Backward into the Eighties
Christopher Booker
Ten years ago, at the end of the Sixties, I contributed to these colums an article called 'Backward into the Seventies', which I ended with the expression of hope that I should 'still be here to write the same article in ten years time'. Well, here it is — and looking back at those predictions as to the likely character of the Seventies, the most obvious comment to make is how unusually (but gratifyingly) predictable the decade just ending turns out to have been.
When I say how unusual it is for a decade to be predictable, I mean that decades in this century have generally turned out to have quite the opposite character from that predicted at their outset. At the end of the Forties, for instance, against the background of continuing austerity, financial crisis and a worsening Cold War (with Stalin just having exploded his first atom bomb), the prospects for the decade to come were generally advertised as unutterably gloomy. Few, if any, foresaw the astonishing transformation which was to come over Britain and the world in the Fifties — to such an extent that, by 1959, in the high noon of Supermac's affluence and the `Khrushchev Thaw', most commentators looked forward to the Sixties with a greater degree of optimism than had been true at the end of any previous decade of the century.
'At the gates of the new decade', wrote the Economist in December 1959, 'the main peril, blinding our eyes to what we could achieve, seems to be smugness'. In Esquire, in January 1960, sensing the mood that was shortly to unleash his friend John Kennedy's 'New Frontier', Arthur Schlesinger Jr predicted that the Sixties would be 'spirited, articulate, inventive, incoherent, turbulent, with energy shooting off wildly in all directions. . . there will be a sense of motion, of leadership and of hope'.
Well as we all know, the Sixties turned out to be rather more uncomfortably 'energetic, incoherent and turbulent' than the good Professor can have allowed for in his wildest dreams — and ten years of 'dynamism', permissiveness, youthful pro test and Vietnam later, the mood could scarcely have been more different. As I wrote then in the Spectator, 'Everyone seems by and large agreed that the Sixties were a party which got rather out of hand, and that in the past year or so, as we look round the wasteland left by ten years of battered hopes, tired novelties and exploded illusions, there have been plenty of signs of a kind of shocked and exhausted hangover setting in'. After the 'dear, dead, foolish Sixties', in short, we could confidently look forward to the 'solemn, square, sane Seventies' — and so, by and large, give or take a few qualifications on the sanityelement, it has proved.
Of course not even Nostradamus could have predicted the surprises of the past decade in detail — Watergate and the resignation of a President, the full scale of the horrors which followed the Communist take-over in South-East Asia, the crystallisation of the long-predicted world energy crisis round the Yom Kippur War and the fall of the Shah, the election in Britain of a woman Prime Minister and the rise of `Thatcherism', the range of victims falling to the world-wide wave of terrorism, from prime ministers in Spain and Italy to Airey Neave and Lord Mountbatten. But at a deeper level, all these things, like inflation and the newly aggressive mood of the unions, were merely expressions or culminations of trends which were already discernible as the Sixties came to an end.
What perhaps I got most seriously wrong in my assessment of the mood of the times ten years ago was simply to prejudge the extent to which the great reaction to he euphoria and follies of the Sixties had already taken place. It is quite true that, by 1970, there were already abundant signs that the wilder notions of those earlier years were being called into question. The great tide of 'dynamism' and 'permissiveness', of tower blocks and technology triumphant was certainly, in the wake of such pointers as Ronan Point, E.J. Mishan's The Cost of Economic Growth, the rise of `conserva lion' and the 'ecology movement', on the ebb.
But in my eagerness to see an end to the foolish neophilia of the Sixties, what I misred was just how long the great Sixties dream would be a-dying, and just how far the reaction would have to work through until it became more or less the prevailing orthodoxy of the late Seventies.
It was not until the end of the WilsonHeath-Wilson era, as I have argued before in these columns, that one could look back to see how much those twelve years between 1964 and 1976 formed a kind of self-contained period in English life, dominated by a kind of trendy, immature wishful-thinking, and by a certain kind of 'boy hero' personality (Wilson, Heath, Thorpe, Frost, Jim Slater, George Best, the Beatles) whose day now seems very much over.
Similarly, I did not foresee just how many of the fashionable notions of the Sixties would have a kind of last, wild fling in the early Seventies— most notably, perhaps, the belief in the bulldozing of our cities into a brave new world of tower blocks and motorways, which collapsed so suddenly in 1974-6, like so much else from those earlier years.
Who indeed could have forseen just what a turmoil America would have to go through in the mid-Seventies, in order to purge the sickness which, after 1963, had just gone on getting worse and worse — or just how total and terrible in its consequences would be the otherwise predictable failure of America to keep South-East Asia from falling under communist rule?
For all these things it can nevertheless be said that the prevailing trend of the Seventies has continued to run pretty consistently in the same direction. Altogether it has been a decade when we have steadily continued to be stripped of our old illusions, when faith in the technological, political, social, artistic and moral progress of our civilisation has become harder to sustain than ever. And the most interesting thing has been the almost complete failure of an.Y new body of illusions to rise to take their place. For this reason alone it has therefore been a decade with much to be said for it. If we came 'backward into the Seventies', sn, even more firmly do we travel back war into the Eighties. In view of the catas trophes and atrocities which have followed in our century from looking rosily into the future, it is perhaps the healthiest of all postures to adopt. I recall saying on the radio at the end of 1969 that I thought thet Seventies would probably be 'a quiescen interlude' before the renewed horrors of thet Eighties. The Seventies have certainly no_ been without their horrors. As for my Pre,. monitions about the Eighties, however, hope I am even more wrong. Even snor,e, fervently than in 1970 do I hope that! sha: still be here in ten years time, to write teho, same article yet again, and to wish all Spe tator readers, as I do now, a happY a w decade.
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