Daniel Maclise, Malvolio and the Countess, 1859

T he only amusing thing I ever heard Hannah Arendt say—admittedly I only met her once or twice—was at a seminar in Princeton. The speaker was Dwight Macdonald; his subject was the inanity (or worse) of popular culture, and as he warmed to his theme, the counter-example he increasingly invoked was that of Europe. On the one hand Masscult and Midcult; on the other hand Athens, Florence, Paris, Weimar … He drifted on in this vein for about five minutes, until Arendt, who was sitting in the front row, permitted herself a very audible whisper: “Ach, Dwight, I could tell you a thing or two about that old Europe of yours.”

No one in his right mind would want to defend the European past en bloc. In the twentieth century, Europe’s gifts to the world have included Nazism and Communism, and even before that, Europeans had quite as much to be ashamed of in their history as Asians, Africans, or anyone else. No, if one worries about the future of the European past, it is as well to make clear that the term is being used in a highly selective manner. It is shorthand, first, for the positive achievements of European culture, and secondly, for the principle of social continuity—not stasis or blind resistance to change, but continuity.

There is nothing new about the enormous impact of American popular culture in Europe.

In speaking of European culture, one immediately runs into an age-old problem. How far, except at a fairly high level of abstraction, does it actually exist? If you search long enough in the corridors of Brussels, you can no doubt discover a few officials who regard themselves as essentially European, and only incidentally French, German, or whatever; but the vast majority of Europeans continue to think of themselves first as French, German, or whatever. Europe remains a collection of cultures interlinked, sometimes overlapping, but still distinct; and the same is even truer of the various historical legacies which European groups do or don’t share. The past that a Russian brings to bear on his experience is as different from that of an Italian as that of a Norwegian is from that of an Irishman, or that of a Portuguese from that of a Pole.

Perhaps this will slowly change as economic and political integration proceeds. It certainly hasn’t changed yet. On the other hand, some traditional boundaries have become blurred: the past twenty or thirty years have seen an unprecedented drawing together of European habits and attitudes, especially among the young, and there are times when one feels that one really is witnessing the emergence of a trans-European culture. But it is a phenomenon that has little to do with the institutions of the European Union, still less to do with immemorial traditions—l’Europe aux anciens parapets—and everything to do with prosperity, fashion, easy travel, and the mass media.

Many of the ingredients of the common brew will be tediously familiar to Americans; most of them, indeed, are American in origin. Rock, rap, Rollerblades; Disney and McDonald’s; Quentin Tarantino, Beavis and Butt-head, Michael Jackson; and, if you want a handy symbol to sum up the whole phenomenon, you couldn’t do much better, for the moment, than the ubiquitous baseball cap. There is a comic strip running in the London Spectator, about an obstreperous youth called Henry King, which gives some idea of how acute this last problem has become: the only real happiness Henry’s parents know is when they are put in touch with a surgeon who has pioneered an operation designed to remove baseball caps from teenagers’ heads. Not that the fashion is confined to adolescents. Princess Diana is a great wearer of baseball caps. So was the late Robert Maxwell.

T here is, of course, nothing new about the enormous impact of American popular culture in Europe. It is a story as old as Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley; as old as Phineas T. Barnum (and in some respects, let it be said, a tribute to the superior energy and efficiency of the American product). But two things have changed over the past generation or so. First, Europeans have become more adept at generating mass entertainment and catering for mass consumption, in a manner which may still ultimately derive from American models but is far from merely imitative. (The Beatles were an obvious landmark here.) Secondly, pop culture is now so pervasive that it is thought of as being international rather than primarily American. There is much less transatlantic glamour attaching to it than there once was. It is part of the air that everybody breathes. Even the strongest cultural traditions have been eroded by the new dispensation. In a poll of 1,500 Italians recently published, over half of those questioned thought that Verdi’s Aïda was by Beethoven; on the other hand most of them had no difficulty identifying the soundtrack of Pulp Fiction.

