Not a thing

In a famous, some might say infamous, interview for Woman’s Own in 1987, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared:

“Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then to look after our neighbour.”

This was mistakenly taken to elevate selfishness at the expense of valuing the community. It was not. Thatcher was simply saying that ‘society’ is people rather than some hard-to-define abstract concept.

Society exists, but is not a ‘thing.’ And do note the inverted commas. Society is more of a process. It is made up of the unwritten and often unconscious rules that make up our behaviour towards our neighbours and our community. It is the way we deal harmoniously with each other, the compromises we daily make with those who share our living space and with whom we interact. It is the way we regard our fellow men and women and the way in which we behave toward them. It is not something apart that has priority over people; it is people.

Edmund Burke applauded the loyalties we feel to the groups we are attached to and in which we participate.

“To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love of our country and to mankind.”

We are not loyal to ‘society,’ nor are we fond of it. We are loyal to the groups we are part of and which we may choose to join. We are fond of them. These groups make up society.

Society changes, of course, as people change their attitudes, their tolerances and their behaviour. Technology plays a part in this, in that access to social media and smartphones demand new ways of interacting with our fellow men and women. But ‘society’ is not changed by diktat. Instead it adapts to new circumstances as people draw on the old rules to develop new ones that deal with the innovations that technology brings.

People’s tolerances sometimes change when they take the new travel opportunities to visit other cultures, to interact with them and sometimes to draw on them. Basically, society evolves because it is not a thing but an ongoing process.