Groovy Times

Yet another of my comments on yet another Grauniad CiF article. Basic civility is about social solidarity

To say that this… well… to put it simply ‘good manners’ thing is the natural preserve of the left is just plain silly. If anything, it must be a Conservative thing, it is – after all – a conservative thing. (Although, you can make a good argument that Thatcher was not Conservative in the same way that Blair is not Labour, but that is by the by.)

As someone (redsquare) has already mentioned in the comments, this current incivility can be traced back to the ‘generation gap’ of the 50s and 60s, where it was all cool and groovy to attack the squares (daddy-o) for their bourgeois attitudes. What is interesting is how quickly this contrarian stance was taken up by first the universities (cf. The History Man – Malcolm Bradbury) and then through their influence out into the media (first the BBC and The Guardian mainly) and then onward and outward into the wider society. The key indicator is how all this talk of – and belief in the overriding importance of - ‘my rights’ has spread right down to the very lowest sections of society.

Of course, there were some good things that came from this ‘revolution’; but even there, there are still problems that a more gradualist approach rather than this rabid iconoclasm would have possibly resolved more satisfactorily. For example, it would have been better to drop the outmoded notion of ‘race’ rather than institutionalising it and the conflict between women as mothers and women with careers is still a mess that satisfies no-one.

So, really if anything ‘the left’ as it were is really the one to blame for this state of affairs, especially that part of the left that used to like to see itself as ‘progressive’, challenging the bourgeois conventions, destroying outdated modes and concepts and all that.

So, unsurprisingly for a CiF article the truth seems to be almost the exact opposite of that claimed in the article. So it goes.