It has also had the effect, as it has gathered power, of making the past seem not merely old, but obsolete. What inducement is there, in a world of instant gratification and continual change, for thinking about the past at all? Consider the lyrics of today’s pop songs: for the most part their range of reference is as narrow and impoverished as their vocabulary. The world began yesterday. But it wasn’t always like that. In the early years of the century the British musical-hall star Marie Lloyd used to sing a song that went, “I’m one of the ruins that Cromwell knocked about a bit”: it was one of her greatest hits, and we can assume that her largely working-class audience had at least some idea who Cromwell was. Today Britain must spend at least fifty times as much on education as it did in Marie Lloyd’s time—and if you came across a reference to Cromwell in a current pop song, it would seem as out of place as a Greek hexameter.

Even the strongest cultural traditions have been eroded by the new dispensation. Italy is the land of opera, and one of the happiest features of the Italian love of opera is that it has deep popular roots. But for anyone inclined to take too rosy a view of the situation, a poll of 1,500 Italians recently published in the Corriere della Sera makes instructive reading. Over half of those questioned, given a choice of composers, thought that Verdi’s Aïda was by Beethoven; on the other hand most of them had no difficulty identifying the soundtrack of Pulp Fiction. Asked who, in their opinion, best represented Italian music abroad, they voted for a number of local pop stars in preference to what might have seemed the predictable choice of Pavarotti.

Complaints about the decline of “cultural literacy” must be almost as common in Europe as they are in America. In every part of Europe, I would guess—but I will confine myself to Britain, the only country of which I can speak with anything like assurance.

Every so often British newspapers carry shock-horror stories about children’s lack of general knowledge. Teachers—some teachers—recount the latest examples of their students’ ignorance with gloomy relish. But has there actually been a deterioration in this respect? Weren’t things, as many people claim, just as bad in the past—a past which we have either forgotten or idealized?

Even the strongest cultural traditions have been eroded by the new dispensation.

It will probably never be possible to provide conclusive proof one way or the other, but certainly there is no shortage of evidence pointing to a decline. A recent instance, widely remarked on, is the return, after a number of years’ absence, of a popular television program called University Challenge, a general-knowledge quiz in which teams from different colleges are pitted against one another. In the 1960s and 1970s, the questions were difficult and the scores impressively high. In the 1990s, the questions remain difficult and most of the scores are depressingly low. They would be lower still if they weren’t buoyed up by lots of marks scored for questions about rock music, a category which was barely acknowledged twenty or twenty-five years ago. Here at least the students display solid scholarship—almost, you might say, to the point of pedantry.

A n even clearer demonstration of declining standards was provided this year by a Gallup survey in which two groups of people, one consisting of over-forty-fives and the other of under-twenty-fives, were asked a series of rudimentary questions about British history—Guy Fawkes, Sir Christopher Wren, 1066 and all that. The gulf between the old (or middle-aged) and the young was even plainer than one might have expected. The first group chalked up respectable scores, while the second group floundered. Most of the over-forty-fives, for instance, knew that the monarch in whose reign the Spanish Armada was defeated was Elizabeth. For most of the under-twenty-fives, it was a mystery.

It isn’t only a question of information, however, but also one of values, interests, and attitudes. Every year, for example, Madame Tussaud’s waxworks museum hands out a questionnaire asking visitors who they think is the greatest figure, past or present, British or foreign, on display. In 1960, the year in which the poll was instituted, the largest number of votes went to Churchill —a somewhat time-bound and parochial choice, perhaps, but hardly a discreditable one. This year the winner was Superman, with Princess Diana as runner-up.

But why should most people be expected to know any better, when one considers the influences by which they are bombarded? The gods of the media have become more real than reality—if a public figure has ever been portrayed in a play or film, for instance, his obituary is more likely to be accompanied by a picture of the actor who played him than by a picture of the man himself; and not a day goes by without a fresh assault being launched on established manners and habits of thought.

