Can you be an egalitarian elitist? Or an elitist egalitarian? To put it slightly differently, can you be a traditionalist and an egalitarian? Can you preserve respect, even a degree of reverence, for traditional standards of excellence in the arts and sciences, while wanting an egalitarian society? This question was answered memorably by the critics of university expansion 40 years ago. "More means worse," they said. In general, I am afraid, they turned out to be right.
"Worse" covers a multitude of possibilities. One possibility is that most students would be taught in large classes by underpaid teachers, and their teachers would themselves be less literate, less confident and less at ease with really difficult material than their predecessors had been. On the whole, that has been true. A second possibility is that some of the skills that had been highly valued would decay. Again, it is true that most students today write less sharply, precisely and persuasively than the (far fewer) students of 40 years ago. A third is that while students 40 years ago could - not always, but not infrequently - be got to see that education was a liberation from the parochial and the commonplace, today's students see post-16 education as a chore that has to be endured for the sake of a comfortable billet in the parochial and commonplace world.
However, I want to take the question a bit differently: to argue that, although the critics turned out to be right, it didn't have to be this way - indeed, that to put up with it being like this is to betray the egalitarian cause. Most sports allow room for both egalitarianism and elitism: they don't care about origins, only about competence. I am a non-starter - not even very bad - as a footballer; Hunter Davies, as a young man, was a bad but enthusiastic one; and Andy Cole is a wonderfully good one. There is a footballing elite, and its members are the players who a competent audience can recognise as the most highly skilled. It is a familiar jibe against egalitarians that they have no complaints against the existence of a footballing elite, but use the term "elitist" as an all-purpose term of abuse in other contexts. It is a cliched insult, but it is on target.
Physics is much like football. Most of us are quite rightly not allowed on the pitch, but we all know that Heisenberg and Bohr did physics the way Michelangelo did sculpture - that is, so astonishingly, that most of the rest of us stand and gawp. We don't have to stand and gawp, however. We can learn enough physics, or at any rate understand enough of the history of physics, to see why Heisenberg and Bohr were important; just as we can try modelling with clay and learn enough of the history of art to get some deeper sense of why Michelangelo surprised his contemporaries and still astonishes us. Making some hefty allowances for the ways in which poetry, historical analysis, urban geography and the sociology of the lower-middle-class family differ from physics and sculpture, we can still draw a sharp line in these subjects between what is done well, and what is done poorly. Indeed, if there are areas where we can't, there is a strong case for thinking that what we are doing is just messing about.
That takes us back to "more means worse". The opponents of university expansion in the early 1960s thought that not many people in any society were likely to devote the passionate attention to works of literature that, say, FR Leavis and his disciples did. Not many people, they thought, would want to read with that intense determination to discover just what was going on and why it mattered, nor would they want to expose their own characters, allegiances and sensibilities to the self-examination that was supposed to flow from encounters with great literature. If you had a tenfold increase in the number of people reading English in higher education, therefore, the result would be a systematic dilution of what made the exercise worthwhile in the first place. Too many would flinch from the demands of serious literary inquiry.
Pause for a moment to bring in the idea of tradition. Traditions can be crippling. Enthusiasts for particular traditions can defer to them far too enthusiastically. Armies attached to traditional formations and tactics get slaughtered by fleet-of-foot irregulars; businesses that practise traditional techniques are undone by innovative competitors. Mere tradition is indefensible. But intellectual and cultural traditions also contain what the philosopher John Dewey described as "the funded capital of humanity". They are our inheritance, without which our cultural poverty would be complete. They are what humanity has achieved in the past and thought worth trying to transmit to posterity, and what posterity has thought worth trying to preserve.
Traditional egalitarianism proposes that the beneficiaries of this inheritance have an absolute obligation to make it available to anyone who can benefit, according to their capacity for benefit, and not according to whatever irrelevances you might care to mention. And to reverse the noun and the adjective, egalitarian traditionalism is the reminder that before we - at any rate, before most of us - can do anything new and interesting, we need to absorb the achievements of our predecessors, and internalise the abilities that went into them. Everyone is entitled to have a go, but everyone should remember that some tasks are difficult, and one way of mastering them is to immerse oneself in the tradition that gives them their point. Nobody ought to try to rewrite Paradise Lost, but anyone who takes poetry, moral imagination and the history of European civilisation seriously must find it an almost inexhaustible source of inspiration.
Why should more have meant worse, then? There are three plausible explanations, but before embarking on them it is worth remembering that, even if more has meant worse, it does not follow that more has simply been a mistake. We may have done worse than we could and should have done, but it doesn't follow that we have just been wrong. As between a world of couch potatoes where Manchester United still play amazing football and a world where everyone plays energetic but mediocre football (and Manchester United are no better than Tranmere Rovers), there is a lot to be said for the second. But as is obvious when you think about it, there isn't really such a choice. The effect of everyone playing energetic soccer would certainly be that more people would play really well. The mistake would be to pretend that merely to kick the ball around energetically is as good as to play real football - a mistake we don't make in football, and do make in education.
So why do we do it? In the first place, sheer good nature. It is, after all, not nothing to do maths at all, to know a bit about English literature, or to string together any sort of narrative of the industrial revolution. And it may have taken a lot of hard work for the student who has got this far. (In general, students in most of higher education don't work hard; they are appallingly underworked, and are much more in danger of demoralisation from that, than from suddenly discovering that even when they work hard, they have come to the limit of their abilities.) Any decent person will want to praise the effort and admire the achievement, and won't want to point out that it is a stroll in the foothills rather than the real thing. American high schools are the great bad example of substituting the attempt to create self-esteem for providing an education, but much of British higher education is well down the same track.
Second, intellectuals find it hard to believe that not everyone can or wants to stretch their mind and imagination as far as they will go. Even those of us who are deeply and irreversibly addicted to philosophy are also happy to dismantle old cars, lie on beaches and sail dinghies quite incompetently. Contrary to Socrates's famous (but perfectly unbelievable) claim that the unexamined life is not worth living, the unexamined life is entirely worth living for very large numbers of people. Tastes vary, temperaments vary, and life has attractions enough to supply us with 70 years of interest even if we never open a book, let alone open the works of Plato.