Persistence of time

[davywavy]

"Want to know something that'll freak you out?" He asked me.
"Um. Go on then."
"If Back to the Future was made today, Marty McFly would go back in time to 1980."
"Ah. That makes me old, doesn't it?"

The wierd thing about human lifespans getting longer is that events which at first glance appear impossibly distant in the past are often actually only a couple of generations away at most. When I was in Dorchester last year I noticed that Thomas Hardy, that chronicler of Early Victorian life, died in 1928 - which means that things like the Indian Mutiny and the Napoleonic Wars are actually only three or four generations in the past. Whilst being aware of this on an intellectual level, it sometimes freaks me out a bit.
What's wierder is that events which seem pretty fresh to me are busily vanishing into the past too. I realised recently that for someone born today, the miners strike of the early 80's would be relatively as distant a history to them as the end of the Second World War is to me.

What this really made me think of is that I grew up reading 'Commando War Stories for Boys', and so by rights for things to continue in that vein somebody should launch 'Commando Miners Strike Stories for Boys', in which brave Tommies shout things like "For you, Scargill, the industrial action is over!", before gunning him down in a hail of hot lead. I'd totally buy that for my kids.

Comments

[blue-cat.livejournal.com]

I was propped up to watch the moon landing.

I saw Rudolf Nuereve & Margot Fontayne dance Swan Lake. Woodstock happened when I was 2.5.

Vietnam war ended while I was living in Hong Kong ['74]. I have no real memory of it other than having to fly around a dangerous area.

Falklands war was 18 years ago. Current uni students probably don't even remember it, yet I have at least 1 Brother-in-law who was out there. I even knew him then!

I voted Thatcher the first time I could vote in a General Election!

My Dad talks of a time when cars were rare, when his mother had to fly for the first time of anyone in his family to get to her dying father in time to say goodbye and her terror of getting into the Comet.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I voted Thatcher the first time I could vote in a General Election!

Huzzah!

I'm doing a project at the moment on 1920s London, and one of the really striking things is just how empty the streets are in the photographs i@m looking at.

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Try this: less than half the people who saw the Moon landings on TV are still alive today.

It is, quite literally, half a lifetime ago.

The people who flew on the world's first jet airliner are now mostly dead ("The Comet? Yes. Very noisy", said an uncle of mine, who had the final heart attack some twenty years ago).

Give it a couple of decades, and you will know of no-one who flew on Concorde - I wish I had: imagine being able to tell kids who are all full of the latest technology and how they 'get' it and you don't, that you remember flying to New York in two-and-a-half hours.

Actually, the bit they won't believe is that you arrived at Heathrow and took off for Kennedy less than forty minutes later.

We have the phrase 'Future-Shock', but someone needs to popularise 'retro-shock' as well.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about the whole kids 'getting it' thing a while ago, and what struck me is that 14 year olds being hip to the jive with the lastest tech is predictable, as it's the first time you have to learn it. The thing is you have to forget and re-learn tech about every 3 years to keep up and really after a while I just can't be arsed.

As for changing things which don't need to be changed...

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

...read this. The man's a genius, I tell you, a genius.

Re: As for changing things which don't need to be changed...

[(Anonymous)]

When I started reading that book I was struck by the parallel between Buffett's philosophy and the famous competition between game theory programs, which was won by a very simple three-line program called "tit for tat." This effectively treated all the other programs it met as if they were honest, until they proved otherwise. And this simple strategy, over time, was able to outperform all the other, much more complex programs which tried to ruthlessly exploit an opponent's weakness through game theory by wrong-footing, short-changing, second-guessing, gaining a temporary advantage ...

The next year they ran the competition again, people entered even more complex programs, custom-written to defeat "tit for tat," and it won again.

I love the letter from Buffett to a man whose company he is looking to buy, warning that if Berkshire buy his company he will be no better off, he will simply have exchanged wealth in one form (equity) for another form (cash). It's a very subtle way of saying "we will pay you exactly the market price."

H

This were before you were born

[(Anonymous)]

I remember the Beatles break-up being satirised in "Punch" as a series of parodies of Sergeant Pepper ("It is rumoured this song has something to do with £.s.d.") I must have been about six because I had not got the foggiest idea what I was reading about, although I knew by then what £.s.d were. I suppose it must have been in the dentists waiting room.

H

Re: This were before you were born

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

"It is rumoured this song has something to do with £.s.d."

Bwahaha!

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Actually, it isn't about lifetimes getting longer: the pace of change is accelerating and, even if your memory appears to be far longer than most, I'd say that memories are getting shorter.

Further: the quality of media reporting has declined, and the corresponding level of 'background' knowledge of recent events - and decade-old ones that have shaded into 'modern history' - is far, far lower.

You and I would have an immediate grasp of the Big Issues of the day and the concerns of a newspaper-reading middle-class professional in any decade of the previous hundred years. I'd know what mattered to them, and why - it's not that I'm an historian (and I'm definitely not!), it's that I grew up reading news commentary and in-depth articles that explained the issues.