So much of the change is gratuitous, too, its only real purpose being to demonstrate that a marketing director, an editor, a producer knows how to stir things up. A particularly galling example is the current fashion for renaming pubs. Few British institutions, one might have supposed, were more indestructible, more part of the landscape, than the Red Lion, the Rose and Crown, the Wheatsheaf, or the King’s Head. Now you are liable to wake up and find that their names have been replaced overnight by something facetious and disagreeable—the Slug and Lettuce, say, or the Rat and Parrot—with a glossy new signboard to match. There is a pub in Kent that is mentioned in Dickens (though it is much older than that) which until the other day was always known as the Guy, Earl of Warwick. Now it is the Ferret and Trouser Leg. Not a major tragedy, perhaps, but another thread torn from the social fabric. The Red Lion and the Rose and Crown have something in common, however tenuous, with the Tabard in Chaucer or the Boar’s Head in Shakespeare. The Ferret and Trouser Leg is a publicist’s bad joke. What is particularly disheartening about the junking of the past is how little resistance has been offered by institutions which not so long ago would have been considered bulwarks of social stability. On the contrary, many of them seem anxious to speed the process on its way.

W hat is particularly disheartening about the junking of the past is how little resistance has been offered by institutions which not so long ago would have been considered bulwarks of social stability. On the contrary, many of them seem anxious to speed the process on its way: the sentries have abandoned their posts and clambered aboard the bandwagon. Take the Church of England. For anyone with a sense of its history, and of the cultural coloration which it has always given to English life as a whole, it is impossible not to feel dismayed by its attempts to jazz itself up and project a user-friendly image. One especially striking aspect of decline, which impoverishes everybody, is its attitude to language and liturgy. For the past thirty-five years, ever since the publication of the New English Bible, it has been busy turning poetry into prose, and pretty undistinguished prose at that; and though its efforts in this respect have met with plenty of criticism, it continues to press blithely ahead. A new Church of England songbook, aimed primarily at children, but also intended for adults “who want to let their hair down,” includes compositions bearing such titles as I Like Eating Sandwiches and Cakes and Prayer Is Like a Telephone. In one song, Who’s the King of the Jungle?, the congregation is invited to act and sound like monkeys. Another contains the line “He gives me lips to eat my chips.” One hopes the children are going to enjoy all this stuff; but reading about it, I couldn’t help recalling D. H. Lawrence’s beautiful essay “Hymns in a Man’s Life,” with its tribute to the power of hymns—good hymns, the kind that are being driven out by cake and sandwiches—to seize and enlarge a child’s imagination.

The Church’s latest stunt has been to unveil a corporate logo (who would ever have supposed that it needed one?) which has been specially devised for it by a commercial design group: an emblem combining the letter c, the letter e, and a cross, to be displayed on notepaper, signboards, and so forth in “warm episcopal purple.” The purpose, we are told, is to improve the Church’s credibility and to make it “more relevant to younger people.” In this sign shalt thou conquer.

Then there is the BBC . The old BBC had its faults (as what does not?), but it also had enormous virtues. Many of those virtues still survive, in depleted or fragmented fashion: if you listened and viewed selectively enough, you might just about persuade yourself the character of the Corporation was essentially unchanged. But it would be an illusion. Over the past generation a great deal of the BBC ’s regular output has been coarsened, or radicalized, or both. Soap operas about the supposedly everyday life of supposedly ordinary people now feature incest, AIDS , cocaine, and gangland killings in pell-mell profusion. (Their predecessors look positively pastoral by contrast.) The most popular current broadcaster on BBC radio, someone called Chris Evans, is a hooligan who has to be heard to be believed. On magazine programs and the like, middle-class values are constantly assailed and ridiculed. At least, middle-class values are what they tend to get called: in my experience they have always been shared by most working-class people as well, but “middle-class” has established itself as a reliable term of abuse.

The week in culture. Recommendations from the editors of The New Criterion, delivered directly to your inbox.

One further example of shifting standards—a smaller one, but highly symptomatic. The National Portrait Gallery in London is a noble institution, possibly the finest gallery of its kind in the world. Until some fifteen years ago, in accordance with its Victorian statutes, it wasn’t allowed to purchase or accept portraits of living men and women. That almost inevitably had to change; and given that the Gallery is already well supplied with the dead, it is no great surprise if the living now make up around half the annual list of acquisitions. What would have been almost impossible to predict, on the other hand, even fifteen years ago, is the composition of the latest such list. Businessmen (of the headline-catching variety) and entertainers are generously represented, science and scholarship barely at all. There are no classical musicians, but space has been found for the pop singer Sting and for Malcolm McLaren, the founder of the punk group the Sex Pistols.

