A Vanished World

J.B. Priestley in “A Journey down a Rainbow”, published in 1955, describes a work on the cusp of massive change, and sees the fragmentation of society, and what Paul Heelas later called the “subjective turn” after the Second Word War.

Heelas documents a “massive subjective turn of modern culture” (Heelas & Woodhead 2005) which is seen as a “a turn away from life lived in terms of external or objective roles, duties and obligations, and a turn towards life lived by reference to one’s own subjective experiences”

There’s something startlingly close in Priestley’s comments to the consumer ridden, latest upgrade, philosophical lite world in which so many people live today. It is not the whole picture, but it is getting closer. There is a counter-culture, but it is a minority.

A Vanished World
By J.B. Priestley
Schoolboys on Speech Days are asked to prepare themselves for entry into a world that died about the time they were born.

Communities assumed to be Christian are mostly composed of people who know and care as much about the Holy Trinity as pygmies in the jungle. Spiritual admonitions are addressed to men who since they were fourteen have believed themselves to be trapped animals on a revolving cinder. Inheritors of a great democratic tradition, vigilant guardians of freedom, are widely discovered among people who have already allowed themselves to be robbed of many hardwon liberties, without a murmur, and would probably swap tomorrow those that are left for a larger car or a 20-inch television set.

Mobs that have been manipulated for years, badgered, bullied and hypnotised into whatever camp, party, store, type of mass amusement, has the cleverest and most unscrupulous propagandists and salesmen, are solemnly congratulated on exercising their power of free choice. 

Standards of value are still warmly recommended to people who would not guarantee two meals a day to any man who genuinely upholds them.

All this is as close to sheer fantasy as Science Fiction. Perhaps it is closer. We have now millions of youngsters who, so far as traditional human values are concerned, especially those expressed in religion, philosophy, art, might as well have arrived here from another planet.

Yes, and unless some of us-- and even a tired, disgruntled author, finishing his third whisky-on-the-rocks in an hotel bedroom, need not be left out--growl and grumble and make a nuisance of ourselves, the world out great-grandchildren will know will be another planet. The green Earth and all its shining dreams will have vanished for ever.