View from the fence

We’re all aware of the per­spec­tive of “the older I get, the less I seem to know ’’. As a younger per­son, I al­ways thought that it must be true, oth­er­wise I wouldn’t keep hear­ing it, but like with other ob­ser­va­tions, such as “time goes quicker as you get older”, it was more an in­tel­lec­tual ac­knowl­edge­ment than a deeply felt truth.

Well, guess what? Now I am older I cer­tainly do feel it to be true. It’s para­dox­i­cal that after decades of ac­cu­mu­lat­ing knowl­edge and ex­pe­ri­ence, un­less it is in an area in which I have real ex­per­tise (of which there are very few, un­for­tu­nately), I’m now far more cau­tious about nail­ing my colours to the mast, as it were, or pick­ing a hill to die on, than I was 20 years ago.

This ap­plies to a host of is­sues, from cli­mate change to re­li­gion, from pet own­er­ship to ve­g­an­ism. It’s in­creas­ingly hard these days to get me to throw my full weight be­hind any one stance, be­lief or cause. It seems that over the years I’ve be­come a shame­less fence-sit­ter. I’m not sure how I got on the fence, be­cause be­fore now I’ve never had any prob­lem mouthing off con­fi­dently about many top­ics, whether I re­ally knew any­thing about them or not. So, let’s just put it down to age, or so that I look bet­ter, to ma­tu­rity.

One of the many sub­jects I’m on the fence about is the in­de­pen­dence issue. I find it fas­ci­nat­ing that two large in­de­pen­dence move­ments have blos­somed in the past few years in the heart of West­ern Eu­rope (pos­si­bly three if you want to in­ter­pret Brexit in those terms). In this mag­a­zine, we often cover the in­de­pen­dence issue in Cat­alo­nia, as you might imag­ine, but this month we have a sum­mary of the in­de­pen­dence move­ment in Scot­land, on pages 16 to 19, which in­cludes the per­spec­tive of an ex­pert in the sub­ject.

With the bar­barous 20th cen­tury firmly be­hind us, charg­ing into the dig­i­tal age, cures for can­cer on the hori­zon, vi­o­lent crime de­creas­ing, progress in elim­i­nat­ing age-old prej­u­dices, as in­di­vid­u­als em­pow­ered and un­shack­led by the in­ter­net, life ex­pectancy ris­ing, falling poverty, Leo Messi and a boom in craft beers, surely things have never been bet­ter? And yet lit­er­ally mil­lions of peo­ple feel that the sit­u­a­tion is so in­tol­er­a­ble that only truly rev­o­lu­tion­ary change of­fers any hope for the fu­ture.

Up here on the fence, by de­f­i­n­i­tion I’m un­qual­i­fied to say whether they’re right or wrong to feel like that, but I will stick my neck out and say that at the very least it’s a fas­ci­nat­ing spec­ta­cle to be­hold: his­tory in the mak­ing. It makes me feel sad that I won’t be around in a hun­dred years to hear the his­to­ri­ans put the whole thing into per­spec­tive.

I re­alise that by ad­mit­ting I’m on the fence I’m invit­ing con­tempt. Fair enough. No one likes a fence-sit­ter. Be­lieve me, I don’t like being on the fence; it’s not a com­fort­able place to be. But until I hear an in­con­tro­vert­ible ar­gu­ment, for or against, which is so clear and wa­ter­tight that to counter it would be non­sense or sheer bloody-mind­ed­ness, I see no op­tion but to stay where I am for the mo­ment. So­ci­ety is not Lego, to be pulled apart and then re­built time and again with­out con­se­quence; it is the long evo­lu­tion of tra­di­tions, his­tor­i­cal events, many sac­ri­fices, the build­ing of in­sti­tu­tions and the adop­tion of new ways of think­ing and liv­ing. Rev­o­lu­tion­ary change brings with it huge dis­rup­tion and al­ways pro­duces losers as well as win­ners. I pre­fer to be 100% sure be­fore I pull the trig­ger.