AND ANOTHER THING
The charge of the angry oldie brigade
PAUL JOHNSON
Agreat hate-young-people campaign is being organised to help the launch of a publication called the Oldie. The Sunday Telegraph has just run a symposium on the subject, written by people over 50. I declined to contribute to it, believing the Oldie is a ridiculous idea which has already received far too much publicity. But I read the various items in it with a certain dread- ful fascination. What struck me was that, with one or two exceptions, most of these people seem to have a genuine personal hatred for the young. The young 'prefer cartoons to real books'. They 'stare for many hours into mirrors'. 'They talk a lot about the environment but foul it up wher- ever they go with discarded cartons, cans and, yes, condoms.' They are guilty of `ignorance, rapaciousness and aggrandise- ment'. They have 'lily hands, limp and list- less'. They lie around in armchairs like lounging leopards'. They are a 'human foam of duped lemmings'. 'They wander about in some mindless limbo.' They are `devoid of curiosity' and 'what they like is the abusive'. In short, they are 'generally bad'.
Can this really be true? Young people have been troublesome throughout history because they either want it now or want it different. A study of the ages, where this is possible, of the leaders of baronial revolts reveals a general pattern of youth. When the Earl of Essex tried to take over the Elizabethan government at the end of the old queen's reign, his 'knights' were young adventurers, gentlemen-yobbos, but with enough culture to have a special perfor- mance of Shakespeare's Richard II put on the day before they rose. Teenage boys at Eton and other public schools periodically staged riots of such violence that the army had to be brought in to restore order. But they could write excellent Latin prose, Greek verse and, often, English poetry. A disproportionate share of our art, music and literature has been provided by the young, usually between the ages of 15 and 30. Coleridge and Wordsworth had written nearly all their best poetry by the time they were out of their twenties, When, in 1816, Byron and Shelley were together with Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont on the shores of Lake Geneva, forming what Southey was said to have called their 'league of incest', the two poets were 27 and 24 respectively; the girls were still in their teens, Mary only 18 when she wrote Frankenstein that sum-
mer. Keats had completed his life-work when he died, aged 26, five years later. Our two greatest watercolourists, Girtin and Bonington, both immensely prolific, died in their twenties. By his death at 35, Mozart had produced 624 compositions and, as someone put it, 'left no branch of the art unenriched by his genius'. Mendelssohn had written most of his best music by the age of 25. I am just picking a few facts from a particular period, but similar examples would occur in any other.
I never cease to be astonished by the desire of small children to learn and explore and find out things for themselves; they positively delight in the process of acquiring knowledge. I have been thinking about children recently because we have just celebrated the birth of our fourth grandchild. I rejoice in all of them, each totally different, each ravishing. I don't believe, with Locke, that a child is a tabula rasa on which anything can be written, good or bad. Heredity is plainly important. But it is never entirely decisive. A child, growing up into a young person, can strug- gle fiercely to obtain what he or she thinks right in the way of facts and culture. But, in the end, a huge element in their mature personality is determined by children's elders, not just their parents but the mid- dle-aged intellectuals and businessmen who run education and entertainment.
If most or, at any rate, some young peo- ple are as bad as the angry oldies say they 'lam troubled by doubts, Father.'
are, we must not look for the guilty men and women in the ranks of the yobbos and lager louts themselves. We must point the finger at the anonymous school inspectors and progressive ideologues of the Depart- ment of Education, of the advisory boards and committees who play the same game, and of that dreadful organisation, the National Union of Teachers. We must look at the Marxist and Deconstructionist dons, often holding high positions in academia, who tell young students there is no real dif- ference between a horror comic and a son- net by Milton. We must also hold responsi- ble the scores of highly paid 'executives' in our disastrous television duopoly — 'the best TV system in the world', as those writ- ers who have made fortunes from it con- stantly describe it — who have set the cul- tural tone for a whole generation. We must arraign the many other elements in the public sector culture, dispensers of funds, Arts Councils, National Theatres and the like, who have helped to create the moral decadence of our time, with its cult of vio- lence, sex, atheism and contempt for all values except hedonism and greed — and of the writers who have been on their pay- rolls. Finally, we must hold to account the architects and abetters, the financiers and the gross beneficiaries of the most evil instrument ever aimed at the heart and soul of youth — pop music, in all its gruesome varieties. It is these various opinion- and taste-formers, sometimes working in con- junction, sometimes separately, who have manufactured and marketed the poison which youth has imbibed. They are, for the most part, rich, middle-aged — even older — complacent and self-righteous, frequent- ly honoured by the state. Oh for the genius of a Carlyle to draw up their indictments!
The truth is, every society gets the youth it deserves. People who matured in the ten years after the war, who had enjoyed a rich culture but had never been called on to make sacrifices to defend it, decided to embrace rights and forgot duties, and most of them abandoned belief in God — the external arbiter of our affairs, who is not mocked. So they got a Godless generation, the first, and we are now acquiring a sec- ond, which has been taught no sense even of secular morality. We shall have to take measures to change things. But we will not do it by abusing the young through an organ of geriatric triumphalism written by people old enough to know better.
Previous page
