Memories of the Way We Were

Conservative commentary on how Western liberalism has lost its way tends to be almost exclusively focused on the changes that half a century of Left-liberal ‘progress’ have wrought. But it is surely equally important to be clear about what is felt to have been lost in the process. Here are my own.

To be clear, these are the recollections and impressions of someone growing up in 1950s and 60s England. They are not a depiction of some prelapsarian ideal world. People today who would identify as socially conservative would, I think, feel an affinity with much but by no means all of it.

An idealised male role model in those days was the strong and silent type. There was a lot of laconic tipping of the hat and ‘just doin’ ma job Mam’ in the hills around Hollywood. Phrases like mental health and self-esteem did not feature. Manly and womanly were words that didn’t need to be spoken with a large helping of wink-wink irony. Strong and silent didn’t mean lonely – not when combined with confident. A late-1950s dance floor was alive with jive pair-bonding electricity. The sexes would rock and roll in symbiosis – more so than in the hermetically individualised dance crazes of the 60s and beyond.

It was my own wishful aspiration to be a strong and silent type. A cross between Clint Eastwood and Paul Newman – in my dreams anyway. In reality, at disco-dances in the late 1960s, my teen self managed the silent better than the strong, diffidently racking my brains for a chat-up line to pitch at pretty girls on the dance floor. In any case, it seems to me that the strong and silent type has been supplanted by the cocky, boyish type. Social historians would probably say that this changing male archetype has a lot to do with the huge technological and economic changes in the second half of the 20th century and beyond.

As a male of the species I have much less sense of how these changes may have affected default female archetypes. It does seem to me that the huge impact of feminism must suggest that all was not entirely well with the mid-century male-female social contract. As I wrote in my ‘The House That Jill Built‘ essay, feminism’s critique of the world I grew up in cannot entirely be dismissed, however misandrist and mourir-la-difference its later phases became. Instinct tells me, on the other hand, that feminisation has brought losses as well as gains to womanhood but it would seem ungentlemanly of me, as a member of the opposite sex, to pontificate about what those might be.

Sex and romance axiomatically meant boy-meets-girl

Sex and romance axiomatically meant boy-meets-girl. It meant marriage and babies; these were the days of the baby boom. Most grown-ups would have been vaguely aware of minority sexualities other than that normal one but generally thought this something best left in the cupboard. I like to think few will have regarded them as actually warranting criminal status.

The way people dressed (outside of job-specific clothing) was very different from now. Men typically wore trousers, jacket and leather shoes. (Grubby trainers and other kinds of stripy apparel had not yet been invented.) Women wore skirts and dresses (the length changing with the latest fashion).

School was a place where you learned about rules – even more of them than mum and dad’s ones. You learned to sit in rows, walk don’t run. You might try to break those rules if you could get away with it (sometimes with the seeming tacit indulgence of the grown-ups) but generally you had to watch out for teachers’ and parents’ stern authority. The school mums’ rush-hour traffic jam had yet to arrive; we used to walk to school or go on the bus.

For middle class children there were prizes to be won but getting them was hard work. Winning them entailed constructing lucid, knowledgeable sentences and paragraphs, not picking the correct box to tick.

After school we might play in the street. Mums and dads didn’t generally agonise ‘should we let them, what about if…?’ etc. There was a pervasive sense that one had the good fortune to live in the ‘civilised world’, a world in which the nation and its police could, for the most part, be relied on to deal with ne’er-do-wells. There were baddies of course – robbers and kerb-crawlers, thugs and murderers – but unless you lived in a really ‘rough area’ that was something for the policeman to worry about, not you so much. Whether actually the case or not, there was a pervasive assumption that the police caught the bad guys and the courts put them in prison.

Was this a mid-20th century reality or a case of ignorance is bliss? A bit of both probably. Laughably, many of our TV crime dramas still peddle a, by now, highly fanciful notion of effective policing. In the days of my youth, 99.9% of people would have thought that having pretty young women as prison officers in a male prison was an off-the-scale barmy idea. They would have thought that the kind of people who come up with the DEI blah blah that now pervades the mission statements of all the Western world’s institutions just needed a good slap.

Social ‘injustice’ was viewed primarily through the lens of class

Social ‘injustice’ was viewed primarily through the lens of class inequality. The following are my honest recollection of typical perceptions about race and ethnicity in the world of my youth, not necessarily an implied endorsement of them.

Crude racial bigotry was frowned upon by ‘decent’ people but there was also a perceived hierarchy with whites at the top. Adult ‘good manners’ dictated that it was tasteless to make jokes about other ethnicities, but such tastelessness was common amongst my fellow schoolboys. People didn’t generally give much thought to ‘foreigners’ and foreign lands. Apart from the upper middle class, they generally holidayed by the seaside in their own land. Outside of Europe, America and the former British dominions, the archetypal foreigner was seen as either a Commie or ‘backward’.

