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https://www.orthodoxconservatives.uk/socialconservatism
"There is no central text to conservatism, unlike The Communist Manifesto, The Rights of Man, Democracy in America, or On Liberty, except possibly Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, but even a cursory reading of this text will show that it is little more than ruminations on the political life, the ‘true’ foundations of social order, and those destructive forces that threaten to transform our societies into the “dust and powder of individualism”.
This lack of a central text is, for the large part, a boon; it frees conservatives in their particular expressions (a term that shall be explained in the series) from doctrine, and allows them to focus on the day-to-day activities of governing. But this leaves the intellectual conservative with a dilemma. This dilemma is simply, what do I believe in? For those of different philosophies, the answer is presented: if I am a liberal, I believe only in myself; if I am a socialist, I believe in equality; and if I am a postmodernist, I believe in nothing.
Any conservative will find that he instinctually believes in the settled way of things as they are. But in an age when this answer is “not enough”, he must have ballast to his arguments, a way of justifying these things beyond their mere factual existence. It is for this reason that conservative students who face this challenge almost daily in our interactions with other students, must articulate their arguments as best they can.
The purpose, therefore, of this document is not to propose the philosophy of conservatism, but a philosophy of conservatism, specifically our own. We will not suggest a political programme, nor a system of thought, but merely observe the principles of this philosophy in a manner akin to a structure of thought, within which you, if you consider yourself a conservative, can place yourself and understand your own philosophy. “The first task of conservatism… is to create a language in which “conservative” is no longer an insult”. It is our aim to do just that.
Michael Oakeshott once wrote that the conservative prefers present laughter to utopian bliss. It is a beautiful gift of mankind that we have the capacity to dream and imagine a better world; one of the first and most enduring imaginations that has captured the attention of all mankind was that of Heaven. But Heaven is a place where everything is perfect, and the imperfections of this earth are enough to know that Heaven is not of this world.
But why does this matter? Because the things we have, and have inherited, are precious and fragile, capable of being lost. They are not the products of design and artificial creation, but the slow, gradual and communal discoveries of the safest and most stables manners of ensuring good social continuity.
The knowledge needed to understand the origins of these things might have since been lost, but rather are distilled into addressing circumstances which these institutions were responding to.
It is forgivable to think that conservatism is overly-concerned - indeed, obsessed - with the past. The conservative often looks back with tears falling from behind rose-tinted glasses, thinking of all that is passing away. We say 'passing', and not 'passed', because the conservative can only love those things he encounters as real, and he cannot love that he does not experience which is confined to the past, for much the same reason the conservative is so skeptical of the dreams of absolute equality; they are not real. Already, and always, the present is passing away, and so the conservative will only ever live in misery and a sense of forlorn, if he obsesses over the past.
Conservatism, though, does not focus only on the past for what it has lost: he seeks to trace lineages and transcendent values that have been proven - not made - by the experiences of history. To this fact, the conservative responds by seeking to carry forth and transmit into the future those things revealed and proven by time, not mire in the present that is already ticking away.
It is the cultivation of values that must be the conservative's call to action: to defend institutions without justifying the foundations on which they are built is to cede the argument at the outset. For too long, the denial of the intellectual argument has been conservatism's undoing, and has played into the hands of conservatism's enemies - socialism, liberalism, and so on - to the extent that the debate has been decided and determined by the language of these enemies. How can the conservative make the case for duty and obligation in the face of the liberal's talk of rights? How can he justify the idea of service and defend the idea of deference when the socialist dreams of equality? From where comes the love of land and country when it does not figure in the calculations of the capitalist? Why would an atheist respect authority, when he denies its very source ?
Conservatism needs to make a positive argument for the values it wishes to preserve and carry forth. It will be necessary to identify these values, no doubt, but truth is not accepted when it is difficult, especially in the face of comfortable fantasies. The case must be made then, and made clearly and intelligibly. The conservative vision must be present without apology or acquiescence. It is time, again, to speak of responsibility, of good public life, of loyalty, of Britishness, of cultural - not just political - identity. It is time, above all, to speak of love for the real world.
1. That freedom is impossible without order.
When the conservative speaks of freedom, he does not mean that same thing as the liberal, who imagines freedom as non-interference, or in John Stuart Mill’s historic pronouncement, that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant”. Neither does the conservative imagine freedom to be non-domination, as is the dream of the republican (see On the People’s Terms, by Philip Pettit) – all society is built from hierarchy, and the reality of any legal system is that power lies in reserve, waiting until it might be authoritatively used.
