The New Dark Ages (2)

II

The Times, Thursday 22nd December 2011

The New Dark Ages

Our palaces of cultures – the museums and galleries of which free access to the riches of their great stores of human learning and culture have been among the greatest achievements of our culture in recent centuries – lie in ruins. Barricaded by rings of security personnel and barred by locks, chains and all manner of high-tech security devices, we, the public, can no longer access the collections to which we previously shared the right of open access.

Yet this denial of access combined with its concomitant rapid increase in security has been powerless to prevent the slow but relentless eradication from sight of artefacts from the earliest times of human culture together with all reference to these artefacts in later artistic, educational and scientific creations.

The darkness which is systematically obliterating human culture and which, if it continues, will lead us into a new Dark Age shows no sign of being abated by the actions taken to date by the Government to seek to protect what remains of our national collections.

Culture, to be preserved, must be lived and breathed in order that it fertilises future creativity and learning. Too much of our current culture is already blind to the extent to which it utilises and is informed by past culture. We think and act as though we emerge from the womb as fully formed independent individuals with no debt to nurture, yet our every thought and word and action is inevitably and unconsciously predicated on some past learning.

This year, we celebrated a cultural artefact – the 1611 King James Version Bible – which is among those artefacts that will shortly be lost from sight should this dark blight on our culture continue its relentless progress. When this Bible is lost from sight, we will not only lose the artefact itself but all that it has contributed to our culture in terms of imagery, story, phraseology and much, much more.

Our culture cannot sustain such a loss, such a repeated series of losses, and survive unharmed. We face a new Dark Age which cannot be prevented by denial of access and security cordons. Therefore, we call for the doors of the palaces of cultures to be flung wide open once again. Maybe in the learning which ensues an answer to the relentless rush of this tide of darkness in our culture can be found. Or, like Canute’s courtiers, we will see the folly of our hubris.

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Carly Simon - You're So Vain.