As a conservative I'm always complaining about the modern world, particularly the things it lacks: tradition, ceremony, community, enchantment, etc. etc. I love everything that's old-fashioned and nostalgic and long-lasting and ancestral.
But every now again--- and I've written about this before-- I feel a positive love of the modern world.
(Almost) everything about it. Budget hotels, Coca-Cola, televised sports, newspaper cartoons, shop windows that are lit up all night long, logos, train timetables, fan clubs, iconic album covers, petrol stations, bags of peanuts, showers, apartment blocks, adolescence, old age, subcultures, fads, the myriad of different occupations and ways of life available to most people...and so on, and so on.
I've often suspected that, if any one of us was dragged back in time to the High Middle Ages or the Victorian era or Gaelic Ireland...we would be massively nostalgic and feel a sentimental longing for all these things. I'm not just talking about sanitation, safety, indoor heating, or all the conveniences that everybody accepts as desirable. I'm specifically talking about all the fripperies and pageantry of contemporary life.
It's not that I want to get rid of all those things, though I certainly think that some occasional austerity and puritantism would do us a world of good. My conservatism lies more in the fact that I want to combine them with the things we've lost.
Pity more indigenous communities , and their white cheerleaders more so,around the world don't see it that way. European powers did a lot of things wrong, but I'm certain that, despite all the virtue signalling,coming out particularly as Charles III visits the Caribbean, few people from the former British Empire ( for example) would return to primeval times. WB probably got the balance right in that respect.
ReplyDeleteWell, I suppose their counter-argument would be that they would have liked to map out their own future. But, as I've said recently on this blog, anticolonialism from the left doesn't make much sense to me, since the whole concept of "indigenous" is taboo to them when it's a Westerner laying claim to the word. (Unless it's the Irish or the rest of the Celtic fringe moaning about Britain, strangely.)
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