This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series Change in British Society, given by A.H. H. Halsey, was originally broadcast in 1978.

Who are you? Where do you come from? Where are you going?

These are old questions, but perhaps never before so anxiously asked or so uncertainly answered.

Each one of us knows them as personal questions, but they can also be put collectively.

I want to do that in these lectures, to turn them in other words into sociological questions,

and I want to manage their immensity by circumscribing them in other words into sociological questions, and I want to manage their

immensity by circumscribing them in space and time, in space by staying for the most part on this

island, in time, by confining the discussion largely to the experience collectively undergone

by those who are listening now.

This will give us material enough and difference enough to demand explanation.

Some listeners belong to the two and a half million compatriots who are over 75,

and even to the half million who are over 85, people who remembered Queen Victoria and a world without radio or plastics or the Labour

Party. Others belong to the 15 to 19-year-old age group of 4 million, for whom the Pax Britannica

is as remote as the Pax Romana, whose world is posseous, who never rode a tram nor wore a Sunday suit.

But we mustn't infer from generational contrasts that all we need to explain is change.

Continuity is no less striking and equally problematic.

Each successive age group in its distinctive collective consciousness reflects a new world,

but it also carries the past into the future.

It's not only that Irishmen perennially re-fight the Battle of the Boyne

or that the BBC annually reenacts the Second World War.

Adherence to ancient custom is so tenacious that at Downham Market in Norfolk,

...