LONDON: Most of us, it seems, were born too late; we’ve missed the best of Britain. The head of the UK’s teaching union, Voice, in complaining that poor parenting has created a generation of children without moral boundaries, finds himself fighting to get hold of the pessimist’s megaphone: recently the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, and the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey, have attributed the country’s problems to the loss of a religious moral framework. The Tory leader, David Cameron, though too canny a politician to risk getting involved with god, clearly implies, by diagnosing a “broken Britain” now, that Britons had a fixed one in the past.

And if opponents of this gloomy view try to call in evidence the most obvious benefits of modernity the way in which new technology has expanded the possibilities of knowledge and communication they find a Jeremiah closing off that pass. A new book, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson, argues that our new convenience tools iPods, emails, Google are robbing us of the ability to think, converse, concentrate and create. “Would Isaac Newton ever have described gravity,” asks the serialisation, “had a text message drawn him away from the falling apple at just the wrong moment?”

What all of these complaints from the speeches of religious leaders to the doom-watching hardback have in common is the invocation of a lost, and by insinuation better, society.

Intriguingly, David Miliband, the UK’s foreign secretary and possible successor to Gordon Brown, in his BBC Radio 2 interview on Thursday, several times criticised this trend towards national despondency (“I don’t accept that the country is in a hole”), suggesting that, in a putative general election campaign against Cameron, he would run with Obama-like optimism against apocalyptic Conservative rhetoric about the breaking of the nation.

That might prove to be a smart position because the challenge for the pessimists is to identify the precise timing of this old OK-UK, in which everyone knew right from wrong and families practised the art of conversation over the dinner table. The tactic of contrasting the present with a supposed “golden age” is common in culture where critics and practitioners, as they get older, start to boom the view that their art-form reached its peak about 30 years before. But just as the supposedly gilded periods of cinema and television of the 1970s are soon disproved by reference to blaxploitation films or peak-time schedules featuring Billy Smart’s Circus, so the dating of the Really Great Britain proves elusive.

The 1930s experienced a credit crunch so far unequalled, while half of the 1940s were spent in a terrible war and the 1950s were an anaesthetised period in which, if you wanted to progress in most professions, it was wise to be male, white and posh. Are these really eras to envy? And in the 1960s there were, well, the Sixties, which are unlikely to be endorsed by many moralists, being the time when one of the problems cited by Rabbi Sacks and Dr Carey – “family breakdown” became morally and legally possible.The problem with hunting social utopias in history is that the ledger always uses red and black ink. In cities with gun and knife crime, the streets in 2008 may be slightly less safe than they were in 1968; but the roads, following the introduction of seat belts and breathalysers, are infinitely less dangerous. And millions of people born during those fabled former decades are only alive now because of medical treatments created during the present supposed decline.

And are email and texting really creating a dark age? Forty years back, someone who emigrated or even went on a long holiday or business trip was more or less lost to relatives and friends. Well into the 1980s there would routinely be appeals broadcast on the radio for “Mr Listener, believed to be travelling in Norfolk in a blue Hillman Imp, to contact Southampton General hospital, where his father is dangerously ill.” There is now no technological reason for such distressing isolation; family upsets of this kind would result only from chosen ostracism. So which era was the golden age of community and communication?

Even the suggestion that family life was stronger in the past an article of faith for many moralists is problematic. Religious and social taboos against divorce or single parenthood created huge human misery, in which one partner usually the woman endured physical or mental cruelty. Similarly, the teachers’ leader complains about contemporary “pushover parents” raising amoral children but, in that past nirvana, bullying parents could literally push their children over, or worse.

The reason that Cameron was careful to say that he had no solutions to the fractures he diagnoses in British life is that he knows that it is impossible for government to reorganise people’s living arrangements without unacceptably draconian interventions: banning divorce, enforcing contraception and so on. And the chief rabbi and the ex-archbishop also offer a lament rather than an agenda.

Even if all Britons’ problems do follow from the abandonment of Judeo-Christian values, it would be impossible to restore them, especially in a country in which liberal secularism and Islamic orthodoxy are struggling to coexist.

Still more gallingly for the religious leaders, I’d argue that current British social attitudes have arisen because of the secular application of two aspects of faith teaching: redemption and paradise.

The parts of Christ’s teachings that emphasised forgiveness judge not that ye be not judged, do not cast the first stone have become the touchstone of modern culture.

And the suggestion that our society is catastrophically declining also comes from a civilian twist on theology. The Jeremiahs seem to work from the position that our daily lives should be paradisiacal: serene and immortal. Judged against this standard, any difficulty is presented as an intolerable defeat. But such sensitivity would have seemed perverse to previous generations.

By almost any standards, most people born in Britain since 1960 have won the historical lottery. Although the financial circumstances in which they are raised remain an unfair determinator of how their lives will likely turn out, they have not had to fear invasion or TB and are far less likely to be killed by a car. But what has happened is that decades of relative peace and prosperity have turned a people who anticipated the worst into a population that expects the best.

So a mid-air explosion on a plane in which not a single passenger is lost or injured is treated as a catastrophe, and hospital boards are dragged through the courts by cancer patients denied another few weeks of drug-driven life. But both of these reactions come from living in highly privileged times, in which survival is perceived as a human right. Those who determinedly invoke lost golden ages should be forced to say whether they would choose to board a flight now or in the 1960s.

Although to say so will seem to contradict most headlines, crises in the UK are mainly those of a comfortable country. In almost every way, we are lucky to be living now.—Dawn/ The Guardian News Service