Can you have a crime against culture? You might argue that, say, boy bands, Jerry Springer and the Daily Mail are, at least metaphorically, crimes against culture. Alternatively, perhaps you consider Riverdance, coloured shirts with white collars and the greed of the fine-art market to be throwaway-the-key crimes against culture. How about the ESB offices in Dublin's Fitzwilliam Street, any film with Hugh Grant in it, any continent with Anne Robinson on it? Subjective, isn't it?
However, condemnation of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban for destroying the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan appears to be almost unanimous. The director-general of UNESCO, Koichiro Matsuura wants consideration given to setting up an international "legal framework with credible punishment for crimes against culture". Given that offences (whatever about "crimes", in the narrower sense of acts punishable by law) against culture have always been a part of culture, Matsuura might be accused of attempting to prune culture itself . . . even to museum-ise it.
Still, in being outraged by the destruction of the Buddhas, he and millions of other people appear to be justified. But why? Because the statues had survived, albeit mutilated by Arabs in the 18th century, for 1,500 years? Because they were beautiful? Because they are irreplaceable? Because to many people they were sacred? Perhaps for some or all of those reasons. A more general case, however, might be made by pointing to the statues as symbols which can help humanity understand its past. Even if we don't know where we're going, it can help to know from where we've come.
In age, scale and cultural significance, the Buddhas are global symbols. But in national, regional and local contexts, similar rows are continually raging. In Dublin, the fates of such as Wood Quay, Georgian buildings, Nelson's Pillar and its replacement spike have generated fierce debates.
Typically, the most agitating aspect of such rows is the crude casting and acceptance of the breakdown into, on one side, the cultured preservationists and, on the other, the philistine wreckers. There's something suspiciously neat and not quite civilised about that.
It's suspicious because, albeit with notable exceptions, the positions adopted almost always fit too readily with our social hierarchy. Quite simply, the higher a person's social class, the more likely (but certainly not exclusively) he or she is to be concerned with conservation of artefacts accepted as having cultural value. Maybe this is to be expected. After all, if the world has been sufficiently kind to grant you high status, you are more likely to want to maintain that world. In turn, any acknowledgment of that means genuine concern cannot always be disconnected from snobbish concern.
Put bluntly, many people not only feel, but have been made to feel, that lobbying for the preservation of, say, certain buildings - even buildings which they may believe to be beautiful - can be practically traitorous of their ancestry, class and ideology. In Ireland, the great houses of the Anglo-Irish, many of them - if art and politics can be separated - aesthetically beautiful and desired, if politically ugly and despised (because of the imperial caste system which made them possible), can be understood in such terms. It helps, after all, to have a formidable army of non-unionised slaves if you want to build the pyramids.
So, one person's "beauty" can be another's image of malevolence. Rural Ireland, not surprisingly, becomes angered over such debates as the one about "bungalow blight". You will often hear country people say that Dublin's well-housed aesthetes and wannabe aesthetes ought to be made to live in straw-thatched, tiny-windowed, mudfloored cottages. Yet such cottages, redolent of rural idylls - though principally to the observer - and altogether more organic within the Irish landscape, certainly look better than the more egregious concrete bungalows which have replaced so many of them.
The problem, it seems, is that typical, urban middle-class criticism of the bungalows suggests that the critics have an aesthetic nature while the bungalow-dwellers, quite simply, have not. That cannot be true, for it carries the revolting whiff of snobbery and has more to do with condescension than conservation. It is certainly arguable that some people are more conscious of their aesthetic natures than others. But people are people, whether paupers or princes, and everybody has a notion of beauty and worth, even if some such notions have been horribly brutalised.
It is easy to condemn the Taliban for destroying the Buddhas. In a better world it would not happen. But whatever impulse is now driving parts of the Muslim world to almost Pol Pot-ish fundamentalism is not unconnected to the wealthy world's callous treatment of the Earth's poor. Perhaps we should face the fact that cultural conservationism, even though it should not be, is a luxury. It is easier to be altruistic about our common heritage when basic needs are not an issue. The ladies who lunch for charity make the point - while the women who serve them make the meal.
