Page 2

Without a doubt if there’s one decade that's been eulogized, scrutinized, analyzed, and pulverized to within an inch of its life it's the sixties, but while that's the case, as I approach my sixties I look back to the sixties trying to figure out where we went wrong. It's becoming increasingly difficult avoid the conclusion that things have gone rather seriously off the rails, though at the same time you wouldn't have described where we were heading before the sixties as the most desirable of destinations.

Unavoidably, the experiences of each generation are influenced, and largely determined by, the experiences of the generation before them, and the sixties' experiences of the baby boomers follow on from those of their parents as inevitably as the blood follows a punch on the nose. As my generation hit the grandparent stage there are two, and possibly even three, generations around who've had their fortunes influenced by what we were doing back in the day.

Looking back, it seems the process of change is gathering speed.  We may well be going to hell in a hand-basket and there's everything to suggest that the hand-basket's accelerating. 

Much of the problem lies in the principle that when you open a can of worms, any attempt to re-can the worms will require a larger can.  There have been many ideological worm cans opened since the end of World War Two, and most attempts to return the wriggling mass to a container have tended to favour a minimalist can. 

We tend to go looking for simple, straightforward solutions to questions that are increasingly complex, one-dimensional answers to questions that are increasingly multifaceted.

It wasn't always like that. If you look at the history of the western world you will see long periods of firmly imposed orthodoxy, and the fragmentation that has taken place over the past forty years is something almost unparalleled in the history of western civilization. 

That's not to suggest that there haven't been major sources of sectional, class and religious conflict over the past thousand years, but when you look back over history the big conflicts tend to be between two or perhaps three rival ideologies or belief systems. At any time you're going to find more than two or three forces at play, but I'd suggest that the nature of conflict means that you tend to find different interest groups lining up on either side of the whichever side of the divide happens to be closest to their preferred position.

In the future the important decisions aren't going to be made by the First, Western or Developed World.  They used to be, or at least that was the way it seemed, but as we see realignments in the pecking order, decisions are going to be influenced by emerging interests rather than long-standing precedence. 

If that's the case in international diplomacy it's also true when you look at a national, regional or local level.  Things seemed to be simpler years ago, so we find people trying to return to a halcyon era when the world wasn't being turned upside down. At least that's what I hear when I pay any attention to the populist poses the politicians and various other ideologues are adopting.

Next...

© Ian Hughes 2013