The Ten Principles of the Orthodox Conservatives - 3. That Civil Society Is a Repository of Knowledge

The Third Principle of Conservatism, from the Orthodox Conservative website. 

From Orthodox Conservatives

3. That civil society is a repository of knowledge. (For none of us is capable of doing all we are able to do, nor knowing all that we know, on our own.

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.