- guardian.co.uk, Saturday October 28 2000 01.02 BST
The only problem is that Britain's 18- to 24-year-olds - our GCSE generation - seem rather ignorant. They may have their neuroses. Only 47% can identify Sigmund Freud as a psychiatrist. Lucian painted in vain; while the poet laureate's evocation of the Queen Mother's hats has passed them by. Whether profound or trivial, for young Britannia, the cultural happens to other people. Perhaps youth is another country where they do things differently. Perhaps behind this litany of ignorance there lurks a parallel universe of excitingly contemporary artistic relevance that escapes this particular scrutiny. Perhaps the GCSE-ites are more interested in the glories of mute Miltons who lurk outside the net of the Great Tradition. Yet, two-thirds of them can't even identify JK Rowling as the author of Harry Potter.
The most bleak conclusions of ICM's cultural poll relate to the canonic: to events, authors, discoveries and achievements which seem so fundamental that you don't need to check that they're still remembered. That is why the poll shocks. The causes behind this modern Dunciad's arrival are many. The stale old English cocktail of class and education always did reserve culture for the few. But there are some modern kicks in it these days. There's the ease of the left-right consensus which lies behind the modern British philistinism in education and all that noisy Benthamite busybodyism. On the left there's the fear that canonised excellence always reflects a petrified authoritarianism. On the right there's been a parallel paranoia: the pursuit of 'relevance' and the invention of a regulatory state in the name of educational 'market forces'. Both have created rootlessness and ignorance.
In Russia, 10-year-olds learn Lermontov's Borodino by heart; 90% of Britain's young adults can't identify Waterloo as the main conflict of 1815. Perhaps national suffering is a better nurse of culture than GDP contentment. But why should this cultural deracination matter? A fact is a stubborn thing, wonderful in its power to puncture pretension and deflate a theory. Our mass entertainment culture has been good at spreading materialistic egalitarianism. The stuffiness of the old hierarchies have gone. But in its place has arrived a glibness, an ability to talk a good game, and the talent to ape the chat-show presenter and the confessionalist interviewee. Getting away with it and larging it are now important national characteristics. Killer facts are lethal blows against the glib bullshitter. But knowing elementary things about who, where and when becomes a rare virtue.
This knowledge is important because it both humbles and inspires. To know what others have achieved is to recognise genius and glimpse self-sacrifice. It provides a scale, rather than a dispiriting shadow cast by the past on the present. If Dickens and Shakespeare, Cromwell and Chaucer, Pankhurst and Livingstone, are literally less than names to you then you're cut off from a whole world of possibility and of emancipation. Marooned on an island where only the urgently evanescent matters, the cultural amnesiac loses direction. Discrimination drops away. It's a significant moment of opportunity for charlatans to peddle their wares; for the meretricious, the bogus and the derivative in art and politics alike. Knowledge means the power to say no, and the ability to give reasons for the rejection.
It matters that 93% can't identify Paradise Lost as Milton's most famous poem. Milton is our second greatest poet, without Shakespeare's irritatingly burlesque fondness for the easy pun and pointless wordplay. But ignorance about the poet who is also our greatest republican carries an even higher price than aesthetic loss. Only one in five of the 18- to 24-year-olds could identify the two sides in the English Civil War, and Tom Paine's Rights of Man failed to register with a miserable 94%. The loss of a tradition of defiance and rebellion makes for passivity.
England is a notoriously non-political country. The same craze for personality which leads us to be more interested in the lives of artists than in their achievements means that our politics is conducted in terms of biography. It's been an important aspect of the Blair premiership. That once-fabled power to emote at the drop of a hat had a special appeal to a generation for whom history is an aspect of empathy rather than an exercise in knowledge and criticism. There are some forms of naivety which are more dangerous than charming. Ignorance of 1900-45 prime ministers means that you can neither name and shame nor extol those who for good or ill helped make the world you live in now. This is not a matter of fusty antiquarianism. Innocence of Bonar Law's existence is a bearable condition, perhaps even of the Marquess of Salisbury's. But Lloyd George, the creator of the Welfare State, and Neville Chamberlain, the architect of Appeasement, are in a different league.
Young Britain offers a combination of residual Churchillianism (whose wartime leadership was identified by 30% of the age cohort) and Fat Boy Slimmery (whose peacetime disc-jockeydom is known to 93% of them); apathy, therefore, with a youthful and capitalist face. The age of information overload is also the age of culpable ignorance. More has, truly, meant less. The past is not an authoritarian domain, despite the best conservative attempts at inventing a nationalised, homogenised culture. Ignorance of past struggle is an important source of mental slavery to outworn dogma. History in Britain was once a Whiggish, providentialist and insular story of deliverance by pragmatism, property rights and Protestantism: Magna Carta as the founding stone of constitutional liberty; the Domesday Book as the result of the last successful invasion.
Revisionists now resile. We know now that the 13th-century parliament owed more to a baronial grab for power than to some protodemocratic zeal. Every healthy culture winnows and chooses a past which it finds useful. But something has been lost. In order to revise you need to know something to begin with. The historian and the critic are the beneficiaries of what they can kick against. But the consequence of kicking against the traces is a generation whose minds are more empty than open. Medieval England, in particular, has disappeared off the map - part of a general loss of Britishness in a devolutionary age. But it helps to understand our present European debate if we know that Chaucer thought as naturally in French as in English, that Angles, Saxons and Franks are all, in origin, Germanic tribes.
It was always a large hope that knowledge leads to liberty, that the better informed are also the tolerant and compassionate. That project of the 18th-century, Enlightenment, has suffered its 20th-century blows. But without some kind of version of that hope it is difficult to see why education and culture are worth doing at all. 'Compare and contrast' seems an instruction from an educational Dark Ages. But the ability to do just that lies at the heart of all cultural progress and debate. Britten looks back to Purcell - and recognition of that fact makes for a better appreciation of both. Bach's partitas and Chopin's mazurkas become even greater achievements if we know the form they mastered and transcended. The shock of the new is only a shock if you know what went before. Context and memory, if not all, are still quite a lot when it comes to the best that has been thought and done.
• Hywel Williams is the author of Guilty Men: Conservative Decline and Fall (Aurum, £19.95). His Short History of the World is published next year by Weidenfeld