This democratization (shall we call it?) has been going on for some time. Step into the twentieth-century section of the Gallery, and where the first face that caught your eye might once have been that of Vaughan Williams or John Maynard Keynes, you are liable to find yourself confronted by sports stars, fashion designers, television personalities. The Gallery’s portrait of Auden now hangs alongside a particularly glitzy portrait of the pop singer Elton John, in a room dominated by a large picture of Paul McCartney. And meanwhile notable figures from the past have been relegated or removed. Mrs. Gaskell, for example, has been packed off to a branch of the Gallery in Wales. The most effective remedy for our cultural discontents is naturally education—or rather it would be, if one didn’t know better. Never has it been more up to teachers to defend high culture and protect what is worth preserving from the past. Never have so many of them gloried in not doing so.

T here is no need, perhaps, to cite further instances of the way in which new values have taken hold in old places. To do so might seem to be laboring the point. Yet part of the point is the sheer number of such instances. They keep streaming in, day after day, from all directions. A famous school, Harrow—Churchill’s old school, and Byron’s—builds its own theater: the first play the pupils perform in it is Angels in America. The Post Office turns down requests for a commemorative stamp marking the centenary of William Morris in favor of a stamp celebrating a television puppet of the 1950s called Muffin the Mule. It isn’t some eager new university but a Cambridge college that elects Emma Thompson an honorary fellow. It isn’t some fly-by-night publisher but Faber and Faber that gives a rock guitarist a place on the editorial board.

The most effective remedy for our cultural discontents is naturally education—or it would be, if one didn’t know better. Never has it been more up to teachers to defend high culture and protect what is worth preserving from the past. Never have so many of them gloried in not doing so.

The situation, one must concede, is complicated. Consider the academic study of history. Readers of The New Criterion don’t need to be told about the troubles that beset it in America, and similar problems are far from unknown in England. Neo-Marxists toil in their vineyards, Michel Foucault casts a long shadow, radical feminists go about their appointed tasks. But there are powerful countervailing forces as well. History remains a flourishing discipline in Britain: to take only one example, this year has seen the publication of a remarkable history of Europe, which would have been done credit to any age, by the British historian Norman Davies. As long as such books appear, it would be absurd to launch into a wholesale jeremiad.

Publicity can be misleading, too. Penguin Books is bringing out a multivolume history of Britain, to replace the one which they published in the years following World War II (and which has been a standby for students ever since). In his initial announcement, the general editor, David Cannadine, made it sound as though it was going to be ruthlessly revisionist, cutting Britain down to size, written from the perspective of a small island rather than that of a former power with global pretensions. This is quite a popular line at present. It suits the national mood of masochism; one suspects that it also plays rather well in America. In reality, one need hardly add, no serious British historian has been in danger of writing triumphalist or imperialist history for a very long time. So one gritted one’s teeth and waited. But the first two volumes of the project—on the seventeenth century and the twentieth century—have now appeared, and they turn out to be solid, straightforward, and quite free from any taint of trendiness.

Professional historians must be left to fight their battles among themselves. More important, for society as a whole, is the teaching of history in schools, and the general hum and buzz of historical awareness in the world at large. Here—witness the Gallup survey, witness those television quizzes—there is undoubted cause for gloom. The history taught in British state schools is now mostly confined to recent times. In foreign affairs, it tends to be history of the we-were-wrong variety, in domestic affairs it puts disproportionate emphasis on “history from below.” It attaches greater value to empathy than to facts: children are supposed to explore and find out for themselves (with a few nudges toward the Left). A British newspaper, commenting on the number of younger respondents to the Gallup survey who didn’t know about the Armada, suggested that there were only two possibilities: either they hadn’t been taught about it at all, or they had simply been told that there had been an Anglo-Spanish naval engagement, and then asked to write an essay expressing the feelings of the widow of a Spanish sailor.

