Everything you wanted to know about western civilisation

...but were afraid to ask. Welcome to the western canon club

I’m ashamed of how little I know about a lot of things. Classical music, for instance, is a huge ocean of unknowns to me. I appreciate it, and I would like to know more, but it still feels like a language in which I have only the barest of vocabulary. 

I’m so clueless and lightweight on that front that my favourite classical music LP when I still had a record player was a double album which told you which advert each piece was from (‘The Hovis advert with the boy walking up the hill’ for Dvorak , ‘the Hamlet cigar ad with Gregor Fisher’ by Bach). 

My knowledge of poetry is quite poor, too, and I wish I could recite more of it, rather than, say, the lyrics of the first seven Iron Maiden albums I learned off by heart at 13 (nothing against Iron Maiden, I still love them, but I’ve found this a slightly less useful skill down the years when trying to impress people).

It’s up to me to learn more, but as everyone knows, wanting to learn about something doesn’t always translate into doing something about it; as you get older, prioritising time becomes more important and ‘shall I learn about the history of opera today?’ tends to get pushed aside by work or driving the kids around or cleaning out the fridge. Besides which, until you learn the basic architecture of an area, it’s hard to reach a point where the puzzle pieces begin to join up.

And I feel that I’m not the only one — all around there is this tremendous hunger to learn more about the western canon of literature, art, poetry and music. So many people feel as if they’ve never gained the knowledge that might once have been passed down to serve as a common culture.

YouTube is full of videos following in George Birkbeck’s tradition of adult learning. There are podcasts like Peter Adamson’s History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps or The Partially Examined Life. One of the most popular Twitter accounts at the moment is The Cultural Tutor, with over a million followers, producing threads on the art, architecture, music and literature you should know about. People really want to learn this stuff, and regret that they were never made to do so earlier.

Some of this is due to the education system, although I don’t want to be one of those tedious people who go on Twitter and blame the curriculum for the gaps in their knowledge of history: ‘why weren’t we taught about the Second Schleswig war in school? Why am I only learning this now?’ as if their teachers had thousands of hours spare rather than a very limited amount of time. But it’s also true that most people leave the British state education system knowing very little about the western canon, and are afterwards playing catch-up with a less absorbent mind.

Perhaps the main reason is that there already aren’t enough people who know about these things to teach in the first place, and who are also willing to endure the strain of having to keep order among an unwilling audience. So the knowledge does not get passed on, and public culture becomes ever more lowbrow.

But while it’s a hopeful sign that so many people go online to learn these things, my take-away from lockdown is that in-person is always better — going to something live, meeting people face to face, allowing your sensory perception to aid the learning process. I also believe that the more clubs and institutions we have, the healthier and happier our society.

That is why I’m proposing an idea, for a sort of club where people come and listen to talks about a particular feature of the western canon — Virgil, Goethe, Milton, Van Eyck, whatever — and fill in all these enormous holes in our knowledge. It would be a bit like an old-fashioned salon, or a Lyceum club. Although there are local salons still running, this would ideally be national. This canon club — I’m open to suggestions for a different name — would initially start in one city, presumably London, but if there was further interest we could help set up branches across Britain (and then even maybe abroad). Each local club would run semi-independently, but the wider organisation would help with arranging speakers and so on. 

It might be useful for authors wanting to sell books, but the club could also hire enthusiastic amateurs to just spread their knowledge for the sheer sake of it. Maybe there won’t be any interest in the events, but maybe there will — and I think there is a tendency to underestimate the public’s enthusiasm for culture.

A lot of people want to learn more, there aren’t really any mainstream institutions directing them where to go, and if you don’t know where to start, it’s that much harder. They also don’t like being hectored and are put off by the intrusion of theory, not to mention a very predictable sort of politicisation that tries to fit old works of art into a modern framing. (Making it ‘relevant’ — shudder).

They also don’t want to be talked down to, one of many reasons for the stand-out podcast success of the 2020s, The Rest is History. Not only does the show exude a huge enthusiasm for learning, but there is also an assumption that the audience aren’t drooling morons, in contrast to the general tone of television. As fellow TRiH superfan James Merriott wrote recently: ‘The worst of this attitude was revealed on a recent episode of the BBC’s only television programme about literature, Between the Covers, when a guest remarked, “I don’t know how people find the time. They’re long, aren’t they, books?” — an observation greeted with sympathetic chuckles by the show’s presenters. The attitude of cheerful hostility to anything “educational” is characteristic of much modern arts programming. The barbarians aren’t at the gates. They are cracking jokes on air.’

English culture has a strong anti-intellectual strain, which in the past has sometimes proved healthy, a sort of vaccine against the terrible ideas regularly produced in France and Germany. But that old prejudice has certainly helped contribute to a public culture which now takes pride in ignorance. We’re encouraged to be morons, because there’s something embarrassing about aiming higher.

Even the arts world has a strong (notional) anti-elitist mindset, obsessed with ‘access’, which makes the promotion of high culture difficult, while any overt celebration of western achievement is also ideologically suspect.

The canon club would be strictly apolitical, this being a basic necessity for institutions forming civil society. Perhaps something which celebrated western civilisation would inevitably be ‘Right-coded’, which leads to the question of why not teach ‘world civilisation’ more generally? The reason is that it’s too broad, and that to really know the world you must understand your own story first. The western canon also has a narrative that makes it possible to learn, like a language; you could, perhaps, attend a lecture a week and have a pretty basic understanding of the thread within a year. (Although there’s no reason why these clubs couldn’t occasionally invite speakers to talk about golden age Baghdad or Japanese poetry, I suppose.) 

Perhaps the other Right-coded aspect of the clubs is that they would absolutely have to be ‘theory’-free; these should not be places where you go and deconstruct Shakespeare, or apply gender theory to Boccaccio, something you can already find at any university. Theory makes learning unintelligible, tedious and off-putting, and itself has an anti-intellectual and lowbrow strain, being in effect 20th-century Franco-German ideas repackaged by American academics for a mass audience; you wouldn’t allow junk food at a warm and welcoming family-run taverna. Instead I want an institution where people can enjoy themselves learning about Moliere’s plays, Michelangelo’s art or Beethoven’s symphonies, including my favourite, you know, the one from Die Hard.

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I don’t know about how the organisation would work, or where you host these gatherings. As someone suggested, churches would be an ideal place. If you’re interested in attending one of these salons, or have suggestions about how to set them up, please respond in the comments (anyone can comment on this post), perhaps mentioning your city or town.