There is a short and rather brutal answer to this article.In 1944 the male life expectancy was 66 years and now it is 79 years.Without the progress that Brian seems to deplore,he would in all probability now be dead.

1944 - what a year. I'm feeling a bit of Polio coming on. Oh no - looks like TB, diptheria, thyphoid, cholera. I wish I was living in 2011 when our main whinge is the inaccuracy of the GDP methodology and whether or not kitchen TV programs are a metaphor for lie.

1944 - a good year for women too - chained to the kitchen.

Remember what Wittgenstein said Brian - if you live in the now, you live in eternity.

How sad it must be to be old.

Not in years, necessarily, but in attitude.

This article has "I'm old" written all over it in big (so that we can read them without squinting) but crumbling-at-the-edges letters.

And it makes me sad, to think that someone who said, not so long ago, that "retirement can be the best time of your life" has finally come to the conclusion that 1944 is in fact the place to be.

In 1944, my father was on a corvette in the Indian Ocean, wondering whether the convoy they were escorting was being shadowed by U-Boats, and suffering constant seasickness. (His description of how a corvette moves through the water was enough to turn the strongest stomach, even on dry land). My mother was at a radar station, ruining her eyesight and listening for the popping sound of the next doodlebug.

Ah yes, halcyon days indeed.

What is it about ageing misery-gutses, that they continually whine about the 'good old days', and how 'too much of a good thing will lead to trouble, you mark my words'?

As Matt Ridley observes, they've been saying the same thing for the last few hundreds years, and, like arch-Jeremiah Lester Brown, they've always been wrong.

So, stop whingeing, and celebrate the fact that you're one of the healthiest, wealthiest, most educated and best entertained human beings ever to walk the Earth.

The 'good old days'? They never were. It's like people who whinge about modern music and how it's not like the days of 'classic rock', in the 60s or 70s. Well, go back and have a look at the charts from, say, 1969. The way the movies and ageing hippies would have it, songs like 'Gimme Shelter', 'Fortunate Son' and Hendrix's 'All Along The Watchtower' were the soundtrack of the times.

Bullsh!t.

Of those three, only 'Fortunate Son' went above 20 in the charts (peaking at 14), while 'Gimme Shelter' was never released as a single at all. Most of Hendrix's singles barely charted at all.

The number 1 song for 1969: the Archies' 'Sugar, Sugar'.

The 'good old days' only seem that way because we choose to selectively forget the cr@p.

Come on Brian!

In 1944 my mother & I were living in a one room flattet in Ipswich, to be near to dad in Amberly, where he was training with his unit to go overseas.

So to be fair to you we'll try 1954. Then she walked over a mile & a half, towing a little canvas trolley, on little wheels too small for our gravel road, just to buy our food. No freezers, so she did this 3 times a week. I don't know if we could have afforded a car just then, but it did not matter. You still had to know someone in the right place to get one of those.

One of my jobs each afternoon was to boil a kerosene tin [4 gallons] of water from the well, for drinking & cooking. We'd been waiting over a year for a rain water tank, which was only 1000 gallons when we did finally get one. Our clothes, washed in well water, were never really clean.

But Cheryl, in 44 she was not chained to a kitchen, we didn't have one. By 1954 she walked that same 1.5 miles to town to play tennis on Tuesday, bowls on Thursday, & played cards in town on Wednesday, before towing the shopping home.

You know, I never saw a chain anywhere, & even with the shortages from the war, it was a better life than today's women with work full time, child care & full time rush.

In defence of Brian (and to bring some balance back into the discussion) not all of the changes since the 1940's have been that great. I think it is healthy to look critically at Australian society in 2011 (as Brian has), in addition to counting our blessings.

While there have been demonstrable improvements in health, wealth, life expectancy, civil liberties etc since the 1940s there is little doubt that we as a society are "less connected" than our forbears. If you want objective evidence to support this look at youth suicide rates, child abuse statistics and marriage breakdown stats for a starting point. the buidling block of our stable society - the family - is under stress!

