The Amnesic Age

I guess it started with the Industrial Revolution: society thrown up into the air and resettled in an urban environment, away from their food source and traditions, the individual’s role a tiny cog in an enormous machine, on which all depend. New opportunities arrived, mass education and, gradually, rights, democracy and freedom, but an insidious irony also accompanied this sea-change: we started to forget how to do things. And, as technology advanced, the malaise grew and continues to grow. Welcome to the Amnesic Age.

Okay, what am I on about? Well, have you noticed how disconnected we have become from some of the fundamentals of life and survival? The basic skills we have forgotten leave us rather vulnerable and each new break-through, such as the internet and now artificial intelligence, make us even less self-reliant and more dependent on a highly complex, but ultimately, fragile system. As the individual gorges on the luxuries of our inventive age, they vegetate, a couch-potato on the human journey to a less certain age.

A city depends on the countryside to provide its food: its residences’ time and energy being required for manufacturing or administration. So, as an agricultural society transforms into an industrial one and generations pass, skills are lost, enthusiasm wains, and people complacently assume the food in the markets will always be there. Technology advances, the food comes pre-prepared and packaged and some don’t even know what they’re eating anymore or where it comes from. With the opportunity to commute to the city, the urban mindset spreads and soon gardening is a burden. Walk down any street with gardens and count the dominance of the unkempt or sparse foliage, the tarmacked surrender to a different priority, the car. If the rug of civilisation was pulled from beneath our feet, how many could find or grow their own food now?

Of course, the advancements of an industrial society bring many benefits. No more back-breaking labour for most, time for leisure pursuits and a chance at longer and healthier lifespans. And new skills and knowledge are learned. I remember weekends when fathers opened the bonnet of the car, tinkering and fixing, while mothers, their arms coated in flour and assisted by mixers and recipe books, baked and created in the kitchen. Weekends have changed. There's not much an owner need do to maintain a car these days, with their computer-tuned engines and slick production, while a kitchen is no longer solely a woman’s domain and ready meals or eating out removes the obligation for anyone to master the craft of cooking. They can binge watch a TV series instead.

As I type this blog, music playing in the background, my concentration wavers, a word comes out wrong, I forget to add a comma. Not a problem: spellchecker has my back. I type furiously but carelessly. No longer do I worry about mistakes or words I can't spell. Technology relieves me of that burden. It’s a wonder but comes at a cost. Discipline is undermined. Do I even need to master my trade to deliver a product now? It took humans millions of years to invent writing and some might say it’s been positive progress ever since, but are we now in danger of going backwards, forgetting the fundamentals? Schools still teach the basics but many children are now unsupported at home with their reading and writing and leave education with no desire to ever pick up a book again. Even with spellcheck, the basic errors I see in others’ writing is shocking.

Schools are only one part of our education; our family, friends and culture the other elements. Yet children can arrive at school without the most essential skills: toothbrushing, toilet training (1 in 4 according to recent research!), social skills and behaviours. The art of parenting has also suffered in this amnesic age. Our culture has developed some marvellous teaching tools but our freedom gives us choice, and our culture also provides ‘sugar-filled’ distractions. An educational programme or an action-filled cartoon? Like the chocolate bar, the latter should be a treat, the former your child’s nutritious, healthy dietary staple. The BBC started out with education at it’s heart but to compete it depends on entertaining. That great educationalist and broadcaster, David Attenborough, charms and teaches us with his wildlife programmes, but I urge you to watch Life on Earth from 1979 and compare it to the later series. The technology and visual power of the latter are stunning, giving us access to some incredible sights that the former just couldn’t achieve, and yet the original series treats its audience in an entirely different and mature way, heavy with detailed analysis and theories. It is the visual that sells and not the stuffy lecture hall dialogue but again we lose something, happy to cruise downhill, unwilling to peddle uphill.

The teenage years should be a preparation period for adulthood but, in the worse cases, have become little more than opportunities for egos or neurosis to develop unchecked on the bedrock of ignorance. Perhaps this is why many parents have forgotten how to parent. This is not assisted by mobile phones. They are an umbilical cord, stifling independence and taking away the chance for youngsters to discover through experience. Why learn to do something yourself when a call to mum or dad sorts it. Teenagers will always have a rebellious streak, it’s a necessity to ensure they fly from the nest, but if we forget how to nurture them towards being responsible adults, the hedonistic, self-centred adolescents who cause havoc, will simply grow up to become hedonistic, self-centred adults.

Just like the child heavily dependent on their parents, we have become a spoilt society, expectant and entitled. As a consequence, community-spirit fades from the memory. No longer do we give and sacrifice in the same manner. You’ll hear people justify their selfish actions with phrases such as ‘Yeah, but I have…,’ oblivious to putting ‘I’ at the heart of their justification and blind to the impact on others. I recall a couple of decades back the government did a slightly odd campaign to ‘restore respect.’ It floundered largely because many had forgotten its fundamental meaning, corrupted by an interpretation more akin to homage. That campaign was promptly forgotten! It was a clear sign society’s moral compass pointed to a different, more-individualist ‘magnetic north’.

All of these observations are me generalising. Yes, plenty of people still know how to garden, cook, fix a car and consider others. I am in awe of a number of teenagers I’ve seen growing up, ready to become far better adults than I. But I believe the general direction of society is how I have painted it. I don’t argue for a step backwards into some mythical, utopian agricultural age, but we do need to rediscover a discipline that gets us up off the couch, reconnected and thinking for ourselves again. If we let the problem grow, anyone left with these skills will find themselves ‘exploited’, relied on by the deficient masses, until consumed. It is so easy to take things for granted, believing technology will always support us, just as this author does with his spellchecker. But we also need to find our own place in this modern age and let the human spirit thrive again. Lett th,e revoluton bigin/