Dear {{first_name | Friend}},

In last week’s Newsletter, and my recent Alternative MacTaggart Lecture, I argued that the Crisis of Connection is the most neglected crisis of our time, immiserating an entire generation. All the evidence suggests that, 25 years after Robert Putnam chronicled the decline of civic and associational life in America, deep underlying trends in technology, culture, and demography mean social capital is diminishing at an accelerating rate. 

This week, I want to suggest what to do about it. But first I need to explain a bit about how we got here; specifically, how the story of modern politics brought us to this juncture. That story begins in 1651.

Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan reads like a fever dream; so much so that scholars often wonder if he was suffering some ailment when it poured forth from his prodigious mind. Published exactly half-way through the English Civil War (1642-1660), and coloured by the violence and brutality of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648 ) in Europe, Hobbes himself was born in 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada - a naval fleet sent by Philip II of Spain to overthrow Elizabeth I. Hobbes joked that he was born “twinned with fear” - and his writing shows it. 

In the history of politics, we are moderns, because we live in the shadow of Hobbes’ Leviathan. This Leviathan, named after a biblical sea-monster, was the foundational institution of our modern politics: the State. And Hobbes’ state was an attempt to overcome the basic division that had dominated political philosophy until then. 

(I owe a lot of this interpretation of Hobbes to David Runciman’s superb Talking Politics: History of Ideas podcast, which I cannot recommend enough). 

In the West at least, all respectable political philosophy until Hobbes was based on two groups of people whose interests were opposed. These had many different names: the many and the few; the masses and the elite; the people and government; the rulers and the ruled. Hobbes proposed a kind of grand bargain between the two, based on a seeming paradox. By giving vast power, including the power of coercion, to a mighty Sovereign, the people could paradoxically be more free. The essential quality of this Sovereign was its doubleness: power granted by the people, and power over the people. Their consent would, by the magic of the arrangement, make the people more powerful, because they could live peacefully in a state of nature that was otherwise “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”.

Monsters, benevolent and otherwise

Hobbes’s image of the Sovereign as a benevolent monster spawned the modern State all over the world. All the Empires and then nation states that spread their dominion over the world in the centuries after Hobbes’ seminal work owed him a debt. And then many of them over-reached, because that is the nature of ideas and of human affairs. 

There is no one supreme goal in politics; rather, there are many. But perhaps the basic goal is not to get butchered to death. This had been the fate of people for centuries, if not millennia. Hobbes understood it; his life was shaped by deep domestic and international traumas; and he conceived of politics as a way of minimising the prospect of anarchy.

In the centuries after Hobbes, a different conception of politics arose, and a different story. This one emphasised the individual and valorised her resistance to tyranny. It prioritised the right of that person to tell the Leviathan to bugger off. It is not a uniquely Western story, and it does not start after Hobbes, but there is a thread that runs through John Locke and Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill, and it is called Liberalism. This mighty strand is many things to many people. It generally promotes tolerance and pluralism and reasoned debate, and limitations on power. It prizes individual autonomy. 

It will be observed that you cannot really distil centuries of History into a few paragraphs. And there are several other stories that you can tell about the march of modernity. One, for instance, is about the class struggle, most associated with Karl Marx. Another is about resistance to imperialism, associated with the likes of Frantz Fanon. But both of those, I think, do accept the Hobbesian compact, either by trying to put the Sovereign to more just use (as under Communism), or fighting Sovereigns from across the seas (anti-imperialism). 

Very crudely put, the story of the 20th Century, in the West at least, is that of two rival totalitarianisms - that is, Hobbesian over-reach - being vanquished, and Liberalism being championed as a response. But Liberalism, which prizes self-actualisation and the fulfilment of personal hopes, has over-reached too. Both economic and cultural liberalism, arising as they did from noble intentions and particular historical circumstances, failed to recognise that there is a third supreme goal in politics. This one involves not you or me, but you and me. 

If the Hobbesian world-view asserted security as the supreme goal of politics, and the liberal world-view asserted freedom instead, the third supreme goal of politics is Connection. Social scientists or religious leaders might call this Belonging. And hippies would call it Love. For reasons that should be obvious, I’ll stick with Connection. 

Connection is the third supreme goal of Politics because all the evidence - and I do mean all the evidence - suggests that the happiest lives and the happiest societies are those where individuals feel embedded in thick webs of reciprocity, trust and affection with those around them. That strong social capital creates strong societies is obvious; that it leads to much better, deeper, happier and more meaningful lives is the bit that liberalism forgot. 

