I was born in 1979. For some of you reading this, that makes me old enough to be, well, your big brother. In fact for two of you reading this I am your big brother. But most of you probably think that twenty-four is young, maybe even obscenely young. "Twenty-four! I wish I was twenty-four again, then I'd never have..." you may be thinking. Don't worry, I think the same way about people who are twenty.
It struck me recently just how much our age influences our attitudes. Or I should say, how much the things we have lived through influence our attitudes. Sometimes even a small difference in age can make a big difference in outlook.
Let me give you an example. A younger sibling is rifling through their older sibling's CD collection. They stumble across a copy of Oasis' first album "Definitely Maybe". "Agh!" they shout, holding the offending article by their fingertips as if it were contaminated. "You like Oasis?! They're shit!"
"OK" says the older sibling "They're shit now, but they weren't always shit. At one time they were quite good. OK, they weren't as good as we thought at the time, but they were still OK. Before the money and the trophy wives, they were a good band. Also you have to remember that back in 1994 there hadn't been anything decent since "Nevermind". Oasis just seemed really good because at least they had a pulse."
So, a small gap in age, even of only two years, can be the difference between remembering a band when they were young and hungry, and only being able to recall them after they "jumped the shark" and bought mansions in Hertfordshire.
As with music, so with politics. It's one thing to read about a momentous event in a book, it's quite another to have lived through it, even if it's only at the vicarious level of watching the world through the TV set. The crucial difference is hindsight. Unless you actually experienced the event as it happened then you don't experience it first-hand. Hindsight may bring wisdom but it also removes both hope and fear. "The Usual Suspects" holds up well to repeated viewings but nothing can compare to the first time you watch the film; the one and only time when you don't know until right at the end that Kevin Spacey is Keyser Soze.
The best all-encompassing event I could think of to demonstrate the power of hindsight is the Cuban Missile Crisis, the only occasion (so far) that humanity has come close to signing its own death warrant. No matter how deeply you study the stand-off, you are always blessed, and cursed, in knowing the outcome. Nothing can compare to having lived through it, listening to the news on the radio and wondering if there was going to be a world in which to listen to radios the following day.
Most people over fifty have such a memory. This must influence their attitude to nuclear weapons. I'm not saying that all pensioners are members of CND. It's perfectly possible to have lived through October 1962 and still be in favour of nuclear weapons. But at least this is an informed position, based on the experience of having lived through a period when their use was a real possibility rather than a vague possibility. Those born after 1962 can be anti-nuclear, but probably on the basis of a general feeling of unease rather than real, visceral fear.
There are any number of other examples. South Africans over twenty can remember apartheid. Zimbabweans over thirty can recall a time when their country was called Rhodesia. Spanish people the wrong side of forty know a time of fascist rule. Some Americans in their fifties are able to recall an age when their country was segregated.
All of this matters, and it matters deeply. There is no substitute for first-hand experience and there is no way of getting it if you don't already have it. If you're not old enough to remember the Berlin Wall coming down, you're never going to be old enough.
But it's not just about experience and hindsight. It's about change. The older you are, the more change you've seen in your life. And the more change you've seen, the more you should appreciate that permanenece is often a facade.
Perhaps the best example of this is Germany. Today's German teenagers live in a rich, democratic country. They know that their country was once divided but they have no living memory of this. Germans in their twenties, by contrast, can remember a time when their country was divided into a communist east and a capitalist west. They have lived through a time when part of their country wasn't ruled democratically. They know that their country was once fascist but they didn't live through it. Germans over seventy remember a time when none of their country was democratic, when there was only dictatorship and war. Very elderly Germans can remember even further back, to the days of hyperinflation and the Weimar republic.
Now let me ask a hypothetical question. Which group of Germans would be most likely to subscribe to Fukuyama's notion that we have reached "the end of history"? The young, who know nothing but the present, or the old, who know nothing but change? An elderly German who believes that their country won't change in the future is ignoring their entire life's experience. After all, they must have been here before, mentally speaking. When Hitler spoke of a thousand year Reich, many listening probably thought he was correct.
But still it was fashionable, at least in the 1990s, to believe that Fukuyama was right, that history had come to an end, that all the great issues had been decided in the West's favour. In the last decade of the twentieth century there was, it seems to me, a real "arrogance of the present", a belief that "History" with a big "H" was over. With communism and fascism slayed, there were no more ideological wars to be fought. There were no more earth-shattering moments, there were only events. There was no point in believing in anything except capitalism. Humans existed only as consumers.
Of course, since 9-11, there are far fewer people prepared to put forward such a point of view. None of us knows how history will recall our time, how our era will be defined. Perhaps the period from the collapse of the Berlin Wall until the collapse of the Twin Towers will be seen as a sort of innocent interregnum between two ideological wars. Maybe though, 9-11 will be seen, not as a defining event which changed the world forever, but simply as a terrorist act which shaped its decade but not its century.
We can't know the future, but we can know the past. And anyone who has lived through change, through times of hope and fear, must realise that that which appears permanent is often not.
It wasn't always like this. And it isn't always going to be like this.