Once a year my father used to take us to the symphony. We never had good seats but Ba said it didn’t matter, the point was to be there, to exist in the room while music, however old it might be, was being renewed.
Do Not Say We Have Nothing, Madeleine Thien
Do Not Say We Have Nothing a novel by Canadian author, Madeleine Thien, is gripping and lyrical, so good that when I finished it I turned back to the first page and read it all over again. There are elements of fantasy, but it charts the experiences of its young Chinese characters during Mao’s Cultural Revolution and up to the events of Tiananmen Square.
Mao launched his Cultural Revolution in 1966, ushering in a decade of brutality and chaos. He announced war on the “four olds”: old ideas, old customs, old habits, and old culture. During this period schools and universities were closed. Libraries were destroyed and books were burned. Musical instruments were torn from music schools, concert halls, homes, and smashed and burned in the street. People suspected of harbouring an interest in Western culture, such as university lecturers, were beaten, torn from their jobs, sometimes imprisoned, and even killed by the Red Guard.
All of this brutality and destruction, was in the cause of clearing the way for a Communist future, whilst also eradicating Mao’s opponents and reasserting his authority. The violence was the point. Many of Mao’s critics were killed during this turbulent time. But also the forcible destruction of the past was intended to make criticism of Mao’s Communist vision of the future impossible, both through fear and lack of knowledge.
At times I feel we in the West are undergoing a more subtle kind of cultural revolution, a New Cultural Revolution, perhaps, in which the intention is not just to destroy some aspects of our culture but to in some way make the new generation of children and teenagers forget our cultural heritage.
The clearest sign of this assault on the past is the tearing down of statues. This is claimed to be because they are monuments to men and women who, however incidentally and obliquely, were connected to egregious acts, such as slave ownership.
Few of the individuals depicted in these statues are honoured solely because of their, now judged to be, nefarious activity. Most were great writers, politicians and so on, some of whom may have been only tangentially associated with slavery or who perhaps wrote a few sentences expressing opinions that would have been totally acceptable in the time in which they lived, but which are now deemed racist, or sexist, or whatever. What is really going on is not an objection to the elevation of people undeserving, but an attempt to eradicate history.
Commemorative street names and statues are a way of encoding in the fabric of the world around us, first our actual history, the names of the great men and women who came before us, and, more than that, the value-judgements of our culture as to who is great and worth remembering.
Whether we are students of history or not, those names become a part of the warp and weft of our consciousness. These physical reminders of our national story connect everybody from the least educated and uninterested in history who regularly walks past the statue of Winston Churchill (in Parliament Square, unveiled in 1973, sculpted by Welsh sculptor Ivor Roberts-Jones, and positioned in a location Churchill chose himself) with the scholar who writes a biography of Churchill. Winston Churchill, his importance to British history, his great acts, are a common reference point for them both.
The destruction of such physical embodiments of the national story breaks down both the connections between people and their history, and the connections between the individuals that constitute the population of a nation. The replacement of such monuments with statues of, for example George Floyd, are a very blatant attempt not only to eradicate deeper cultural connections but to replace them with the signs and symbols of the new ideology which has been spun into existence over no more than the last twenty years, perhaps less.
This destruction of statues and the commemorative naming of streets, schools, and buildings has been remarked upon, but what is less noticed is the way in which our culture seems to be being erased behind us like the path in Alice in Wonderland rubbed out by the dog with a broom for its head. Our culture seems to exist closer and closer to this present moment.
I notice this in the attitudes of my children, now teenagers, and their friends. Any movie made before they were born, or even in their early childhood, is dubbed ‘old’. It is ridiculous to most people over the age of twenty to consider a movie made since 2000 to be old. To us old movies are primarily black and white or at least made in the forties or fifties. I might refer to a movie from the seventies as an ‘older’ movie but never old, but to this generation pretty much anything made more than five years ago is old.
Old of course for the young, is not good, it’s not a selling point. So now we are stuck with the problem that any movie more than five or ten years old is dubbed ‘old’ and therefore unwatchable. How is it possible to communicate any kind of culture in that atmosphere?
Growing up in the seventies and eighties when Saturday Matinee on television showed two movies usually both made before the sixties and of various genres, Westerns, melodrama, screwball comedy, I gained an incredible film education and a life-long love of movies.
In the modern age of streaming services where kids and young people select every item they watch there is no need for them ever to watch an ‘old’ movie from five years ago or even longer. They can live in a ‘forever present’ watching the latest cinema releases streamed almost immediately or the, mostly execrable, movies churned out by the streaming services. This is their culture.
I mentioned Gregory Peck to my younger daughter a few days ago, she had no idea who he was, ditto Cary Grant. This surprised me as she is a fan of musicals and some classic movies. It made me realise the sheer scale of the gap that is opening in this generation’s cultural knowledge.
