NEW Year is supposed to be a time for looking both backwards and forward – that is why January is named after the double-faced Roman god who looked in both directions at once.But if it's a good thing to acknowledge a quiet moment of transition between past and future, it's profoundly debilitating to find yourself permanently trapped between the two, and it often seems, at the turn of the year, as if that kind of limbo is where British society has found itself for the last 30 years or so, unable to move backwards, yet somehow reluctant to move on.
It's not that nothing has changed in that time, of course. There has been turbo-charged economic growth, wave upon wave of migration, a massive shift from an industrial to a service economy, and a generation of unprecedented change in sexual politics and family life. Yet still, in our future-shocked hearts and minds, we seem to be resisting the changes with which we live from day to day, as if every statistic recording numbers of children born out of wedlock, or numbers of migrants arriving in Britain, or numbers of teenagers enjoying an active sex life, represented a deep, atavistic threat to our world, and therefore to ourselves.
So it could have been almost anything, this New Year, that triggered the latest round of shock-horror headlines about a nation going to hell in a handcart, but, as it was, it was a public comment by Dr Charles Saunders, chairman of the British Medical Association's Scottish consultants' committee, advocating that children as young as five should be receiving sex education in schools. Dr Saunders' reasoning is simple: children, he argues, need a good, confident knowledge of the facts about sex, long before they are even tempted to start experimenting themselves.
There was no chance, though, of his remarks being greeted with calm agreement all round. For this is a culture where, well within living memory, children as old as 13 or 14 were forbidden to know anything about sex at all, sometimes with tragic consequences. Put the words "five-year-olds" and "sex education" together, therefore, and the old atavistic monster rears up, roaring phrases like "going to the dogs", or – in the case of the Catholic Church's response to Dr Saunders – "pouring petrol on a fire".
Now, of course, it's possible to debate at length whether or not, under current conditions, the extension of sex education in schools would make any decisive impact on that group of vulnerable British youngsters who, for a blizzard of social reasons, just can't seem to associate what they are told about sex at school with what happens in their own lives.
It seems to me, though, that it's not really the substance of the issue that's in question here. In reason, we all know that five-year-olds need to know a little bit about sex, even if it's only why their own bodies are as they are. It's just that we don't like seeing that truth written down in so many words, and we don't like the idea that we can't rely on families alone to do the job.
And the mood is the same in dozens of areas where our society should be moving forward to deal with the practical challenges of 21st-century life, but, at some deeper level, seems to have come to the limit of its capacity for change. We know that our binge-drinking culture is dangerous, for example, but still snarl with resentment at politicians like Kenny MacAskill who tell us so. We know that racism is wrong, but still make endless excuses for the surly dislike of foreigners that scars our society.
And when it comes to the defining issue of our age – climate change – well, we know, in some corner of our brains, that the whole basis of our economy and society has to change over the next 20 years if we are to avoid outright catastrophe, yet we continue – for example – to regard personal motorised transport as some kind of birthright, and bitterly resist any effort to shift us from our cars.
So what are we to do, stranded in this no-man's-land between an old civilisation that's no longer sustainable either practically or morally, and a new one that we still resist because it seems somehow alien? Some, like the Catholic Church, bluster hopelessly about the need to return to the past. Others, like the blithe Dr Saunders, talk as if there was no problem about abandoning the family as a useful transmitter of wisdom, and passing the whole job on to schools.
BUT for the rest of us – well, we probably do best when we face the truth that all social change involves some measure of loss, but that the clock cannot be turned back towards attitudes and prejudices that were abandoned for the best of reasons. And, above all, we perhaps need to strive to move forward as a whole society, rather than as a bunch of fragmented individuals demanding increasingly impossible feats from our hard-pressed public services.
For in the end, schools can teach nothing that society as a whole does not want children to learn. If our society eats junk food, schools cannot make children eat healthily. If our society is full of bullying behaviour, schools catch the backwash of emotional and physical violence.
And if our society remains hopelessly ambivalent about sex – so recently an unspoken taboo, now a multimedia nightmare of cheap raunch and smut – well, then it's not primarily the failure of teachers and educationists that leaves so many teenagers all at sea in this key area of their lives.
It's rather our own embarrassment and silence, passed on from generation to generation, and whether lessons begin at five or 15, it will take more than a change in education policy to make any difference to that.
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