Pages

Tuesday 16 March 2021

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.

5 comments:

Sam Vega said...

Good post. The collective cultural inheritance of our society - all successful societies - is necessary for future survival. This is Burke's main contribution to political philosophy.

The collective culture is a bit like our DNA, or an individual organism's memory. It was built up through being successful in the past, and is the best guarantee for being successful in the future. Jettisoning it in favour of some idea of diversity is therefore patently self-defeating. Like introducing alien DNA into an organism, or somehow implanting memories which were not acquired by that organism.

DiscoveredJoys said...

What happened rather than what ought to have happened according to modern ideologies.

And yet there is nothing sadder than died in the wool 70 year old communists. Still dreaming the Utopian dream despite all the Communist regimes that failed, all the mountains of corpses. Perhaps the Communist mindset is the one that rejects the past lessons with the most disdain.

We owe it to our descendants to not skip over the gruesome history of the Nazis, Russia, China, Kampuchea, Venezuela, Cuba, and various Middle Eastern theocracies.

James Higham said...

"chip shops, pubs, drunks"

The rolling English drunk?

The Jannie said...

Boo! Hiss! Anglocentricity! What about us rolling Scottish drunks!

A K Haart said...

Sam - thanks and yes, the collective culture is a bit like our DNA. Possibly even influenced by our DNA.

DJ - yet the focus seems to be Hitler, Stalin and Mao getting a free pass. Ideology appears to trump everything.

James and Jannie - come to think of it, do we ever hear of Manx drunks?