BY SEAN WALSH

Trigger warning: contains references to Catholicism. 

No politician does casual spite quite like Bridget Phillipson. In a Seasonal message to the struggling but aspirational middle-class family she has decided to cancel the Latin Excellence Programme. This, you may know, is a provision introduced in 2022 to around 40 non-selective state schools. From February the resource will no longer be available to the 4,000 students who currently –and voluntarily- benefit from it.

Note the timing: the programme will be withdrawn from students halfway through the school year, at a moment of maximum disruption. This is the bit in the film when our hero, having done nothing wrong, is required by his envious boss to surrender his pass and clear his desk with immediate effect.

We should have seen this one coming, on the grounds of nominative determinism if nothing else. Anything with the word “excellence” attached to it is likely to attract the malignant attention of the philistine rent-seekers at the Orwellian-titled “Department for Education”, which is in practice the outrider agency for the state’s increasingly overt ambition to confiscate our children.

A genuinely egalitarian political party would embrace this initiative. The Latin Excellence Programme offers a welcome alternative to the STEM fetishism imposed by the “blob” over recent decades. For this reason alone, it was unlikely to survive long into Starmer’s dystopian Year Zero.

Its brief presence on the curriculum has been a good thing. It reminds us that at least some of our teachers have the correct attitude to the humanities. They understand that high culture is anything but “elitist” and that it speaks to the human heart in ways that have no concern for the social or economic situation of those willing to listen. The Marriage of Figaro is as beautiful when heard in the prison yard as it is when listened to from a freebie box in Covent Garden.

Phillipson’s nonchalant act of intellectual vandalism is familiarly reductionist. It conflates value and utility and, even worse, analyses that utility in terms of cost-benefit. But the study of Latin is valuable in ways not amenable to the utilitarian and transactional mathematics deployed by those whose world is contained within the parameters of a power-point presentation.

When you learn the grammar of Classical languages you become acquainted also with the structure of human thought; you participate in a discussion about what we are. Try quantifying that.

Latin, we are told, is a “dead” language, but this is true only in terms of the calendar. It survives via hand-me-down and continues to work its magic in disciplines as apparently unconnected as law, history, botany, philosophy and medicine.

There is, I suspect, an ulterior motive here, one which goes beyond the obvious desire of this government to churn out the next generation of intellectually uncurious Rayner clones. Latin, to the extent that it is not part of the “here and now”, is not so susceptible to the linguistic colonisation which is the Left’s favoured modus operandi. Its structure is sturdy enough to hold off the mischief makers who are so keen to tell us how to speak and therefore how to think. It is obnoxious to the Maoist mind.

We see something similar in the Catholic church, where the progressives are at war with the Traditional Latin Mass. Once again, the charge of “elitism” is laid, and once again the suspicion arises that there is something deeper in play. The Latin liturgy, being less vulnerable to progressive “modification”, serves as a codification of true doctrine. There are many in the Church who find this frustrating, their ambition being to subvert orthodoxy and to bend Church teaching in the direction of the secular-pagan world, instead of vice versa.

This latest purge, of things which are valuable in non-transactional ways, should draw attention to a more metaphysically fundamental malaise: our disordered relationship to time, and the temporal chauvinism which assumes that the modern is axiomatically better than the ancient, or the present necessarily an improvement on the past.

This chauvinism is embedded in all progressivist, and much modernist, thinking. Latin is the language of people long dead spoken in times best apologised for, if thought of at all.

What evidence do we have for these intellectual conceits? Solzhenitsyn wrote that “the battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man”. There is no reason to think that the fracture, which has existed since the Fall, is one that will be healed in physical time.

In the Christmas Morning Mass just gone we didn’t celebrate the birth of Christ so much as re-live and participate in the mystery of the Incarnation – the miracle “intersection of the timeless with time”, effected when God drew us into Him by becoming one of us. And from His perspective – sub specie aeternitatis– what happened thousands of years ago is happening right now.

The Latin language is valuable because it rebukes those who think, without cause, that wisdom is date-stamped. And if you think it dead then venerate it accordingly, by keeping it alive in your mind. Or at the very least, Mrs. Phillipson, don’t deny others the chance to do so. Don’t make the inquisitive minds of our children casualties of your shoddy class-war-driven vindictiveness. 

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Sean Walsh is a former university teacher in the philosophy of mind. That was a while ago – but he keeps up with the subject. 2015-2017 he was slightly homeless. He now writes and is the very proud father of a wonderful child. He is grateful for everything he has.