The library at Cumberland Lodge contains extraordinary and unexpected treasures. Last week I discovered the text of a lecture given by E.H. Gombrich at the London School of Economics in 1961, entitled: The Tradition of General Knowledge.
Click here to find out more about Gombrich’s involvement with Cumberland Lodge>>
Gombrich begins his lecture by retelling the plot of an Agatha Christie novel in which a murderess poses as her victim in order to cover up the crime. The imposter is unmasked at a luncheon party at Claridge’s because she thinks that the right response to a mention of the ‘judgement of Paris’ is to say that New York and London are far more in vogue. The murderess’ lack of a classical education marks her out as from the wrong social class and thus as an imposter.
Gombrich rightly castigates the superficial use of classical education as the marker of status, drily observing, though, that: “...the possession of knowledge is not, after all, a worse touchstone than the possession of more tangible status symbols such as cars, yachts, or Impressionist paintings” (p.4).
Classical education is, in the Christie story, a commodity which is exchanged for entry into an exclusive club. Just like other forms of capital, then, knowledge of classical culture has an exchange value. Has that value increased or diminished since the ‘60s?
Gombrich seems to predict that, for a multitude of reasons, the scope of cultural capital has and will continue to diminish. It’s no longer knowing about Lycurgus, Pericles, or what the ‘judgement of Paris’ is, that is important. Now it is more important to understand an allusion to Cliff Richard (well, he was writing in 1961). In other words, cultural capital has become transient: “...speech is interlaced with phrases and catchwords from the popular [media] which for the habitué evoke a whole chain of associations and are forgotten tomorrow.” (p.10). So contemporary cultural capital has a very limited shelf-life as an exchangeable commodity: Greek mythology is timeless in a way that pop music is not, but whereas the one has decreased in value the other has risen.
Where does this leave the value of classical education? Clearly its value as capital has diminished – as the possibilities for social networking and material possession has exponentially increased, classical education appears to have been crowded out as the marker of status. Now Christie would be more plausible if it were a fake Rolex that marked out the murderess.
Does classical education have a value quite apart from its value as an exchangeable good? Of course, and now that it has less currency as a status symbol its true value has become clearer. What is that? Well, to paraphrase Gombrich: knowing your classics makes you open to the permanent possibilities of interpreting the life and duties of mankind. In other words, the value of education is not possessive or exchangeable, but reflective: it’s about realising that your habits of mind offer but one interpretation of life among many.
Owen Gower
Senior Fellow
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