PERSONAL COLUMN

The yahoo effect

A. E. DYSON

On a recent Man Alive programme, Mr Quintin Hogg was confronted across the 'generation gap' with some young people, and the gap mysteriously failed to close. George Melly, recording this in the Observer. saw it as one of the 'absurd heresies' of Man Alive to hope that 'any- thing meaningful can come out of an argu- ment in which the two sides have nothing in common'. 'Quintin Hogg is not, in my view, a monster', he conceded, 'but he is a man of a certain generation, rooted in another age. None of the people they con- fronted him with could be expected to feel any sympathy with what he stood for, nor he for them, yet none of then; were monsters either . To argue fruitfully one must share at least a few basic premises. A waste of time'.

Now I am sure that Mr Melly, too, is not a monster, but he has some pretty monstrous assumptions. 'None of the

cople they confronted him with could be expected to feel any sympathy with what he stood for, nor he for them' . . . Why not? If a liberal education cannot help us to feel sympathy with people who are not absolutely like ourselves but not absolutely monstrous, what can it do? Sympathy with reasonably unlike people is a concerted aim of imagination and the arts. And why does Mr Melly say that Mr Hogg and these young people have 'nothing in com- mon'? It is not as if the BBC had confronted Mr Hogg, in a supremely trendy moment, with little green Martians. In fact, Quintin Hogg and the young people were all human beings, and living in England; they were all alive in 1969. They spoke the same language literally (and, if we discount the humbug, even figuratively); they were all capable of lively anger and indignation— Mr Hogg, indeed, is in the world champion- ship class. Mr Hogg, it is true, is a pro- fessional man of great ability and achieve- ment, and forty years the young people's senior, but this is no total obstacle in itself. It is to be hoped that some embryonic men of ability and achievement still exist in England.

Unsuccessful confrontations across the 'generation gap' usually seem to include that highly distinctive group of young people, perhaps preserved in cold storage by Rentacrowd, who are perfectly unable to be reconciled to society, or to com- municate, or to grasp a word that anyone over thirty says. 'Please pass the salt', we ask, and they reel back in amazement.

Please pass the salt, indeed!—as if we were

not guilty, they not innocent, and mere bourgeois syntax could expiate Hitler, Palmerston, the Borgias, the Emperor Nero, all our crimes! Yet young people like these are not in the least typical of the present younger generation; they are typical only of what the mass media regard as news. If Mr Hogg (for instance) had been confronted with really typical young people, he would have communi- cated with them with comparative ease. They might even have sat down for a civilised chat over sherry instead of being 'confronted', and discovered common views upon trendy producers, inarticulate claptrap, and allied themes.

Normal young people are very much the

victims of the communications industry, which seems determined to turn them all

into freaks. They suffer like the rest of us, in short, from the Yahoo Effect, as I pro- pose to call it here. The Yahoo Effect is a neat two-tiered process, not unlike a syllogism with an undistributed middle, which is making nonsense of our society at the present time. It begins with the per- ception (say) that 'Bishop believes in God' is not news, while 'Bishop disbelieves in God' is. So far, so usual; but now the second stage occurs. It is a nineteen-sixties discovery that whatever is news is new and new is progressive, and that whatever is progressive is relevant, exciting, meaning- ful, and on the side of life.

So the disbelieving bishop, who was news a fortnight ago for his rarity value, is news today as a trend. The pendulum swings left with irresistible vigour, knocking the other, reactionary, Powellite, socially ir- relevant bishops for six. A great public demand for restructuring the Church is everywhere asserted, with Tv and the posh papers well to the fore. By now, the dis- believing bishop is blessing Marcusians and discovering Christ among the hippies, and the Yahoo Effect is virtually complete. There may still be a few morose church- men who believe in God and are mildly unhappy, but is the Church to risk social irrelevance for the likes of them?

