It was an unusually warm winter’s day and in the early hours of the afternoon, with the sun streaming through the windows, I abandoned the computer and my usual raft of research and the quest for knowledge and understanding of the confusing world around us. I made a fresh cup of coffee and sat outside on the deck to catch some rays and contemplate.
I was thinking that a lot of gut-wrenchingly awful things have happened in our world in the recent past: things that just didn’t seem to happen as recently as say 25 or 30 years ago. Levels of violence have gone up at an almost exponential rate. Respect appears not to exist anymore. Sensible debate and discussion on any subject at all seem to have disappeared. World leaders including our own ‘leaders’ seem obsessed with triviality and wildly stupid, costly theories. Cycle bridge over the Waitemata, climate change and the Covid response are the most glaringly obvious at present. They are only three out of hundreds of heady ideas, many of which will never be more than ‘wild ideas’ just like Kiwibuild, the immensely stupid Hamilton train and eliminating child poverty.
Never mind the leaders though, they merely represent the top level of the scale. Where are we as individuals in contributing to the downfall of society?
My thoughts inevitably drift back to a few key historical factors that arose in the late fifties and grew through the sixties. Rock and roll and pop music, rebellion against authority, the discovery of “free love” made easy by “the pill”, even freer speech and two other vitally important societal changes: The beginnings and rapid growth of secularism and the beginnings and growth of women’s liberation movements.
“The thin end of the wedge” was well and truly driven into the tiniest of gaps.
What followed was the breakdown of families as the quest for self-gratification became more important than family values, integrity, standards or principles. Meanwhile, well meaning ‘leaders’, with no thought whatsoever to the unintended consequences, introduced legislation that was supposed to make the world fairer but in some ways accelerated the destruction. Witness the effects of the Domestic Purposes Benefit on New Zealand society.
Following two world wars and a world economic depression, the late fifties and sixties were always going to be decades of growth and development and I’d argue that most of us would have supported the principles of those changes. After all, what intelligent person wouldn’t fight for equality for women? For a financial escape from an abusive husband? And why shouldn’t women freely enjoy the pleasures of sex without fear of pregnancy? Of course none of those were going to work if we stayed attached to the moral norms of the church, so secularism to some level was inevitable and of course the breakdown of families also became inevitable.
As it happens, it also left a lot of damaged men who had returned from military service overseas, even more damaged emotionally, and that’s a cycle we’ve never managed to bring under control. The result is that far too many of our children grow up without adequate male mentoring in their lives or with mentoring that is too often highly dysfunctional. Little girls don’t know what little boys should be like, and of course neither do the little boys themselves know what they should be like.
Remember the days when we used to say something “fell off the back of a truck”? These days relationships, feelings, experiences, love, hate – you name it – fall off the back of a blue screen!
Easy come, easy go – and no real contact with the real emotional effects of the many things that happen ‘online’.
Without basic ‘family’ values and mentoring by two well balanced parents, it can come as no surprise that we have many social issues to deal with daily. As the population grows, so do the numbers grow and the balances change. We’re seriously out of balance at present.
Next time I see the sun streaming through the windows I’m thinking whisky might be a better option!
Post Script – Proof that somewhere somebody is reading my mind – I came across this article “What My Dad Taught Me, His Daughter, About Manhood — And Why It Matters” on The Federalist – it’s a good read.