So what, then, does the conservative truly mean by ‘freedom’? After all, no political philosophy that exists only in repudiation, in denying that which others talk of, will last long – especially if it cannot engage with the real world. This is the age-old problem of conservatism; it has spent so long fighting against ideas, it has forgotten the ground it stands on, and seems anti-intellectual in itself.
What the conservative means by freedom, is the freedom to become the best version of oneself. This idea involves multiple elements, but the first and most easily identifiable is that we have many desires naturally arising within us, that must be tempered and controlled in order to live in that civilisation JS Mill thought of as so important. We do not pretend here that biological drives – those most essential to survival – are bad, merely that there is such a thing as excess; and the received wisdom of centuries have proven that you can have “too much of a good thing”.
Those of us who surrender to every whim and desire that arises within us are not free, because we cannot escape the dictates of the most permanent thing in our lives – ourselves – and the ability to gain discipline over yourself is the most important cause of all, because it is only through internal discipline that you gain the capacity to follow rules and laws.
But not only is the constant satisfaction of each desire as it arises a poor display of discipline – it lends itself to an unsatisfied mind, seeking to satisfy every desire as it arises immediately, and becoming agitated in oneself from the inability to provide that satisfaction leads to the constant pursuit of excess, overloading oneself with stimuli until only the largest possible dose of pleasure registers. Once each desire is satisfied, another immediately arises, and that is satisfied immediately, after which follows another desire, and so on until you are caught in an endless cycle of self-satisfaction that does not allow for the cultivation of the good life. This agitation carries over into the social world, where satisfaction is not derived from the appreciation of others as they are, but for what they can do for you – or what they can satisfy in you.
Of course, this freedom from animalism is not the only ‘freedom’ necessary for good social order: so too is that freedom provided by the security of civilisation. We would not consider, for instance, a child dropped in the centre of the Sahara ‘free’, because he would have no parents to protect him, no walls to keep out the heat, no roof to block away the sun, and no infrastructure to provide him with the water and food he so desperately needs.
With this in mind, it is the firm belief of the conservative that, though they may seem antithetical, freedom cannot exist without a stable, peaceful and secure order underpinning it. It might seem that the order necessary for this freedom is one that impinges on liberty, but the truth is that we do not emerge into the world as complete and separate individuals but as children who need structure and guidance in order to show us how to achieve this freedom, and in that respect provides us with the self-discipline necessary in order to fully utilise the liberty we feel as a natural impulse. Without the self-discipline capable for pursuing this liberty, we risk falling into the inseparable twin of liberty, that of license; we are incapable of recognising those desires that will improve ourselves and our lives from those that will be damaging. If we are incapable of disciplining ourselves, we will call a foreign body in to discipline our lives for us – this is, inevitably, the State.
I recall here Edmund Burke: “I pride myself that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty”.
2. That Western civilisation is an achievement, but easily lost.
The West is the civilisation that has contributed most to the history and development of Mankind; some may be older (the Chinese), but the political settlements that have arisen in the context of the West – the nation-state; religious toleration; the rule of law; amongst others – have been the most conducive to the enrichment and advancement of human civilisation. But this civilisation is not natural, easy, or ancient; it is hard-won, and only recently found its clearest expressions, and must be defended.
The key institution of the West, of the nation-state, is explored further below (in principle five), but here our concern is principally with that web of loyalty we call the ‘rule of law’. The gradual development of the West has been one of reconciliation, first and foremost between the rulers and ruled who, in times past, were separated by the gulf of conquest, but through the mixing of cultures (and, often, blood) found points of agreement between themselves. This mixing was gentle, for the most part, but would often erupt into violence when that gulf became too much to bear. Take the Barons’ Rebellion of 1215, for instance, when King John was forced to recognise the ancient rights and liberties of the Barons and the church. The charter, originally drafted in the previous century, was dedicated to the liberty of ‘the realm’, because the Barons of the time knew (quite rightly) that while individual Barons would come and go, it was the land that was permanent, and the shared home of those who lived there. In this respect, the long tradition of law (that, as we say, only found its clearest expressions in the recent past) as binding all who lived under its aegis – including the rulers – reflected that reconciliation necessary for the foundation of good order; that all are equal before the law.
