Cultural Continuity and a Scottish Tradition

Extract

Can the university—even a radically reformed university—really carry the burden of providing our society with ‘memory and mature purpose’, as Dr Leavis keeps hoping? Remembering some of his more recent essays while staying in fairly remote parts of Scotland this summer, I began once again to reflect on how much the schools fail to do and yet could so easily undertake (as a handful of rare teachers have always done)—if only we could unlearn the attitude to language that has prevailed from the beginning of public education a century or so ago. Gaelic steadily declines in the Hebrides, the vital remnant of the Scottish Gaidhealtachd, and the Buchan dialect in the north-east of Scotland is losing its vigour. In both cases the schools are where the native speech dies. If this is a matter of conscious political decision at all, it is only because we submit to the priorities of the commercial system and allow our conception of language and life to be dictated to us by that. Seeing a language die out doesn’t bother the man who regards language as simply a means for exchanging ideas: for him another language can easily be substituted. But if language is, as Dr Leavis says, what creates ‘the human world of values and significances and spiritual graces’, then it is surely clear that ‘exchanging ideas’ is much less than an adequate description of the place of language in human life. Hard Times, which came out in 1854, surely is the moral fable for our time Dr Leavis has so long insisted it is: bland and dulcified as it now is, Mr Gradgrind’s Utilitarianism still shuts out what Sleary’s Horseriding represents. ‘Louisa, never wonder’, Mr Gradgrind said to his daughter. But wonder is the most essential response to reality and a language surely begins as a people’s way of wording their sense of the place in which they dwell. Any given language is the tradition— the living and developing tradition—springing from the original sense a people had of its place on the earth. All significance must derive from the significance a place must have had for a people, whether it meant security and home or seemed eery and alien, or whatever.