As mentioned this daughter likes the old musicals. She discovered my Fred Astaire collection on DVD, and has since grown to love Judy Garland and Cyd Charisse. She showed a friend of hers Funny Face because this friend loves Audrey Hepburn as a style icon. Funny Face, is a top-notch musical and features the incomparable Kay Thompson in a rare and joyfully brilliant all-singing all-dancing performance, but the friend squirmed through the songs and found the dancing embarrassing.
The movie musical is an art form in its own right, and like all art forms it requires some training, but only a small amount, to appreciate (it’s popular entertainment, not Beckett). Twenty years ago everybody could ‘get’ a movie musical although it might not be their favourite genre, maybe soon nobody will. La La Land, which my young musicals connoisseur considers barely a musical and doesn’t like, was released when she and her friends were six, making it what most other kids her age would classify as ‘old’, and therefore not worth their attention.
The streaming services themselves seem happy to allow movie culture to slip away. Whereas maybe five years ago they would have had a healthy selection of old movies in a ‘classics’ section now they don’t even have such a section. Not so long ago if a movie icon died they would put on a season of his or her movies. That doesn’t seem to happen anymore. Is it a response to these older movies not getting the viewings, or is it part of an effort to stop our young people accessing these older stories, which also transport older values? Almost anything from the past can now be discovered to be ‘problematic’.
The point of Mao’s cultural revolution was not to leave old-fashioned art behind but the values and messages those older art forms contained. They were ‘bourgeois’ and the values of the bourgeois are the values of conservatism: love, marriage, and family life, working hard and saving to have money and security to pass on to children and grandchildren. The stories of the past are the stories in which the boy gets the girl, and true love is not only viewed as real but also one of the greatest adventures in life. In addition there is no promiscuity, no drug-taking. Honesty, kindness, truthfulness are rewarded and cruelty and deception are not.
These are old-fashioned values, obstacles to the kind of progress Mao wanted. In our time they are viewed by the billionaire technocrats and their globalist-politician side-kicks as an obstacle to the power of the state. An emphasis on hard work, financial independence, and property ownership is in direct opposition to the technocratic desire to control everybody and everything.
Both my daughters love Meet Me in St Louis, a story of romance, family values, love of home and your home-town. Real ‘apple-pie’ stuff and it’s totally awesome. How did they encounter Meet Me in St Louis? By watching The Family Stone in which one of the characters is watching Meet Me in St Louis and says it’s her favourite Christmas movie. They were only watching The Family Stone, an ‘old’ movie (2005), because I had nagged them mercilessly.
Both my daughters tell me their friends watch movies even less than they do and never anything ‘old’. This is a huge swathe of Western culture that these teenagers are are losing access to: the adventure and independence embodied in the Western; the heroism and grit of war movies; the joy of romances; the exuberance and artistry of musicals; the acting, dancing, singing of all those supremely talented performers may be lost forever and soon.
Clearly we can’t live in the past but we live (and create) on the past. Another aspect of culture that seems under threat is the classic novel. Of course the demise of reading is always being greatly exaggerated, but again I observe that most of the teenagers I know do not read books, they read screens, but not books. If they do read, they focus primarily on contemporary fiction. There are many recently published novels with real merit, that have been sensational hits, but there is also a lot of dross. Moreover, there are many classic novels of American and English literature that are still enjoyable to read beyond what they communicate in terms of our lives in the past and our values. Yet these are increasingly seen as the preserve only of the literature student and increasingly not even then.
Classic novels convey a sense not only of how people dressed, ate, and spoke in the past, but also their values. We do not have to follow the strict rules of Victorian society, but Victorian novels remind us of the importance of truthfulness, kindness, and honour.
The novelists of the past, Dickens, Melville, Austen, Dreiser, influenced the writers who came after them, these texts speak to each other through time and if you only know one side of the conversation you’re missing out. Of course if this ‘forgetting’ of the past goes on, contemporary novelists will only be in conversation with other contemporary novelists, having no knowledge of the classic authors, but I hope that time will never come.
The New Cultural Revolution is more subtle than the ravages of Mao’s Red Guard, but it is purposeful. Such idiocies as trigger warnings on Austen discredit and edge out the classic novels from mainstream consumption to be replaced by the ‘forever present’ stories in which characters text and SnapChat each other, swipe left and right, declare their pronouns and do a whole host of things that have only been in existence for a handful of years.
The values such cultural revolutions seek to wipe away are the products, not just of millennia-old religions, but thousands of years of trial and error in terms of what makes for a good life, a good society, a good country. These messages are enshrined in our music, our art, our monuments, our writings. What is new is not always progress. Sometimes, as C S Lewis said, “If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road”. The West has taken a wrong turn, we need to go back before, like Alice, we discover the path has been rubbed away behind us and there is no finding it. Perhaps the first step is to put on an old movie.