Many things will die out with my generation

Many things will die out with my generation, which is to say people born in the 1960s. European ethnic states, Christendom, or at least the idea that Europe is Christian, cash, cheque books, land lines and telephone kiosks, much of the English countryside, high streets, masculine dominance. Free speech is already restricted, except in the USA and Eastern Europe. Mothers who cook each evening. Lard. Smoking, I hope. Newspapers made of paper. Privacy. 


Children in many Western European countries are no longer taught Christianity as factually
true - in Sweden it is illegal to do so, I think. They are taught instead comparative religion, which was not long ago only studied by graduates. 

The England of the late 1960s and the 1970s, that seemed such an ugly, seedy, graceless, calamitous era when I was in short trousers, now seems old fashioned. But it still repels me. The 1960s social revolution has led us to where we are now.

While students in West Berlin in 1968 were protesting in favour of Communism the rest of Eastern Europe, ruled by Marxist tyrants, remained immune to the social revolution in the capitalist West. This is why the region is so attractive and civilised.

The young people who wanted to change the world in 1968 are now in their late 60s and succeeded in doing so. They didn't do a good job of it. 

Their ideas are very powerful and most powerful in universities and schools. So they are passed on to the elite of thirty years from now.

Yet, even though I loathe the era, I admit that it does give me pause to think that if the extraordinary revolution in tastes and thought had not taken place in the West in the 1960s the iconic 1960s film might have been The Sound of Music.

Very much that is taken for granted in England and the developed world started in the 1960s. Affluence, motorways, celebrity worship, mass immigration, feminism, classlessness, consumerism, rock, the end of colonialism, the idea that traditions are oppressive, legal abortion and of course the sexual revolution. The last of these happened oddly enough on both sides of the Iron Curtain. 

The vast increase in the numbers of abortions led someone to say that the sexual revolution was a pleasure chamber built above a charnel house.

The list of changes that happened in the 1960s is long and contains many very good things (higher living standards for all classes and legalising homosexuality, for example) and many very bad things.  You know what you think about them.

The post-Christian era began in the 1960s in most of the First World except the USA. In England it began with a book called Honest to God, by the Protestant Bishop of Woolwich, who misunderstood the ideas of Paul Tillich and was in turn understood by the public to be saying that there was no God. He changed his mind much later but by then the damage was done.

It might be argued that single sex marriage moves a country from being post-Christian to anti-Christian. But it isn't necessarily so. America has legalised single sex marriage and remains very Christian, for the time being, though becoming less so as each year goes by. Malta, which only recently legalised divorce, has now also legalised single sex marriage, yet the little island remains the one country in Western Europe that is still devoutly Catholic. 

Revolutions take place when traditions harden, lose their meaning and cease to capture the imagination, when enthusiasm turns to cant and change is needed. This has certainly happened since 1989 when the last big ideas, anti-communism and communism, vanished like Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty falling from the Reichenbach Falls

Their place was taken by an olla podrida of free market economics, equality of opportunity (which meant identity politics), internationalism and welfare considerations. Taken together or separately they didn't have the rallying power that patriotism possessed in the days when people were open about loving their country. 

Which is why we are seeing the beginning of another revolution in the West today. It is a revolution in thinking in which Central Europe may play a big role, though I doubt if Romania will. The fight in the developed world is increasingly a fight about and against the ideas of the 1960s. 

If the revolution is successful and  far-reaching it will save some important things, but it would have to be much more extraordinary than the cultural revolution of fifty years ago to make birth-rates start to climb or Europe rediscover Christianity or faith in the superiority of Western civilisation to any other way of organising things. 

What happens to people who do not practice their religion? They are invaded by people who practice theirs.