The Yahoo Effect is not an isolated phenomenon, or an altogether new one, but certain kinds of modern progressive nonsense make it worse. There has always been a tendency for news to create what it feeds upon, and for newsworthy sen- sations, which are by definition exception- al. to achieve a spurious typicality in public debate. But we now have the added ores- sire of a reckless egalitarianism, which first invests Gallup polls and random interviews with the degree of respect due only to informed opinion, and then makes informed opinion almost a sin. It becomes snobbish, elitist, undemocratic to prefer one opinion to another for traditional or in- tellectual reasons, or to doubt a popular consensus on any theme. At the same time, the Yahoo Effect gives an absolute advant- age to novelty, which no longer has to be remotely sensible to win assent. The dis- turbing aspect (to me) is that supposedly intellectual media of communication are now as vulnerable to the Yahoo Effect as the popular papers, and often behave as though no remnant of European culture --Hebraic, Hellenic and Christian— remained.

The real problem. clearly, is an edu- cational one, since education is the trad- itional and eternal opponent of the Yahoo Effect. But unfortunately, education is cur- rently infiltrated by yahoos and the Yahoo Effect, and failing to cope as it should. The most obvious failure is the observable ignorance of many young people, for which they themselves can scarcely be blamed. They have spent thousands of hours in classrooms, paid for by the public and supposedly learning, yet they cannot com- municate with Mr Hogg. The great Am- old;an idea of education has somewhere foundered; instead of the riches of civilisa- tion being made available to everyone wil-

ling and able to receive them, the riches of civilisation have been gently passed by.

It is my own experience as a teacher that, for at least fifteen years now, many schools have not been passing on know- ledge of the Greek and Latin classics, even to students whom they send to the uni- versity to read English Literature. More recently, the knowledge of Christianity has not been imparted. Seminars on Milton or Donne have to include, very often, some admittedly amateur expositions of the doctrines of the incarnation and original sin. These deprivations add up to more than random gaps in complex timetables; they indicate why a shared culture is put in doubt.

And why such deprivations? Not be- cause European culture has been intellectu- ally discredited, or morally improved upon, but because it has been tacitly ignored. The real enemy, I suspect, is child-centred- ness, that cult of self-expression and self- fulfilment which has made such inroads in secondary as well as primary schools since the war. In its crudest form, this amounts to the notion that children should only be taught what they want to learn, or are supposedly ready for, and that learning is a personal adventure, full of fun and ex- citement, with the teacher as companion, equal (of course) and friend. In practice, this often results in children showing no aptitude for learning anything very much; and, indeed, the child who spontaneously demands to be taught about Homer is observably rare. But even in schools where child-centredness is only a trend and not a gospel, it can have debilitating results. More and more, one encounters the notion that education is a matter of unfolding, or decoding, individual children, and that the teacher's responsibility to his subject hardly exists.

The importance of not exaggerating these trends must be balanced against the import- ance of not overlooking them; it is a per- ceptible fact that our culture has become fragmented, and that this is partly because a common culture, tradition and wisdom are not being passed on. And in so far as children at school are not stimulated and challenged to their fullest ability, their edu- cation has something of the nature of a hoax. The essential irony is that many of them certainly would enjoy learning far more than they do learn, if they were intro- duced to the necessary disciplines and facts. It is also ironic—or worse than ironic—that the very self-fulfilment which supposedly justifies child-centred education is self- defeating; how can you fulfil the self in a void? It is not merely that self-fulfilment is only worthwhile if the self is fulfilled worth- ily, but that self-fulfilment is only possible if the self is informed. An educated 'self' feeds on Greek and Christian writings, on philosophy, science and history, on fact and object, not on self-regarding sterilities from within.

What is needed now is an educational counter-revolution, which will ensure that learning prevails. We need teachers profes- sionally responsible for the subjects en- trusted to them, and schools where the real needs of talented children are met. At the same time, we need to keep alive for every educated person the wisdom of Europe. which some, but possibly only a minority now, of young people possess. If we achieve this, then Mr Hogg at seventy-five will find no shortage of young people whom he can communicate with; and he might even be allowed to do this on the box.