Litter: The Remains of Our Culture by Theodore Dalrymple

Author:Theodore Dalrymple
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Popular Culture, Politics & Social Sciences, Social Sciences
ISBN: 9781908096524
Publisher: Gibson Square
Published: 2012-10-01T22:00:00+00:00

However, I suspect that those who are not outraged by or distressed at the litter that now submerges Britain’s towns and countryside do not so much like it as fail to notice it. And this is only in part because they have grown so used to it that they think it is natural, as much a feature of the land as oxygen is of the air (in fact, they are probably more concerned about the composition of the air than about what is under their feet).

Of course, to realise that the littering of town and countryside is not natural, it is necessary to realise that things could be different. And this requires either memory, in the case of people old enough to have lived at a time when things were different, or imagination fed by historical knowledge. Comparison with other countries, and therefore foreign travel, might serve the same purpose, at least in theory.

The memory of people who lived at a time when there was less litter is easily dismissed as golden-ageism, the propensity of the elderly to invest the past with a glow of perfection. A more sophisticated version of this dismissal is indissolubly to associate the superior aspects of the past with its defects, as if, for example, the cleanliness of the streets were just the obverse of the awfulness of the food at the time, as if there were a choice between good food and dirty streets on the one hand, and bad food and clean streets on the other. Babies exist to be thrown out with the bath water.

As to those too young to have known anything but public slovenliness, they have been carefully and deliberately prevented from developing any sense of the past; they do not even know what it is to have such a sense, or that it is necessary. For what use could it serve? Would it increase their chances of getting a job, could it increase their income? It is as if the words that end the first part of Hume’s Enquiry, in which he ironically deprecates all written works that conern neither mathematics nor scientific experimentation, had been written about the study of history:

If we take into our hand any volume; of history, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain anything that will help me procure a job? No. Does it contain anything that will increase my earning power? No. Consign it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

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