T here may be worse to come. The crisis in history-teaching is part of a more general breakdown of standards in education; it is all of a piece with the policy of dismissing instruction in punctuation and grammar as “hegemonic,” or the belief that you empower children by not correcting their mistakes. But history has also been specifically targeted. There have been proposals for removing it from the school syllabus altogether; and if that sounds far-fetched, consider the recent experience of Spain. There is at present no teaching of history in Spanish schools, although the government is planning to reinstate it as soon as possible: it was abolished by the previous government, led by the Socialist Felipe González, and replaced by a cooked-up course (for students between the ages twelve and sixteen) labeled “social sciences.” According to the new Spanish minister for education and culture, Esperanza Aguirre, it wasn’t until she began examining the situation in detail that its full bleakness was brought home to her—that she realized that there was now no reason why a Spanish schoolchild should ever learn of the existence of Julius Caesar, for example. (It is somewhat droll, given the revelations about British ignorance of the Armada, that another figure she should cite—but she was speaking to a British journalist, so perhaps she was teasing—was Sir Francis Drake: “A Spanish child has a right to learn about Drake. And about the galleons he looted.”)

As for the positive content of the social sciences course, it turns out, according to Señora Aguirre, to be even more slanted than one might have supposed. The textbooks prepared for it are littered with references to neo-colonialism and “the crisis in the liberal-bourgeois world.” A section on “the evolution of ideology after the Second World War” contains expositions of Marxism and existentialism, but capitalism is mentioned only in connection with such topics as Third World debt.

It seems to me unlikely (though you can never be sure) that the Spanish experiment will be attempted in Britain, and if it were, I doubt whether it would have the effect its architects intended. The chief effect of dismantling old-style education, as far as I can make out, has not been to create an appetite for new-style education, but to create an even bigger vacuum for “youth culture” to rush in and fill. A student who has been force-fed Marxism and existentialism is more likely than ever, once he escapes, to take refuge in the excitements of rock and pop (and possibly even stronger substances).

It is now possible to study English at college level and emerge ignorant of almost everything written before the twentieth century.

It is now possible to study English at college level and emerge ignorant of almost everything written before the twentieth century.

Meanwhile, there is still a lively public interest in history, and in many respects it is still very well catered for. Every week, for example, large numbers of people visit the historic homes administered by the National Trust (though they don’t always win the approval of their intellectual betters for doing so: Jonathan Miller, with his inimitable command of metaphor, has said that the British would “walk through a lake of pus” in order to see a country house). Again, serious historical exhibitions are still packed and serious historical biographies still figure prominently on publishers’ lists: a leading daily paper can still run a series extending over several weeks on the latest state of knowledge about Roman Britain. And there are still serious historical programs on television, if you know where to look for them—though they tend to be shown at unsociable hours, and you can’t help feeling that they have an increasingly old-fashioned air. A better guide to the future is probably the history channel on British satellite television, in which “history” all too often turns out to be what would once have been called current affairs, with a strong dash of show business. As I write, for example, half the current week’s schedule consists of biographical programs; the subjects are George Bush, Saddam Hussein, Sherlock Holmes, Lord Mountbatten, Hillary Clinton, O.J. Simpson, Yitzak Rabin, Jules Verne, Audrey Hepburn, and Buffalo Bill. You wonder whether they will ever get round to the ruins that Cromwell knocked about a bit.The manufacturers of popular entertainment still show a certain fitful interest in the past, but much less of one than formerly; and one isn’t necessarily inclined to feel grateful to them when they do. If I may intrude a personal note, I recently went back, for the first time for over thirty years, to take a look at the house where I spent my early childhood: it is now a video store, and the window was dominated by a life-size cut-out of Kevin Costner as Robin Hood. (Costner may well be an even bigger star in Europe than in America: “Kevin” is currently the most popular boy’s name in France.) A lowering experience—though no doubt we can survive a politically correct version of Robin Hood, just as we can survive the hostile caricatures of British officials in the latest Disney version of The Jungle Book. The distortions and anti-English bias of a Hollywood movie like Braveheart (about the Scottish hero William Wallace) are more serious, however, and those of a movie like Michael Collins positively pernicious. It shouldn’t be forgotten, in fact, that the future of the European past is partly being shaped in America. And when it comes to education proper, and the recent decision that New York schoolchildren should be taught that the Irish famine of the 1840s was on a par with the Holocaust, what can we do but throw up our hands? (One place where this decision has excited interest, not surprisingly, is Germany, and it is a sign of the way media culture tends to work, even in the most distinguished quarters, that the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung should have commissioned an article about it, not from one of the many excellent Irish or English historians who would have been available, but from the literary critic and republican sympathizer Terry Eagleton.)

