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133 | Tue PuicosoPuy or Eco-Pozrrics 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.
