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No wonder the Queen feels desolate
Change is on the side of youth and of people trying to sell things
There was something very endearing about the picture of the Queen last week, swathed in a billowing white beekeeper's veil, shod only in clumsy black socks, wandering rather oddly around Pakistan and musing rather sadly that the world is leaving her behind. "I sometimes think," she told the National Assembly there, "that the world is changing almost too fast for its inhabitants, at least for us older ones."
Her Majesty is not the only one, older or not, to be troubled by this idea. Sir Peregrine Worsthorne has written several times of great and irreversible changes in society which, for all his belief in tolerance, he does not like. In many ways, he says, "this is not a country I recognise or am particularly fond of any more".
Ludovic Kennedy was reprimanded on television last week for refusing to take any interest in the mysteries of computer technology; he says he has no need of it, but other guests on Newsnight insisted on our duty to keep up with the times. A powerful idea seems to have taken root, planted perhaps, or at least carefully cultivated, by New Labour, especially after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, that the country is undergoing a profound change, and that those who are not for it are against it and therefore "out of touch". Out of touch is out of power, old and obsolete.
There is nothing new about this. Anyone old enough to remember the prime of the Rolling Stones will recall their song about being out of touch: "You're obsolete my baby, my poor old-fashioned baby, I said baby, baby, baby you're out of time." In this way, time out of mind, youth has challenged maturity, demanding power by insisting that only the young are "with it", as people who are now old used to say when they were young. This does not mean that things have actually changed so very profoundly, as people are saying these days, though certainly there has been change. I do hope the poor Queen doesn't take it all too seriously; after all, Mick Jagger is still prancing about as much as ever, though he may be a grandfather and as wrinkled as a prune. And Ludovic Kennedy can communicate as well as ever without launching himself into the time-consuming frustrations of the Internet.
The reason why the young and those who want to seem young (like New Labour) get away with this ageist posturing is that many of the old, like the Queen and Peregrine Worsthorne, do have a sense of letting go. Nature is merciful to most people in this way; it is part of a natural preparation for death to begin to find life less attractive. Literature is full of older writers looking back in anger and nostalgia, without always realising that they are obeying the natural imperative of ageing. So the old tend to exaggerate the speed of change, though they do not welcome it; while the young exaggerate it because they do welcome it; change is on the side of youth and, of course, on the side of people trying to sell things, like designers and politicians and the media.
I don't believe we are really living in a time of immense and rapid change. It is true that information technology has brought many useful changes, but computers so far are nothing much more than a refinement upon the telephone and the typewriter. Because people fear computers they think them capable of much more powerful magic than they really are. They are just wonderful tools for doing things people have always done - faster, better, more easily, but in much the same way. There is nothing difficult about learning to use them. Computers have caused a revolution in convenience, but not in consciousness; anyone prepared, like Ludovic Kennedy, to put up with a little old-fashioned inconvenience is no worse off without one.
It is true that the balance between men and women has changed radically in the past quarter of a century; we have demanded, or accepted, much greater sexual freedom, and very rapidly. The idea that Conservative grandees might talk calmly of gay marriages would have been quite preposterous only five years ago. But I am constantly reminded of how slowly most things change, in much of the country. We are told we are now part of a multicultural society but actually only about 5 per cent of Britons are from ethnic minorities, and outside some of our bigger cities most people see very few people of a different colour.
The view from the metropolitan brasserie, or from the New Labour think tank, is distorted by a longing for change. The rest of the country, as readers' letters constantly remind me, is more likely to see signs of the old adage: the more things change, the more they stay the same.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, October 12, 1997
Comments:
"Computers have caused a revolution in convenience, but not in consciousness..."
Can we still say this, twelve years later?
Posted by: mouse | 1 Jun 2009 20:10:33
