We see ice cream Snickers bars and in vitro babies and beautiful electronic pads on which you can paint with your fingertip and – by heaven – suitcases with wheels! Think of it: we managed to put a man on the moon about 35 years before we came up with wheelie-suitcases; and yet here they are. They have completely displaced the old type of suitcase, the ones with a handle that you used to lug puffing down platforms.Not so quick, sparky. Even the happiest societies could just as well collapse if we don’t mind them well and take them seriously.
Aren’t they grand? Life seems impossible without them, and soon they will no doubt be joined by so many other improvements – acne cures, electric cars, electric suitcases – that we will be strengthened in our superstition that history is a one-way ratchet, an endless click click click forwards to a nirvana of liberal democratic free-market brotherhood of man. Isn’t that what history teaches us, that humanity is engaged in a remorseless ascent?
On the contrary: history teaches us that the tide can suddenly and inexplicably go out, and that things can lurch backwards into darkness and squalor and appalling violence.in all seriously, it’s those with a total lack of real seriousness, or actually a lot of fake seriousness about a lot of fake problems that aren’t exactly doing us any favors right now – I’m thinking of “climate change campaigners” who give lip service to starvation, and leftists more interested in actually engaging in socially harmful experiments than actually dealing with the economic crisis. The happy world where “seriousness” meant getting red in the face and cranked up about something that really doesn’t matter (like say saving the wales or something,) are just going to have to step aside for a while.
With them, the promoters of fake, invented “issues”, which the social caste around the European Union have been tops at.