The lyrics from an Everything But The Girl song sprang to mind: Why does England call… when soon there’ll be nothing left at all?

Written during the height of Thatcherism in the 1980s it mourned, like many songs of that era, the passing of a certain kind of England. An England of strikes and industrial atrophy yes, but also a more collective England, a more socialist England if you like, where politicians on left and right believed in a kind of communal consensus. Things may have been more sluggish and relatively expensive, but there was a homogeneity that seems but a memory 20 years after that song was penned.

It was not, I think, what Margaret Thatcher intended. Despite her famous exclamation that there is no such thing [as society]! There are only individual men and women… she presumably expected her reforms to bring out the best of our culture – one of self-sufficiency, enterprise and sobriety. But the “blowback” of liberalization also resulted in a kind of cultural fragmentation… her victory, coinciding as it did with the end of the Cold War, was so comprehensive that the punch-drunk Left concluded individualism was the only way. After all, hadn’t their core working class vote deserted en masse for the party that let them buy their state-owned homes?

So when they came to government, New Labour bought in lock, stock and barrel to the Tories “choice” agenda, heedless to the warning of another Eighties band, the Blow Monkey’s, who’s lead singer Dr Robert memorably crooned: It’s your choice: there’s no choice at all…

In policy terms then, on Left and Right, we are all Thatcher’s children, politicians competing to offer us more “choice”. It is hard to understate how it has reshaped the dialectic: who would have imagined 30 years ago, for example, feminists ardently arguing in favour of a woman’s “choice” to adopt the full-face veil? Yet this is increasingly the default position, the concept of “false consciousness”, it seems, having been consigned to the dustbin of history along with much else. Choice trumps all.

Consciousness is shaped by environment. We remain collective creatures – pack animals – even in a culture of individuality. It is the context within which we perceive not just the world, but ourselves. As Laurens van der Post pointed out: We live not only our own lives, but, whether we know it or not, also the life of our time.

Decades of legislation, economic policy and cultural drift have promoted “me” over “you”.

Thirty years after Thatcher came to power, England’s only agreed commonality appears to be consumption, with citizens increasingly reduced to the status of “consumers”.

Indeed, the very concept of a wider community itself has fast become not a source of consolation but actual fear: how many youngsters are now allowed to walk to school alone as they did in my day? Yet little has actually changed, save perception.

It is therefore no coincidence that Britons are emigrating at record levels and a recent UN report identified the UK as the “worst place in the West” to be a child.

America of course shares similarities with the UK, not least in its Anglo Saxon heritage. But England is not America – from its outset, US individualism was married to community, embodied in church attendance rates of 50 per cent, compared to less than five in Britain.

England was traditionally a “tribal” society with no abiding ideology as in France or the US, but customs and practices that evolved uninterrupted over hundreds of years. The consensus politicians who preceded Thatcher represented a continuity that stretched back at least 50 years, maybe more.

The sense of displacement in England is therefore palpable, and cannot be salved by consumer durables or even necessarily “self-fulfillment” because disconnection from society, I believe, results in disconnection from spirit.

Many of us can feel lonely, cut off, afraid, not only because of an individualist culture, but because our own consciousness is shaped by that culture – we believe that this is just how the world is when in fact a Buddhist, Hindu or Muslim might have a very different perspective.

Connectivity is in fact our context, community its embodiment. We might sometimes be frustrated by the compromises it entails, but it is who we are, our totality. The individual is not our sum of being. Society makes us whole. I suspect even Margaret Hilda Thatcher, frail and subdued at her few recent public appearances, may have come to realize this by now.

Reading Robert Hellenga's novel Fall of a Sparrow about the effect of the Bologna Railway Bombing on an American family, I was impressed by the observation of his central character, a classics tutor, that history "began" when Aeneas, the mythical refugee of the Trojan War, arrived on Italian shores to establish Rome. I think the spirit of this observation was spot on: to the Greeks life was cyclical, psychological, mythical. Humanity was essentially subject to the whims of capricious Gods, and always would be.

Although the Romans too made obsequies to the Gods, there was no doubt about who was in charge. Everything came second to the will of Rome. The world would be shaped according to their vision, whatever the Gods might say. Hence Hellenga’s (character’s) observation that the modern era began with them.

I can't mention Aeneas without referring to my favourite opera (and not only because it is blessedly short) Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, which features the doomed love affair of our Trojan hero and the Queen of Carthage.

In the final stanza, as well as featuring some of the most beautiful music ever composed, there is the following exchange between the departing Aeneas and the Queen:

     [Cupids appear in the clouds o're her tomb]

     When I am laid in earth, May my wrongs create

                 Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.

Great minds against themselves conspire, and shun the cure they most desire: Aeneas, brutal youth, presses on to Italy and the city he will build, leaving love behind.

But as I grow older the emotional sum of my life seems to count for more than my supposed accomplishments. When we are dust so too are our deeds, to us. Love, in its many guises, feels more important in the here and now.

We might fancy ourselves the builders of our lives but despite our grand designs we are only ever tenants.

While others may remember us, even benefit from our legacy, as individuals we leave life with nothing except our experience. In the end emotions are all we own.

This the Greeks understood, embodying our merry-go-round lives in their myths, which remain alive in modern drama and psychology.

The ancient world is our world, and we travel through it even if we’re not on the deck of a Mediterranean cruise liner.