“Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

And never brought to mind? 

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

And days o’ lang syne!

For auld lang syne, my dear

For auld lang syne,

We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet

For auld lang syne!”

Every year at the stroke of midnight on December 31 the world sings these lines “for old times sake”. Since the New Year begins an hour apart in each time zone it would be an exaggeration to speak of a “universal chorus”. And in truth this singing is mostly confined to areas where western influence is strong – though this probably includes well over 50% of the planet by now.

But a Martian observing the earth from afar and hearing the rolling hourly refrain across the planet might well conclude that “Auld Lang Syne” is mankind’s national anthem. It certainly has strong claims to be the most popular tune ever written, at least next to “Happy Birthday”.

Admirers of Robbie Burns know that “Auld Lang Syne” is a traditional song shaped and given final form by the immortal Bard of Scotland, and that the melody now sung is not the one he used originally. But why did it become the western world’s New Year hymn?

To answer this question in the pre-internet days I would have had to go to the library and start looking up books on Robert Burns, probably turning first to the Encyclopedia Britannica. Now all I have to do is turn on the computer, dial up a provider, type in “Auld Lang Syne” and voila – a virtually endless stream of information on the song appears.

There is a lot of rubbish on the world wide web, but a little common sense sorts out wheat from chaff. And there is practically no subject on which some authoritative reference is not available. But it still does not know everything. An hour on the net could not tell me just why or how “Auld Lang Syne” had become so universally popular. But I did learn that its present familiar tune comes from the last section of the overture of "Rosina", a 1782 light opera by the English composer and tune collector William Shield.

All in all, the web puts an unparalleled amount of knowledge at our fingertips. Never in the history of mankind has so much been available to so many for so little. Even in Jamaica in nearly every town of significant size the public library offers internet services at an hourly cost of little more than the price of a large chocolate bar. A few years ago Technology Minister Phillip Paulwell talked of setting up internet computers in every post office in the country. When is this wonderful idea going to be implemented?

In any debate about the costs and benefits of globalization, the internet computer should be exhibit one. Cheap computing power is at once the technological advance most responsible for the transformation of the world over the past decade and the most important product of this process. It may not be as important an invention as writing or even the printing press, and would have to contest the title of “most life transforming invention of the twentieth century” with the mass produced automobile, the telephone, television, and electricity. But those of us who use one regularly find it very difficult to imagine life without a computer.

The internet computer is perhaps the culmination of the mass knowledge explosion that began with the printing press and went through the newspaper, radio and television stages. The average man has never been better informed about the world than he is today. If knowledge is power, then we are all more in control of our own destiny than ever before.

Yet our age of miracle machines and infinite information has hardly proved to be one of literary excellence. Proving once again perhaps that art does not advance in a more or less straight line like technology. Look at the primitive technology that Shakespeare had to work with. The thousands of pages he produced were all scratched out with quill, ink, and paper. He had no computers to pour words into and re-arrange at leisure, to instantly reference facts and sources, and to effortlessly revise and re-write drafts.

And with no newspapers, radio or television, how ignorant he must have been of the planet at large – the average schoolboy today is probably better informed about the world than he was. Even more difficult for us moderns to comprehend is the reality that Homer’s Iliad – the first and arguably still the greatest work in Western literature – was created by an illiterate bard and not written down till centuries after his death.

Perhaps this inexplicable feature of art is related to another curious truth - the fact that all the advances of the twentieth century seem not to have made us much if any happier in general. In almost every aspect of life human beings today are unimaginably better off than they were 100 or even 50 years ago. We live longer, suffer less from disease, are freer to do as we wish, and have many more material comforts. Yet to hear most people talk - even those who society considers blessed – life is more a weary struggle than anything else.

No people love to complain more than Jamaicans. Sit down with one for any length of the time and the moaning and groaning is bound to start. And so often the refrain is “things used to be so much better”. Admittedly some things have gotten worse, such as the crime rate. But were we on the whole really better off in the days of donkey carts, yaws and chiggers, and all white bank tellers and cricket captains?

Still, it is true that in the good old days – “all times when old are good” said Byron - people’s expectations were guided by what they saw around them and hence more realistic. No one compared their life then to “Bold and Beautiful” TV fantasies. Is it not ironic that US television shows and movies are populated almost entirely by the young, slim and gorgeous when Americans in reality are the fattest people in the world?

But perhaps there has never really been any place and time where men in general have been happy. Maybe an indefinable and ineradicable discontent is simply an intrinsic component of human nature. As Blaise Pascal put it

“All our life passes this way. We seek rest by struggling against certain obstacles, and once they are overcome, rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces.”

Or as The Red Queen said in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass” “The rule is, jam yesterday, and jam tomorrow - but never jam today”.