There Is No Alternative

It is time to bring to an – ignominious – end the cod-Romanticism of the ‘1960s’. All this ‘alternative society’ nonsense, once the province of befuddled hippies has dragged on far too long and seeped into the mainstream where it has almost become respectable. Indeed, to a certain sub-category of Guardian left(ish) leaning middle-class mindset, it has almost become the conventional wisdom it once set itself up as the alternative to.

Such things as:

• Alternative medicine & therapies.
• Alternative ‘ways of knowing’ as opposed to science, reason and logic.
• All cultures are equally valid in their own way and on their own terms.
• Alternative religions, both mainstream and ‘new age’, as long as they are not the terminally unhip Western churches.
• Alternative ways of everything else really, as long as it has something that can set it apart and above the hoi polloi.

In fact, it has for a certain set of the middle classes who like to feel they are not of the common herd it has become just another form of one-upmanship.

It began – back in that period of frantic experimentation that became known as The Sixties - by questioning the conventional wisdom of the time, which is often a good thing to do. They believed they could imagine better ways of doing things than the old tried and trusted conventional way that had been – and still was – slowly evolving over time. Then they made the jump from imagining ‘better things’ to believing that these other ways were better because – like Blair later imagined himself to be – they were ‘the good guys’ compared to those who stuck to the old outmoded ways; the reactionaries, the ‘squares’, the bourgeoisie and all those other demeaning caricatures. Then their alternatives themselves became just another conventional wisdom.

Since then, though, we have seen how various 1960s ‘experiments’ have all come to naught, either through their own failure, or because of the law of unintended consequences caused more problems than they solved. So, it is time to dump all of them into the dustbin of history and to move on.