The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [500]
Never before had any civilisation been so cocooned from nature. Never before had human beings been so dependent for their comfort on something so vast and impersonal outside themselves that they could survive through much of their everyday lives without having to take any real direct responsibility (other than knowing which buttons to press). Without being aware of it, they were being infantilised, reduced psychologically to a child-like state of dependence on that `Great Mother' which had been called into being by late-twentieth-century technology. And an inevitable consequence was that the traditional constraints on the gratifications of the ego were being eroded as never before.
On the surface, the prevailing mood of the years since the 1950s had been one of liberation. For most people, life had in so many ways become easier, materially more comfortable, morally more relaxed, less constrained by social conventions. But in all directions this was accompanied by a social disintegration which manifested itself in the soaring incidence of crime; in the breakdown of discipline in families, communities and schools; in addiction to drugs and pornography. One of its more conspicuous features was an unprecedented increase in the breakdown of marriages, and of that basic family unit which had been the bedrock of every human society since the dawn of recorded time.
Another phenomenon reflecting the new prominence now given to the ego was the cult of `celebrity. Athough this was a process which had begun in the earlier decades of the twentieth century, not least with the worldwide fame won by the first movie stars, the glamour and deference once attached to royalty and those occupying leading positions of responsibility in society now increasingly centred on a new fantasy-community of `celebrities, blurring together actors, sportsmen, pop singers and other `personalities' created by the media. Although those inhabiting this unreal bubble did occasionally include politicians, by definition they were responsible to no one. Most were in reality very ordinary, shallow individuals whose only claim on public attention was that they appeared on television, and, in the words of Daniel J. Boorstin, had become `famous for being famous'.12
At the end of the 1970s, the writer Tom Wolfe, writing about the ego-obsessed culture of contemporary America, preoccupied by personal vanity, reflected in anything from slimming and physical fitness regimes to the vogues for self-regarding psychobabble and pseudo-spirituality, summed up these years as `The Me Decade'. But no one cast a more questioning eye on what had happened to Western civilisation since the 1950s than the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, after his exile in 1974 from the Soviet Union.
In 1978 Solzhenitsyn delivered the verdict of a shocked outsider on the culture he had found on arriving in his new home, America.13 His first surprise was the lack of `civil courage' and moral character he saw in those who were supposed to be society's leaders: their air of weak geniality and a tendency to say only what people might want to hear. Another, in a society which gave its citizens a degree of material comfort which 30 years earlier would have seemed inconceivable, was how strained and unhappy so many people looked. A third was the emphasis now placed on people's `rights', rather than their duties and obligations. A