Social Trends 2010 - an article from LICC

This is an article from the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity......

Middle age is always a good time to take stock, to analyse where we have come from and think through where we are going.

Social Trends, the Office for National Statistics' annual survey into British life, is 40-years-old this week. It is now, officially, middle-aged and its latest publication offers much material with which we can take stock.

Some of the signs are good. Britons are living longer. We smoke less (surely not a disconnected fact). We are much richer, earning two-and-a-half times more today than forty years ago, and we holiday abroad much more often.

Some of the signs are ambiguous. There are five million more of us than in 1971, living in seven million more homes, spending less on necessities like food and non-alcoholic drink, and more on recreation and housing.

Some are negative. We are financially more unequal than we have been for generations. The prison population has more than doubled. We save less than we have for decades. We are choosing not to have children. And we are living unprecedentedly more fluid and isolated lives, the number of first marriages falling precipitously, while the number of single person households, divorces, and children born outside marriage rising.

Explaining this spaghetti junction of trends is not easy. Societies rarely undergo uniform or predictable change and are never amenable to single, simple explanations. Perhaps the best we can hope for is to tell stories that encompass and enlighten what is going on.

Listen to any funeral sermon and you will soon realise that what we value is not how rich or how independent we are, how far we travelled or how much we hoarded. It is how much we gave, how much we loved, how much we were loved.

Life is better for me today. I can expect to live longer, earn more and travel further. But it is worse for us. We are less likely to live together, stay together or maintain some measure of genuine equality. Our obsession with autonomy and choice may make us richer and more independent, but it is slowly eroding the bonds of trust, responsibility and perseverance that make loving relationships possible.

Are we so preoccupied with our desire to gain the whole world that we are in danger of losing our soul?

Nick Spencer