But the law is itself based on the reality of social life, which is that of a shared space in geographic terms – the land – and it was the gift of Western civilisation that slowly eroded the assumption of claim to the land on the grounds of blood. The violence of the previous century was the final repudiation of this idea – specifically that obsession with race of the National Socialist government in Germany – and instead sought to justify inclusion to a political order on the question of behaviour in legal terms.
That system of law that has grown through the development of the West has not only been one of reconciliation between rulers and ruled, but also through tradition and change. When the West was shaken so violently by the birth of the Industrial Revolution, it was the rule of law that mediated between the demands of society and the impulses of the industrialists. Granted, the violence and speed of the Revolution often led to a situation in which the law struggled to keep up – but this is testament to the challenging nature of the Revolution, not the foundations of the law. Good sense prevailed – sometimes too late – but the key method of that mediation (the law) was always there. The greatest change we face now is one of declining religiosity and increasing atheism and multi-faith societies; but the ancient recognition of the law in the West has been one of toleration and privatisation of faith, to the extent that (as Sir Roger Scruton remarked), “to us it is not just absurd but oppressive that there should be a law punishing adultery. We disapprove of adultery; but we also think that it is none of the law’s business to punish sin just because it is sin”. The sentiment, as we say, is not recent but ancient: John Locke’s Letter on Toleration summarised this most clearly:
“The care of souls is not committed to the civil magistrate, any more than to other men… nor can any such power be vested in the magistrate by the consent of the people, because no man can so far abandon the care of his own salvation as blindly to leave it to the choice of any other… to prescribe to him what faith or worship he shall embrace”.
But this is not to say that toleration cannot go too far. It was Karl Popper’s great paradox to ask how we tolerate the intolerant, but the conservative ought not to think of the government as an impartial mediator in this debate. Instead, the government (whilst respecting religious freedom) should make it clear that the practice of modern secularism has only been possible with a harsh submission of religious identity to the primacy of law and the nation. Any religion that sees no distinction between religious identity and the law – as shari’ah Islam does, for instance – will struggle to accommodate itself to the West. We say this with awareness that shari’ah is not the mainstream religion of any Arab states bar the odd exception (Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia, for instance), but the conservative is not the only mind aware of this problem. The fantastic series of essays, Minorities Within Minorities, edited by Avigail Eisenberg, is the clear expression of liberalism’s wrestle with this problem.
The undercurrent of this is the way of life we know in the West is the product of gradual, long and experimental reconciliation, but this reconciliation can be damaged if there is no shared ground on which we stand, or overriding order to which we are committed.
3. That civil society is a repository of knowledge.
Margaret Thatcher once (in)famously declared that there is “no such thing as society”. It earned her the enmity of the Left permanently, whose very philosophy is built around the primacy of society and the subjection of the individual to its will. The forgotten second half of the declaration, however, is telling; “there are only individuals, and their families”. What Thatcher maybe misunderstood of her own philosophy, was that there is no monolithic society; instead, ‘society’ is merely a collection of associations and traditional communities, overlapping constantly with one another, brought and held together under the banner of government and politics, national identity, and (perhaps) some quirk of geographic boundary. Indeed, the Conservative Party’s 2010 Manifesto stated, as some leading members of the Party had in the 2000’s, “there is such a thing as society, it is just different from the state”. An observer would be forgiven for being confused here; “so what do conservatives think about society?” The answer, if there is one, is varied and complex (as usual – nothing is ever easy).
The first thing we think needs addressing is the concept of Knowledge. Kieron O’Hara predicated his defence of conservatism on the twin principles of Knowledge and Change, both pertinent to conservatism’s continued relevance and revivals, and distinctly connected. The issue of change is always a difficult one; the assumption that conservatism is the “desire to conserve” is misguided in that it ignores one of Burke’s most fundamental observations, that “a society without the means of change is without the means of conservatism”. Hogg makes this point more lucid in his claim that “if conservatism meant ‘no change’, then the only truly conservative organism would be a dead one”. Here is revealed the distinctly organic view of society that conservatives take; that it changes of its own accord, it is a living thing, and must be respected as such.
