The prism of the ages. (Ryan).

THOUGH THE PROCESS had already long been in train, it would have been about thirty-five years ago that I caught for myself the first linguistic whiff of menace, a small early omen of the postmodernist delusion which encourages us to throw away our intellects, deny the observed evidence of historical common sense, and cease to exercise moral discrimination because--of course--"everything nowadays is relative".

I felt like a saddle-horse who, pricking up his ears and pulling up to stamp and snort and stare, is telling you he knows some threat lurks in that next patch of scrub, or just over the hill; he knows, even though he hasn't seen it yet.

It was a single word which gave me this instinctive premonition of the world's mind sliding backwards. Or, rather, it was the change in usage of a single word: relevant.

My dictionary said that it meant: "bearing on or pertinent to the matter in hand", and should be used with the preposition to. That is to say, relevant as a word by itself signified nothing. Nevertheless--and chiefly at first among academics and "educators"--it assumed a new and active dimension as a significator of quite a different sort.

Relevant, standing nowadays brashly on its own new false legs, has become skewed to mean something like "meritorious" or "desirable". It is thus another weasel-word, another pop-gun in the armoury of the architects of modern curricula and modern teaching practice. As in Alice in Wonderland, it now means just whatever the speaker wants it to mean at any given moment. And irrelevant is now the final curse with which unfashionable or "unacceptable" subjects are flushed down the memory hole.

Shakespeare, the Bible, Greek and Latin, ancient history, basic English grammar, arithmetic--all that "old stuff" vanished, and we entered our present stage of culture where the Beatles are more "relevant" than Beethoven, and Walt Disney and Madonna between them have replaced Petronius Arbiter.

Purged of all those "irrelevancies", the landscape of the mind is reduced to a desert. Mankind's 3000-year-old groves of pleasure and its productive, cultivated fields alike have been bulldozed away. Why would a culture wish in this way to ringbark itself, to sever the roots which have nourished the wisdom and understanding of the centuries?