THE topography of the present is defined by two horizons. Behind us we see the 1960s: the beginnings of our present state of prosperity and self awareness. In front, although not quite so distinct, is the millennium. We have contrived to perceive this final century of the millennium as a reluctant worker sees the working week.
We trudged through the first six decades, investing all our hopes and dreams in the weekend. And now, on the Sunday afternoon of the century, in order to distract our thoughts from the coming Monday, we look back longingly to Friday afternoon, when we skipped gaily out the factory door.
Just before Christmas, I saw an advert on television for "Sixties Music", and got to thinking how meaningless such a concept will appear in 10 years. If a reference to such should pass our lips in the presence of our children, I suspect it will provoke a response along the lines of: "Which sixties would that be now, Daddy/Mammy? Oh, you mean the nineteen Sixties". In just three years, our present preoccupation with a short stretch of temporal territory will be exposed for the delusion it is.
We will be cast yet again into the endless ocean of time. The "Sixties", then, will not be something to reminisce about, but something to create anew. Most of our present assumptions, values and aspirations will be up for grabs as we find ourselves sliding down the snake to the beginning of time. At midnight on December 31st, 1999, the phrase "20th century outlook" will begin to be a term of abuse.
The TV advert was, of course, in black and white. Black and white, in this particular context, is not a function of necessity but of condescension. The Sixties were a teeming mess of colour and light, and putting them in black and white has very much to do with the 1990s. There is no shortage of colour footage of Sixties music, but to use it in this context would be to imply that it was simply the music of three decades ago.
By "Sixties Music" we mean much more than that. We mean the music to which we awoke, the music of the beginnings of the present. Presenting it in this way betrays a refusal to believe that the Sixties might have been the end rather than the beginning of something. A black and white Sixties signals the beginning of our self awareness. It bespeaks the innocence which we associate with the dawning of our civilisation.
In large part, our obsession with the Sixties a consequence of television. In a sense, the state of TV tells us everything we need to know about the hidden condition of our societies. In our post Sixties state of self satisfaction, television made us self aware in a way we had never been before, and effectively wiped out our memory of previous forms of awareness. The TV set endowed all previous means of communication with a profound pathos, causing us to regard all previous efforts with condescension and pity.
Whether the Sixties Dream would have survived without television is moot. Perhaps because of television it survived without ever being realised. The Sixties package of peace, love and understanding might have been everything we pretend it was if only it had been followed through. That it was not was due to the insistence of the succeeding generation on banking its hard won freedoms and leaving the mortgage of optimism unpaid.
We were not ready for the thoroughgoing transformation demanded by the Sixties Dream, and so opted for the a la carte menu, picking and mixing the bits we wanted. We chose affluence without equality, flesh without spirit, compassion without inclusion and freedom without responsibility.
We talked social consciousness and slithered into the polling booths to vote for Reagan, Thatcher and their even paler imitators. Those at the front took John Lennon's instruction to rattle their jewellery a little too literally.
And yet, to the present day, we have traded off the Sixties myth. We live in an age of post Sixties self congratulatory hubris. Every day, in every way, things are getting better and better. The Sixties themselves may have been spontaneous and idealistic, but the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties have been merely imitative, smug and self regarding - and pretty much in that order.
It was as though we had decided no further effort was necessary. The Sixties was the Final Revolution, the opening sequence of the End of History. From here on, nothing would be required to change drastically. We just needed to fine tune our civilisation in accordance with the most superficial of Sixties ideas and pour scorn on everything that had happened before.
This is why we are so obsessed with the past and the immediate future, at the expense of the present and the long term. The unspoken project of what we term modern society is the obliteration of all pre Sixties ideas, beliefs and aspirations before the first dawn of the new millennium.
For example, in order to comprehend the present pressure for full European integration, it is vital to understand that all of the current generation of Europe's political leaders are of an age which averages somewhere in the upper 50s. All were born during or immediately after the second World War and came of age in the 1960s. Their notion of themselves and of the world is therefore defined by the post war reconstruction, culminating in the flowering of the 1960s.
To a degree that is almost certainly unhealthy, these leaders have identified themselves and their own lifetimes with the life of the century. The symmetry which they have perceived in their own careers they have projected on to the affairs of those they have been elected to rule.
THE better to drive us into the pen of their ambitions, these pale revolutionaries accuse us of parochialism - of mind, territory time. They tell us we are small minded, introspective, insular and backward - unless we do as they say.
They admonish us, too, that as a result of the communications revolution the world becomes smaller and smaller. Our clinging to old ideas, therefore, is evidence of a sub modern anxiety. But the notion that media are making the world smaller is typical of the kind of Sixties idea that is rapidly being revealed as a canard.
Markets for television and other technological media have already started to fragment in a manner which promises to return us, metaphysically and culturally, to the way we were before these media were invented.
In the kind of politico cultural context to which these questions refer, a television audience of a million divided between a thousand channels becomes the technological equivalent of a Sunday night in the Irish ballrooms of the early 1960s.
The core problem is our congenital inability to transcend our own sense of self importance, our belief that the previous thousands of millennia were simply a rehearsal for the 1990s. Truly, as John Vincent wrote in his book, An Intelligent Person's Guide to History, there is no parochialism like the parochialism of the present.