All human experience generates knowledge, but no individual is capable of experiencing everything, so no individual is capable of knowing everything on their own. As a result, it is impossible for you to know if something is dangerous to you until you have tried it – part of the wonderful playfulness of children is the curiosity that spurs them on. But trying something once can be so dangerous that there might be coming back from it; the reason we do not allow children to play in the road is because they do not understand its dangers. Unfortunately, this is often how we learn – from the mistakes of others.
This is where the truth of civil society shows itself: we learn from the shared knowledge of those around us. At times this might be direct experience , but for the most part it is from the knowledge that is passed down through generations until such a time when the threat of danger has seemingly disappeared – but only because we have taken that knowledge seriously. Chaos always lurks just beyond the boundaries of the known, sometimes with a comforting face, and (as we show in principle six) it is better to stay within the boundaries of received knowledge than to abandon it entirely.
This is not to say we cannot challenge this knowledge – after all, we are beings with free will that very often refuse to listen to received wisdom, because it is the natural curiosity of life to dream and wonder. It is this experimentation of the individual that allows society to persist in its safety. And this deep well-spring of knowledge is not only the guiding light of safety and action to the individual, but the source of continued and persistent identity for society at-large. The shared history and experiences that stretch across generations provide a continual lineage of identity that flows through the residual symbols of culture that others have loved and have found value in.
So why is Knowledge relevant? Put simply, the knowledge of how society could change and alter can only be found in society itself. In other words, even if it were a good idea to do so, government cannot possible know how to direct society towards a final goal, because the knowledge required to do so is so dispersed and unintelligible that it cannot never be held, all at once, by one institution. Similarly, as society is the primary repository of knowledge, it is also the primary producer of identity. Where postmodernists seek to tear down the categorical boundaries of social identity to strip us back to the bare bones of our animal state – and thus remake us into novo sapiens that can live in the utopias of tomorrow – conservatives are enamoured with those social identities that have been produced and fostered over time, and which shape us indefinitely. The significance of institutions – from families to schools, from friendship groups to sports teams – in shaping our behaviour, and by extension our identities, cannot be overstated. But it is this shared identity that provides society with the unique means by which we can bridge the gap between individual identities and see ourselves as members of the “first-person plural – the ‘we’”, and so we must cherish these identities as providing us with a sense of belonging with one another.
Society is a fragile organism, and it must be respected as one; protected from harm, but given the room and freedom to develop as it so organically wishes.
4. That the family is the initial foundation of all society.
We emerge into this world (for the most part) as members of a family – even if we are the first-born child, by definition we are creating the family into which we emerge; we would find it strange, for instance, to call a couple without children a family in itself. The family is, with the State, the only association that is not essentially optional; indeed, it precedes that very entity that the State is built on, which is society itself, and has existed for time immemorial.
Families are, by virtue of their necessity, the key institution through which an individual learns of who he is and his place in this world, relying on the beneficent love and stewardship of his parents for his very existence, both in the first instance through birth, and every moment after that until he is mature enough to exercise his own autonomy and independence. To this end, parents are bound by a duty of obligation to protect their child from the dangers he has no knowledge of, and provide the stable and safe environment for the cultivation of his identity necessary for the exercise of liberty (as in principle one).
Through this sacrificial tie, and unconditional love, the individual learns the importance of deference to authority; by recognising that parents know more (even if they do not always know what is best), the child learns that all authority that precedes him is built on a vast foundation of experience and knowledge (as in principle three) that, rather than binding him and ‘destroying’ his liberty, is a deep well from which to draw in the pursuit of that liberty. Legitimate authority exists, not to control us, but to keep us safe.
When the conservative defends the family, he does not defend the family in a particular form, such as the ‘nuclear family’; though there is research that shows the nuclear family has existed as far back as the 13th century, due largely to the fact that English couples married much later than their continental counterparts, by which time they were expected to find a new home and start their family proper, society changes and shifts, and to try to prevent or reverse changes that organically occur would be to capitulate to the social engineering impulse of socialism that conservatives so stridently reject.
The conservative, then, defends family, not in any prescribed format, but as a truth of learning those boundaries so important for the recognition of liberty (as in principle one), educating us on the significance of deference to authority, and what obligation to each other and ourselves means in its real terms. To this end, family is a place of stability, and love, and its particular substance is not important to the overall form it takes in the provision of this key element.
