Industry | 2009.11.22
Decoding the decade | Joe Moran
Here in the year 2039, the appetite for nostalgia and labels persists. And the noughties are our 1970s
Iam pleased to announce that, after years at the cutting edge of scientific discovery, I have mastered the art of time travel and am writing this column in November 2039. We\'ve got it all here: teleporting, thinking robots, space elevators. The only slightly disconcerting thing is seeing the decade I have just left being recycled as part of the nostalgia industry.
For instance, there is a chain of "noughties" theme pubs here, called Strictlys, where all the staff wear stick-on goatee beards and they play Coldplay on a loop. Then there are the digital retro parties, where everyone has a good laugh at those primitive iPhones we put up with in the 2000s, and we all wonder how we got through the winter with only 200 TV channels. You only have to see people getting wistful about the whole family watching X Factor to realise what a strange and omnivorous human urge nostalgia is.
Not that remembering the 2000s is all about wallowing in kitsch. The New-New Labour politicians of the 2030s have been distancing themselves from their New Labour predecessors by reciting the mantra: "We must never go back to the failed policies of the noughties." Strangely, they don\'t mean the unregulated financial system that caused the money markets to crash and turned the bankers into folk devils. Instead, the winter of discontent of 2009 gets mentioned ad nauseam, when the intransigence of all those public sector workers who resisted market "modernisation" caused the worst recession in memory. Everyone here remembers the noughties as the dark ages to which we must never return – rather like the 1970s in your day, in fact.
In short, we in 2039 are suffering from a nasty bout of what Ferdinand Mount , way back in 2006, called " decaditis ". This tendency to package decades as entities is a relatively recent phenomenon, and it takes a while for each decade to accumulate its own set of historical cliches. At the end of 2009, no one knew what the noughties stood for.
You may remember a similar thing with the 1970s. In 1980, Christopher Booker referred to the decade as "a kind of long, rather dispiriting interlude". We had to wait a few years before the 1970s assumed the now familiar Thatcherite narrative of postwar decline. The problem with this kind of decadology is that it treats the past as a cautionary tale in which the ending seems inevitable, and thus views our forebears as stupid or naive for not seeing the writing on the wall. The 1970s, or the noughties, come to seem as distant and alien as Pompeii, with nothing to teach us except how much more enlightened we are today.
It isn\'t read much in 2039 but there is a novel called 1984 , in which the hero, Winston Smith, works at the Ministry of Truth rewriting old editions of the Times and casting the previous versions into the "memory hole". What the author, George Orwell, failed to realise is that in the future there would be no need for censorship because of our insatiable appetite for decadology and its capacity for inducing selective memory.
Every so often here, an older person might dimly recall something about "bankers\' bonuses" or "sub-prime mortgages", and for a brief moment it acts like a Proustian madeleine , a secret corridor into a forgotten past. But mention these phrases to anyone under 40 and you might as well be speaking Latin.
Admittedly, one or two maverick historians point out that the economic crisis of the noughties led to a questioning of market fundamentalism and its relentless pursuit of growth. But then the market fundamentalists fought back and managed to present their version of the future as the only form of progress, so that everyone who disagreed came to seem like a dinosaur. I don\'t think this alternative version will ever catch on. As some pointed out even in 2009, decadology has very little to do with history.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/13/1
