Technophobia.

 
We are just recovering from 24 hours without the internet: no newspapers, no radio, no Wimbledon info for Pat etc. I spent much of that time desperately seeking to restore the connection.
However, to people like our occasional neighbours, Norman and Jayne, such dependancy merely evokes contemptuous laughter: computers, smartphones and tablets are silly irrelevancies, unnecessarily complicating the straightforward business of everyday life. I'm sure the mediæval world was full of people who similarly poured scorn on those sad folk who laboriously wrote things down rather than simply committing them to memory. For, in the middle ages, people's memories were very good. They needed to be as most people were illiterate and the average book cost the equivalent of several thousand pounds in today's money. One Pope was reputed to know the whole of the Bible by heart and it was not uncommon for a monk to have memorised the psalter.
Significantly, Norman commented that, in his days on the bench, using a computer was a task he left to his secretary; once again he was reflecting mediæval attitudes. Prior to Henry II English kings were illiterate. The sovereign and the aristocracy had a man to do their reading and writing just as they had a cook to prepare their meals, a groom to look after their horses, and a bailiff to oversee their estates. The Renaissance brought a gradual shift in attitudes. Education became the prerogative of the upper classes rather than a field best left to a short-sighted peasant unfit for farm work. Oxford and Cambridge became finishing schools for the gentry rather than institutions for training those same peasants to become priests or gentlemen's secretaries.
The history of the secondary school I attended illustrates this development. It was founded in the late sixteenth to provide a comprehensive education for poor children. The academically inclined were prepared for Oxbridge, those of a practical bent for apprenticeships. Come the Civil War, everything changed: a university education was no longer considered appropriate for the common people and the school stopped sending boys to university for a century and a half. In the nineteenth century things evolved once more. It began sending boys to university again, but it also started recruiting fee-payers.
Within the last few years the foundation boarders - I was one - who paid no fees and for whom the school was founded, have disappeared, entirely replaced by fee-paying day-boys. And computer-literacy forms an integral part of their education.
'The moral of this story, the moral of this song is that one should not be where one does not belong.' It's no longer the twelfth century, modern man does not belong there. 'For the times they are a changing': illiteracy has long been the hallmark of the alumni of the lower streams of Bash Street Comprehensive rather than the distinguishing characteristic of the gentleman. Similarly, feeling at ease with computer technology is no longer the exclusive preserve of the pimply nerd with malodorous armpits. We are rapidly approaching the time when technophobia will be more readily associated with elderly readers of the Daily Mail and with the lumpenproletariat than with membership of the Establishment.
 

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