In theatres up and down the country, it used to be that anyone, whatever their job, was pulled magnetically towards the stage. All through the day they would find themselves venturing down into the auditorium. They would casually try to catch a glimpse of the actors, a glimpse of the action, because that was where their job was rooted. Today, 10 years into the new century, theatre workers, like the rest of us, sit staring at computer screens all day, and sometimes all night. Hardly surprising, then, that this has been the decade of Looking Away.

Visit us, please, from a previous century and you'll see us walking down the streets, wired cockleshells in ears, jabbering like lunatics in a Victorian asylum. It has long been understood in any line at any shopping till that the electronic will take precedence over the physical. The queue will wait while the sales assistant answers the phone. In any given situation, Absence always trumps Presence, presumably on the grounds that the unknown has more potential for excitement than the known. "Is he all there?" we used to ask of our neighbours' idiot children. Now we ask of everyone, "Is he there at all?"

Every period throws up its own favoured means of mass distraction, but you're going to have to pull every history book off the shelf to find a distraction quite as nothing-to-do-with-anything as the US invasion of Iraq. The decade's significant date of choice for most historians is taken to be 11 September 2001. An airborne suicide attack on the twin towers in New York killed 2,948 people of 91 different nationalities. But if I was going to choose the day when the destiny of the new century really took shape, then I'd opt for 96 hours later. On 15 September, George Bush assembled his cabinet in casual clothes at Camp David (Paul Wolfowitz came without invitation and wore a suit) and, over chicken noodle soup, fried chicken and mashed potatoes, began to yield to the dazzling temptation of deliberately pursuing the wrong suspect. Hey, said the Americans, Let's Look Away.

It was Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, who, on that occasion, had the foresight to point out that Afghanistan had often been the nemesis of imperial powers. Britain had got bogged down there. So had Russia. The attraction of Iraq as a theatre of war was that it was doable. One hundred thousand Iraqis killed in the doing might have begged to disagree. But it was also Condoleezza whose face later expressed a momentary affront to the ever-growing privileges of the privileged. After Richard Clarke, the graceful counterterrorism adviser to the US National Security Council, had apologised to the grieving relatives of 9/11 for his failure to forestall the massacre, you could see in Rice's sour, magisterial demeanour a rather different reaction. She wore a scowl that, at the end of decade, you would see on the faces of leading financiers and politicians all over the world. Etched deep on her features was a look of pure disbelief. My God, the ruling class was being held to account!

On our side of the Atlantic, Tony Blair chose to deal with his own massive wrongness by insisting that it was fair to question his judgment but not his integrity. And yet by the time he had refined 20,000 ways of saying the same thing – "I was wrong but I'm not to blame because I fooled myself I was right" – it was hard to know where integrity began and judgment stopped. Did it even matter? Blair was already Looking Away, both to his maker in his sky, whose verdict, he insisted, was the only one he respected, and to his many lucrative postwar directorships. This was the period in which British foreign policy colluded with torture to mutate into schoolboy power worship. Whatever Americans did was right. Whatever everyone else did was wrong. After Robin Cook was asked to leave his job because Dick Cheney didn't like him, there didn't seem much point in having a purely British Foreign Office, since its business could have been more efficiently conducted from Foggy Bottom.

It suited Anglo-Saxon politicians fine to be able to insist that, if only they could show us the intelligence, we would know that civilisation was under sustained, coherent attack. The ceaseless reiteration of the claim provided perfect cover for ignoring problems. It's hard to remember a time when things that really mattered received so little attention. Climate change, the social consequences of the growing gap between rich and poor, the ridiculous size of the prison population and the essential corruption of politics – its slide from representing the public interest merely to representing itself – were all held to be nothing next to the immediacy of the threat from the mujahideen. While Blair insisted to uniform derision that there was no connection between violence against western countries and the deteriorating situation in the Middle East, Palestine was quietly, and then not so quietly, strangled. Its society was permitted to splinter and fall apart. Meanwhile, a wall was built, without negotiation. It was four times as long as its Berlin prototype, and in places twice as high.

The construction of the overlooked wall – at a cost, by the way, of $4bn – was the defining political act of the age. In the name of security, a whole country resolved to turn its back on its problems. Bush did a little bit of acting, pretending for a week or two to believe in a road map to peace, while winking at the creation of a barrier that would make progress to that peace infinitely more difficult. Hypocrisy was in style, big-time. Bankers dug themselves, and then all the rest of us, into the biggest financial hole of all time, while loudly boasting that their creative innovations had rendered holes a thing of the past. CDOs, CDO squareds, mezzanines and all sorts of ingenious credit swaps were touted as the means by which the laws of economics could be suspended. Then, having spent the last months of 2008 insisting that the public must bail them out of the consequences of their own mistakes, so the bankers turned, refreshed, in 2009 to a second round of blackmail. This time, they said, we must leave them unregulated. Only by letting them help themselves to as much money as they wanted could we persuade them to stick around and lead us out of this mess.

It was a breathtaking performance, rhetorically at least, and clearly one that contributed to ubiquitous cynicism. Never had George Bernard Shaw's conviction that all professions are conspiracies against the laity had greater play. The police, politicians and financial leaders were the decade's big losers, alongside neoconservatives, admirers of New Labour and market fundamentalists. Senior BBC executives, with their self-interested juggling of market and public criteria ("The BBC's public when we're taking your money, it's private when we're taking ours") weren't far behind. In the 80s Thatcher had privatised water, electricity and gas. But in the new century we privatised virtue. We ceased to believe anyone could be in public life except for what they could rip out of it. The BBC and ITV could no longer find professional entertainers to command audiences on a Saturday night. Only amateurs could be trusted to do the job. From the stuccoed fastness of Notting Hill, the increasingly creepy David Cameron, our prime minister in waiting, announced we were entering the Age of Austerity.

Well, you may ask, what has changed? Human beings have always found that life has a curious way of slipping away from them. You reach the end without feeling you've done anything you meant to. For that reason, I'm reluctant to speak ill of Looking Away. I do a great deal of Looking Away myself. Who knows? It may be the only way of getting through. But our inclination to Look Away is the reason we invented professionals. Their job, after all, is to Look At. A doctor is there to examine things you prefer to ignore. In Britain the uncontested hero of the decade became the Polish plumber, the man or woman who efficiently mended your sink and didn't rob you blind while doing it. At some point, public figures are going to have to move off the distraction agenda and on to the real. October 2009, and we wait.