The same triumph of short-term memory can be widely observed in other areas—in the study of literature, for example. It isn’t uncommon to read about such things as the recent case of the headmaster whose school was accused of neglecting serious literature, and who protested that, far from it, his pupils were actually studying the classics: “this year we’re doing Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath.” No educational reformer, as far as I know, has yet proposed that schools should drop the literature of the past completely, but as time goes by poor Shakespeare has more and more had to shoulder the burden of representing it all by himself —or at most with a little assistance from Jane Austen or Hardy. Nor is the situation very different in the lower reaches of the British university system. It is now possible to study English at college level and emerge ignorant of almost everything written before the twentieth century.

It is against this background that some critics have found consolation in the recent wave of movies and television series based on literary classics. For sterner spirits, even the best of these adaptations, though they plainly vary a great deal in merit, are irreparably marred by anachronisms and false notes: they represent a betrayal. There are two irreconcilable doctrines—either “something is better than nothing,” or “nothing but the best will do”—and I must admit that, like many people, I find myself caught between them. Fortunately, however, this isn’t a major problem. If you don’t like the adaptations, the books themselves are still there, waiting to be read without benefit of a go-between. Modern theater directors, like other modern artists and intellectuals, are frequently engaged in selling an apocalyptic or anarchic version of the world which doesn’t bear much relation to the way most people live—which probably doesn’t bear much relation to the way most of them live themselves.

I n the theater, on the other hand, the question of interpretation is inescapable, and in recent years, while I have been working as a drama critic, hardly a week has gone by without my being forced to consider our relationship—and responsibilities—to the art of the past. Some of the productions of classics that I see are admirable (and they include productions of minor classics that theatergoers haven’t had a chance to see for generations). Many of them, however, are disfigured by the kind of gimmicks that go by the flattering name of “concepts” among their admirers, and quite a few are insulting travesties of the works which they purport to present. Time after time, though I ought to know better by now, I settle down hoping to see King Lear, or The Tempest, or Hamlet, and find myself watching a Lear who starts off (in Act One, Scene One) in a wheelchair, playing silly games, or an Ariel who ends up spitting in Prospero’s face, or an Ophelia whose dress is stained with menstrual blood—you know the kind of thing. And it isn’t only Shakespeare who suffers in this way. Lady Bracknell turns up played by a drag queen; Congreve’s The Way of the World is acted out amid rubbish stuffed into black plastic bags.

Even the most unlikely candidates are given a going-over. The other day, for instance, I saw a production of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, which is one of Bernard Shaw’s earliest plays, and one of his better ones. It was a good production, for the most part, but in case we should think he lacked originality the director had brought the action forward from the 1890s to the 1920s, and a hundred social nuances were lost in the process.

Still, Shakespeare remains the prime victim of “innovations,” and one disastrous production stays in my mind in particular— partly because of the initial sympathy with which I approached it, partly because of its subsequent reception. Since the advent of the National Theatre, and the establishment of a permanent base for the Royal Shakespeare Company in London, Shakespeare has seldom been produced in the West End, and when a Shaftesbury Avenue management decided to stage Much Ado About Nothing several years back, it was the first Shakespeare production on that celebrated theatrical thoroughfare for forty years. I found it hard not to feel well disposed toward it in advance; in addition, my hopes were colored by memories of a magnificent production of the same play with John Geilgud that I had seen in the West End when I was young. But alas, this time Benedick had a droopy little moustache, capered around like a slapstick comedian in a silent movie, and spoke with a thick Ulster accent which bore no relation to the way anyone else spoke. Beatrice was a slattern who made her first entrance stuffing her mouth with a banana. “Sigh No More, Ladies” was turned into a square dance, complete with gingham dresses and jeans. The subtleties of the play were wrecked. The poetry went out the window.

