Willy Trolove: Making our mark before reaching the ditch

Sooner or later, all civilisations get bogged down in the paddock of progress. And as the tractor of technology ploughs its way ever onwards, it's humbling to know that one day we, too, will end up in a ditch with the engine revving, the wheels spinning, and the bonnet sinking into the mud.

If I was doing the predicting, I'd guess that the ditch we get stuck in will be dug by ignorance, widened by self-loathing and watered with credit-card debt. It will reek of lawyers.

I don't mean to depress you over your cornflakes but it is tempting to wonder what our civilisation will leave behind when it eventually sinks into the landscape.

All the other great civilisations left their mark. The Egyptians built pyramids and, long before sex changes, figured out how to turn daddies into mummies. The Romans laid roads across Europe and discovered traffic congestion. The British spread the warm glow of justice, bureaucracy and cricket (damn them). The Soviets perfected equality of misery and an orderly system of queuing for lightbulbs.

Modern Western civilisation has left its mark, too. In science, we have boldly gone where no one has gone before and driven remote-control mobility scooters on Mars. In medicine, we have battled disease and perfected breast enlargement.

In culture, we have transformed painting and sculpture so that any old blob of paint or random pile of bricks can be hailed as a great work of art.

But our greatest achievement has been in communication.

No civilisation has ever been able to communicate as loudly, as clearly, and as quickly as we can.

If you tried to count the means of communication available to you today, you wouldn't get far without being interrupted by your cellphone belting out the tune to Mission Impossible or the William Tell Overture or some aggravating Neil Diamond melody that you can't get rid of because you haven't got the faintest idea how you got it on there in the first place.

We live in a communications utopia. Every need, every want, every passing fancy can be satisfied by clicking a mouse, tapping a keyboard or dialling 0900-HOT-4U.

Every one of us can pick up the phone and talk to pretty much anyone else on the planet, except when we've been served with a restraining order. Every family can be reached by television and brought up to date with the great developments of the day, such as what's happening in the Tom Cruise young love saga.

But has our civilisation's greatest achievement, this communications revolution, left the world a better place? Has it left a legacy that will endure through the ages?

Today, powerful ideas can be presented to millions of people. Political leaders can talk directly to their constituents.

Once upon a time it took weeks, months, or even years to convince the electorate that some course of action was necessary. Now it can be done in just a few minutes with the help of an image consultant, a public relations budget, some emotional language and a team of spin doctors.

So why are there still so many disagreements and misunderstandings? Why are there still so many wars?

Why can't, for example, Osama bin Laden and his fanatical followers see that a life featuring shopping malls, video games and television advertisements for impotence treatments is infinitely superior to living in a cave with a donkey-powered dialysis machine?

Why, when the great works of philosophy and science are so accessible in mass-produced books or on the internet, do so many people choose to be ignorant and believe that God's creatures were created in a divine flash of light, and that tsunamis, floods, earthquakes and epidemics are the good Lord's punishment for neglecting his will?

And why, when I want to get hold of my credit-card company, or my insurer, or the cowboys who sold me my dodgy computer software, do I have to wait in a telephone queue for half an hour before being put through to an answering machine?

Advances in communications should make communicating easier. Sometimes it feels like they have the opposite effect. Sometimes it seems that the more advanced communication becomes, the poorer we get at communicating.

When communication was slow and rare, people took great care to understand and to be understood.

Now, in a world awash with different means of communication, all we do is talk past each other, pursuing our own agendas, hearing what we want to hear, and refusing to listen to what other people have to say.

As our civilisation advances, communication will continue to improve. Unless we match its advance, and get better at communicating, none of us will be listening when someone points out that we're heading for a ditch.