Jill Lepore: Is society coming apart?

By Dilip - Tuesday, November 30, 2021

Forging stronger bonds in a post-pandemic world... will require acts of moral imagination that are not part of any political ideology or mission statement, but are functions of the human condition: tenderness, compassion, longing, generosity, allegiance and affection. These are the only answers to loneliness, alienation, dislocation and disintegration. But the fullest expression of these functions... requires both society and government... a new social contract for public goods, environmental protection, sustainable agriculture, public health, community centres, public education, grants for small businesses... funding for the arts. It won’t be a new New Deal. The dangers are graver because decades of a world, both real and virtual, shaped by Reaganism and Thatcherism, has left the waters rising, all around us, and the forests on fire. Governments rest on a social contract, an agreement to live together. That contract needs renewing. But the problem, in the end, isn’t with society, or the social fabric. It’s with governments that have abandoned their obligations of care...

“One thing I think the coronavirus crisis has already proved is that there really is such a thing as society,” the prime minister announced, confirming the existence of society while talking to his phone, alone in a room. All this was very odd. Johnson seemed at once frantic and weak (not long afterwards, he was admitted to hospital and put in the intensive care unit). Had he, in his feverishness, undergone a political conversion?

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Because, by announcing the existence of society, Johnson appeared to renounce, publicly, something Margaret Thatcher had said in an interview in 1987, in remarks that are often taken as a definition of modern conservatism. “Too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the government’s job to cope with it!’” Thatcher said. “They are casting their problems on society, and who is society? There is no such thing!” She, however, had not contracted Covid-19….

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/nov/25/society-thatcher-reagan-covid-pandemic

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