For Better, For Worse

Gordon Deighton looks back on a career or three and around half a century - a Great War, the Revolution in those 'Swinging Sixties' (menswear, theatre, films, sex, rock 'n' roll, drugs ) and Supper - Cabaret's last gasp at the Ritz Hotel in the 80s. As witness and participant, "Doin' What Comes Naturally", in a most colourful and passionate period in history, there was a quality of life there for the asking. Today, the passion is technology, computers, internet, Facebook, texts and tweets. Back in the 18th Century, the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau questioned the costs of progress. Now, everything is moving at a far greater pace with our' Celebrity Culture' and inflated incomes but is the quality of life suffering greatly? In 2012, Mark Pagel, the world's leading expert on human development, wrote in his "Wired for Culture" ... "As our societies become even more connected and globalized it will become increasingly easy for most of us not to innovate at all, to become lazy and docile, at least in matters of inventiveness".