And then there are the lifestyle related diseases - obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease ... we are so wealthy it is killing us!

Am I saying we should go back to the 1940’s ! No way – (and I don’t think Brian is saying that either). However it seems clear that in our headlong pursuit of profit, success and wealth there are a few values we have sacrificed as a society along the way. Many of these values will do much more to help us live the elusive “fulfilling life” than an 120cm Hi-Def TV or another 50% increase in BHPB half year profits!

Well, Matt, I would counter by asking how a generation who use social networking technology so avidly are 'disconnected'? Even an old fart like me uses Facebook to maintain social relationships with people who I otherwise haven't seen in decades. Other friends I have made through social media and blogging I have never met IRL (In Real Life), but some of them are just as meaningful friends as people I grew up with.

Sure, the technophobe will grump that it's not 'real' communication, but I'm sure there were those who grumbled that telephones were no replacement for letters written with a feather quill. The human instinct to interact, gossip and chat hasn't changed, just the means of doing so. Arthur C. Clarke was never more perspicacious than when he wrote, in '1984: Spring', 'the world will become one vast, chattering village'.

As for suicide rates and child abuse statistics, I'm not sure what the official rates are, but there is good reason to argue that for many years, due to cultural and religious pressures, the problems were largely hidden. They were certainly there, though. Try reading some old newspapers, as I did when researching family history: the accounts of death by violence and suicide are quite shocking. Jack Marx has written an excellent article on this: http://tinyurl.com/46fteww .

As for marriage breakdown, again, cultural pressures may have acted against divorce in the past, but all that meant was that millions of people - mostly women - lived trapped in miserable and often brutal relationships, unable to leave because of the social stigma and economic impossibility of being a single mother.

As my mother always says, 'no-one had sex outside marriage in our day - funny how the orphanages were full to bursting, though.'

Lifestyle related diseases? To put it frankly, we're lucky enough that we're living long enough to get sick with heart disease, instead of dying from tuberculosis, cholera, influenza, smallpox, polio, diptheria, malaria, dysentery ... I think you get the picture. In many ways, though, we're actually healthier than ever: cancer rates, for instance, have fallen steadily.

One set of reactions to Brian’s article speaks of material blessing ‘progress’ has achieved. Yet within that material advantage the Existentialist and Nihilists’ view of life seems victorious - we are no more than an accident existing on the 3rd rock from a sun in a solar system somewhere on the outer edges of a spiral galaxy amongst many galaxies.

What makes life meaningful? Isn’t this the question Brian wants us to ponder?

Materially we may be blessed, spiritually we seem increasingly bankrupt. Our lives are full of things yet we seem less at peace with existing.

If God does not exist then all things are permissible and we are left forlorn for all is temporary, we have nothing to rely on. The hollowness of creating a priori values and beliefs which are no more than what we imagine deludes no one, emptiness will always remain.

Isn’t Brian suggesting the increasing clutter we use to avoid the existential drama is a delusion that must be questioned? Reacting to the article by pointing to some benefit from progress ignores the challenge of living empty lives by saying we live longer ones.

I see where Brian is coming from: Most of our economy is based on quite unnecessary things...but I don't think he realises that without them very few could take part in the economy at all! Machines do much of the work that humans used to have to do, and we haven't worked out how to distribute wealth without work. (humans are very easily spoiled, and do not like sharing!)
I do think that we need to tax industries according to their inherent value and also reward the wealth creators, not the wealth collectors.
Folks over a certain age don't get computing, games and the internet at all, so I expect the "spending hours on internet *instead of* socialising" rant. "Playing with friends" in the modern context just isn't understood! They are also very scared that kids can learn from a local newspaper in the middle east as easily as the carefully sanitised western version...pretty radical stuff!

'We are no more than an accident existing on the 3rd rock from a sun in a solar system somewhere on the outer edges of a spiral galaxy amongst many galaxies' - this is not an observation exclusive to Existentialists or Nihilists. It is, in fact, a plain statement of the facts as borne out by evidence.

