Nothing In Common...

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At the end of the Second World War, George Orwell recorded several times in letters and in articles his feeling that the British people had seemed curiously happier during the War, than in the immediate past. Now of course Orwell did not mean that they were objectively bursting with life and joy, that they were happy to be bombed, or to see their husbands, sons and daughters sent off to war and in some cases die. But Orwell, a keen observer of the public mood, turned out to be broadly right, by some measures at least. Admissions to psychiatric hospitals decreased, for example, working days lost to illness and absenteeism went down, the effect of rationing was to improve health overall. British morale in the War has been massively studied, and the conclusions have followed the usual Oedipal dialectical pattern of historical writing. First, wartime and postwar studies lauding the British spirit, then a short-lived “revisionist” school of younger historians sneering at ordinary people, and now, something of a consensus that the original picture—of a society which managed to endure a great deal of stress without actually cracking—is broadly accurate. I’m not going to go into this subject in any detail here, fascinating though it is, but rather use a couple of its features to address a larger and now quite urgent question: how well will western societies be able to cope with the enormous social, economic and even security stresses that they can expect over the next five years or so? Can they expect to do it successfully, not least burdened with governments who fear and distrust …