The Age Of Innocence

by Mara MacSeoinin, UK

Michael Jackson’s death was received with a surprising – and to many, a disproportionate – outpouring of grief on the streets of England. It was not only those of us who had grown up with his music and astonishing dance routines, who remembered him as the first black singer to appear on MTV and guiltily enjoyed the film 13 Going On 30 because of its homage to “Thriller”, but those who were rarely – if ever – exposed to his genius too. Those who were more accustomed to reports of near-insanity and behaviour that almost bordered on paedophilia. Small boys sleeping in his bed. Dangling his baby son over the edge of a balcony; forcing his children to wear masks on excursions. Watching E.T. every day for twenty years without fail. His failing career; his Neverland ranch which was, at the end, less amusement park and more car crash. Yet thousands held candlelit vigils for his memory and lamented his loss with a display of grief a Greek chorus would have envied. For the Boy Who Never Grew Up, like Princess Diana, held a psychological key to the attitudes that underpin contemporary England’s entire modus operandi: intense vulnerability.

Today’s England is like the new girl who was intensely popular (if a little notorious) at her old school but who is now standing at the front of the class, awaiting judgment. Distant rumours of her past have preceded her, encouraging the envious to eye her with disfavour; she apologises to all and sundry for perceived wrongs and historical offences, desperate to make new friends so that she can gain an identity. The rebellious part of her that clings to her former popularity is ruthlessly shunned. She ends up unable to open her mouth to voice an opinion lest she offend someone; this, the Labour government calls ‘equality and diversity’. (This we call brutal self-censorship: ‘re-education’.) She has been forced to put off those so-offensive badges, emblems, merits and ties of her Old School – nation, history, pride; class, patriotism, imperialism – because her new school sees such things as unenlightened and ‘undemocratic’, though their ideas of democracy are closer to the gulag than anything else. (Anyone who has returned to London via the Heathrow Express after visiting a country without mass surveillance will be forcibly reminded of the Beatles’ “Back In The USSR”.) Now she is being taught that her history, her upbringing if you will, is shameful; that deference, etiquette and good breeding are outmoded bourgeois conventions; that education and academic aspiration are ignoble and classist; that it is easier to better yourself by going on Big Brother than to Oxbridge; that modesty, decency and restraint have been abandoned for ‘if you can’t be good, be careful’— whatever your age.

Our intense cultural vulnerability, as we stand at a crossroads in history (whatever Fukayama may say we have not quite reached the end of history based on post-Enlightenment principles just yet, though we are perilously close to the edge) has communicated itself to our children. If we don’t know who we are, collectively or individually, how can they? And our own crisis of confidence is emphasised by a recent report that a quarter of all primary-school aged children — some as young as four — have been suspended for inappropriate sexual conduct. Sexual misconduct in pre-sexual beings. But it is not entirely surprising in a nation that has been trained to view everything – people and institutions alike – as commodities. The aptly named Ed Balls even referred to Education as a ‘brand’. Stripped of everything that once gave it meaning, pandering to its yen for instantaneous physical gratification rather than cool, calm and above all measured reflection, it has become a nation of barbarous infants who work out their aggression through sex and violence. The savage and feral is celebrated and accorded a perverse kind of nobility.

In centuries gone by, the churches told the average citizen what he wanted – and needed –  to believe. The state, in taking on the role of church and indeed of thinking altogether (to the extent that it feels it necessary to spend taxpayers’ money on designing a webpage telling us how to ‘keep cool’ during a heat wave), has taken on mass marketing ideologies with fiendish enthusiasm. It decides upon our morals (or lack of them); and the advertising world makes our ‘lifestyle choices’ for us whilst pushing the illusion that we are ‘free’. We are not. We have crossed over the line between having a product sold to us and selling ourselves, following the shifting whims of external forces with blind obedience. The marriage between consumerism and overt socialism is pushing us further and further away from freedom and identity. And today’s children are the offspring of this unholy union: targeted from birth by Labour and advertising giants like Saatchi, they are not being taught to think, let alone develop a version of self, that is separate from the corporate identity decided for them in the boardroom. Babies are earmarked as tomorrow’s consumer. Little girls’ role models are not Michelle Obama and Jackie O but the despicably trashy and unglamorous Katie Price and the prefab mime-group Girls Aloud. A career in pornography is deemed desirable. Mothers let the television and internet educate their children whilst they delve into self-help books to ‘find themselves’. The biology syllabus fails students who add an ethical dimension to genetic modification or IVF. Only 11.5% of history undergraduates could name three C19th British Prime Ministers – despite being awarded top marks in their A-Level exams.

The developmental years are the most important in a child’s life; the way in which they see the world will inform their relationships, their ambitions and their ethical and moral codes. As a new and vulnerable nation in which our background has been gleefully smashed up and made derelict by the Labour machine, we are entirely at their mercy: what ambitions? What ethical and moral codes? “Right” and “wrong” are relative, right?… And yet. And yet. We need not be doomed to decline and fall. We do not have to vote in Caligula’s horse; we do not need to be at the mercy of 646 of our peers. All — all we have to do is affirm our history honestly. Roots go deep, and there is no victory to be gained in abandoning them: we are, in the words of the tired adage, merely doomed to repeat our mistakes.  In the Age of Innocence, Newland Archer yearns for a country in which he can simply be with the object of his affection, free from the trappings of the past and the social structures in which he grew up; but the Countess Ellen Olenska is more realistic. Losing one’s history causes a diminution of the world, rather than its expansion:

“Oh, my dear – where is that country? Have you ever been there? . . . I know so many who’ve tried to find it; and, believe me, they all got out by mistake at wayside stations: at places like Boulogne, or Pisa, or Monte Carlo – and it wasn’t at all different from the old world they’d left, but only rather smaller and dingier and more promiscuous.”