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development in opposition to the all-unifying and -subverting
progressives.
I will go so far as to say that the difference between the two —
conservative and anarchist — views of community boils down to two
questions. ‘The first is lack of compulsion. The anarchists think in terms
of voluntary forms of association. The conservatives remind us that the
ultimate form of coming together is people’s interdependence, i.e., the
need for cooperation; in circumstances not of their own choosing,
moreover, such as family, country of origin, mother tongue, etc. The
citizens of a free society do not wish to escape interdependence — which
would be impossible — but to find its tolerable form appropriate to human
dignity — together. (For they depend on each other even in the search.)
The other is the perception of the role of tradition. If the community is
organised on a purely voluntary basis, such as a grassroots movement,
a drama group or a city fire brigade, then the measure of agreement
indispensable for cooperation is already given. However, where the
composition of the group and the framework of the community are a
given, there agreement is a rarity, at least in the case of a modern
pluralist society. Hence why what we previously called the culture of
reasonable disagreement becomes an existential question. According to
the conservatives, this has a chance only if the participants possess
common cultural foundations: for instance, ideas about the acceptable
ways of handling problems, the purpose of institutions and the status
of the participants which others can rely on and respect. For conservative
thinkers, this approach often goes together with overvaluing tradition
or affording it unquestioning respect. This is however by no means
necessary. Ihe modern conservative approach prefers to emphasise
dialogue within the framework of tradition on the meaning of
tradition." A tradition is living, they claim, while it changes. It must
change, for its true meaning lies not in the preservation of the memory
of the past, but in passing down and renewing the knowledge a
community needs for recognising the potential of the future. In the
words of Alasdair MacIntyre, “...an adequate sense of tradition
manifests itself in a grasp of those future possibilities which the past
has made available to the present. Living traditions, just because they
continue a not-yet-completed narrative, confront a future whose
17 Alasdair MacIntyre, ibid.