by Peter Mullen, TCW
MY subject is tragedy, contemporary tragedy. Our editor pointed out in her last Sunday’s review that our most valuable, historic and formerly cherished institutions are being destroyed – sometimes by a neglect born of colossal ignorance, but increasingly by deliberate policy formed out of malice, a vicious hatred for our history and for everything that has made us the people we are. We are witnessing the twilight of our institutions. So we need to know first what an institution is.
Political parties come and go. Institutions are – or used to be – what transcend mere political opinions. They are above the noise and traffic of the daily squabble. They were carved with pain out of violent quarrels and even civil wars. Institutions are the stuff of ancient compromises which persist to give life and freedom to the whole of society. Institutions are the remedy for sectarianism. We have institutions so that we do not die of politics. Institutions are not political theories: they are quite simply the way we do things; the refined habits of our civilisation. They are our words made flesh, incarnated.
Today these institutions and the society, culture and civilisation they create are undermined, perhaps fatally. Let me speak today of one of the greatest of all our institutions: education.