The overwhelming fact of everyday life is the arrival of the modern liberal-leftist cultural mores.
All-pervasive, unavoidable, and self-consciously triumphant, it has given us the rule book on how to live and, increasingly, it makes clear its intolerance of dissent.
At the same time, people living in Britain, and probably (though I don’t live there) in the United States and other countries of “the West”, know that this gigantic cultural experiment is in trouble. This only makes it more important that we write about it and sensibly debate it.
Cultural life as we know it today is new, at least in historical terms. The rules for life have not always been like this. Between the end of the war in 1945 and 1955, social life and attitudes carried on very much the same as in the 1930s. The reaction of many will be: jobs and the economy change and develop, people become more prosperous, and with this attitudes change. It is covered by the concept of “keeping up with the times”, not getting out-of-date. It is not surprising if there was a period of hiatus after 1945, given the sacrifice and suffering of World War II.
My purpose is to assert that this interpretation is wrong. While there clearly was economic development, the cause of the change in cultural attitudes, which began to bed in from around 1955 onwards, arose from much deeper corners of the national psyche. The cultural change itself, especially as it developed with very little check through the following decades, was enormous and socially transforming (the Thatcherite episode of the 1980s, which was itself contradictory, provided only a minor dent in the headlong process of progressive social change). Overall, the upheaval which has occurred was not something heralded or expected, so much so that many now in the last period of their lives find themselves unable to recognise or feel themselves part of the prevailing social mores.
No. My view is that the massive change in everyday attitudes, in world view, in individual and collective sense of self has not been the accidental corollary of prosperity or consumer capitalism. What occurred from the mid 1950s was a growing liberalisation of social ideas, the beginnings of a breakdown of the formality and the inbuilt hierarchy of life alongside the increasing popularity of what came to be regarded as the progressive or liberal attitude to life. This revolution in outlook was, in fact, deliberate, the expression of a major requirement of Cold War strategy.
The all-absorbing struggle of what has, misleadingly, been called the Cold War, had emerged from the war, had penetrated Europe as a whole and, very rapidly, had spread in one way or another to every other continent. Though not widely appreciated, it represented at least as great, if not greater, a threat to the free-thinking, constitutional culture of the West as Nazi aggression had done. The United States, fully intending rapidly to return home after the crushing of the Nazis in 1945, reversed this policy entirely within years. Britain, in response to events in Europe and beyond, installed peacetime conscription for the first time ever. The US and the UK took steps to help ensure that two major states of Western Europe, France and Italy, both heavily under the influence of the popular partisan fighters who had engaged the Nazi occupiers in World War II , did not bring Communist governments to power in the post-war period
A pre-war atmosphere settled on the US and the UK in the late 1940s, especially when it became clear that the states of Central and Southern Europe, which had actually been occupied by the Soviets, were all themselves being forcibly transformed into Communist societies, with all that implied for freedom of thought and expression. The expansionist tendencies of Communism, led by the Soviet Union, seemed clear. How far would this go, and what strategy was needed by the West, led by the World War II allies, the US and the UK, for the longer-term struggle?
To be continued.
Junius 2
Junius 2 