Letter to Grandad c/o Si Hodges

Sorry it's taken so long to get in touch with you since your change in circumstances. I've had the intention to write a call across the generations for some time, but found the desire to create the perfect dissertation got in the way of writing anything. But I'm sat here after six weeks of indescribable wonder in India, and alone with time and means to express my thoughts to you.

I wonder what it must be like for you in your chair, with such restricted mobility. Does the world seem smaller or does your brain still range across it like the vast armies you fought with?

It's impossible for my generation, save for the few in active service, to imagine what it is like to fight a battle. To lay down a life for anything in fact; and while we seem to parade careless apathy almost with pride, there's a secret jealousy that something should occur where the provocation for action was so clear cut.#

Was it such an automatic decision to fight for South Africa, or am I idealising?

There's no doubt my view is coloured by my circumstances - being 25 with no stable prospects and little idea of where I'll be in 1 year, let alone 5 - but the overriding feeling of my generation is one of being lost. It's an odd thing to say, since we are the best educated, most prosperous, most physically healthy generation in the history of mankind and yet it seems that the mechanism that brought us all these things is in some way found wanting. That progress, having brought us all it originally desired, has left us wanting at the brink of achievement, with no firmity of purpose, no clear idea of what to do with these riches.

Every older generation has bemoaned the slipping of its certainties as it gives way to the young but I wonder if this has been so radically felt as now. The good of the economy and the good of the people is no longer the same thing, and with the astonishing irresponsibility of our rulers, it seems the good of the government has experienced a similar divorce.

I know last two points may be contentious for you but after a war which seems to have only benefitted an engine of private security, munitions, and infrastructure companies and economic requirements that are exhausting the resources and ecosystems of the planet, ideas of stewardship for communities and our natural environment seem to have been submerged.

As I mentioned in my last letter, I'm always touched by stories of how you managed your affairs, the fairness and wisdom you displayed in dealing with your lawns, people and resources

And so here's our challenge but there's such uncertainty about how it can tackled. Our requirement to fill our basic needs is undermining in a real way, the ground beneath us. And while the urgency is extremely intangible, the guilt of inaction is not. It weighs heavily that we see changes we do not like but have no power to change them. And the breathing space that the crumbling of social certainties have given us - so magnaminously swept aside by the 60s generation - makes some of us feel the burden all the more.

I feel this uncertainty has much to do with the detachment of modern life from land, resources and people - the information age causes these things to have less of a concreteness tan they did before.

I would hold that those of my generation who do not feel this burden nevertheless exhibit its effects. For communities who find the change particularly radical, there's an adherence to religious fundamentalism - a modern phenomenon - that alienates its problems, placing them squarely at the feet of the non-believer, so justifying the most violent retribution. For the more prosperous - those with education, wealth and power - the focus is harder to shift ("I have everything, maybe the problem is me?") and so obliterated with drugs and drink - both of which displaying higher-than-ever rates of consumption and increasingly intense levels of toxicity.

Perhaps the two confusions of Western society - binge drinking and terrorism - cannot be so easily explained. But their pervasiveness, not only throughout every western country, but also in those countries where western culture has taken root (that is to say - almost everywhere) suggests these are symptoms that something is not right, and not right the world over.

We've lost the quality of introspection in an information age that swamps you from the first text message to your mobile phone, through streets drenched in coloured hoardings and flickering across television screens - an environment whose drive is to take you out of yourself, flood you with novelty so that your next move may just be the one that brings you the perfect life - sold for the price of the product advertised. Modern life is so saturated that there's less space to allow its more beautiful coincidences to settle and flow round us.

I think of you and your biblical knowledge of flora and fauna, and the joy you must have experienced building it up - amongst birds, amongst plants - such foreign things to a mind accustomed to emails and wide screen TV.

But it's a situation which I find myself part. And I don't wish that an attempt at a clear-eyed world view should turn into a misty-eyed lament. It would also exclude the astonishing wealth of creativity that man will always display; an incredible expansion of awareness of world affairs, mirrored by progress in science, as well as the fact that capitalism is distributing its fruits to a wider and wider group (the disparity of that distribution notwithstanding).

The point I wish to make is that the melting of social boundaries, as well as the deluge of information with which we are surrounded has put the inner moral compass to severe test. In the former instance, morality is no longer so readily provided by succesive conditioning of generations - as the circumstances that generated this conditioning seem more and more detached from those of the present. In the second instance - the information deluge becomes an increasing distraction from the inner contemplation that gives people the only true basis for firmness of moral purpose.

But its also in this that I have most optimism. That the two factors of our age - guilt and uncertainty and the test of the inner moral compass - should be the cause of our greatest blessing. For the guilt which drives people to action can only show itself to be a chimera - something to be shed, and never the basis for productive activity. And that as people feel the effects of straying from their integrity, and that nothing material or experiential can replace it, there will be a return to virtue, not as a set of received concepts but of real inner knowing far more consistently applied.

And again we're arriving at the intangible, but of a quality so much deeper than which besets us now. It's the knowing that moves us to acts of great courage, kindness and remarkable ingenuity. Where the determinants of our action seem at a loss to explain its brilliance, and the changes it can produce. And its a deepening of this inner knowing and its boundless creativity acting in the heart of each and every human on the planet, that can bring about the most wonderful and necessary change.

We've exhausted systems, comparisons and there's no structure of thought that can truly explain the world. But an emergence of shining inner quality in every situation bypasses and answers all of these.#

Much love to you, in dearest hope that I'll see you soon,

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