Skip to content

The rights of the obsessively self-interested community.

I’M SURE I heard a politician use the word ‘society’ the other day, and not in reference to Cameron’s now half-forgotten Big Society phantasm. On its own it sounded so quaint, so old-fashioned I felt a pang of nostalgia.

Whatever happened to society? It can’t have been Thatcher who erased it from consciousness, despite her famous ‘who is society? There is no such thing’ comment in 1987 (misconstrued as it was by the left). She was basically attacking the confusion of state with society. No wonder the luvvies didn’t like it, for who could love the state more than the left? And who could hate society more?

At some stage between 1987 and now, the word – and hence the very concept – of ‘society’ vanished from public discourse. By the time Labour had run its course bankrupting the country (again) society had been completely replaced by its smug little cousins from the family called ’community’. We even got a Secretary of State in charge of communities (there’s lots of them, you see). It wouldn’t sound quite right with society, would it – Secretary of State for Society and Local Government – a bit too bossy and authoritarian, perhaps?

There’s the rub. Community sounds so much more cuddly and friendly, so much more local and ‘accessible’, so much easier to identify and identify with than society. Society is big and rather amorphous. It contains both multitudes and minorities. Like life it’s a bit of a mess; it keeps changing unpredictably and yet remaining somehow familiar. A single society is capable of containing the working class Tory and the Labour-voting middle classes, the bourgeois Europhile and the Labour Europhobe. Society is big and solid in a squidgy sort of way; it can feel rather soft and jelly-like but you can’t guarantee it won’t roll over and crush the life out of you. More to the point, it’s beyond the control of the state.

Communities, on the other hand, are small, discrete units. They can be created, defined, labelled, pandered to, criticised, marginalised, pampered, manipulated, presumed upon. They can be activated, fired up, righteously aroused, offended, invoked. Communities have identifiable ‘leaders’, ever ready to provide soundbites for the media and to pose looking angry and moral and demanding action – action which always involves taxing, banning or introducing more regulation.

Politicians love them and so do think tanks, fake charities, pressure groups and the media. A good community is PR gold, because a community is, above all, a cause the self-interested can ride relentlessly.

Hence the Balkanisation of society into communities: women, gays, ethnic groups, greens, class-warriors, students, the disabled, the children (always the children), the poor and disadvantaged, etc., and many with proliferating subdivisions. Every year, for instance, the sex-identity community seems to grow. Originally it was just gays, then it acquired bisexuals then transgenders. Who knows what they will be next year and how long their acronym will be?

Without these communities, these causes, we wouldn’t have the human rights industry. We wouldn’t have the expanding ‘hate crimes’ scam and the greed to find new groups of victims. Without the specious idea of community, Manchester Police wouldn’t be deciding to record attacks on cultural sub-groups such as punks and goths as hate crimes. Where does that stop? Accountants? Bankers? Video-gamers, Artists? Florists? Why not? Each is as specific and meaningless as the other.

‘Community’ is a toxic solvent that destroys both society and the individual. It’s the atomisation of a nation. It’s a means of destroying the concept of society while pretending to care about it. It’s the operation of a very old, well-tried political tactic: divide and rule. Dissolve society and you have nothing left but the state. That’s why the major political parties like it. That’s why the EU likes it. That’s why it should be dumped in the bin.

Michael Blackburn.

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x