I have called my new world The Amol Rajan Connection in large part because I want to champion the revival of community life and elevate social capital as an urgent priority in our time. This is not about nostalgia; it’s not about harking back to some sepia-tinged, Hovis-advert illusion about life in the 1950s and 1960s (some of which looks lovely; some of which looks horrid). It is in fact about dealing with what is in front of our noses: about the particular contingencies of this crazy, bewildering moment in the history of Sapiens.

Connection, and the revival of community life, has to be our priority because the central question - and the mission that follows - of our age is whether we can use the Promethean technologies we have now loosed upon the world to advance eudaemonia, or human flourishing, for billions. That is, whether we can use AI to dramatically improve what it means to be human, or whether AI wipes out human life. It really is that simple. Whether we get that right depends on politics, and The Amol Rajan Connection is here to help. 

Properly understood, Artificial Intelligence clarifies what it means to be human. In the age of super-abundant information - that is, the past two decades - what became scarce is our attention. Hence the Attention Economy. In the age of super-abundant intelligence created by AI, what becomes scarce is human connection. What you might call relational capital: those precious bonds that weave our lives together to create the fabric of society. 

Last week, I showed the extraordinary degree to which those bonds have frayed. A quarter of a century on from Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, we are now Scrolling Alone. Modern technology, the decline of faith, the transformation of work, liberalism’s cult of the individual, and deep, accelerating trends in demography (particularly immigration and ageing) have all frayed those bonds, and so torn our fabric. How do we re-stitch our society?

There is such a thing as Society

Two of the beautiful lessons from 20 years of following politics very intimately are, first, there is no such thing as an original idea; and second, the best ideas call on traditions that go beyond Left and Right. You may note that I completely reject the utility of the Left/Right prism in politics today. The Left and Right arose in response to an industrial revolution of centuries, and we need a new politics that responds to the industrial revolution of today. And so it is that we come to a phrase that has fallen out of popular usage, but which I believe deserves to be re-visited. 

The Big Society was little understood when launched, and eventually vanquished by the economic reconstruction job, post-Financial Crash, that dominated the Coalition government. Neither that beginning nor its end are an argument against it. In between was a serious attempt to make politics more human, and to revive community life. It is true that there were inconsistencies, and that - as I wrote at the time - it was never ultimately reconciled with austerity, which swallowed it up. At the core however, was the outline of an agenda which ought to command respect across the political spectrum, in part because it was an audacious raid on Labour territory, as many Labour folk noted at the time. 

I actually attended the launch of the Big Society, in Coin Street Neighbourhood Centre in south London in 2010, and remember thinking David Cameron’s vision did lay out a plausible future for post-liberalism, precisely because it contained so many ideas that went beyond the tedious prison of Left and Right. I was a leader writer on The Independent, and it was a time of real intellectual excitement. The fields of behavioural economics and social psychology had revealed the ‘Hidden Wealth of Nations’, as David Halpern’s superb book put it. And behind all the chatter about Blue Labour or Red Tory, was a real intellectual lineage. Cameron’s Big Society was in a conservative tradition, beautifully elucidated in David Willett’s 1994 pamphlet on Civic Conservatism. But what you might call the social-ist agenda was integral to New Labour thinking too.  From David Blunkett’s Scarman Lecture (2003) to the ‘Together We Can’ Action Plan of 2005 and Hazel Blears’ ‘Active Citizens’ speech of 2006, there is a thread of (New) Labour thought which conservatives have no monopoly on. 

In practical and policy terms, the Big Society not only had much to recommend it, but articulated an agenda which could just as easily come from Andy Burnham today. If you look up the Big Society Programme, a policy paper, you will find 5 pillars. I know this Newsletter is already read and shared by powerful people across Westminster, Whitehall and No 10, and I implore them to take a look at that policy paper. It says the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition will: 

Tell you what, that doesn’t half sound like the Makerfield Agenda of Andy Burnham. He is, as I pointed out in my Edinburgh lecture, Britain’s first Prime Minister to be a Member of Parliament on behalf of the Co-operative Party. I’m struck by how little we’ve heard about that, and how little the mutual model has been raised since his ascension. The above agenda could absolutely form the pillars of a new politics of Connection, in which Burnham, who is keen on local life, revives community spirit in Britain. 

One thing he ought to consider, but probably won’t, is restoring the National Citizen Service (NCS). This has been scrapped by Labour on the bizarre grounds that it wasn’t working for most people, a lot of young people didn’t know about it, and it ought to be replaced by a more comprehensive Youth Strategy. That strategy reads pretty well, but was perfectly reconcilable with the NCS, which had been taken up by thousands, and had something like a 90% approval rating. If not enough people knew about it, that’s a marketing problem. 