What's so bad about that? To me, it's one of the most humbling discoveries ever made. Taking our telescope into the backyard and peer into the night sky, I am overwhelmed by the sheer wonder of the universe. Watching Jupiter's moons disappear behind its disc, and realising that this was just what Gallileo saw, and which bolstered his case against the Ptolemaic, geocentric cosmology of Church dogma.

But you make the common Theist's mistake of assuming that a life without God is empty. Nothing could be further from the truth. Personally, I find the truths demonstrated by science to be far more awe-inspiring, beautiful and thought-provoking than the petty jealousies and tribal obsessions of the God/s of the world's religions.

To quote physicist Brian Greene, 'the more than 100 billion galaxies, sparkling throughout space like heavenly diamonds, are nothing but quantum mechanics writ large across the sky. To me, this realization is one of the greatest wonders of the modern scientific age.'

You also fall into the classic Theist's fallacy of believing that, without God, there is no morality ('if God does not exist then all things are permissible'). As philosopher Stephen Law has pointed out, deriving morality from God makes morality entirely arbitrary. Good and evil are so, purely on the whim of a deity. If God had decided that, say, incest and murder were moral, then on the Theist's logic they necessarily must be.

Indeed, you undermine your own argument by deriding 'the hollowness of creating a priori values and beliefs which are no more than what we imagine'. Which is exactly what religion does, without the benefit of logic or reason. 'This is what is true and correct because our holy book says so; no debate can be entered into'.

Thanks Brian Holden:

...For another reflective article. The word to describe the fall from simplicity of living is “aspirational”. Interestingly, you describe a time in the 1940’s with a national focus on the war effort in Europe and the Pacific. This was a desperate time for Australia and Australians which stripped the nation of any “spare change”; life was spare and bare.

...A childhood reflection of the era is wistful though. It was a period of course many adults wanted desperately to escape, and did: Into bigger better and faster.

...Poverty is the brake to "progress": The one escape mechanism well known for its reductionism; remember!

Interesting enough when I was at school in the 70's we were told by the 'experts' that computers were going to reduce the working week to 22 hours with the need of only one income. The problem was going to be what to do with all that leisure time. The other night I sat with a couple of other guys who were still working at 11pm with their laptops. Brian certainly has a point when we see the need for 2 people to be working long hours in order to pay the mortgage and wants of so many. It has been very detrimental to family life.

Brian, why stop in the 1940’s, why not go all the way back to the future?

"The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for
authority, they show disrespect to their elders.... They no longer
rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their
legs, and are tyrants over their teachers."

Socrates

“Good and evil are so, purely on the whim of a deity.” Is good and evil an expression of mass opinion? Or do the erudite have greatest say? Or the powerful? Does good and evil merely reflect the thoughts of the time? Who decides in the wonderment of an existential world? Does consensus guarantee ‘truth’?

So the marvel of an apparently infinite universe overcomes the sense of being forlorn!

Clownfish, good and evil being an artefact rather makes them nothing but a whim. Greek God’s can certainly be regarded as acting on whim, as with many others. On what basis do you hold Yahweh acts on a whim?

Is there something ironic about a person lamenting the loss of the simplicity of 1944 from a you beaut computer over the world wide web??

Clownfish: Amen!
runner: I totally agree (!)...as technology improves we approach an "android economy" where human labour is not worth much. Instead of reducing labour we are using make-work and many "adult daycare" industries to keep the "pay by the hour" economy ticking. Of course there are two economies with two sets of rules: One for the workers and one for the obscenely over-paid. ("If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys" applies to the wealthy, "Payrises causes inflation" for workers...etc) This is not good for our spirit, nor our economy.
Cronus: Which version of God's word do we believe? It seems to totally depend on your tribe! At least Atheists tend to converge on a set of important ethics and agree to disagree on the rest. Most of what Jesus said is ignored by Christians so where's the value in God's authority if it can be arbitrarily interpreted? The shenanigans of almost all churches in history doesn't inspire confidence either!

