There is no such thing as society

I found the following report from the BBC website (in full here) insightful but not at all surprising. It shows that over the past 30 years individuals have become more separate from their local communities and society as a whole than at any other time. Anomie and loneliness are now the prism through which a lot of people live there lives. This isn’t about people who don’t have many real world or Facebook friends, its about people’s stake in their communities and what they put in and get out of it.

It proves exactly what I have seen happening around me for years and is the culmination of certain political and economic ideological preferences which have held sway in this country and the United States for the past 30 years. The idolisation of the individual above all else is dangerous in human terms, but in economic terms it has two practical implications for those who currently hold wealth and wish to maintain its narrow concentration. Firstly it leads people to spend more money on themselves fuelling  unsustainable (ecologically/morally etc) modern consumption and secondly it leads to the break down in communitarian feeling in societies and therefore allows a private takeover of public services and provisions which in the past were bastions on local communities. People used to take pride in national symbols of equality and the belief that all men should enjoy at least a decent standard of living. When 1% of the population in this country hold in excess of 15% of the entire nations wealth, it is clear that money is there and reappears when the ’free market’ hits a bump in the tracks. This is money that should be providing a respectable level of provision for average people.  Communal spirit was actually quite weak from the outset in liberal welfare states such as the United States and United Kingdom, but it did nevertheless exist, especially post-WW2. In the 1970s and 80s an ideological, political and economic (in that order) phenomena gained weight and the support of those who wished to defend the current order which had been ever so slightly rocked by a boisterous labour movement (especially in the UK), the global economic trends at the time (the lose of money invested prior to the global debt crisis etc) and ongoing state intervention in the economy. A new way of looking at the world through the ‘rationality’  of the market was born and its greatest proponent in the UK was one Margaret Thatcher who in an interview once claimed;

‘…there is no such thing as society…’

If there was a society, she was determined to break it, leaving atomised individuals to for fight for the scraps not yet claimed by the tiny number of the wealthy elite who were becoming ever more powerful. The wage gap between workers and bosses went from 30 to 1 to 500 to 1 in the space of a couple of decades. Society was eroded and people lived in the same places, yet separately. This is why it always astonishes me when people seem so surprised by huge rises in violent crime and general social disorder. People no longer respect one another and your neighbours welfare is no longer important to you. What matters is numero uno. If you have to steal to buy the latest piece of shit that you’re told you need thats one thing. Stealing, drug dealing or whatever to put food in your families bellies is another. Of course, some just commit crime because they can, but I believe that is a symptom of the economic and political policies of the past couple of decades.

In many social democratic states which have tried to maintain social cohesion, the wealthy (who haven’t all run away due to relatively high tax levels as is oft claimed would happen by those who denounce gov intervention in the economy) realise they too have a lot to gain from higher quality public provisions. The wealthy enclaves bordered by high rise fences and CCTV cameras becoming ever present in broken societies such as the UK and US are not so necessary in countries with narrow inequality gaps between the rich and poor, high employment levels, extremely good health, education and other provisions. Unlike their money, the rich can’t all go and live on the Cayman islands, therefore they have a stake in seeing the communities they live in cope. The extreme opposite to this is becoming a reality in the US where certain wealthy communities are cutting themselves off from poorer neighbouring districts and funding their own health and education systems, without paying their share of taxes for those around them. This is a step beyond the historic atomisation of individuals towards the atomisation of communities. To me, this is wrong headed and only increases the likelihood that the wealthiest will come under attack at some point from the rest who realise such inequality of income is unfair. Much more canny would be to do as the capitalist classes managed after WW2 and in a way ‘buy off’ the lower and middle classes by funding public services that would hold back a possible revolution and maintain the current order of power.

Now the global economy is in a nosedive and not likely to pick up anytime soon. The difference this time is that less people than ever in the past 50 years are going to be protected by their governments from the worst effects of economic crisis. People will begin to question why they can’t pay for hospital treatment (in the US), or their kids school has had its funding cut for the fourth year in a row while privately provided services flourish and take chunks out of state services to make a profit (ie not investing in education in the long term, but ensuring your shareholders make a profit). Such a wake up call is necessary. A non-existent or cohesive social order means a return to feudalism. The rich landlords protected on the hill while the serfs down below cannot attain such wealth and are left to fend for themselves in the cold. Rather than cementing its place in human relations forever, neoliberalism may inadvertently lead to the sounding of the death knell for capitalism in the long run. One can but hope.

From the BBC News website;

“Community life in Britain has weakened substantially over the past 30 years, according to research commissioned by the BBC.

Analysis of census data reveals how neighbourhoods in every part of the UK have become more socially fragmented.

The study assesses the health of a community by looking at how rooted people are in their neighbourhood.

Academics created “loneliness indices”, to identify where people had a “feeling of not belonging”.

Substantial changes

The study ranks places using a formula based on the proportion of people in an area who are single, those who live alone, the numbers in private rented accommodation and those who have lived there for less than a year.

The higher the proportion of people in those categories, the less rooted the community, according to social scientists. They refer to it as the level of “anomie” or the “feeling of not belonging”.

Comparing the figures from the 1971 census with those in 2001 reveals substantial change.

Every region in the UK, broadly defined by a BBC local radio areas, has seen its communities become less rooted.

“Even the weakest communities in 1971 were stronger than any community now,” says Professor Dorling.

The researchers conclude that the increase in anomie weakens the “social glue” of communities. The result, they suggest, is that neighbourhoods are likely to be less trusting and more fearful.”