THE means by which beauty and worth are attributed are contentious. Perhaps all works of art have something in common. Monet's paintings, Joyce's novels, Shakespeare's plays, Mozart's music, Michelangelo's sculptures, the Custom House, Giggs's sublime goal against Arsenal - is it possible to isolate some quality common to these? Or, is beauty simply always in the eye of the beholder? Such questions cannot be answered easily, for who can possibly set down any objective standard?
No doubt, rules of proportion and perspective can be formulated just by observing what appeals. The shapes and structures of nature can be copied and incorporated and arguments can thereby be made. There are few people, I imagine, who believe that the Custom House would be "improved" by giving it a "face-lift" of an all-over lash of pebbledash, spraying it deep yellow, and giving the window frames "a bit of a lift" by painting them fluorescent purple, high-gloss, of course. Yet somebody might find the results beautiful.
And if such a person turned up and said how stimulating and pleasing they found the transformed Custom House, the opprobrium would be boundless. "Cretin", "peasant", "barbarian", "vulgarian", "uncouth" . . . are among the more printable descriptions which would be unleashed, some, no doubt, by people who had dodgy face-lifts themselves. Sure, the example, even for a hyperbole, is quite absurd. But gradations of nastiness permeate conversations about taste and, as often as not, it seems that it's not so much the aesthetic judgment but the person expressing it who is being vilified.
That is snobbery. Why the Taliban is so violently rejecting modernity and attempting to plunge Afghanistan back to the seventh or eighth century is the fundamental question. To hear Europeans, who, like others in earlier times, marauded around the world, wiping out entire cultures, condemn the act as merely barbarous and leave it at that, is to hear the echo of our own continent's barbarism, which, with horrific irony, was perpetrated in the name of civilisation.
Or consider Ireland. We have many sincere and dedicated conservationists who understand the symbolic importance and richness of the past. Unfortunately, we also have legions who, while working hard at saving the Irish landscape, appear to think that they are saving what they deem its beauty for themselves and other sensitives. The claim is that the saving is always for the population at large . . . but implicit in the struggle is often a notion that a common herd of coarse brutes requires civilising.
SO, along with people concerned about conservation for its inherent merit, we get a cadre of less purely motivated taste vigilantes. Yet, even taste vigilantism is supportable . . . but on one condition: the class system which can poison motive must be denounced. In a global sense, this would require Europeans not feeling culturally and morally superior to the Taliban. In an Irish context, the lecturing and hectoring of people who do not have the luxury of being bothered about such matters, would have to stop.
Conversation, not condemnation could better facilitate conservation. Vulgar and all as it is to mention mere money, there are issues of hard cash too. If, as this society does, you teach people to believe that economic reality is the most important reality, then concern for conservation becomes relegated. But the car-park maker, albeit most likely to a lesser degree than, say, the sculptor, has good dreams of humanity within. Even the members of the Taliban's demolition squad - though their dream seems perverted to us - have that sacred spark too.
Much of the difficulty lies in the fact that culture and what passes as culture is appropriated. The late Alan Clark made fun of people "who had to buy their own furniture". It was a cliqueish Tory insult.
But that wasn't the worst of it. Such "jokes" are routinely parroted and laughed at by people who had to buy their own furniture, but who have clearly been inculcated with the nonsense that those privileged enough not to have to are somehow culturally superior.
If it means something to the part of a person which connects spiritually with its symbolism, isn't the tackiest, plastic Virgin Mary from Knock more sacred than the inherited and hoarded "art" which backs up condescension and insults? Class attitudes may be unavoidable - and certainly they are historically understandable - in the social world. But detaching class from conservationism will not be easy and perhaps not even possible.
It is hard to imagine that history will not judge the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan as wanton and barbaric. Not that we in Ireland can afford to be too lofty about it. Only very slowly do we seem to be understanding that snobbery doesn't have to be a part of our culture. Barbarism begins with those small, daily discourtesies which wound whatever it is that might be sacred in people. The real vileness of smashing stone Buddhas into fragments is that it's likely to be a precursor to smashing flesh and blood people.
As to laws which might punish "crimes against culture"? Well, that's awkward. If the Egyptians decided to raze the pyramids to make way for a motorway, hypermarket and condos, would they be entitled to? Framing global laws, the world order, like its manifold social orders, cannot simply claim controlling rights without acknowledging responsibilities for all the world. It's a moral problem which may be beyond lawyers - one that might have confounded Gautama Buddha himself.