"There is no central text to conservatism, unlike The Communist Manifesto, The Rights of Man, Democracy in America, or On Liberty, except possibly Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, but even a cursory reading of this text will show that it is little more than ruminations on the political life, the ‘true’ foundations of social order, and those destructive forces that threaten to transform our societies into the “dust and powder of individualism”.
This lack of a central text is, for the large part, a boon; it frees conservatives in their particular expressions (a term that shall be explained in the series) from doctrine, and allows them to focus on the day-to-day activities of governing. But this leaves the intellectual conservative with a dilemma. This dilemma is simply, what do I believe in? For those of different philosophies, the answer is presented: if I am a liberal, I believe only in myself; if I am a socialist, I believe in equality; and if I am a postmodernist, I believe in nothing.
Any conservative will find that he instinctually believes in the settled way of things as they are. But in an age when this answer is “not enough”, he must have ballast to his arguments, a way of justifying these things beyond their mere factual existence. It is for this reason that conservative students who face this challenge almost daily in our interactions with other students, must articulate their arguments as best they can.
The purpose, therefore, of this document is not to propose the philosophy of conservatism, but a philosophy of conservatism, specifically our own. We will not suggest a political programme, nor a system of thought, but merely observe the principles of this philosophy in a manner akin to a structure of thought, within which you, if you consider yourself a conservative, can place yourself and understand your own philosophy. “The first task of conservatism… is to create a language in which “conservative” is no longer an insult”. It is our aim to do just that.
Michael Oakeshott once wrote that the conservative prefers present laughter to utopian bliss. It is a beautiful gift of mankind that we have the capacity to dream and imagine a better world; one of the first and most enduring imaginations that has captured the attention of all mankind was that of Heaven. But Heaven is a place where everything is perfect, and the imperfections of this earth are enough to know that Heaven is not of this world.
But why does this matter? Because the things we have, and have inherited, are precious and fragile, capable of being lost. They are not the products of design and artificial creation, but the slow, gradual and communal discoveries of the safest and most stables manners of ensuring good social continuity.
The knowledge needed to understand the origins of these things might have since been lost, but rather are distilled into addressing circumstances which these institutions were responding to.
It is forgivable to think that conservatism is overly-concerned - indeed, obsessed - with the past. The conservative often looks back with tears falling from behind rose-tinted glasses, thinking of all that is passing away. We say 'passing', and not 'passed', because the conservative can only love those things he encounters as real, and he cannot love that he does not experience which is confined to the past, for much the same reason the conservative is so skeptical of the dreams of absolute equality; they are not real. Already, and always, the present is passing away, and so the conservative will only ever live in misery and a sense of forlorn, if he obsesses over the past.
Conservatism, though, does not focus only on the past for what it has lost: he seeks to trace lineages and transcendent values that have been proven - not made - by the experiences of history. To this fact, the conservative responds by seeking to carry forth and transmit into the future those things revealed and proven by time, not mire in the present that is already ticking away.
It is the cultivation of values that must be the conservative's call to action: to defend institutions without justifying the foundations on which they are built is to cede the argument at the outset. For too long, the denial of the intellectual argument has been conservatism's undoing, and has played into the hands of conservatism's enemies - socialism, liberalism, and so on - to the extent that the debate has been decided and determined by the language of these enemies. How can the conservative make the case for duty and obligation in the face of the liberal's talk of rights? How can he justify the idea of service and defend the idea of deference when the socialist dreams of equality? From where comes the love of land and country when it does not figure in the calculations of the capitalist? Why would an atheist respect authority, when he denies its very source ?
Conservatism needs to make a positive argument for the values it wishes to preserve and carry forth. It will be necessary to identify these values, no doubt, but truth is not accepted when it is difficult, especially in the face of comfortable fantasies. The case must be made then, and made clearly and intelligibly. The conservative vision must be present without apology or acquiescence. It is time, again, to speak of responsibility, of good public life, of loyalty, of Britishness, of cultural - not just political - identity. It is time, above all, to speak of love for the real world.
1. That freedom is impossible without order.
When the conservative speaks of freedom, he does not mean that same thing as the liberal, who imagines freedom as non-interference, or in John Stuart Mill’s historic pronouncement, that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant”. Neither does the conservative imagine freedom to be non-domination, as is the dream of the republican (see On the People’s Terms, by Philip Pettit) – all society is built from hierarchy, and the reality of any legal system is that power lies in reserve, waiting until it might be authoritatively used.