All good questions, Cronus.

>>Is good and evil an expression of mass opinion? Or do the erudite have greatest say? Or the powerful? Does good and evil merely reflect the thoughts of the time?<<

"Good and evil", as you call them, are concepts that have been adapted over the centuries by the various civilizations, to mesh with the expectations of the society within which they exist.

A quick glance through the various scriptures that rule the different religions of the world will illustrate the many behavioural adaptations, on topics as varied as murdering firstborn sons and cutting one's hair, that they have had to make over the years.

Why do you think there are schisms currently in the Anglican church over gays and female priests? It's nothing more than the visible facets of a seismic shift that the church needs to take into account in the face of increasing social tolerance. In a hundred years time, it will be as uncontroversial as the decision to stop witch-burning.

We aliens are in control. Don't try to adjust your way of life or your TV. Just drink more beer.

We've been multi-dimensionally here for over 50 years actually. Just lik,e Eka-Platinum.

Who d'ya think taught your Governments to hand all their problem portfolios to "Commercial in Confidence(trick)" golden teflon coated CEO's. The only portfolio YOUR Governments keep now is Immigration. No more cranky electors! Just wonderful bum kissing migrants who someone else has to live next door to. Goverments get the pleasure, YOU get the pain.

That "all care taken no responsibility accepted" regime change, our idea, means they can FARM you morons like cattle and there's nothin' you can do about it. The buck now stops at CommInCon -Commercial In Confidence.

Aliens taking over? Ha!

We already have!

The only worry is a few fockers who keep talking about the second law of THERMODYNAMICS and some of its saving applications for you idiots. Geothermal power, Wetland hydrological cycle regulation. packet switching space networking and Quantum Mech properties in Laser printers for ultra efficient Energy extraction from fuels are NOT to be mentioned.

We cannot permit you fools to breed endlessly for no greater purpose than just getting your rocks off. We can not permit this cancer throughout our Galaxy.

PS We like fresh meat.

KAEP, thanks for the laugh: it's always amusing, if a little bit sad, seeing someone confidently trot out the phrase 'second law of thermodynamics' as their magical trump card, when it's clear they don't really understand it.

Cronus, the best form of defense is attack, it seems: you didn't once attempt to answer my argument about deriving morality from God, instead choosing to launch a series of pre-emptive strikes against what you guess to be my beliefs.

But to answer your final question: well, *you* (and all Theists) self-evidently argue that your God acts on a whim.

'All morality derives from God', goes your argument. Which means that morality is what God says it is, neither more nor less. Therefore, it was purely up to God, when creating the Universe, to decide what was moral and what was not. God could just as easily have decided to make rape and incest the pinnacle of morality, if he so chose, and, voila!, rape and incest *would* be the pinnacle of morality. Because God said they are, and God is the ultimate arbiter of morality.

'Well, that's silly,' you may argue. 'God would never make rape and incest morally right, because they just *aren't*; they're evil, and God would never condone evil.'

But, if that is so, then you are admitting that moral truths exist independently of God. If God *couldn't* have chosen to make rape and incest virtuous, 'because they just aren't', then, ipso facto, morality *must* exist independently of God.

'So the marvel of an apparently infinite universe overcomes the sense of being forlorn!'

Who feels forlorn? I don't. I'm perfectly happy knowing that I live in this amazing Universe, perfectly majestic and wondrous in and of itself, needing no tribal sky-fairy lurking away behind it.

Not to worry Brian;
It will wind back, gradually, I hope.
More people will walk to the station, even if it is a half hour walk
or indeed more.
The cost of energy generally will impose an overhead on our economy
that will impact in ways most will not expect.

The motorways will be, if not empty, then have not enough traffic to
keep the companies from insolvency.

Food will be a lot dearer as well and the world's population will fall
at the same rate as the fall in oil production.

So all in all I think you will be very happy in that time if you are
lucky enough to live long enough to see it.