Humanity Woz Ere

Ben Wildsmith

Thinking is hard. I’d rather lie spread-eagled on the couch dribbling Doritos dust down my George-at-Asda T-shirt whilst Netflix injects Yellowstone into my passive brain like anaesthetic, if I’m honest.

Firing up my decrepit neurons in search of truth and beauty seems like a losing game when AI can out-think me at every turn. What’s the point?

Well, it’s something to do, isn’t it? When an unremitting blizzard of digital information is hurtling past, and often through me, it creates the illusion that I’m a participant rather than an intellectual vole being ploughed up by the JCBs of the Big Tech.

Staring flintily into the half-distance, I can sigh portentously before subjecting my spouse or colleague to whatever poorly-researched notion I’ve managed to assemble from said blizzard and experience the dignity of my humanity.

‘That’s nice, dear…’

Niche

Now that we don’t have to bother, and Grok would prefer we didn’t, thinking is becoming a niche hobby: orienteering without the need for a cagoul. We do it because we have, if we are lucky, been trained to for our improvement and enjoyment.  That exercising reason and imagination are the pleasures that separate us from animals was the motivation behind the most prized of all human privileges, an education.

Canterbury Cathedral has an exhibition on at the moment. An artist has created stickers featuring spiritual questions presented in the style of graffiti and these have been installed on the stonework inside the cathedral. The exhibition is temporary, and the stickers do not harm the stone.

Predictably, the growing throng of politicians and celebrities who benefit from stoking outrage has been apoplectic.

Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson took a break from pimping out hate criminals to expound windily on ‘the work of generations – stonemason handing chisel on to stonemason,’ being debased by the exhibition.

‘Travesty’

US Vice President JD Vance, evidently bored in Donald Trump’s lower colon, complained that the stickers were, ‘making a beautiful historical building really ugly.’

Elon Musk, who still hasn’t moved to Mars as promised, demanded that, ‘Whoever approved this travesty should be fired immediately.’

Permanently cross ex-swimmer, Sharron Davies, decried the exhibition as ‘a very poor decision,’ whilst the spiritual community looked to astrologer, Russell Grant, who thundered, ‘The murder of St Thomas Becket and its effects on English history was profound. Graffiti strewn upon this great place is a travesty. Shameful.’

Didn’t see that coming, did he?

The chef’s kiss though came from ‘Britain’s strictest head teacher’, Katharine Birbalsingh. She was, you might remember, the Tories’ fave teacher. Brooking no leftie nonsense, her tough-love approach to inner-city larrikins was touted as the antidote to woke failures in education that have supposedly undermined the fabric of society.

With the certainty that characterises all her convictions, the educator let fly.

‘Protecting the sacred matters. Graffiti stickers in a church, stepping on a gravestone, disrespecting silence in a library…Culture is precious and fragile. When nothing is sacred, our culture is weakened and the vultures descend. Some of us see this. Some of us don’t.😥’

We’ll leave the grammar and emoji-use aside, not to be churlish, and have a look at this on its own terms.

Graffiti

The immediate point, and the reason for the exhibition, is that cathedrals have been covered in real, non-removable graffiti ever since they were built. From masons’ marks to expressions of faith and simple declarations that people have been there, unofficial chiselling has always been a feature of the cathedral experience. There are so many examples within Canterbury that the cathedral offers a dedicated tour of them.

Beyond historical ignorance, however, sits the pernicious attitude that informs Birbalsingh’s worldview, and that of many like her.

Culture is not ‘precious and fragile’, as she would have us believe. It is boisterous, transgressive, alive, and happening all around us. It transforms with every moment that passes and is made collectively, not decided upon from above and fixed in aspic for us to negotiate our ways around.

The view I’m expressing here is liberalism and its retreat in education should worry anybody who values humanity as anything more than an economic resource.

A liberal education exists to provide students with the tools to interrogate life on their own terms. It acts to arm our children against the sophistry employed by privilege to enslave them. It is kryptonite to con artists and liars.

Demeaned

Since the 1980s, the teaching profession has been demeaned and demonised by government. Any notion of education existing as more than training for life as a drone in the financial system has been held up to ridicule with the result that humanities courses at universities are now under threat.

The philistinism of politicians is, of course, largely an act. They are happy for their own children to experience the richness of cultural life at independent schools, whilst the rest are encouraged to value nothing but the bottom line.

The reaction to Canterbury Cathedral’s exhibition isn’t just reactionary and vulgar, it is based on ignorance of true history.

As information becomes concentrated in the possession of a handful of billionaires and sold to us as a utility, it is vital that we produce human beings who can think contrary to those interests.

Anybody preaching conformity to your children in these circumstances is a menace to them.

Think about it.