You don't have to be change's passive victim

You can be its active author instead

(This will be in this month’s Bournbrook Magazine, to which you should certainly subscribe.)

You won't always know when it's the last time. It's a thought that used to occupy my mind: what if that was, albeit unknown at the time, the last occasion you saw a friend before drifting apart or had a pleasant date with a girlfriend before everything went catastrophically wrong? Not that I speak from experience, of course.

It's not usually flagged when something is the last of its kind. When they are, there'll likely be more opportunities in the future anyway. A last concert by a band is followed by the inevitable grey-haired reunion, a once-forgotten product will be met with ironic reproductions twenty years hence.

Yet, sometimes it is the last time and you know it; there is no re-run. It was a lot to take in for teenaged me.

What is true for the individual is true for an institution, a country or a civilisation. There was a last calm day on Lindisfarne before the Norsemen crashed in, axe-happy. There was a final heartfelt prayer at each pagan temple across the Roman Empire before it was abandoned or torn down. There was a child's last play on the swings at Hiroshima.

With the luck of hindsight none of these appear out of the blue to us, but we can be sure they were at the time. At each point, normality was displaced irrevocably and – damn the phrase – a new normal took over.

Before that final Roman prayed to Jupiter wheels outside of his or her control had long been turning. A generation was born in the early 300s who entered a world of apparent permanence. The pantheon of gods, long established, blended seamlessly into the everyday fabric of Roman society and its calendar. However unchanging it appeared, a new breed of man – believing in a three-personed God – were poised to launch a revolution which would alter the course of Roman and world history.

Until it reached critical mass, however, few would have noticed. This is one of the worrying things about many revolutions: they don't always come and hit you round the head, although the more lunatic among them – a la Pol Pot – are hard to miss once they get going. And while we have been promised a future of boring stability and an end of history, only the most foolish believe such fateful changes to be a thing of the past.

For example the last generation of those knowing London as an Anglo-Saxon city have already passed through their youth. Today only 21.5% of children in Inner London are counted as 'white British'. At any other time this would be considered a momentous change, today its significance papered over with thin ideology and gratuitous insult.

However, demographics are destiny, or so they say, and our destiny doesn't appear to be pasty skinned and blue eyed. Where London goes, so will many other urban areas across the West. Whether this is better or worse, who can say: it is certain, however, that it will be quite noticeably different and that you are not allowed to pass too much comment on the matter.

The disappearance of London’s ‘White British’ (% per London borough)

Other signs are there, should you care to look. There is only one major bell foundry left in the UK. No longer believing in God – and thus not needing any church bells – demand dried up. The Whitechapel Bell Foundry, which operated from 1570 to 2017, was one such victim to our civilisational changes. The native hipsters and new arrivals of Whitechapel have little interest in such wares, after all.

Elsewhere, up and down the land, pubs have their final last orders before shutting down for good, suffocated under the weight of tax, unfair competition with supermarkets and people's preference to get leathered at home. What was a cornerstone of British culture atrophies gradually into irrelevance.

Once functioning institutions descend into dysfunction. Getting a licence of any kind or slip of paper stamped by the appropriate bureaucrat can today take months or years instead of the weeks it once took. Those hired to do this work only ask for more money, with strike after strike called. Working from home is the new inalienable right of the over-fattened public sector type. A first-world nation descends into the indifferent malaise of a third-world, where we are grateful when anything works as it should at all.

Perhaps the most alarming change of all is that people do not seem to particularly care, too obsessed as they are with the tawdry day-to-day.

Still, nothing is permanent. Not even the Romans could manage that. Change in itself is inevitable, so we shouldn't get too melancholy about it. This is a flaw of too many self-described conservatives.

Yet, change is not an a priori good either: Obama's 2008 slogan of just 'Change' always struck me as bizarre. What kind of change? Having a limb gnawed off by a crocodile would be a change, but hardly one that I would be keen on.

So it is a matter of which changes. Are we the enactors of change or its compliant victims?

Changes, in the end, will be dictated by those who have the convictions and stomach enough to forced them through. Those indifferent to what is going on around them will be lost among the surging tides of those who bothered to take the field. It only took a few rowdy Bolsheviks to change the course world history, after all.

Don't be like those who are forgotten among the reeds of indifference. Start today and be the change you want to see, no matter how small it may be.

Who knows, maybe you will have the impact of ten thousand lesser men.