I mentioned powerful people. One very powerful person in Britain today is the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, James Purnell. I know James quite well. He is highly intelligent. Twenty years ago, when he was in the Cabinet and before I knew him, he and Liam Byrne would summarise their approach to politics by saying they wanted “powerful people”. James is a keen student of history, and thinks fondly of political heroes in the 20th Century. There is one I can recommend.

When it was launched, the most obvious reference point for The Big Society in the eyes and ears of lots of people was Lyndon B Johnson’s The Great Society. LBJ used that phrase between 1964 and 1968 to champion the idea of national renewal, and to offer a compelling vision of the next America which had strong social ties at its heart. 

Andy Burnham is often accused of being excessively nostalgic, of talking too much about the past and not enough about the future. He and his team are currently working hard on his conference speech. They need an overarching theme. Can I suggest one?

To address the contingencies of our age, and the Crisis of Connection above all; to offer a compelling vision of Britain’s future that learns from the past; to give a coherent thread to our national renewal, drawing on a social-ist tradition that goes beyond right and left and so appeals to a broad swathe of the British public; to steal the allure of patriotism from Reform; and to lean into his historic role as Britain’s first Prime Minister to represent the Co-Operative tradition, Andy Burnham should use his conference speech to go not full Cameron, but full LBJ. 

He could call his speech, ‘The Great Society’. 

You’re welcome, Prime Minister.

*** 

A weekly selection of life-enhancing delights, curated by your humble correspondent, in response to popular demand. I think you will enjoy them.

Visit:

For several years, I was a restaurant critic. Unlike others, who actually got paid a hefty salary to write about food they didn’t pay for, I just got a free meal. This was still rather cool, and quite useful for a young married couple. It dramatically heightened my appreciation of good food, beyond the world-beating Indian food I grew up on, and the pizza addiction I cultivated at University. It also inspired a lifelong reverence for those who work in hospitality, with its unsocial hours, generally grim pay, brutal inflation, and unhelpful government policies. Nobody I know works harder, or does it better, than my dear brother from another mother, Jackson Boxer. Yes, I’m biased, but I still think his Brunswick House in Vauxhall is London’s best restaurant. Recently he opened Vesper in Exmouth Market. There is a massive, viral buzz about it, with constant chatter not just in foodie circles but beyond. It is justified. The food is sensational. I know he won’t appreciate my saying this, but Jackson loves what he does so much that he prioritises happy customers over profit margins, and does his damndest to keep prices down. He is a hero of our time, and you must go to Vesper. 

Read: 

Derek Thompson on Substack. Probably my favourite writer on Substack - and no, I’ve never met him or been in touch. Thompson used to write for The Atlantic, has a podcast called Plain English, and just writes the most magisterial, sweeping essays on the biggest issues of our time. I think we’re quite similar, and may tell him, if I ever have the privilege of a connection. 

Watch: 

One thing you can expect from me: recommendations of the astonishing world-class programmes made by the BBC that just don’t get the attention they deserve. Most people don’t realise that, with the iPlayer and Sounds, they’ve got Britain’s greatest cultural institution in their pocket. This week, I’ve got to ask you to watch the documentary on Jared Leto. He is not the man who you might have thought he was. I made documentaries for the Current Affairs unit that produced this, and I can tell you it is suffused with absolutely world-class journalists who go to extraordinary lengths to get things right. 

Listen:

Something extraordinary happened when Jordan Schwarzenberger came on RADICAL, the podcast I hosted for BBC News, which many of you loved. I hadn’t met him before, but knew him as the genius manager of the Sidemen on YouTube, perhaps Europe’s most successful YouTubers. We ended up talking mostly about his extraordinary journey in faith. Jordan, who is Catholic, has thought hard about many of the deepest questions in life (and beyond), and the chat was riveting. So much so we split it into two episodes, with a separate one that was a masterclass on how to grow in the age of YouTube. Perhaps two dozen senior people in the Media messaged me to say they were taking notes. And it is obviously something I’m thinking about rather a lot at the moment too. And every company, brand and institution should be thinking hard about it; specifically they should be learning how to Think Like a Creator. This is Jordan’s regular YouTube show and podcast, and it is quite bonkers how valuable the insight in it is, even though it’s free to access.

***

Ok so this is crazy. 

I mentioned last week that, as I stood at the foot of St Paul’s Cathedral, a lovely member of this club, who subscribes to the newsletter, said hello, which made me happy. Her name was Helen and I’d never met her before. I promptly came home, wrote last week’s newsletter, and then implored all of you to say hi if you see me out and about, which I’m delighted to say you did. But get this: that very night, at a party in west London, I met… Helen! Again! Twice in one week, and having mentioned her in the newsletter. Wild scenes ensued, I promise. We’re now connected on LinkedIn, obviously, and Helen is lovely. I love moments like that. 

Have a great weekend!

Yours ARCfully,

AMOL