I've been prompted by a couple of things to take stock of how life is changing at an ever faster pace. An excellent special report in this week's Economist looks at how mobile technology is changing the way mankind (half of humanity has a mobile phone!) lives, works, loves and interacts with family, friends, colleagues and strangers. No one could have predicted - even five years ago - how dramatically the mobile phone and it successors will have altered human behaviour patterns.
The other thing is a remark made by Olek, who grew up round the corner from me in West Ealing's Polish community. "When we were children, there were hardly any divorces among our parents' generation", he said. He named one divorced couple, I named another - and, er, that was it. We could not think of any other Polish family we knew, from Hammersmith to Hanwell and all points in between, where the parents had divorced. Yet from our generation, a different story. From the six Andrzejs I knew from west London, four are divorced. Only two are still with their original wives. That's just the Andrzejs. This change has happened in one generation. Why?
Is social change predicated by technological change?
Or something else? To quote the father of one of the divorced Andrzejs, "when I was your age, I was shooting Germans. You are watching Top of the Pops." The father, of course, is still married. I don't think that divorce is merely a peace dividend. Europe enjoyed a century of peace between the Napoleonic Wars and WW1 (the Crimean, Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars not withstanding), divorce was still largely unknown.
I think if there were one main factor, it would be consumerism, breeding a restless dissatisfaction in us. The coinciding decline of Christianity in the western world, which has (and you can't deny this) been an effective instrument of social control for the best part of two millennia, has allowed individuals to place their own quest for happiness over and above that of the happiness of other members of their family and indeed social cohesion. Is the pursuit of happiness bound to end in unhappiness? Isn't life paradoxical?
This time last year:
Polish Air Force transport planes flying into Warsaw Okęcie
Field behind our house: ploughed, sown and growing
Hare on ul. Trombity
Roadkill on ul. Trombity
Weather patterns, Warsaw, spring 2007
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
1 comment:
So the old adage about never going to bed angry isn't the way to make a happy marriage… just chuck out your mobile and shoot a few Germans!
I probably should have taken that a little more seriously.
Post a Comment