So what, then, does the conservative truly mean by ‘freedom’? After all, no political philosophy that exists only in repudiation, in denying that which others talk of, will last long – especially if it cannot engage with the real world. This is the age-old problem of conservatism; it has spent so long fighting against ideas, it has forgotten the ground it stands on, and seems anti-intellectual in itself.
What the conservative means by freedom, is the freedom to become the best version of oneself. This idea involves multiple elements, but the first and most easily identifiable is that we have many desires naturally arising within us, that must be tempered and controlled in order to live in that civilisation JS Mill thought of as so important. We do not pretend here that biological drives – those most essential to survival – are bad, merely that there is such a thing as excess; and the received wisdom of centuries have proven that you can have “too much of a good thing”.
Those of us who surrender to every whim and desire that arises within us are not free, because we cannot escape the dictates of the most permanent thing in our lives – ourselves – and the ability to gain discipline over yourself is the most important cause of all, because it is only through internal discipline that you gain the capacity to follow rules and laws.
But not only is the constant satisfaction of each desire as it arises a poor display of discipline – it lends itself to an unsatisfied mind, seeking to satisfy every desire as it arises immediately, and becoming agitated in oneself from the inability to provide that satisfaction leads to the constant pursuit of excess, overloading oneself with stimuli until only the largest possible dose of pleasure registers. Once each desire is satisfied, another immediately arises, and that is satisfied immediately, after which follows another desire, and so on until you are caught in an endless cycle of self-satisfaction that does not allow for the cultivation of the good life. This agitation carries over into the social world, where satisfaction is not derived from the appreciation of others as they are, but for what they can do for you – or what they can satisfy in you.
Of course, this freedom from animalism is not the only ‘freedom’ necessary for good social order: so too is that freedom provided by the security of civilisation. We would not consider, for instance, a child dropped in the centre of the Sahara ‘free’, because he would have no parents to protect him, no walls to keep out the heat, no roof to block away the sun, and no infrastructure to provide him with the water and food he so desperately needs.
With this in mind, it is the firm belief of the conservative that, though they may seem antithetical, freedom cannot exist without a stable, peaceful and secure order underpinning it. It might seem that the order necessary for this freedom is one that impinges on liberty, but the truth is that we do not emerge into the world as complete and separate individuals but as children who need structure and guidance in order to show us how to achieve this freedom, and in that respect provides us with the self-discipline necessary in order to fully utilise the liberty we feel as a natural impulse. Without the self-discipline capable for pursuing this liberty, we risk falling into the inseparable twin of liberty, that of license; we are incapable of recognising those desires that will improve ourselves and our lives from those that will be damaging. If we are incapable of disciplining ourselves, we will call a foreign body in to discipline our lives for us – this is, inevitably, the State.
I recall here Edmund Burke: “I pride myself that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty”.
2. That Western civilisation is an achievement, but easily lost.
The West is the civilisation that has contributed most to the history and development of Mankind; some may be older (the Chinese), but the political settlements that have arisen in the context of the West – the nation-state; religious toleration; the rule of law; amongst others – have been the most conducive to the enrichment and advancement of human civilisation. But this civilisation is not natural, easy, or ancient; it is hard-won, and only recently found its clearest expressions, and must be defended.
The key institution of the West, of the nation-state, is explored further below (in principle five), but here our concern is principally with that web of loyalty we call the ‘rule of law’. The gradual development of the West has been one of reconciliation, first and foremost between the rulers and ruled who, in times past, were separated by the gulf of conquest, but through the mixing of cultures (and, often, blood) found points of agreement between themselves. This mixing was gentle, for the most part, but would often erupt into violence when that gulf became too much to bear. Take the Barons’ Rebellion of 1215, for instance, when King John was forced to recognise the ancient rights and liberties of the Barons and the church. The charter, originally drafted in the previous century, was dedicated to the liberty of ‘the realm’, because the Barons of the time knew (quite rightly) that while individual Barons would come and go, it was the land that was permanent, and the shared home of those who lived there. In this respect, the long tradition of law (that, as we say, only found its clearest expressions in the recent past) as binding all who lived under its aegis – including the rulers – reflected that reconciliation necessary for the foundation of good order; that all are equal before the law.
