What we need is hope, not hype

The eve of the year 2000 was a Sunday, so this last ‘Faith & Reason’ column of the second millennium was published in the Independent on the 30th December 1999, under the headline ‘Hype springs eternal – but there must be a cure’.

‘For all sad words of tongue and pen,’ wrote John Greenleaf Whittier, ‘the saddest are these: “It might have been!”’ No longer so, I suspect, for most of us. A society that has access to almost everything that any reasonable heart desires has discovered a sadder saying: ‘Is that it?’

It is a thought that will occur to many of us two days from now, after a year of relentless, if rather forced, anticipation has come to a head in the anticlimax of the century. It isn’t just that most of us will welcome the new millennium in an unsatisfactory way – doing nothing more memorable, perhaps, than having a drink too many with some B-list friends, or flicking channels to see if everybody else’s fun looks better on ITV. The fact is that the year 2000, a date which all our lives has signified the threat and promise of the future, will dawn no different from the year that is just past.

Of course, things do change, though not overnight. And they have changed beyond recall since Whittier’s day. ‘It might have been!’ could be the epitaph of the 19th century. It was an age when people truly wanted, in both senses of the word. Ignorance, disease, poverty and insecurity were still common in this country – but belief was strong that education, medicine, industry and law could transform people’s lives. The myth of Progress was that happiness would flower in its train.

And if too many people’s dreams went unfulfilled, those ‘saddest’ words implied even so – indeed, affirmed – that they were good. The sky might still be dark, but the sun was not merely a rumour, and somewhere it was shining, on someone else if not on them. Even the gloomiest of writers, Thomas Hardy, in his fin-de-siècle poem ‘The Darkling Thrush’ – published, quite properly, at the end of 1900 – surveyed the ‘corpse’ of the finished century and yet heard in the ecstatic song of a ‘blast-beruffled’ bird a suggestion of some, to him inscrutable, hope.

But the motif of the present age is ‘Is that it?’ It speaks of aspirations finally achieved, and discovered to amount to nothing much. The day has broken for us, and it turns out to be greatly overrated. We have reached the promised land, and find its milk and honey rather tame. And there is no consolation. Postmodern thinkers tell us that the dreams of the 19th century were reduced to ashes on the battlefield of the Somme and in the Nazi death camps; but for most of us the defeat of hope is something much more trivial. The grandness of despair has been replaced by a mundane sense of personal disappointment.

Various factors contribute. Individualism tightens our horizons to ourselves and those who are nearest to us, and consumerism defines our wellbeing in terms of what we own. Affluence delivers so much – but only so much. If happiness still eludes us, can we honestly suppose that one more purchase can attain it? The old, straightforward challenge of keeping up with the Joneses has gone as even the middle-class way of life has fragmented into any number of alternative ‘lifestyles’. So, if we cannot settle for impressing the neighbours, we have to please ourselves – and that gets ever harder as we have to spend more and more to make even marginal improvements to our lives.

Still the advertising industry puts out its constant propaganda that we should not be content with what we have already, and the media tantalise us with hype, which guarantees that each new acquisition will only add to our deep-down disappointment. A phenomenon of our times is the event you have to attend or the product you have to buy in order to satisfy yourself it wasn’t worth it. Many young people have given up the prospect of any settled kind of happiness and seek instead what Douglas Coupland has called a succession of ‘interconnected cool moments’.

Of course, our larger hopes for humankind are not dead, as the recent choice of ‘Imagine’ as ‘the song of the millennium’ might bear out. But John Lennon was imagining a different world, and the hard fact of this one, daily brought home to us by the forces of globalisation, seems to be that one man’s emancipation comes at another man’s expense. Who cares whether universal education can spread enlightenment across the world if our children find themselves competing for jobs with better schooled boys and girls from Hungary or India? Who cares whether modern medicine can eradicate malaria or typhoid when the burgeoning populations of Africa and east Asia threaten our prosperity?

Perhaps that is why there seems to be so little joy, as we prepare to turn the imaginary page of history, in the cancellation of a large part of the poor world’s debt.
We need a new theme for the next century, a constructive answer to the question ‘Is that it?’ And, in fact, even in the flatness of that question there is a germ of hope: we feel instinctively that there must be something more. And dissatisfaction with our present state, and disaffection from its pettier hopes and dreams, may be (as spiritual teachers have said not just for centuries but for millennia) the necessary prelude to true happiness.

© The Independent 1999

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