So I'd know why Suez, the end of Empire, immigration and the strength of Sterling mattered in the late 1950's, and formed a background to the changes of the following decade. Ditto, for the issues of the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties.

Distant times, now.

You'd, know, I'd know: but who else would know? Take the 1970's, the IMF crisis, the sense of a country in collapse and chaos, 'In Place of Strife' and the roots of the Thatcher Revolution that comprehensively rejected a consensus model they perceived as having failed... That's a decade recent graduates will only know as soundbites, or from intensely partisan (and short!) opinion-pieces. They will have no feel for it, and are baffled by what little they will ever hear or read about those times.

But is any of it relevant today?

Obviously, I would say an emphatic 'Yes' to that. If you want to make sense of politics, government and economics, you need a sense of how we got here and - above all - a sense of context. Take today's Brave New World of 'Spin' politics and shallow focus-group driven policy, with the major parties led by PR flacks rather than people who had 'real lives' outside politics: it all seems perfectly normal to anyone who grew up in it, and they will never get a sense, a feel that it wasn't always so and people used to do things differently.

And what could the next generation possibly think - or be led to believe - about the miners' strike and the state of the energy industry today, with no background, no folk history of the Labour Movement and the Great Strikes of the prewar era, and of the middle classes who felt so threatened by what they read about it in their decade's equivalent of the Daily Mail? What kind of understanding of the issues, and empathy for all the actors - right down to the man-in-the-street - would you have, without a sense of why the very first item on the Early Evening news was so often ACAS and 'Industrial Relations', forty years ago?

But then, that's half a lifetime ago, too.

In summary, I'd say that we have two sorts of 'accelerated history' in play:

1. Shorter memories - I think the cutoff-point in popular consciousness that marks events as relevant to current issues, or as 'History', has shifted, as we no longer have mass-media outlets giving in-depth analysis of news and current affairs. I would go so far as to say that politics now has no history at all, beyond the last big soundbite and whatever media circus is performing in the current week.
2. Faster Changes - Events are actually moving faster: communication's changed out of all recognition; we've deindustrialised in less than three decades (and at a local level, it seems to happen overnight); we've transformed banking; lost one Cold War and gained another; become miraculously able to step on a jet plane to anywhere for pocket-money; and , in other areas, gained all sorts of amenities (and inconveniences) in rapid but unreported and uncommented myriads of ways - the Internet's the biggest, but it seems to be the only one we've noticed. We've gained economic and environmental crises - including price spikes in food and fuel - which are very new indeed and they are springing out at us far faster than they used to.

I worry that adapting to the pace of change by having a shorter attention-span is maladaptive, and I wonder if we're due for a reminder about being doomed to repeat the lessons of history.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Well, that has to be one of the most in-depth replies I've ever had. Slow day at the office today?

I wonder if we're due for a reminder about being doomed to repeat the lessons of history.

I'd say we're in the middle of one; someone pointed out lately that we've only just really finished paying off the effects of the great depression, and it's happening again. The legislative framework of the investment markets was designed by people who remembered the depression and it coloured their thinking. Once they were all out of the way and nobody remembered? Along comes Brown to screw things up for us again.

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Slow day? Not quite: I'm doing the documentation, and I can slip in this stuff as if I'm working.

I do sometimes go off on a long ramble this way: the better thought-out posts on my LJ all started as comments that expanded, distended, and the n spattered past the 4300-char limit.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Oh, and you'll be pleased to know that history is no longer a compulsory subject in schools, and only 1 in 10 pupils studies it beyond the age of 13.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

Wait, what?

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Alas, yes. History is seen as a 'difficult' subject, and so kids are taking worthwhile and economically useful courses like media studies instead.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

When I was last out in Manchester, I got talking to some students who, as it turned out, were members of the Rock Soc from my alma mater. The most terrifying thing? I was a founder member of that society in 1990, before some of this bunch were born.

[danfossydan.livejournal.com]

As I get older less important changes seem to happen.

Certainly at school each term seemed full of exciting things.
At univesrity each year brought massive changes.

Now, every couple of years something big changes in my life.

I think for my grandparents the only big changes for them were births and deaths. Fun stuff still happens in the gaps between times, but your kind of used to that stuff.

Or may be its just me.

[redhillian.livejournal.com]

My current girlfriend studied the fall of the Berlin Wall in history class, yet she's old enough for ours to be a seemly and appropriate relationship.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I could tell a story at this point, but to be honest nobody would thank me for it.

[thegreenman.livejournal.com]

I stayed up to watch the moon landing and my main memory is of being very tired and being hugely disappointed by the image quality.

I can remember when Ice Cream came wrapped in paper, like a pack of butter and the only flavour you could get was vanilla.

But then I am very, very old.

[(Anonymous)]

Ooh yes, we used to get that sort of ice cream too, when we went to Rosehill Park! It was like a piece of lard and you also got an oblong cone, if that's the word, into which you had to manoeuvre it, and it didn't quite fit.

H