to assist the enterprise in the long hours and days outside the classroom. Neither the broadcast media - with the occasional distinguished exception, such as Melvyn Bragg's brilliant Radio 4 series In Our Time - nor the popular press find it safe or desirable to discuss ideas or concepts. Most television programmes on the main networks are drivel. Even so-called intelligent ones are formulaic and lacking in discursiveness, because of the presumption of a short attention span. We still fail to teach properly the languages that open up new worlds of culture. And local authorities, which once made high-quality investments in public libraries, now seem to regard their role - if they regard it at all - as being to provide mass rather than high culture. It is no wonder there is a lack of cultural ambition among our people, because any squeak of interest is in effect suffocated at birth.