7 June

Everyday social life is like weather, it can change from hour to hour, and politics follows short cycles too. So most of what we experience in daily life is these short-term patterns and cycles, changes in fashion, the daily news cycle, etc. But I think society also has a geology, it has deep tectonic plates that change much more slowly, and which, like an earthquake, explode if life at the surface isn't releasing forces. Those tectonic plates are institutions, set up to cross over multiple generations. Like marriage, the law, government itself, language etc. We're so focused on the present that we always forget that most of society was built by people long dead, whose experience and hard work and wisdom continues in institutions. The appearance of crisis in most societies at the moment is our institutions not being updated to match our current lives. Society is cracking, and we're looking at the surface to try to fix it, rather than at tectonic institutional plates. Put another way, society is about time as well as space, it continues across generations. The people is those who have died, as well as those still alive.