Jill Lepore: Is society coming apart?

By Dilip -

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...

Jill Lepore: Is society coming apart?

“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?

George Monbiot: Ayn Rand - A Manifesto for Psychopaths

The destruction of society EUROZINE REVIEW

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


A moment of moral and political nihilism: Theologian Adam Kotsko on our current crisis


Jon Henley: Rise of far right puts Dreyfus affair into spotlight in French election race


A Hunger Artist - by Franz Kafka (1922)


Albert Camus's “The Human Crisis” (March 28, 1946) - 'No cause justifies the murder of innocents'


Socrates: If the whole is ailing the part cannot be well / Ajit Prakash Shah: Darkness at noon, felled by the judiciary


Society of the Spectacle / 'इमेज' - 'Image': A Poem on Deaths in the Age of Covid


Book review - Seeing reason: Jonathan Israel's radical vision


Ayush Chaturvedi: Main Gandhi ke saath hun // Samar Halarnkar: In the time of Godse, a search for Hindus who will stand with Gandhi


Rabindranath Tagore's essay on the cult of the nation


The Philosophy of Number


Sabyasachi Bhattacharya - Antinomies of Nationalism and Rabindranath Tagore


The Bleak Left - On Endnotes. By TIM BARKER


Sam Kriss: 'Neoliberalism' isn't a left-wing insult but a monstrous system of inequality


Defying capitalism and socialism, Kumarappa and Gandhi had imagined a decentralised Indian economy - Venu Madhav Govindu & Deepak Malghan


एक बात हमेशा ज़हन में सवाल खड़े करती है A question that stays with me... / Ravish Kumar's Speech at Berkeley (2019)


Dennis Dalton - Gandhi During Partition: A Case Study in the Nature of Satyagraha


The Compass


The music of humanity


Satyagraha - An answer to modern nihilism


Gandhi visits the poor people of England in 1931 - Gandhi Video


The Almond Trees by Albert Camus


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