Sep 10, 2024 8 min read

How I Think About Society Now

I’m Umair Haque, and this is The Issue: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported publication. Our job is to give you the freshest, deepest, no-holds-barred insight about the issues that matter most.

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Hi. How’s everyone? Welcome back old friends, welcome new ones, and a big thanks to everyone for reading and thinking alongside me.

Today I want to discuss…

The Widening Gulf Between People and Elites

It’s funny. How do you think things in the world are going? If you’re like most people, you’re jittery. Worried. Afraid, even. The future. It’s rarely seemed more uncertain.

We’ve been through many shocks as a civilization. World War. Fascism. Disaster. But we haven’t been through so many all at once. That’s what makes this age feel so different. And the burden of all that risk…who bears it? But I’m going to come to that.

How do I think about society now? Recently, we were discussing a finding in Edelman’s new report on global levels of trust (they’re a research group.) They put it in a way that I suggest is a very accurate and insightful way to think about it: a “trust chasm” has emerged between leaders, institutions, and people.

How I think about society is reflected in that yawning chasm.

To be even a little critical these days rubs certain groups the wrong way. Do it, and you’ll get a reputation as…all kinds of things. A “doomer.” An “anti-capitalist” (whatever that means.) A communist, a simpleton, etcetera, doesn’t matter.

That’s the trust chasm.

You see, what Edelman’s found is striking. This divergence—I don’t think we’ve ever seen something like this. You can say, well, it’s not as bad as World War II. And sure, in a way, that’s true, even if it’s a…low bar. But even then, there wasn’t this gap. Leaders weren’t sort of preening about telling people everything was fine, fantastic, never better. They were as determined, worried, and iron-willed as the average person.

In other words, this chasm, and it grows every day, is something new.

So what does it mean?

What Makes This Period in History So Troubled

Let’s rewind in history. I’m hard pressed to think of another time when such a chasm emerged.

With one striking exception: the pre-war period. Then, the world’s leaders sort of…gave up. Weimar Germany’s paved the way for the Nazis. In America, the excesses of the roaring 20s, unchecked, gave way to the Great Depression.

This is the only period in modern history I can think of when there was such a yawning gap between what people thought of their lives, their societies, and the world, and elites and leaders did. People’s pessimism and fatalism soon gave way to war—by way of leaders’ complacency and willful ignorance.

I’m not saying there’s going to be a World War. That’s not the point. Rather, think with me.

Let’s go back even deeper in history.

As we do, then, finally, we begin to see periods where this chasm was…almost normal. Just an everyday feature of social life.

Think of Versailles era France, and Marie Antoinette’s notorious “let them eat cake,” while the Jean Valjeans pursued Les Miserables through the filthy streets.

Or think of Dickensian England, where poverty, inequality, and powerlessness were taken for granted, while an aristocracy enjoyed a life of Downton Abbey level finery.

So if we rewind past modernity, then—and only then, really—do we see the kind of gap that’s opening up today. People by and large were discontent, angry, thwarted, kept in their place, while elites, in those days, aristocracies and nobles, thought that everything was wonderful.

Because for them, of course, it was.

The (Last) Age of Revolutions vs This Age of Stagnation

That was life. Two classes in society—three, really—proles, bourgeoisie, and slaves. And that was it.

Until an Age of Revolutions swept the globe.

That Age of Revolutions came in different degrees. France abolished the old order, formally. Britain never did, and perhaps, as many think, that led to many of the problems it still faces today, propelling nationalisms like Brexit. That doesn’t matter.

The point is that in history we see a line of progress, true.

But it’s an uneven line. It proceeds not at all, for ages. And then suddenly, things erupt, and old orders, paradigms, structures, and institutions are swept away, all at once. A “new world,” as Gramsci said, emerges.

So where are we now? We seem to be in just the place Gramsci warned of, in his famous quote about the new world struggling to be born, while the old one refuses to die.

But where does that leave us? How should we think about society now?

The Rise of the Hyper Individual

Many of us don’t.

Many of us don’t think of society one bit. This is the spell of the demagogue, of course. We think of ourselves, then the tribe, the clan, those “like us,” bonded by blood and soil.

And the rest are our enemies. Our hated rivals. Unlike us, right down in the soul.

But this way of thinking isn’t just about the far right, sadly.

Let’s think of what neoliberalism did. As the dominant paradigm, it ripped through social bonds. That’s because it elevated the primacy of the individual. We were all little atoms in “free markets,” to take “individual responsibility” for our own lives, and that was…it. The market was to mediate everything.

