Some months ago a fellow guest at a college dinner dictated to me, as I scribbled on a slip of paper, a quote I didn’t want to forget. It is beside me now as I write. “Remember, I was knocked down by a horse-drawn bus, and lived to see a man on the Moon.” This (my fellow diner told me) was remarked to her by her late grandmother in 1972. The old lady was illustrating how much life had changed since she was a girl.

I retrieved that slip of paper, after reading in Thursday’s Times Anatole Kaletsky’s remarkable account of the convulsions of upheaval and change endured by his own forebears up until the middle of the last century. By comparison, wrote Anatole, the half-century since has been rather uneventful. The idea that we should be left giddy by what Tony Blair in a conference speech once called “the ever-increasing pace of change” is a misapprehension.

Or a misapprehension here in the West. I suppose that if you lived in Kampala, Jakarta or São Paolo, the last 50 years would have seen life revolutionised at least as much as in the half century before. But not here in Britain, Europe or North America. I have written before on this page about the technological doldrums through which we have been passing in the past half-century: still living much as we did when I was a boy in the 1950s; still driving cars powered by internal combusion engines, still going in to the office, and still (we men) in infernal suits and ties.

With very few exceptions (I shall come to information technology in a moment) the great life-changing inventions and discoveries — humble or hi-tech — that shape modern society were made before or during the Second World War: automobiles, aeroplanes, the jet engine, electricity, telephones, radio, television, refrigerators, washing machines, industrial mass production . . . the list is endless. In medical science the same is true: germ theory, penicillin, virology, radiology, anaesthetics and bacteriology are all pre1950, and the huge leaps enjoyed in average life expectancy in the developed world were made relatively early in the last century. Today life expectancy is only creeping forward.

I have just been reading an article written in America in 1950 for Popular Mechanics magazine. Waldemar Kampffert, then the science editor of The New York Times, offered his predictions on how science and technology would be shaping our lives by the year 2000. Reviewed 57 years later, “Miracles You’ll See in the Next Fifty Years”* is a chilling read for any journalist in the business of prophecy. We are not living in anything like the way Kampffert, who is deadly serious, predicts. He has us in disposable underwear which — like most of our textiles — is made from sawdust or chemicals, and which after use is broken down and “converted into candy”. Much food comes from chemicals or sawdust, or in frozen standard bricks: “Cooking as an art is only a memory.” We do not shave, but wipe on depilatory cream. Our houses are built of plastic: “By 2000, wood, brick and stone are ruled out because they are too expensive.” Crockery and cutlery are disposable, and dishes dissolve after use.

When a housewife “cleans house she simply turns the hose on everything. Why not? Furniture (upholstery included), rugs, draperies, unscratchable floors — all are made of synthetic fabric or waterproof plastic. After the water has run down a drain in the middle of the floor (later concealed by a rug of synthetic fibre) Jane turns on a blast of hot air and dries everything. A detergent in the water dissolves any resistant dirt.” Almost everything is standardised, predicts Kampffert, but to a high standard. “The heart of the town is the airport” and we travel in family helicopters or by jet. Weather forecasts are perfectly accurate. Approaching storms are diverted by burning oil beneath them. And a retardant for ageing has been discovered: people look 40 when they are 70.

An entertaining romp through the perils of prophecy, the article is adrift in more than its particulars; it is adrift in its overall message: that we would be living lives barely recognisable to the people of the 1950s.

We are not, with one significant exception (not predicted by Kampffert). This is the means by which I can offer you instant access to that back number of Popular Mechanics. IT has yet to represent much more than a huge convenience. Perhaps it will but so far its effect is to facilitate and accelerate.

But what struck me for the first time as I read of the whole-life shocks that Anatole’s forebears faced, is that the slowing pace of change in the material world has been mirrored by a sharp loss of momentum in the world of ideas, ideology and ethics, too. In the past quarter century, new thinking here has all but juddered to a halt.

When I was 10, my schoolmates and I believed that an Age of Reason was almost upon us. Reason was (unthinkingly) associated with science; and science would help to lead mankind not only to a more comfortable, but to a more just and moral, way of life. We learnt in our history lessons at school of religious and ideological spasms — the waves of philosophical and ethical change — through which our culture had passed in previous centuries. Another, we believed, was imminent. Perhaps it was already under way.

Prominent among the ideas whose time we thought would come was a withering away of nation states, and the growth of World Government. Petty nationalisms were primitive and old-fashioned, and humans would outgrow them. And we would learn fairer means of distribution of the world’s resources. Population control would occupy the world’s leaders. Wars and conflicts would cease — or at least be controlled and adjudicated by international bodies. Lives of selfish greed would yield to reason. Growing understanding of psychology would help to tame madness — collective and individual.

Some believed communism was the human system through which this transformation would be wrought. Others thought a liberal humanism — and, of course, science — would do it. And there were those who thought that America would lead the world until all the world was so much like America that world government was effectively achieved. The clash of ideologies was strong, stronger than ever — indeed it was to lead to the Cold War — but both sides to that argument shared belief in an important premise: that human society was, if not perfectible, then capable of huge improvement through political and social action; and that that old devil, human nature, could be tailored, trimmed, rebalanced and enlightened.

Had we not (after all) seen patterns of human belief and behaviour change almost out of recognition from our great-grandparents’ day? Change on a comparable scale must lie ahead too. In our heads as well as in our household appliances, modern man would be new and different.

None of this has come to pass. The gap between rich and poor has widened. The nation state is as strong as ever. With the stumbling of the United Nations, ideas of world government have faded. We are no closer to curing mental illness or human misbehaviour: crime has increased. The forced migrations of peoples haunt the age. We have given up even thinking about the population explosion. And, now that communism has fallen by the wayside, Adam Smith’s view of human progress driven by individual self-interest is even more widely accepted than in 1950. A profound pessimism underlies it all. We do not any longer suppose it likely that the human race is capable of improvement except in its material circumstances.

Will this pass? In 2050 will there be new ideals, idealisms and ideologies, new plans for the betterment of humanity as a whole? I shall not fall into the same trap as Kampffert; I shall attempt no prophecy. I do not know. I know only that as I write, the world is pretty well stuck.

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