--- EnteredBy: Kevin Murray DateEntered: 2022-03-16 Comment: Publish: true --- >[!INFO]+ Meta >Author:: Jill Lepore >Reference:: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/nov/25/society-thatcher-reagan-covid-pandemic >Date:: 2022 >Tags:: #textiles >WeftLinks:: [[Social value of craft]] ### Summary The "social fabric" is commonly used to describe the degree of connectedness that holds together individuals in a society. While this does not have a direct link between craft practice and society, it demonstrates the importance of craft as a metaphor. Craft practice keeps this metaphor alive by reminding us of its material meaning. For example, a torn social fabric can be "darned" or "patched". > This year, while the world begins to remake itself, and as each of us, like so many hermit crabs crawling along the blinding sand, try to get our bearings, it may be that the future of society can be found in its past. Even before the pandemic, intellectuals and policymakers on both the left and the right had been raising alarms about the future of society, launching ==initiatives designed to pin, stitch and darn the world’s tattered “social fabric”==. In 2018, the American conservative columnist David Brooks founded [Weave: The Social Fabric Project](https://www.aspeninstitute.org/programs/weave-the-social-fabric-initiative/), advocating “a life for community rather than a life for self”. Last year, Onward, a conservative thinktank in the UK, founded [Repairing Our Social Fabric](https://www.ukonward.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/ONWJ8080-Community-report-200304-WEB.pdf), a programme aimed at offering “a comprehensive understanding of the state of community in Britain”. > Nor have these calls come only from conservatives. More in Common, a nonpartisan, multinational research organisation, undertakes projects designed, for instance, to “strengthen the parts of Germany’s social fabric that remain intact”. > Racial justice has lately been framed as a social fabric problem, too. “A functioning society rests on a web of mutuality, a willingness among all involved to share enough with one another to accomplish what no one person can do alone,” Heather McGhee writes in her 2021 book, *The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together*.