# Review: Is Society Coming Apart? | Jill Lepore  ## Metadata - Author: [[theguardian.com]] - Full Title: Is Society Coming Apart? | Jill Lepore - Category: #Source/articles - Document Tags: [[Liked]] - URL: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/nov/25/society-thatcher-reagan-covid-pandemic >[!AI Summary]+ >This note is a review of an article titled "Is Society Coming Apart?" by Jill Lepore. The article explores the concept of society and its relationship with government, particularly in the context of modern conservatism. It discusses the impact of the internet on society, the stress on social norms, and the importance of mutual support and cooperation in a functioning society. The review also touches on the historical perspectives of liberalism and conservatism, the role of revolutions, and the influence of individualism and choice. It concludes by highlighting the need for governments to fulfill their obligations of care and renew the social contract. ## Highlights - 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. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1465512498/18279705)) - society and government mean different things. ==Society usually means the private ties of mutual obligation and fellowship that bind together people who have different backgrounds and unequal education, resources and wealth==. ==Government is the public administration of the affairs of people constituted into a body politic as citizens and equals==. Society invokes community, government polity. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1465512498/18279708)) - the architecture and ethos of the internet, which is ungoverned, deregulated, privatised and market-driven – a remote and barren wasteland where humans are reduced to “users”, individuals, alone, just so many backlit avatars of IRL bone-marrow selves. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1465512498/18279713)) - there is a general sense that social norms are under a wartime level of stress, absent a wartime solidarity. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1465512498/18279719)) - “A functioning society rests on a web of mutuality, a willingness among all involved to share enough with one another to accomplish what no one person can do alone,” Heather McGhee writes in her 2021 book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1465512498/18279730)) - “the social fabric of the country has been torn,” said Eddie Glaude, chair of the African American studies programme at Princeton University, ... We have to imagine a different way of being together with each other.” - “The faith of a liberal is a profound belief not only in the capacities of individual men and women,” Franklin D Roosevelt said in 1935, “but also in the effectiveness of people helping each other.” ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1465512498/18279756)) - After the second world war, the anguished investigation into the rise of totalitarianism shattered liberals’ faith in society, and “gave rise to a theory of mass society that rooted totalitarianism in modernity itself”, ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1465512498/18279760)) - “The threat to liberal democracy of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union brought these fears into focus: the atomized individuals of mass society were ready supporters of totalitarian movements and the false solidarity they promised.” ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1465512498/18279764)) - Hannah Arendt sorted revolutions into those that attempt “to change the fabric of society” and those that try “to change the structure of the political realm”. She admired the second and feared the first, arguing that revolutions can never solve the “social question” – poverty – and should not try, because “the whole record of past revolutions demonstrates beyond doubt that every attempt to solve the social question with political means leads into terror”. Overwhelmed by the desperation of the poor, she argued, revolutions that attempt to change the fabric of society will lead to the evisceration of order, the destruction of property, and the mass execution of intellectuals ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1465512498/18279778)) - ==conservative thinkers blamed the fraying fabric of society – and the masses’ vulnerability to totalitarianism – not on the dislocations and inequality wrought by industrial capitalism, but on the growing power of the state==. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1465512498/18335748)) - the gap between liberalism and conservatism closed in the 1950s, when liberal intellectuals, terrified at the prospect of a collapse of liberal democracies into totalitarianism, lost faith in the idea of society and abandoned their commitment to social democracy. Ross argues that these liberals no longer believed their role was to protect society by arguing for assembly, mutual concern, cooperative action and equal inclusion. ==Instead, they strove to protect the individual, and the individual’s ability to make choices, as if the act of choosing, and the market-driven rhetoric of choice, could inoculate the masses against becoming a mass==. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1465512498/18335773)) - no one disputes that the political revolutions of the 1960s provoked a counter-revolutionary conservative insurgency, animated, in part, by a furious opposition to civil rights. To McGhee’s point, ==a great many white people appear to have stopped believing in the existence of society just at the point when Black people won enough political power to declare that society could no longer be “whites only”== ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1465512498/18335801)) - Here’s Nisbet, in a preface written for that edition, decades before quarantines and stay-at-home campaigns and the loneliness epidemic and social distancing and lockdowns: ... The individual not only does not feel a part of the social order; he has lost interest in being a part of it. For a constantly enlarging number of persons, including, significantly, young persons of high school and college age (consider the impressive popularity among them of JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye), this state of alienation has become profoundly influential in both behavior and thought - In the middle decades of the 20th century, people on all sides seemed to agree about the problem: the vulnerability of rootless, ignorant mass society to political persuasion and propaganda. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1465512498/18335869)) - ==Nisbet and his conservative kin, blaming the state, placed their faith in a laissez-faire free market and a return to institutions more powerful in “earlier times”: the family, the church== ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1465512498/18335878)) - Black civil rights activists called on the communal traditions of the Black church and the Nation of Islam. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1465512498/18335883)) - ==The New Left, which began as a movement of students, placed its faith in the university and, ultimately, in cultural rather than social or political change== ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1465512498/18335888)) - white liberals invoked a vague notion of choice – the rational political choices of voters, the informed purchasing choices of consumers. Even abortion would be framed as a “right to choose”. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1465512498/18335890)) - political conservatives searching for a coherent philosophy to support their efforts to tear down the modern welfare state and replace it with more localized and voluntary efforts to lift up the poor.” ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1465512498/18339067)) - Barlow’s rhetoric was anti-government (“Cyberspace does not lie within your borders”) but pro-society (“We are forming our own Social Contract”). He predicted that the internet would be all society and no government. He was half right. With notable exceptions – above all, China – it is ungoverned. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1465512498/18339092)) - readers understood The Unwinding as a lament about the abandonment of the New Deal, first by the New Left, then by the New Right, and then by the New Democrats. Packer believed that the weakening power of the state diminished community: less government, less society. Nisbet believed the opposite, that the rising power of the state diminished community: more government, less society. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1465512498/18339133)) - The risk, when interactions with other human beings are narrowed to these remote, glancing and often combative exchanges – simulations – is that, once the lockdowns are over, people will bring the culture of the virtual into the real, creating even angrier, more impatient, more superficial, more transactional, more commercial and less democratic societies ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1465512498/18339185)) - ==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 ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1465512498/18339230)) - Liberalism didn’t kill society. And conservatism didn’t kill society. Because society isn’t dead. But it is pallid and fretful, like a shut-in staring all day long at nothing but a screen, mistaking a mirror for a window. Inside, online, there is no society, only the simulation of it. ([View Highlight](https://instapaper.com/read/1465512498/18339238))