Allowing for differences
Some commentators bewail the fact that we no longer all share the same experiences. When the first TV series of ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’ appeared, the Alec Guinness one, we all watched it together and talked about it the next day. It was a shared experience. By the time the second series, ‘Smiley’s People,’ was broadcast, we watched it separately. The difference was the appearance of the video recorder. We were no longer prisoners of the programme schedule; we could record it and see it at a time that suited us.
I could never quite understand while some observers thought it a bad thing that we no longer had to do things together. It gave us all more choice, and the ability to go our own way.
People used to await Wimbledon and the arrival of strawberries. Fruit growers would plant for earlier strawberries, rather than larger crops, because the early ones were more profitable, and they were a portent of a longed-for summer. Then came the cargo holds of jumbo jets, and with them the arrival of soft fruits in winter. Now we can enjoy summer and autumn berries all year round. Again, I fail to see why some people think this is a bad thing. It allows for individual choice, and unless you think differences of tastes is itself a bad thing, and that we should be forced to accept the limits imposed by the seasons, you are favouring an imposed and unnecessary conformity.
The people who wanted to ‘keep Sunday special,’ didn’t just want to keep it special for themselves, they wanted everyone else to have to keep it special, whether they wanted to or not. I wonder if there are people who oppose winter holidays in the sunshine because they think we should all have to share the experience of January and February? It wouldn’t surprise me if there were. I say this because there seem to be many people out there trying to impose their own tastes and preferences on others.
Most of us who espouse a fairly libertarian outlook regard choice and the ability to differ as useful ways of allowing people to express their personality through their choices and differences, and we revel in the variety this brings to the human condition. Voluntarily copying what others do is a good way to find what seems to work. But if we are constrained into all doing the same things, we lose that variety and that opportunity.
It was undoubtedly a simpler life when we all had to do what others were doing, and we were constrained by nature and its seasons in what we were able to do, but today’s more complicated life is a richer one, with its myriad of opportunities to do what our predecessors had no access to and could only dream of.
Madsen Pirie