Martin Jacques writing in the Guardian recommends leaving this country. He says that if you do you will never see the UK in the same light again. You will realise that it has become a small and declining faction of humanity.

Jacques’ disquiet has something to do with the state of the culture. With the rise of celebrity has come a coarsening of tone and a loss of meaning. He has found it difficult to give expression to these thoughts but specifically bemoans the dominance of pop culture. When he left, years before, Chris Evans was the current icon representing this new, flippant, irreverent, anything goes, self-reverential, self-absorbed celebrity culture. Now there’s a huge cast of them, a feeding frenzy with an insatiable appetite for something different, something more outrageous than the previous thing.

He thinks this is consistent with the market becoming all-pervasive. The market is now the measure of all worth. We may live in the age of freedom but it should more properly be described as the age of selfishness, the result being that the myriad ties that hold society together are being seriously eroded. Individual gratification is the highest priority now.

He didn’t use to think this. He felt until fairly recently that the balance between social good and personal freedom was healthy enough. But now the combination of marketisation and unrestrained individualism are profoundly corrosive and are undermining the social ties that bring us together. Manners and courtesy have declined generally. So has the public demonstration of respect toward other members of society. Older people are becoming increasingly marginalised, the extended family has declined. The wisdom of age is less valued and society is more youth oriented. But the most telling example for him is in the realm of personal relations where we are moving toward the ‘peer group society’ where friendships tend to be short lived and contractual in nature. This differs from family relationships which are permanent, unconditional, unequal and non-contractual. It’s impossible for a person ever to reciprocate the love they receive from their parents. The only reciprocation is through the love they give and sacrifice they make for their own children.

Jacques is the former editor of Marxism Today. He’s maybe a touch apocalyptic in his tone in the way that Marxists, in my experience, often were. He believes all this stuff is a recipe for dark times ahead and blames Thatcher as the instigator. I find myself conflicted when considering his words. On the one hand, most of what he says strikes a chord but I am uncomfortable with identifying with him too closely. Blaming Thatcher is too easy and probably gives her more credit than she’s due. She may have articulated the case for self-interest and market forces well enough but I believe we were going in that direction anyway. Most other Western societies have developed similarly albeit in their particular ways. More likely that at the present time we are seeing the apotheosis of capitalism and its being able to meet the material demands of society giving the majority of people for the first time the kind of living standards they have always craved. Encouraging their selfishness in order to achieve that was no great feat of coercion - just setting the tone for people to do what they want to do anyway. Given the raw material of humans and the way they are it’s difficult to imagine how much more you can expect from a political system.

It’s inescapable to note that Jacques’ kind of talk would have been an almost mirror image of the stuffy old Victorians condemning the 60s generation and its attendant values. Perhaps he, like them, represents the voice of a generation growing old and feeling nostalgic for what used to be. In this light it’s compelling to think that society is actually crumbling all around when it’s merely changing to suit the emergent values of the new generation. There is also something curiously comforting in taking the Jacques’ view in that blame can be attached. If that can be identified as political all the better. Identifying the problem as outside of ourselves alleviates the all too difficult job of having to look inward and adjust our orientation to suit the changing landscape.

I’d like to go along with Martin Jacques and blame the market, the media, the political ideology or whatever. God knows they are easy targets. But maybe too easy. Coming to terms with the world as it is rather than as we would like it is a hard task and a struggle central to any credible spirituality. It’s also necessary for growing old gracefully and arriving finally at some kind of peaceful settlement. I’d rather be at peace finally than forever the discontented radical.