THE PRESENT IS ANOTHER COUNTRY


I do not know how important familiarity, routine, habit, the predictable, is in our lives, though I suspect it is much more important than most people might like to admit. Our lizard brains certainly prefer solidity. We sit in the same chair, sleep in the same position, take the same route to work each day. When we ascend on the escalator, we know that daylight will greet us as we leave the familiar tube station, supermarket or department store.  To gauge our reliance on familiarity for our mental health it only requires this orderly arrangement of things to be disrupted. We instantly feel uncomfortable, ‘put out.’ The greater the disruption the greater the discomfort.
When the reliable and familiar disintegrates on a much larger scale, at the national and cultural level, this sense of disorientation can be even more disturbing. This is best illustrated by the hyperinflation of Wiemar Germany, or the impact of the Wall street crash and the depression of the early nineteen thirties. When the familiar and trusted disappear panic sets in and people search for scapegoats. People, just like ourselves, demand order, that someone take control and bring back the lost security and familiarity. Demagogues’ rise to prominence by exploiting these fears.
For so long Britain felt immune from this phenomenon, ‘English’ exceptionalism in particular rested on the smug assumptions created by centuries without turmoil, revolution, or civil war, that that kind of thing couldn’t happen here. Change was something that if it happened, happened slowly in an evolutionary way.
Now these smug assumptions no longer seem to hold. Politicians seek and promise revolutionary change.  Our unwritten constitution, wholly dependent on politicians playing by the, unwritten, rules. When they cease to observe these unwritten rules and conventions the whole edifice is seen for what it is, a fragile framework of compromise and reliance on politicians behaving ethically. Our democracy is seen not as a stranding on the solid ground we thought it did but turns out to be as delicate as tissue paper and as just as easily blown away by gusts of a populist wind. More significantly these winds far from being confined to our own country seem to be sweeping the democratic world.

With so much that seemed secure and stable swept away it is no longer possible to be sure of anything. So already the period before 2015[1]has taken on an attractive hue, a period that feels stolen from us, when presidents did not tweet banal abuse and prime ministers behaved like prime ministers. The world we knew and understood and the rules that governed democratic discourse are vanishing fast into a cloud of the past. So that it is no longer the past that feels like a different country but the present.


[1] The real point of departure was, of course the 2008 financial crisis, the wave of populist anger was merely the delayed aftershock.

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