Diversely incompetent

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

Edmund Burke 

As many of us know, our society here in the UK is far more complex and subtle than progressives would have us believe. We are grounded in what Edmund Burke called the inherited wisdom of the social order. Yet problems arise if influential people do not accept the inheritance because they know better.

Our inherited wisdom ought to be one of our most fundamental protections against the disasters of social and political incompetence. A genuine case of lessons learned. Protection inherited from our parents, relatives, language, friends, school and history, all woven into a hugely complex social fabric from the day we were born. We build on it throughout our lives. We are supposed to pass it on.

History, geography, literature, WW1, WW2, climate, roads, bus stops, newspapers, habits, fashions, assumptions, Shakespeare, music, kings, queens, wars, Brown Bess, battles, celebrities, London, cities, towns, villages, flags, religions, shops, offices, factories, inventions, castles, stately homes, dereliction, industrial heritage, flora, fauna, stage coaches, footwear, brass bands, pottery, schools, games, sports, social class, diet, recreation, sun, snow, rain, hail, fog, laughter, jokes, theatres, TV, radio, music, cinema, newspapers, chip shops, pubs, drunks, furniture, cemeteries, churches, geology, dialects, pets, eccentrics, crime, policing, road signs, traffic, holidays, hotels, clubs, camping…

Even a comparatively simple list of social furniture illustrates how formidably complex and subtle our inherited social order must be. We cannot describe it comprehensively because it is not that kind of inheritance. It is something in our bones, something we could barely begin to describe and yet… And yet the trite phrase use it or lose it comes to mind. 

Burke explained something we now seem to have forgotten - a nation really is guided by its social history which is more than facts, figures, rulers, politics and money. To be guided by it we need to know it and respect the obvious outcome that it brought us to where we are. Or maybe where we once were. If we are to teach it to the next generation, then as far as schools go that could be a matter of putting language, literature and history before STEM subjects and everything before politics.

In other words we have to understand roughly how we got here. What happened rather than what ought to have happened according to modern ideologies. How our ancestors adapted to their world as they saw it rather than their world as ideologues see it.

It is remarkably easy to see how an obsession with diversity may have already induced social and political incompetence merely by closing off our access to the inherited wisdom of what was our social order. The BBC is diverse. The BBC is incompetent. Perhaps this is not a coincidence.