And…look around. That’s what came to be. What don’t markets mediate anymore? Today, there’s a small revolt against dating apps—that’s how deep this sort of fundamentalism about markets, as it’s called, went. So when markets were mediating even the most primal social relationships…what was left? How could social bonds form?

And in that milieu, it seems to me, “thinking about society” was something that we stopped doing.

I mean that “we” in several senses. I don’t think of myself as an economist anymore—we discussed why recently. But my former peers, economists, certainly stopped thinking about society, assuming that the magic of markets was akin to the alchemists stone, the magic substance that would transform lead into gold. The field of social psychology, beloved to me, went from magisterial insights about society, by the likes of Erich Fromm and Alfred Adler, to…lab experiments about how many jellybeans people wanted.

On and on it went.

How We Stopped Thinking About Society

So in a sense, we had a kind of paradigm…collapse.

Our horizons narrowed. Our vision shrunk. We no longer thought about society much at all.

Let me continue that thread quickly. Even in Europe’s mature social democracies, “brakes” were put in place, to limit investment. Huge waves of immigration washed up on its old, glittering shores. The idea was…

What’s the idea here? The mistake?

That society was a problem we’d solved. Something we didn’t need to think about anymore.

Every side had its own answer. The neoliberals said markets made thinking about society obsolete. What social democracy had shrunk to said that having built these grand systems, they’d last forever. Conservatives, meanwhile, shrugged, and said society was something that didn’t really exist at all, in Margaret Thatcher’s famous, bizarre words.

This is paradigm collapse. When a paradigm’s walls close in on itself, to the point that its foundations crumble.

Today, we need to think about society again.

But where do we begin?

What History Will Say About Us, Or Where We Go From Here

History will regard our era as troubled—but also unwise, strange, and foolish. Because of the above—assuming society was a problem that was solved, each faction promoting its own reason for the obsolescence of thinking about society.

But this question is eternal. How are we to live and die together? What will bond us? What endeavors do we share? What are our dreams—and nightmares? What aspirations link us, and what temptations divide us?

I can’t see an age where these question ever have what we assumed in the last one. Permanent answers.

The answers, rather, must always change. Depending on so, so many things. Economics, technology, resources, nature, and plenty more.

So we face this massive challenge in this day and age, which is thinking about society again.

To begin, I suggest that we need to ask a few questions.

What’s a Society For in the 21st Century?

What are societies for in this age? Are they just here to protect blood and soil, and keep the rest out, as the world begins to burn? Or are they there for higher purposes, of the growth of the human spirit, collective endeavor, shared interests in the positive?

What are social contracts for now? Are they just there to let a predatory class take the lion’s share of gains? But that seems to be plunging us right back to pre-modernity—remember the chasm between elites and people in the 18th century—as we approach something like neofeudalism. Or are they there to support people in their pursuit of a good life, however we might define it, the American ideal of liberty and happiness, or the European one of public life and joie de vivre?

What is our relationship to society? I don’t mean that just as individuals—remember what we just discussed. Rather, I mean it as groups and classes. Are our societies going to continue this trajectory back in time, to become things made again of two classes, a huge gulf between them, aristocrats and peasants, however much we might want to gild that lily with buzzwords? Is that all we’re capable of, Dune or Star Wars style? I doubt it, but then…

What is our relationship to society, as in, how are our societies to be structured? Do we want vibrant middle classes making up the vast majority, or a bifurcated structure of underclass and overclass, with all the attendant problems that result? Do we want classes of elites to run everything, allocating all the resources, making all the decisions, which results in populist backlashes, or do we want power structures which are more cooperative and participative and probably far more stable and enduring?

These are strange questions. They’re problematic and challenging ones. You don’t hear them much anymore. Anywhere, really. Not in the columns, not on the news, barely even in academic papers or books.

Yet these are the central questions of this age. We are going to have to start asking them again. Thinking about them. Considering them, discussing them, and I don’t mean that in the way of the adversarial political “debates” of today, but I mean genuinely studying history, reflecting on them, and gently sharing what we learn with one another.

Together, our civilization is going to have come to a new understanding of society.

Or else this is where we’ll stay stuck. In this unstable place, where the old world clings on, while the new one struggles to be born.

That place is better called purgatory. And that sense of anxiety, discomfort, and worry we all feel? It’s because we’re trapped in it.

Time to get unstuck. To demand better of our leaders. Institutions. Ourselves. To ask these great and noble questions again.

Knowing there are no answers. If Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Mill, Hume, Locke, and Rousseau couldn’t solve them, none of us can, either. All we can do is try, fail, and try again, and in that very quest lies the project we call civilization.