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CAMBRIDGE LETTER
Lessons from the past
BILL KIRKMAN
Nostalgia is much overrated, in my opinion. I do not look back to mythical golden ages…Clearly not all change is improvement, but much of it is.
Last week, my wife and I went to an informal gathering of people who lived in the early 1960s in the same village near London. Three of the families still live there, but most of us have moved away. These reunions take place every year. They are the
kind of occasions at which you pick up the conversation where you left it a year ago. There are few surprises; to the contrary, there is a kind of reassurance born of continuity.
A few days ago, we went to another gathering, this time a retirement party for two former colleagues. They have both been careers advisers at the Cambridge University Careers Service, in the one case for 25 years, in the second for 15. I was head of the service for 24 years, but retired 15 years ago.
It’s relative
There were obviously many people present whom I did not know. In conversation with one of the current advisers, she mentioned an event run by a student body at Trinity College, Dublin of which she was the secretary. “Of course,” she commented, “it was a long time ago — about 15 years”. I remember vividly many things about the organisation for which she now works, and they happened, from my vantage point, quite recently. For her, they are history (as, of course, am I).
Nostalgia is much overrated, in my opinion. I do not look back to mythical golden ages, when things were much better than they are now. Clearly not all change is improvement, but much of it is. In the U.K., we are better fed, better housed, more affluent, healthier and can expect to live longer than my parents’ generation. We do not always behave as if all that were true, but it is.
Occasions like those just described are pleasant for their own sake, but they also have a value in helping us to keep a sense of perspective. It is obviously difficult to look with detachment at things going on around you. Whether the context is family life, or work, you are more likely to experience total immersion than the opportunity for dispassionate observation.
I thought about this as I left the retirement party. Throughout the lifetime of the young careers adviser with whom I was talking, women have had the same employment opportunities as men. That is not to say that they never face discrimination; they do. But such discrimination is illegal.
By contrast, when I became head of the careers service, discrimination not only happened, but it was legal. Until the passing of the Sex Discrimination Act in 1975, employers could refuse to employ women in particular jobs. One of the tasks which my colleagues and I took very seriously was persuading such discriminatory employers how foolish and unreasonable they were. If I had mentioned this in my conversation last week, my young careers adviser friend would, I am sure, have expressed polite, but possibly incredulous, interest.
My wife’s grandmother died in 1968 at the age of 103. In the early 1870s she returned to Newcastle from southern Russia, where her father had been working, on a sailing ship. She lived well into the jet age.
Learning something about her life, given even the most superficial knowledge of recent history, provides a vivid reminder of how much has changed over two or three generations.
Balanced perspective
It also serves to remind us that things which may seem crucially important now will quite possibly prove to be far from that when looked at a few years later.
Take, for example, the state of the economy in the U.K. and the United States. Having just seen the annual budget presented by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and read and heard many thousands of words of comment on it, we cannot fail to be aware that we are passing through stormy economic waters. For the many people whose adult lives so far have been spent in a period of general increasing prosperity, it is inevitably difficult fully to comprehend that, as distinct from just being aware of it.
If we can manage to view the present situation in a broader historical context, we may well be able to see it in a more positive light. This is not an argument for false optimism, nor for pretending that the problems are imaginary. They are real enough, and we shall doubtless find their effects unpleasant. Perhaps, however, we may find some reassurance in the recognition that difficult problems are not unique, and have occurred before.
Bill Kirkman is an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College Cambridge, U.K. Email him at: bill.kirkman@gmail.com
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