But the law is itself based on the reality of social life, which is that of a shared space in geographic terms – the land – and it was the gift of Western civilisation that slowly eroded the assumption of claim to the land on the grounds of blood. The violence of the previous century was the final repudiation of this idea – specifically that obsession with race of the National Socialist government in Germany – and instead sought to justify inclusion to a political order on the question of behaviour in legal terms.
That system of law that has grown through the development of the West has not only been one of reconciliation between rulers and ruled, but also through tradition and change. When the West was shaken so violently by the birth of the Industrial Revolution, it was the rule of law that mediated between the demands of society and the impulses of the industrialists. Granted, the violence and speed of the Revolution often led to a situation in which the law struggled to keep up – but this is testament to the challenging nature of the Revolution, not the foundations of the law. Good sense prevailed – sometimes too late – but the key method of that mediation (the law) was always there. The greatest change we face now is one of declining religiosity and increasing atheism and multi-faith societies; but the ancient recognition of the law in the West has been one of toleration and privatisation of faith, to the extent that (as Sir Roger Scruton remarked), “to us it is not just absurd but oppressive that there should be a law punishing adultery. We disapprove of adultery; but we also think that it is none of the law’s business to punish sin just because it is sin”. The sentiment, as we say, is not recent but ancient: John Locke’s Letter on Toleration summarised this most clearly:
“The care of souls is not committed to the civil magistrate, any more than to other men… nor can any such power be vested in the magistrate by the consent of the people, because no man can so far abandon the care of his own salvation as blindly to leave it to the choice of any other… to prescribe to him what faith or worship he shall embrace”.
But this is not to say that toleration cannot go too far. It was Karl Popper’s great paradox to ask how we tolerate the intolerant, but the conservative ought not to think of the government as an impartial mediator in this debate. Instead, the government (whilst respecting religious freedom) should make it clear that the practice of modern secularism has only been possible with a harsh submission of religious identity to the primacy of law and the nation. Any religion that sees no distinction between religious identity and the law – as shari’ah Islam does, for instance – will struggle to accommodate itself to the West. We say this with awareness that shari’ah is not the mainstream religion of any Arab states bar the odd exception (Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia, for instance), but the conservative is not the only mind aware of this problem. The fantastic series of essays, Minorities Within Minorities, edited by Avigail Eisenberg, is the clear expression of liberalism’s wrestle with this problem.
The undercurrent of this is the way of life we know in the West is the product of gradual, long and experimental reconciliation, but this reconciliation can be damaged if there is no shared ground on which we stand, or overriding order to which we are committed.
3. That civil society is a repository of knowledge.
Margaret Thatcher once (in)famously declared that there is “no such thing as society”. It earned her the enmity of the Left permanently, whose very philosophy is built around the primacy of society and the subjection of the individual to its will. The forgotten second half of the declaration, however, is telling; “there are only individuals, and their families”. What Thatcher maybe misunderstood of her own philosophy, was that there is no monolithic society; instead, ‘society’ is merely a collection of associations and traditional communities, overlapping constantly with one another, brought and held together under the banner of government and politics, national identity, and (perhaps) some quirk of geographic boundary. Indeed, the Conservative Party’s 2010 Manifesto stated, as some leading members of the Party had in the 2000’s, “there is such a thing as society, it is just different from the state”. An observer would be forgiven for being confused here; “so what do conservatives think about society?” The answer, if there is one, is varied and complex (as usual – nothing is ever easy).
The first thing we think needs addressing is the concept of Knowledge. Kieron O’Hara predicated his defence of conservatism on the twin principles of Knowledge and Change, both pertinent to conservatism’s continued relevance and revivals, and distinctly connected. The issue of change is always a difficult one; the assumption that conservatism is the “desire to conserve” is misguided in that it ignores one of Burke’s most fundamental observations, that “a society without the means of change is without the means of conservatism”. Hogg makes this point more lucid in his claim that “if conservatism meant ‘no change’, then the only truly conservative organism would be a dead one”. Here is revealed the distinctly organic view of society that conservatives take; that it changes of its own accord, it is a living thing, and must be respected as such.