That the production received some enthusiastic reviews didn’t altogether surprise me. What was dismaying, on the other hand, was that it rapidly became that comparatively rare thing in the contemporary theater, a hit with the young. Friends told me that it had aroused an enthusiasm for Shakespeare in their children which they had never hoped to see. After I had made some uncomplimentary remarks about it in the course of a talk, a woman in the audience came up to to me with a stricken look: she was a schoolteacher who had taken her class to see it, and if I only knew what it was usually like trying to get young people interested … How could I fail to feel a twinge of sympathy? But whatever the young people were getting out of it, I don’t think it was Shakespeare. There are times when something is less than nothing.

“Sigh No More, Ladies” was turned into a square dance, complete with gingham dresses and jeans. The subtleties of the play were wrecked. The poetry went out the window.

A nd what is the updating and relocating of plays that takes place in the theater all about? Occasionally, it serves a clear political purpose. Not long ago, for example, there was a big production of Euripides’ Trojan Women at the National Theatre, in which the Trojans (good) were presented as an array of international types, while the Greeks (bad) were uniformed Americans straight from Vietnam. But this kind of direct equation is less common than it used to be. Most of the juggling of periods and styles (as in the Much Ado) is far more wanton and arbitrary. There is logic in a doublet-and-hose production of Shakespeare (which is about the most revolutionary thing anyone could propose at present), or in a production which reflects a play’s setting (Romans wearing togas), or in a modern-dress production, but most contemporary productions are none of these things. Instead, they abound in strange juxtapositions. A duchess who might have stepped out of a Renaissance painting chain-smokes, while her brother is got up like a Ruritanian general. Russian boyars jostle with Edwardian clubmen and Italian fascisti. If half the Romans wear togas, the other half seem to be serving under Napoleon. Motorbikes appear from nowhere. Knights wear armor, when they are not sporting black leather, and humble folk shuffle along in what a colleague of mine calls “old overcoats.” The preferred term in the trade for all this is “mixed period.” The effect is a mishmash.

It may seem odd, given the semi-Marxist ideas that float around in the theater, that there aren’t more attempts by directors to set Shakespeare in his social context. If there were, we would surely see more Elizabethan-dress productions. But perhaps the Marxism doesn’t go very deep, and it would be truer to talk of a vague amorphous leftism. At all events, the impression we are left with by most modern productions of his work, and of other classics, is of the past as an impossible jumble. “’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.”

A great deal of this reflects the desire to break things rather than the reality of breakage. Modern theater directors, like other modern artists and intellectuals (to say nothing of sub-artists and sub-intellectuals), are frequently engaged in selling an apocalyptic or anarchic version of the world which doesn’t bear much relation to the way most people live—which probably doesn’t bear much relation to the way most of them live themselves. Still, they find a widespread echo; and if they are part of the problem, that only means that the problem is even bigger than it would have been without them. We should do everything we can to resist the false diagnoses, the meretricious solutions, the revolutionary zeal of people who still haven’t learned the lessons of the past eighty years; but in the end we are still liable to be left with the sensation of living in a society that is adrift, a society which has lost its narrative thread.

This is a condition which, however reluctantly, I believe we have got to learn to live with. We can work to defend what is left of our civic culture, and to restore some of what has been lost; but any panacea that is proposed for our disorders is likely to turn out to be much worse than the disease. I don’t think we should underestimate the potential for tyranny that lurks in our society. Today’s demagogue remains tomorrow’s gauleiter. Today’s ideologue remains tomorrow’s commissar.

A s for the future of the European past, it seems to me too big a question to admit of a coherent answer. The one thing we can safely predict about the past is that there is no going back to it. Beyond that, I think it probable that the culture of a federal Europe will grow steadily less European, in any traditional sense. There will be no shortage of festivals and galas and cultural commissions, but they will be synthetic, without roots. But I could be wrong, and meanwhile we can still learn from the past, and learn about it, and try to defend its achievements from the depredations of pop, postmodernism, and all the other forces ranged against them. There are endless battles to be fought, even if we lack a grand strategy.