Cries and whispers | 23 September 2009

The habit of dividing the past into centuries or decades might be historiographically suspect, but by now it seems unavoidable. And it is possible that, because we now expect decades to have flavours of their own, they end up actually having them. We change our behaviour when the year ends in 0. Can there be anyone who has never used ‘The Twenties,’ ‘The Thirties,’ ‘The Fifties’ or ‘The Sixties’ as historical shorthand, expecting his interlocutor to know exactly what he means by it?

By comparison with the Sixties, the flavour of the Seventies is indistinct and muted. Everyone is agreed that, for better or worse, the Sixties now represent the breakdown of social restraints on personal behaviour; but what do the Seventies represent in popular imagination? This is the question that Francis Wheen sets out to answer in his breezy and readable, but superficial, account of these years.

He answers in a single word: paranoia. All over the world, he says, politicians saw conspiracies all around them, and so did the populations over whom they ruled. He illustrates his thesis with repeated (and to me tedious) references to the Hollywood films of the era.

The Seventies were the years in which we learned to distrust our rulers, when we started to assume that all politicians, ex officio, as it were, lied continually, and when we came to believe that skulduggery was a normal instrument of government, not only abroad (where it had always been practised), but at home. Indeed, all figures of authority were tarred with the same brush, and came under the same indiscriminate suspicion.

I personally do not remember it quite like this — which does not make it wholly untrue, of course.