Are Conservative values a victim of virtual reality?

We can’t cope with waiting or discern the difference between what we want and what is possible

‘Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” wrote TS Eliot in 1934. If he were alive today, he might have added: “Where is the information we have lost in fake news?”

As the digital revolution hits, we are finding that among all that the internet gives, we are losing things too. One casualty may be our imaginations. A recent study found that the proportion of children creating imaginary friends has declined by half since 2001, raising concerns over an erosion of children’s creativity. Former children’s laureate Dame Jaqueline Wilson is worried that adults are replacing reading proper books on-the-move with compulsive email and social-media checks.

But I suspect the power of digital may be even deeper, rewiring our expectations of reality – and politics. At least if this recent experience of mine is anything to go by.

We all know the frustration: my storage was low and nothing was working properly. The obvious answer flashed before me: “Clear some space. Upload it all to the cloud.”

There was one problem. I was not staring at a screen. I was staring at a loft full of boxes. But as I persevered in the relentlessly physical task of moving house, it kept happening: Upload it. Move file. Delete.

The realisation was inescapable: technology was eating my brain. This magnificent organ, evolved over millennia to the realities of space, gravity and cardboard boxes, was being reprogrammed, grasping pathetically at a digital solution in a stubbornly tangible world.

I was ashamed. Was I alone in surrendering my evolution to my pocket electronics? But as I sifted through physical remnants of the general election campaign of 2017, and as I recalled what I had seen on the doorsteps and in my inbox during my time as an MP, I concluded I was in good company.

I was selected as a candidate to fight Bristol North West in 2006. Back then, blogging felt a bit modern and Twitter was years from flight. Emails were increasing, but letters were still frequent. By 2015 everything had changed. I blogged a final “Twitter ate my blog” post, and resigned myself to the blue bird.

I noticed other things too. People became less tolerant of waiting – for answers to emails, for appointments. My office often had to explain at greater length the reality of the limits of an MP’S resources – both in time, and what was in my remit or ability to achieve. It was profoundly dispiriting to have to reply to the email of an articulate, educated constituent that it wasn’t in my gift to ‘‘sort out’’ global Islamic extremism, as she demanded I immediately do.

By 2017, emails like this had begun to interest me. Intelligent people were starting to make demands based on expectations as unrealistic as my embarrassing flash-instincts to upload the physical contents of my loft.

And I recognised the outrage that sometimes met my attempts to adjust a constituent’s expectations to realistic levels as similar to my own demands that life produce results at a swipe – and my own intense angst if my phone buffering lasts longer than seconds.

In the space of just a few years, our technology has made us far less able to cope with waiting, and far less able to discern the difference between what we want and what is possible.

This is going to pose challenges for politicians of all parties. But if our technology really is turning us into instant-gratification, virtual-reality addicts, I wonder if the Left will have a smoother ride than the Right.

The philosopher Roger Scruton claimed: “Reality is the greatest enemy of the Left.” If true, could virtual reality be the greatest enemy of the Right? In a world of virtual reality, we might believe we can fund public services not with money from a strong economy, but with abstract nouns, a speech at Glastonbury and hashtags. Until of course, ‘‘actual’’ reality inevitably reasserts itself, the economy crashes and we have no money to spend on the NHS.

Experiments in which children were given a choice of one marshmallow now or two 10 minutes later famously showed that the developed sense of delayed gratification of the children who opted to wait is a key predicator of success in both individuals and societies. Delayed gratification is a fundamental element of Conservative thinking: Graft now, flourish later.

Are these quintessentially Conservative values being designed out of us by our technology? Is digital reality reprogramming us to prefer the instant over the long-term, and the virtual over the real?

If so, the technological gradient Conservatives have to climb if they are to own the politics of the future may be much steeper than getting loads of likes on Instagram. But the tectonic challenges posed by the environmental, demographic and financial realities looming ahead mean that the imperative to ‘‘get real’’ is now more urgent than ever before.