Any patriotic renewal for the English and British as a whole needs to concentrate on the cultural reinvigoration of national life. All of which will involve a concerted attempt to raise the present dissolution of cultural ability, taste, talent, and appreciation through proactive measures. First of all, we have to remember—in the manner of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy—that Kultur is hierarchical, mercilessly so. There exists a definite and elitist projection of culture, wherein low or folk culture feeds into middling and/or explanatory forms which then finds its full elitist flowering in high culture. The latter needs to be given to the people openly and blatantly through mass forms—on television, the radio, on the Internet, by virtue of the mass airing of advanced music in public places, etc. Muzak will and must be replaced by the musicology of Tallis, Byrd, Taverner, Purcell, Bliss, Bax, Ireland, Walton, Delius, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Smyth, Britten, Mathias, and so on.
All cultural initiatives must be evolutionary and will point away from the materialistic, the somatic, the low-grade and the non-European towards spiritual growth, mental hygiene, eugenic potentiality, and the possibility of creative genius—whilst being grounded in the reality of the senses and the erotic. On the practical front: all galleries, museums, cultural institutes, scientific institutions, and such like, must be free of charge to the general public. All cultural patrimony obtained through imperial progress (such as the Elgin marbles at the British Museum) must remain in this country. All attempts to remove the country’s heroic racial past—the dismantling of statues to heroes who put down the Indian mutiny, for instance—need to be resisted in a similar manner to the UN’s efforts to prevent the Taliban destroying Buddhist antiquities in Afghanistan.
“Censorship” must also be applied to forms which are egalitarian, anti-elitist, “politically incorrect” in their so-called “political correctness,” ultra-liberal liberal, miscegenatory, or scatological pornographic—always with the proviso that great art is possessed by the dialectic of death and sexuality (witness Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus), that periods of decadence can combine with periods of Renaissance, and that the censorship spoken of relates to the marginalization of pieces like Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain instead of a celebration of Restorationist drama, rather than the reverse.
Likewise, poetry, rhetoric, Latin, Ancient Greek, the drama (in which we have excelled as a Nation), music, dance, sculpture, painting, and drawing must be taught at school. The false antithesis between sport and artistic culture must end—there needs to be a synthesis between the mind and the body, not the converse. Our ideal must be a combination of the spirit of the artist and the soldier in one man, in many men. To that end: national competitions from early adolescence until adulthood, and then after, need to be established throughout the nation. The logic of competition and the “death by combat” of the artistic sword needs to be universally institutionalized as in the case of the world-renowned Leeds Piano Competition, for example. Several universities or advanced polytechnics need to be created in order to solely foster genius—namely creative and artistic potential often in those with a G-factor intelligence of over 148 IQ (the Mensa criterion of genius). Similarly, later genetic experimentation so as to raise human intelligence across the board by operating directly on the gene-line should not be shunned. Even though these developments are maybe a century off (minus ten to twenty years) no religious or ethical scruple should waylay the nation from developing the biological basis of talent for its own sake.
Also, a subcommittee of the Arts Council needs to be created in order to facilitate creative genius at every level. All power on such a body needs to be vested in one man—nothing can ever be done creatively with committees; all genuine culture is created in a progressively dictatorial manner. The subcommittee chairman would doubtless change every year or so—but he would be charged with providing a plethora of modest bohemian bursaries to enable people to live while writing plays, film scripts, painting, acting, sculpting, finishing symphonies, and the like. All such monies would be kept very tight; all such grants would lead to publication or performance. Private sector equivalents need to be encouraged, and all private sector donations to the Arts and creativity in general must be made tax exempt. While all artistic bodies must be based on a principle of permanent revolution—after a time all state theatre companies, performing arts organizations, and grant-in-aid bodies must dissolve their management teams and seek outside replacements—with the proviso that such groups must be solely or primarily funded by the tax-payer. If not, then the pressure of the marketplace doubtless suffices.
This revolving-door policy will guard against cliques, nepotism, personal networks, and the boosting of safe or affordable work which at the present time relates to a totalitarian liberal bias in culture—towards the work, say, of Acker, Rushdie, Pinter, MacInnes, and Kureshi, as against the relativistic iconoclasm of a Powell, a Pressburger, a Scruton, a Wyndham Lewis, or in contemporary German culture, a Syberberg.
Finally, the State and private-public partnerships must invest in ultra-modern technology so as to project the greatest images onto buildings, in public places, in the air, on trams and means of public conveyance, even in the sky—in short, all of the techniques presently used to bombard the citizenry with advertising must be used to convey images which (just to restrict it to the British tradition) could see Turner’s The Fighting “Temeraire” tugged to her last berth to be broken up (1838) floating in the ether above Trafalgar Square, adjacent to the National Gallery.
This brief, privately circulated essay by Jonathan Bowden is from early 2001. I wish to thank Adrian Davies for providing it.
—Greg Johnson, Editor-in-Chief, Counter-Currents
This article originally appeared on Counter-Currents and is republished by The Noticer with permission.
