Does Mrs Montgomery Live or Die?

I can't open the paper nowadays without reading a column by somebody raving about the weakness and decadence of our society. How we have lost our "traditional values" and are spiralling towards societal collapse. Apparently modern society is weak, lazy, decadent and full of a sense of undeserved entitlement. Our culture is too permissive, morally bankrupt, saturated with sex and so on. If our society is saturated with sex is it too much to ask that a little trickle down to me? We have apparently lost the fine virtues of a previous generation who were much more noble, self sacrificing, hard working and blah blah blah. "The fabric of our society is crumbling," they yelp as stories of single mothers, juvenile drug dealers, illegal immigrants, political correctness and racial tension assault the very bastions of decency itself. Well it must be admitted that society has a problem, for starters we can't get these obsessive whingers to shut up.

Certainly there are many problems with our society; people have problems, people make up society, can anybody do the math here? Possibly the only way to have a flawless society is to remove people from it. For those desiring a perfect society permit me to commend them to an anthill. Apparently the way to solve all of our problems is to look back to a more appropriate time. This despite the fact that today's society was created because people realised that yesterdays society wasn't satisfactory. Throughout history people have looked at society and thought "surely we can do better". History has shown that they were right, every time. We could do better and have. No doubt we will do better than our current society in the future, we usually do the occasional backsliding notwithstanding.

Nevertheless the past seems to hold a great deal of attraction for some people and its easy to see why. Society in the past wasn't fairer, or better, or nobler but it was easier. A place for everything and everything in its place. Things were simpler back then; black was black, white was white and as a rule the two didn't intermarry. Any attempt to find this society, however, runs into an unpleasant stumbling block; where the hell is it? How far back do we have to go to find it? Twenty years? Not even I want to relive the eighties. Sixty years? World War 2, that was a lot of fun for all concerned. A hundred years? I quite agree, penicillin and pain free dentistry are vastly overrated. Further still? Might be okay as long as you're white, male, don't have to work for a living and have a relaxed attitude to personal hygiene but at some point a priest is going to come around to ask why you haven't been on crusade recently.

Of course it can be argued that what such people really want is a return to the moral attitudes and outlooks of earlier times when people were polite, respectful, honest, hardworking and patriotic. There certainly was some of this back in the day but at the exact same time as people were displaying those qualities they were also displaying racism, homophobia, hypocrisy and intolerance. In any event the people who had these qualities were not a product of their time they were a product of their upbringing. There are people today who show all the good qualities mentioned above (and not a few who show the bad) what is missing today is the pretence that everybody behaves like that. This is largely because people are more informed today (note I said more not better). Nowadays you have to be living under a rock not to realise that many of the virtues touted by our leaders are conspicuous by their absence in those self same leaders. This was also true in earlier days but fewer people realised it. The true difference between society today and that of say forty years ago is a tearing of the veil. The emperor has no clothes and people are shocked at the display, but the emperor never had any clothes. Attitudes have changed over time naturally and many people who were brought up with the qualities I've mentioned previously nevertheless have managed to adapt them to our new society by keeping true to themselves and improving our overall society by doing so. It's entirely possible that their earlier counterparts would still consider them to be hopelessly depraved and decadent. So be it, I know which era I would prefer to live in and its the one with decent toilet paper.

In judging society I have a very simple rule of thumb. I call it the Mrs Montgomery rule. Elizabeth Montgomery nee Hobart (and Carver) was the wife of the man who would eventually become Viscount Montgomery of Alamein. At the time he was a major in the British army and she was a widow with two young children. Montgomery was a ruthless, rude, arrogant pathological liar and (according to one of his biographers) a closet homosexual and borderline psychopath. Elizabeth was artistically inclined, something of a pacifist (despite the fact that her brother was in the army) and quite a good amateur painter. Despite their personality differences the marriage was a very happy one on both sides until 1937. In that year Elizabeth was stung by an insect while on holiday, contracted blood poisoning and died. She wasn't in any exotic locale, she was bitten by a very ordinary run of the mill British insect but due to a lack of penicillin and antibiotics (which hadn't been discovered yet) she wound up in a box. Montgomery was devastated as he had lost about the only person who could put up with him. So my rule for society is this; any society in which Mrs Montgomery dies rather than being up and about twenty four hours after the insect sting simply isn't good enough for me.