WITHOUT SOOTHING HEROIN TONICS, WE'RE ADDICTED TO PANIC

AUSTRALIAN society has gone to the dogs. The young are intravenously
connected to iPods at birth and think nothing of pulling out a pink
bit and performing a turkey slap live on national telly. Parents are
permissive, schools are postmodern, and cruise ships, once innocuous
floating nursing homes, are now dens of druggish vice and nudist
iniquity. If only we could return to the golden era. You know, that
time when neat nuclear family units flourished behind white picket
fences, blissfully free from the multitude of social ills that plague
us today. No scary new technology, no sleazesome celebrities, no
teenage girls in slutty porn-star singlets. Just good, old-fashioned
moral uprightness.

Although it's tempting to allow social conservatives to whisk us back
to the good old days in a metaphorical time machine, perhaps first we
should work out where to set the co-ordinates.

And that's where things get tricky. According to Why TV Is Good For
Kids, a new book by Catharine Lumby and Duncan Fine, it's difficult
to find an era when society was given a clean bill of moral health.

Despite the endless "end is nigh" headlines, many of our contemporary
social concerns actually have extraordinarily long histories.
Consider the following quote: "Many young girls, from morning to
night, hang over (SCANDALOUS ACTIVITY X) ... to the neglect of
industry, health, proper exercise and to the ruin both of body and of
soul ... The increase of (SCANDALOUS ACTIVITY X) will help to account
for the increase of prostitution and for the numerous adulteries and
elopements that we hear of in the different parts of the kingdom."

Such hysteria could be applied to any number of modern evils: being
taught about frangers instead of abstinence at school, buying
celebrity-endorsed tween-age bras, watching old Baywatch reruns on
pay television.

But this quote comes from a 1792 book called Evils of Adultery and
Prostitution, warning about the moral corruption caused by reading
novels: the 18th-century equivalent of internet surfing. That's
right, Austen lovers. Back in 1792, all of today's Australian
commentators urging a return to the teaching of classic fiction in
schools would have been run out of town as pimps and whoremongers.

Lumby and Fine go on to reveal that debauchery and crime have also
been blamed on nefarious villains such as premodern feasts and
festivals, 18th-century theatre, the music halls of the 1890s, Elvis
Presley's rumpy-pumpy pelvis and foreign disease-infested comic
books. But what about youth culture? Surely that's a new problem
that's getting worse by the minute? Grumpy old Socrates certainly
thought so. Back in about 399BC, the Greek philosopher grouched that
the young "love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for
authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place
of exercise". Worse still, they "no longer rise when elders enter the
room", "they contradict their parents", "tyrannise their teachers"
and spend too much time gorging on treats.

Sound familiar?

In the 1950s, the sordidly back-combed hair and over-plucked eyebrows
of the widgies copped the same treatment that kinderwhore midriff
tops and micro skirts get today.

The alleged masculinity crisis is also old news. Why TV Is Good For
Kids explains that the Scout movement was founded by Lord
Baden-Powell because he thought the appallingly feminising influence
of female teachers had rendered 1900s boys altogether too soft,
sensitive and flaccid. And next time you bemoan Australia's literacy
standards, remember you're joining a long line of shrill Chicken
Littles, including several NSW chief English examiners who accused
secondary schools in the 1940s and '50s of failing to produce
literate students able to write proppa sennences.

The overwhelming evidence is that the more things change, the more
they stay eerily similar. But this is unlikely to come as a comfort
to a society that loves working itself into a sky-is-falling frenzy.
Oddly enough, we seem to prefer the panic.

Oh well. At least the troubled populace is now free to drown its
sorrows in the odd novel, even if soothing heroin and cocaine tonics
- -- once widely prescribed in Australia -- are no longer as readily
available as they were in the so-called good old days.