All human experience generates knowledge, but no individual is capable of experiencing everything, so no individual is capable of knowing everything on their own. As a result, it is impossible for you to know if something is dangerous to you until you have tried it – part of the wonderful playfulness of children is the curiosity that spurs them on. But trying something once can be so dangerous that there might be coming back from it; the reason we do not allow children to play in the road is because they do not understand its dangers. Unfortunately, this is often how we learn – from the mistakes of others.
This is where the truth of civil society shows itself: we learn from the shared knowledge of those around us. At times this might be direct experience , but for the most part it is from the knowledge that is passed down through generations until such a time when the threat of danger has seemingly disappeared – but only because we have taken that knowledge seriously. Chaos always lurks just beyond the boundaries of the known, sometimes with a comforting face, and (as we show in principle six) it is better to stay within the boundaries of received knowledge than to abandon it entirely.
This is not to say we cannot challenge this knowledge – after all, we are beings with free will that very often refuse to listen to received wisdom, because it is the natural curiosity of life to dream and wonder. It is this experimentation of the individual that allows society to persist in its safety. And this deep well-spring of knowledge is not only the guiding light of safety and action to the individual, but the source of continued and persistent identity for society at-large. The shared history and experiences that stretch across generations provide a continual lineage of identity that flows through the residual symbols of culture that others have loved and have found value in.
So why is Knowledge relevant? Put simply, the knowledge of how society could change and alter can only be found in society itself. In other words, even if it were a good idea to do so, government cannot possible know how to direct society towards a final goal, because the knowledge required to do so is so dispersed and unintelligible that it cannot never be held, all at once, by one institution. Similarly, as society is the primary repository of knowledge, it is also the primary producer of identity. Where postmodernists seek to tear down the categorical boundaries of social identity to strip us back to the bare bones of our animal state – and thus remake us into novo sapiens that can live in the utopias of tomorrow – conservatives are enamoured with those social identities that have been produced and fostered over time, and which shape us indefinitely. The significance of institutions – from families to schools, from friendship groups to sports teams – in shaping our behaviour, and by extension our identities, cannot be overstated. But it is this shared identity that provides society with the unique means by which we can bridge the gap between individual identities and see ourselves as members of the “first-person plural – the ‘we’”, and so we must cherish these identities as providing us with a sense of belonging with one another.
Society is a fragile organism, and it must be respected as one; protected from harm, but given the room and freedom to develop as it so organically wishes.
4. That the family is the initial foundation of all society.
We emerge into this world (for the most part) as members of a family – even if we are the first-born child, by definition we are creating the family into which we emerge; we would find it strange, for instance, to call a couple without children a family in itself. The family is, with the State, the only association that is not essentially optional; indeed, it precedes that very entity that the State is built on, which is society itself, and has existed for time immemorial.
Families are, by virtue of their necessity, the key institution through which an individual learns of who he is and his place in this world, relying on the beneficent love and stewardship of his parents for his very existence, both in the first instance through birth, and every moment after that until he is mature enough to exercise his own autonomy and independence. To this end, parents are bound by a duty of obligation to protect their child from the dangers he has no knowledge of, and provide the stable and safe environment for the cultivation of his identity necessary for the exercise of liberty (as in principle one).
Through this sacrificial tie, and unconditional love, the individual learns the importance of deference to authority; by recognising that parents know more (even if they do not always know what is best), the child learns that all authority that precedes him is built on a vast foundation of experience and knowledge (as in principle three) that, rather than binding him and ‘destroying’ his liberty, is a deep well from which to draw in the pursuit of that liberty. Legitimate authority exists, not to control us, but to keep us safe.
When the conservative defends the family, he does not defend the family in a particular form, such as the ‘nuclear family’; though there is research that shows the nuclear family has existed as far back as the 13th century, due largely to the fact that English couples married much later than their continental counterparts, by which time they were expected to find a new home and start their family proper, society changes and shifts, and to try to prevent or reverse changes that organically occur would be to capitulate to the social engineering impulse of socialism that conservatives so stridently reject.
The conservative, then, defends family, not in any prescribed format, but as a truth of learning those boundaries so important for the recognition of liberty (as in principle one), educating us on the significance of deference to authority, and what obligation to each other and ourselves means in its real terms. To this end, family is a place of stability, and love, and its particular substance is not important to the overall form it takes in the provision of this key element.
Dernière édition par Johnathan R. Razorback le Sam 29 Aoû - 8:58, édité 1 fois
