I think of high culture in something like the spirit that you seem to be expressing. It's a realm of critical reflection from which there emerges over time, a canon. And I think what the gentleman was trying to say, and certainly my view, is that the issue is, to what extent it is realistically possible to spread that form of culture much, much more widely. That was certainly a very strong aspiration at the time when I was at university - exactly the same place as both of you. In the last 40 or 50 years, that really hasn't happened, has it?
What really divides the left and the right? To answer this question, Intelligence Squared brought together two giants of British intellectual culture for an ideological reckoning: Terry Eagleton, literary critic and long-time hero of the radical left, and Roger Scruton, right-wing philosopher who has written on everything from economic theory to literature, and architecture to wine. What we heard was two two irreducibly different views of the world, where each tries hard to understand the other’s view.
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