KEY POINTS:
It is time, I think, for those of us who have the gumption to ponder whether all the social engineering we've indulged in over the past 40 years or so has improved our quality of life. Or whether, in fact, it has failed miserably and left us worse
off.
There can be no doubt that most of us have substantially improved our material lot and are much better off when it comes to "things" than our parents or grandparents ever were.
We have better homes containing labour-saving equipment they wouldn't have conceived of in their wildest dreams. We have food and clothing choices that would leave them confounded and a wide choice of vastly improved and instantly available motor vehicles.
We have achieved a mobility - nationally and internationally - that has made the world pretty much a global village. We have medicines and treatments that would have saved many of our forebears' lives. And we have at our fingertips a plethora of entertainment and communication devices - including the incomprehensible internet - available 24 hours a day, some without even having to leave home.
But it seems to me that by any measure other than material and physical, society is no better off than it was in the 1940s and 50s and in fact is probably worse.
And one of the fundamental reasons for society's present woes is, I think, that we fell for the fallacy that if we improved ourselves economically and materially then all our other problems would take care of themselves.
In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, that concept of improving society by creating more wealth is still very much alive and well - witness the "economic transformation" slogan on which the Labour Government seems to have pinned its hopes for the future.
I am no sociologist, just a skilled and long-time observer of humanity, but it seems to me that our pursuit of materialism, particularly in the past 20 or so years, has created at least as many social problems as it has provided physical benefits.
I wonder, for instance, whether the epidemic of domestic violence and child abuse - which seems to be spreading unchecked - isn't intimately connected with our rampant materialism.
Could it be that the constant bombardment of advertising of desirable things that many people would like, but will never be able to have, might set up resentments and anger that turn easily to violence?
"Debt," someone once said, "is the worst form of bondage." I suspect that many family fights arise initially from an unmanageable load of debt.
The supplanting of the traditional family - dad the provider, mum the nurturer and their children - with other types of relationship is often blamed for the plethora of social problems that plague us.
But that also has resulted mainly from the financial pressures imposed by the economic earthquake triggered back in the mid-1980s which forced vast numbers of married women into the workforce, and not necessarily by choice.
Feminism, too, is regularly blamed for the unravelling of family and community life as we knew it, but surely it was a natural progression of the "liberation" of women that they would seek equality largely through economic empowerment.
Open-slather abortion has unquestionably had an effect on how men and women see each other and how many of us see babies and little children, who are more vulnerable to murder and violence than they ever were.
But irrespective of the "legal" excuse given for the thousands of terminations each year, I'll bet at least 999 out of every 1000 are, in fact, sought for economic reasons.
Which is ironic, really, for one of the big social problems we face these days is that we're not replacing ourselves naturally and are afraid that our productivity will suffer as the population ages at a faster rate.
Another bogey is the liberalisation of our sexual mores, and undoubtedly that has had a deleterious effect on society at large. But that would never have gone as far as it has had not sex been such a saleable commodity.
The porn industry and its associated personal or telephone contact businesses generate hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Many billions more are reaped by those who use sex to sell anything from cars to candy bars.
So what's to be done?
There are those, particularly the ultra-conservatives among us, who seem to think they can stuff all these cats back in their bags and all will be well again. They are dreamers.
There is no way that we can reverse these developments and return to a familial security and community awareness that we once thought we had. Human nature will not let us.
I know. I am not particularly acquisitive but I certainly would not readily give up my comforts.
I lived through that magic time between the ready availability of the birth-control pill and the onset of Aids and made the most of it.
It doesn't help that the word "sin" has disappeared from most people's vocabulary and has been firmly put in the closet by many churches.
So the best we can hope for, perhaps, is that some of us who have the gumption might take the time for a bit of introspection, take a candid look at our priorities, and decide perhaps to make some modifications in the interests of a better mental, emotional and spiritual quality of life for ourselves and our loved ones. Those are the ones that really count.
A couple of thousand years ago the Apostle Paul wrote: "For the love of money is the root of all evil." I reckon there's a message there somewhere.
