Lifestyle

A Fortnightly Column
Science fact or science fiction?
LAs.r WEEK I was turning out a cupboard to make way for our new autocomposter when I dug up (to coin a phrase) some old newspapers from 20 years ago. Inevitably everything else had to wait and I spent the rest of the evening reading through the news and articles.
It was a salutary experience, reminding me of just how much our outlook has changed. The papers of November 1979 were simply full of the economic woes of the country. Everyone seemed convinced that we had reached rock bottom and that (he future was dismal.
fwo curious aspects of the outlook then struck me forcibly. One was that everyone seemed bound up with their own problems, quite unable to realise that what was happening In Britain was just one part of much more basic world-wide changes. The other was the implicit belief that progress could be achieved without radical change.
With the easy benefit of hindsight we can now see that the governments of the late 1970s and early 1980s were quite appallingly short-sighted. Instead of trying to use the brief breathing space provided by North Sea oil they persisted in the crazy belief that the old order had not changed.
In the event, of course, the net result was simply to speed up the pace of decline and this made the search for viable alternatives much more urgent. The slump which developed from 1978 onwards turned out to be far worse than that 50 years previously, not just because of the world resource crisis but also because of the haphazard move into wide-spread automation which ended up throwing several million people out of work. When unemployment in Britain hit the six million mark we really did seem near to the point of collapse and seemed set for widespread social conflict.
1 he problems of poorer people were inevitably intensified, malnutrition became common and urban decline accelerated, [he social and economic climate seemed set to usher in a thoroughly authoritarian government with all the tensions that would raise. let though few people realised it at the time, developments already taking place within this decaying environment meant that a new outlook and more general improvements were on the way. People took it upon themselves to co-operative rather than compete. We lived through a revolution, but it was not violent. Slow and painful certainly, but fundamentally successful and one which we now almost all endorse.
During the 1970s a few farsighted groups and individuals had started to work out ways of living within our means.
Much of this so-called lifestyle movement was dismissed as middle-class whimsy, but there was a solid core of commitment which expressed itself in many ways. There was the upsurge in interest in all kinds of co-operatives and common ownership movements, more people began to understand the benefits of simpler ways of living — they became more self-reliant but at the same time more helpful to each other.
Prom amid the problems of an ageing industrial society a different kind of society was struggling to emerge. As we now appreciate, it was successful. Perhaps this was because when things really did get difficult there were enough people around with the experience and optimism to help everyone to work together.
We take it all for granted now and look forward to the year 2000 with optimism, but it is worth remembering that 20 years ago it was a very different story.
Paul Rogers