Christopher Booker's The Neophiliacs: A Study of the Revolution in English life in the Fifties and Sixties was published in 1969. It's well worth a read, despite - or rather because - his take on the 1960s is so unsympathetic.
The overall theme is the idea of Sixties neophilia as a kind of collective national hysteria, a mass delusion, a mirage caused by the media that became self-perpetuating, stoking an appetite for shocks of the new and breaks with tradition... leading to an upward-spiraling demand for change that couldn't be satisfied, short of revolution. It could only crash and burn into bitterness and disillusionment.
Brooker is a persuasive enough writer that even a "Sixties fan" like myself began to feel like it was all quite insane. At the same time, you gradually become aware that his worldview is basically Christian - I'm guessing in the high Anglican tradition, moderation in all things, non-fervent. He views society as - ideally - homeostatic. Things should change only very very slowly indeed - and perhaps not at all. You sense that he not-so-secretly believes that things were better and people were happier when everyone knew their place.... The right attitude to have is humility and fatalistic acceptance of your God-given lot, rather than striving to get above yourself, or shake things up.
Curiously, Booker was a player in the British Sixties early on as one of the writers on That Was the Week That Was. So he was instrumental in the whole Sixties satire boom - with its groundbreaking irreverence towards authority (e.g. the impersonation of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan - something deemed unthinkably disrespectful in 1962 or whenever it was). He was also involved in Private Eye.
But by the time of writing The Neophiliacs, Booker has switched over to the other side and the satire boom is something he criticises.
But then he criticizes everything: fashion, the cult of photographers like David Bailey, commercial TV, the dissolving of class barriers, permissiveness, the Pill, feminism, Brutalist architecture, urban planners, Harold Wilson's "white heat of technology"...
He's possibly the original young fogie.
America gets blamed for a lot - rock'n'roll obviously, but also for the arrival of supermarkets in the U.K. And if I recall right, he blames Americanization for the liberalisation of gambling laws, with casinos opening in London for the first time.
Another thing he doesn't approve of is James Bond movies! On account of the way they glamorise sex and violence (which Bond clearly enjoys).
Wish I had this edition rather than the one up at the top....
One thing's for sure, Christopher would have hated, hated, Expo 70.
Even if you already know a lot about the British Sixties - from more sympathetic historical accounts like say Robert Hewison's Too Much: Art and Society in the Sixties, 1960-1975, or frontline real-time takes like Jeff Nuttall's Bomb Culture, Richard Neville's Playpower, or George Melly's Revolt Into Style - the Booker-book is worth a peruse I'd say, for the quirky way he's goes about assembling the narrative, as well as the less-common conservative perspective.
He has a peculiar methodology, which is that he appears to have sat there with piles and piles of newspapers and ploddingly worked his way through the late Fifties and the Sixties year by year, month by month, week by week, day by day. On one level, that's lazily linear and pedestrian: a chronicle, insufficiently analytic. But on another, it's fascinating - you get to know what the weather was like and how that affected the national mood. All kinds of little stories get included that a historian of the era operating later on might not have swept up. A reference to a "power breakfast" that David Frost held with all kinds of cultural bigwigs and movers and shakers attending. Something I'd never heard of, no doubt a big deal at the time, at least for a few weeks, but subsequently utterly erased from the memory.
Another interesting tic is the way Booker - being a bit of a snob, or more charitably, acutely class-conscious - will mention what school someone went to, whenever he introduces a significant new character to the narrative. Or what university. It all feeds into his running theme of how the old social barriers were collapsing, an unprecedented degree of cross-class hobnobbing was going on. Which he probably found consternating.
There was a follow-up to The Neophiliacs, not written as a book-book but compiled out of articles and opinion pieces:
However it's not so much that the 1970s is "the decade that changed the future" - rather it's the decade where the future died. Or at least where the idea of the future, the romance of the future, faded and fizzled. That's what Christopher says. Faith in a brighter tomorrow, anticipation, eyes on the horizon, we are the tomorrow people - he thinks all that goes, under multiple pressures (economic decline, environmental devastation, the oil crisis, the break-up of families through divorce, you name it - the laundry list of right-wing bogeymen). Hence the boom for multiple simultaneous nostalgia revivals....
(But there's plenty of evidence for continued neophilia and future-anticipation in the 1970s- look at Tomorrow's World, Omni magazine, books of futurology, the aesthetics of disco and glam).
I guess The Neophiliacs and The Seventies are Transatlantic cousins of Alvin Toffler's famous work Future Shock but Toffler is more diagnostic, whereas Booker is just aghast, recoiling in horror and disgust.
Blank-eyed dollies in space age fashion juxtaposed with urban bleakness or Brutalist architecture - this is a special bugbear of Booker's
Of course, he became a strong supporter of leaving Europe...
Just one of his anti-EU tomes.
Now I wonder if Booker actually coined the term "neophiliac"?
And what would its opposite be?
Not retrophiliac, because "retro" is always a present-day version or revision of the past - it says more about today than it does the actual historical past. .
Whereas loving the actual past in all its deadness and gone-ness.... antiques and long-ago glories..
hmmm
Paleophiliac?
What we know now, that Booker didn't know at the time, is that a lot of this "future" was coordinated from the top, usually by the CIA and the other security services, and wasn't an organic process at all. A deliberate process of pacification via Americanisation.
ReplyDeleteYou should read "Who Paid The Piper?", Simon.