Looking now at the dramatic changes resulting from mass immigration from the ‘Third World’, I can see that the effective importation and nurturing of a black and Asian middle class arguably has much to be said in its favour. The importation of a large black and Asian underclass (to add to our own indigenous one), not so much.

What Westerners got hopelessly wrong was underestimating the huge latent cultural capital of the peoples of South East Asia.

Unless my recollections are woefully inaccurate, most people were not really that bothered about injustice unless it was close to home. Is this truly any different now? Or is the big difference that then, unlike now, there was no automatic victimhood status – and sanctification – conferred on particular ‘identities’. There were the deserving poor and undeserving poor. Women were not axiomatically victims of ‘the patriarchy’. Blacks could be good sorts or they could be bad sorts. And it was a given that their status was as immigrants to a land of opportunity that they were assumed to admire.

The foregoing misty watercolour has been painted by someone who was a young man in the times I am depicting. Grown-ups who had lived through World Wars are bound to have seen things differently at least to some extent. And I would very much welcome comments from readers – both older and younger than me – on how well my recollections do or do not accord with their own.

And the way we are?

In the days I am depicting, the bien pensant progressive pearls of wisdom that have been metaphorically rammed down our throats these past decades were already being proudly worn by the intelligentsia. Some of them – like white-self-hate-by-proxy – had been around since the late 19th century. But in those days you had to make a positive choice to opt in to such pseudo-intellectual fashions. Most ordinary Westerners had yet to be taught – in their schools and colleges and on their televisions – the joys of racial-guilt-tripping and gender-bending.

I would guess that ‘media people’ were probably pretty annoying and full of nonsense even in those days too. But nowhere near to the same degree as our 21st century ones who seem unable to grasp that their 50% black and homosexual dream world is not the real world – not yet anyway. We have lived through 50-plus years of a progressivism aiming to remake us in its image as nice multicultural, non-binary, quasi-androgynous beings. Schools, colleges, civic institutions and media progressively came in those decades to all sing from the same ‘social justice’ hymn sheet.

In the last 20 years the progressive hegemony over the means of communication has been undermined by the internet. And we have entered a time when the mass of previously semi-apolitical normies have become collectively angry. Angry at repeated failure of a political establishment – hopelessly steeped in a bankrupt progressivism – to keep their word about reining in ever crazier politico-activist grifting on the public purse. The more politically savvy recognise that things are more complicated than just out with the old and in with a new, more populist kind of politician – that the ever-expanding 10- ton Blob payload that our democracies have been carrying all these social-justice decades is still there under the democratic political canvas. It’s an undemocratic dead weight that would take at least a generation to shift.

For many on the political Right it is tempting to imagine that, once finally freed from the yoke of up-its-arse hyper-progressivism, our Western culture might revert to something not so far from the social conservatism of the pre-1960s. I personally would welcome the return of much of it, though by no means all. In any case, I am not holding my breath. My instinct is that this might only happen in the wake of some economic cataclysm. So if my depiction of ‘the way we were’ is not a natural Western order of things but just another of its historical phases, how then might an AI-enhanced, digitised, post-progressive 21st century unfold?

Who we ‘truly are’ is a question philosophers have been wrestling with for thousands of years and I have been wrestling with for about 70 – I was a strange kid! On the level of trite of course, we can say that most of us are a mixture of kind and cruel, loving and hating, wise and foolish, and so-on and so-forth. Where it gets more complicated is the old nature-nurture question scaled up to the civilisational level. To what extent, in other words, is our collective human nature moulded by the civilisation we happen to be born into?

The following are my brief thoughts on this.

In all civilisations, there will have been, I imagine, a gap between an ideal of human nature as conceived of by its spiritual clerisy and the actual appetites and inhibitions of common folk. It is worth remembering that the Enlightenment was essentially an intelligentsia mind-game; its transformation of our way of life more economic and technological than intellectual or spiritual. We certainly continue to be a people of extraordinary enterprise and ingenuity – superb toolmakers. (I waxed lyrical in a previous essay on the wonders of the search engine.) But on the downside, has this IT wizardry given us a dose of ‘who we truly are’? Sociologist Danielle Lindemann thinks so: “For all of its extreme personalities and outlandish premises, reality TV reflects how regressive we truly are.”

It seems to me that there is currently a degree of cognitive dissonance in our Enlightenment liberal-individualist ideal of ourselves. It’s of two kinds. Firstly, that ideal is at odds with the multi-trillion dollar market for the great majority of the TV we watch, advertisements we respond to and social media we engage with. And secondly, it’s at odds with a life of sitting in front of little screens and pressing little buttons.

First published on Graham’s Substack page, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Subscribe here.