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If these days I stay in an expensive hotel, it is because someone else has paid for it. Left to my own devices, I stay in cheap hotels because I prefer them. There was a time, when I could not afford to do so, when I enjoyed staying in luxurious establishments, but now that I can afford to do so, at least for a day or two, my taste for being bowed and scraped to by assorted staff has evaporated.

This is all but a prelude to something of interest that I learned recently in an expensive—though not the most expensive—hotel in a European capital. It was part of a chain that shall be nameless, to avoid any possibility of a libel action (for there is no libel quite as dangerous or feared as the truth).

What I learned was that, up until four years ago, no one with a visible tattoo was permitted to work in any of the chain’s hotels. Then it changed its policy: Henceforth a visible tattoo did not disqualify a person from working in one of its hotels, provided it could be covered. Then a visible tattoo that could not be covered was acceptable to the hotel chain. More recently still, the chain has decided positively to contribute to the cost of any staff member’s tattoo, should he decide to have one while in the chain’s employ. I suppose the next stage in normalization of this form of self-degradation will be to make it compulsory for an employee to be tattooed, both new employees and old, the latter to be faced with the choice between a tattoo or dismissal.

For reasons unnecessary to go into, I was introduced to the manager of the hotel, and I asked him why the company was now subsidizing tattoos for its staff. The answer was exactly what I expected: It was trying to attract and be welcoming toward a younger clientele than that which the hotels attracted at the present. Such a clientele would (so the thinking went) find tattooed staff a sign that it was valued; it would feel at home, or that a hotel was “cool”—the current code word for self-congratulatory bad taste among the young.

There has been a vogue for running after a youthful clientele ever since the Second Vatican Council, when the Catholic Church more or less abandoned the Latin Mass, among other things. The leaders of the church had the rather dim idea of trying to attract young people to the religion by “modernizing” its liturgy, which was far more beautiful in Latin than in any modern language (and which my wife still remembers). An institution that proclaims truths that are supposedly eternal must handle change with care, and by slow, almost imperceptible increments rather than by leaps and bounds; and the result of the Second Council has been priests who welcome their congregation (if any) like a TV talk-show host, with jokes, and tone-deaf people who strum guitars while singing banal lyrics that hardly count as hymns. Incidentally, but not coincidentally, the direction of flow of Catholic missionaries to and from Africa has reversed: Now they come from Africa to Europe rather than the other way round.

The hapless Church of England has also all but abandoned its own beautiful liturgy, which indeed was so beautiful that any skeptic with a feel for the English language would have wished that it were all true. The Book of Common Prayer, whose final version dates from 1662, though it had by then a history of more than a century, is certainly not modern, let alone colloquial—not that it ever was colloquial, for no one ever spoke in the type of language that it employs. Be that as it may, the church abandoned forms of words of great beauty for formulae so jejune that the instructions for use of almost any implement are exciting by comparison.

I have been, in my own small way, a victim of this mania for attracting youth. I once wrote book reviews for a newspaper about once every two weeks, for something like fourteen years. Then the editor changed, and the new occupant of that most important post announced that what was needed from then on were younger reviewers, with more reviews about books by or about celebrities, to attract younger readers. I was “let go,” as they say, without a word of thanks or recognition.

I was 55 at the time and by then had been reading book reviews for about forty years. I can honestly say that in all that time the age of a reviewer never crossed my mind even flickeringly, and I suspect that the same was true of most readers of book reviews.

The newspaper was not of a kind in any case to attract anyone under the age of 50, or 40 at the youngest; the old were the fastest-growing demographic group, but still the young were desired as a clientele, perhaps on the theory, which might not be totally incorrect, that they would never grow up and become old themselves. I am glad to say that the circulation of the newspaper fell precipitously and is now considerably less than half of what it was, though I am not (alas) able to claim that this fall was due entirely to the absence of my book reviews. Newspapers were then—though I did not know it yet—in the position of horse carriages after the arrival of the internal combustion engine. The book itself, of course, was hardly the technology of the future, so that book reviewers are now like dinosaurs in a world of mammals (as one day men will be compared with insects or bacteria).

The dream of eternal youth is, of course, an ancient one. In truth, we have managed to postpone, though not completely to vanquish, old age. Here are lines from Matthew Arnold’s poem “Growing Old,” written in 1867 (or perhaps earlier):

What is it to grow old?
Is it to lose the glory of the form,
The luster of the eye?
Is it for beauty to forego her wreath?
—Yes, but not this alone.

Is it to feel our strength—
Not our bloom only, but our strength—decay?
Is it to feel each limb
Grow stiffer, every function less exact,
Each nerve more loosely strung?

Matthew Arnold was 45 at the time, and while it is possible that he was using his imagination about what it is like to grow old, it is likely that he was already experiencing the effects of old age.

We are more realistic than to wish for eternal youth. What we wish for now is eternal adolescence, and since the latter is so much a matter of taste—bad taste—we are on the way to achieving it, at least until we die.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).