A development during my lifetime has been the way newness has become a major criterion of taste. It has been noted and commented on for many decades yet it still persists as strongly as ever. New domestic décor, new cars, new clothes, new holiday destinations, new gadgets, new cookery recipes – the list is endless.
In one sense newness has become destructive in that we are required to admire new political policies, new leaders, new laws, new sources of energy, new ideas about the environment, new genders, new fashions, new attitudes, new celebrities, new words, new cliches. This list is growing.
The media seem to find something new to add every week, although that isn't a new problem. It may be a stretch but is surely not impossible that we have become conditioned to accept newness as inherently good. Conversely we are losing the capacity to see that it often isn’t.
I wonder how Boris and his new cabinet will perform?
I wonder how Boris and his new cabinet will perform?
9 comments:
Somebody makes money out of it. Right from the 60s.
You don't want your voters to live in old victorian houses. Let me employ your wife as a consultant and we can knock them all down and build lovely lovely blocks of flats.
I notice that the real nobility dont bother.
I lived in a wee country town and the local Earl's wife walked about like Compo's missus. Holed, patched tweeds, wellies and common headscarf. Everybody knew who she was and politely left her alone.
The Queen drove an old Landrover. Charles patches his clothes.
No doubt this is one of the problems Me-again is having with her Duke. He cannot see the point of always having NEW. That old shirt is doing fine. Why throw it out
It's been on my mind for a long time - is the new and innovative always better than what preceded it? What if anything in the past was superior to the equivalent today?
I would suggest that some aspects of human behaviour, paradoxically were better understood, especially the social relationship between males and females in the 19th century than they are today.
And experts say that the Morris Marina was in every way technically inferior to the 1100 that it replaced.
Oh! And in many ways from my own experience house construction. 18th and 19th softer bricks and lime mortars gave rise to more durable housing stock which in dense urban areas have been admirably able to withstand road vibrations from hgvs and road traffic; modern badly built houses with their rigid cements and plaster boards are shaken to bits. Internally, horse hair lathe and lime plaster walls, if you have the time to make them, are much superior at sound insulation than what is offered today - plasterboard pinned over a wooden frame is positively a drum for sound. And it took decades to rediscover the desirability of 'breathable' paints for house exteriors!
New population, too. The media just love those new arrivals and the vibrancy they bring to our towns.
Doonhamer - jeans with artificial holes always make me smile.
Tammly - furniture too. Our dining table and chairs are about 90 years old and good for another 90 years as far as I can see. A friend of mine has a house which is partly seventeenth and partly eighteenth century. Some years ago he had to remove old plaster from an internal wall and said what hard work it was as the plaster had been mixed with horse hair.
Sam - yes, thanks to our new arrivals we now have some new ideas about personal safety.
A new cabinet, eh? We will need a new word to describe them. In the past inefficient would have done the job. Then corrupt was the word. Treasonous could be the new word for this new cabinet. Eventually we will run out of words to describe them.
As for new this and that, does anyone, ever, ask the question "what is the problem to which this is the solution?"?
Andy - it's a good question, but as we know any answer would be dishonest or irrelevant or even gibberish.
For historian the 'modern' period begins somewhere in the seventeenth century, though it took another hundred years or so for the confidence to grow that the moderns had maybe surpassed the ancient world. The Victorians had no doubt of that; progress was new and it was good. Twentieth-century 'modernism' was aping the form but not function; new was progressive and it was all for good. Judging by the first two decades, in our present century we will rediscover retrograde motion, decline and fall — not for your own good.
djc - I agree, we will discover decline and fall. I often think the upper middle class can see it coming and much of what goes on is their way to prepare for it, but most of us are not included in that preparation.
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