On the whole sociologists tend to pick holes in society and historians usually venerate our rich cultural heritage. Historians are generally more endorsing of our great national character. Equally, as historian, I cannot rationalise the headline of The Times today. Seemingly our national censorship has decided to ban a Christmas advert where children are encouraged to say the Lord's prayer, yet endorse cigarette and tobacco advertisements. It is my belief that we live in the worst period of history, in living memory.
I have on my bookshelf a reference work which shows the evolution of civilisations throughout time. The categories are as follows:
History and politics
Literature and the theatre
Philosophy, religion and learning
The visual arts
Music
Science and technology
Daily life.
Now, let us examine our great nation, today, in comparison with say twenty years ago, and the changes that have come about in recent times. Firstly, let us consider the law. Since the abolition of habeus corpus we have arbitrary "terrorism" and "patriot" so-called "legislation" which does away with the need for due process and the finding of evidence beyond reasonable doubt to prove a successful conviction. We have more war, more disaffected elements in our society and more threats from terrorists than at any time since the 1970s.
Literature. Well, the Booker Prize goes on "how many books will sell" rather than actual literary merit. The country loves fifty shades of lay over Shakespeare or Marlowe. The English Opera company have had their budget cut, so it can be argued that we live in a literary dark age.
Religion: if today's headline is anything to go on, or indeed the attendance at an all time low when I was in Church yesterday, we can safely discern that we are in an age where science, materialism and amorality are riding high, and good old fashioned Old Time religion is at rock bottom. What need have we for ethics when we have cars, fashionable cookery programmes and gold-plated fantasies, computer games and social networking sites?
What about learning? Well, with the 84% cut in tertiary education we can safely say that we live in an educational dark age.
The visual arts. This is a tricky one. On the one hand many modern "art" is a pile of rubbish. I recall one exhibition in Scandinavia a while ago that lost one of its "sculptures" before the grand opening. The "art work" was a clear plastic bag filled with refuse. But it's okay! They were able to re-create the "masterpiece" within minutes. On the other hand, I live in Bridders, and we have many fine artists here. Even so, they are nothing compared to the Renaissance masters, and sculpture doesn't get much better than Roman sarcophagi from two millennia ago.
What about music? Does the sound of squeeches and squelks beat Haydn, Mozart, Bach and company? No. We live in a "musical" (for it is not "music" it is merely noise that works well with drug ingestion) dark ages.
Science. Last year a lady scientist discovered a means of a protein strip that tells you when food is out of date, accurately. This has not been rolled out because too much money is already made by the antiquated systems we already have in place. Therefore science is not making any progress. The internet is more screened now than it ever has been. We live in a virtual dark age.
Daily life. What about the economy? The cost of subsistence (for it is not "living") and all the food banks.
This is where we live in history.
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