The Point of Community

I read an amazing book recently, The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe, that I’ll highlight in my best books post next month. Like many Jonathan Coe books, it explores the conservative movement in the UK and the US (within a murder mystery frame), and how people are drawn to or repulsed by certain political ideologies.

But the best part of the book comes on page 168. The character is retelling a lecture he went to while at college where the lecturer makes a point about how famous pairings often stand in for society as a whole:

Here, in the comic interplay between a Laurel and a Hardy, or an Abbott and Costello, you had a microcosm of how all people interacted with one another: frustration, misunderstanding, getting in each other’s way, but also total interdependence and – in the case of the greatest double acts – real and unwavering love. Look at Vladimir and Estragon, he said – look at Laurel and Hardy; even look at Morecambe and Wise – and you see a pared-down image of a more-or-less functioning society. Human beings doing their best to get along together; unable to hide their impatience, sometimes, with the recalcitrant behaviour of their fellow earth-dwellers, but each one unable to do without the other.

The character — and by extension, Coe — continues to talk about how community has changed from that time after the Second World War to the rise of the first mobile phone:

I think people used to believe in a different kind of society. We had a model for it, back then: more or less organized, more or less functioning, held together by the belief that things should not be shared out too unequally. It was imperfect, of course, full of injustices and disagreements and bumps in the road, but above all it was cohesive: just like one of the great double acts.

Even if we didn’t always achieve it, we had a goal of moving together as a society vs. focusing on the individual and uniqueness, our personal needs, and our personal success. He traces the change back to the 1980s.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since reading the book; it’s hard not to as you watch the dismantling of pieces of society that were in place to keep us moving forward together with equity and what happens when society becomes so fractured that we can’t find each other again?