Pedants up and down the country were reportedly still reeling today over the Queen’s description of Heathrow’s Terminal 5 as a ‘21st century gateway to Britain’. One should hope so, as it is the century is already nearing the end of its first tenth. Where would we be if still producing 20th century gateways to Britain? Would they be those automatic doors that everyone got excited about, when they had only seen them before on Star Trek? One can picture the A380 taxiing through a giant set of retractable perspex doors, while 1950s boffins applaud from a distance.
This anchor to the past even gouged a path through the morning’s reporting, which related the unveiling of an epoch-making construction packed to the brim with what Radio 4’s finest confidently described as ‘21st century technology’, rather than some 20th century knock-offs from a bus garage in Benidorm. People have been looking forward to the 21st century for much of the 20th (certainly since the days of Boys’ Own) so it is understandable they find it hard to let go of it, or even relinquish it as an ideal as we are, in the grand scheme, not that far into it. Perhaps this inability to progress also stems from fear – where once we saw a utopian future, now we see the abyss of climate change, a new armageddon that provides a handy, scientific stand-in for today’s secularised youth. Before they feared the judgement of god; now, it is Al Gore. Instead of indulgences to excuse our sins, we offset our carbon footprints with saplings and energy efficient lightbulbs. This may be overstretching the point, but there is some truth to it.
Thankfully, America’s PBS has seen fit to confront the issue head-on with a science programme devoted to covering the ‘brave new world’ known as the 22nd century. But they are mostly alone – the world’s googlers are in a slowly degrading denial about the situation: while their searches for ‘21st century’ are slowly declining, those for the ‘22nd century’ have yet to even register. We live in blinkered times.
News hour, with Jerry Caesar 