Poppy Coburn: What is the point of community?

To promote the common good, obligation must be truly reciprocal

Do we have obligations to the people around us? You’d be hard pressed today to find someone who would disagree with this. Community, reduced to its fundamentals, is a network of reciprocal obligation. The nation, after-all, is a community writ large. We have claims on each other that go beyond the purely contractual. Non-elective bonds have frayed, while elective ones face constant attack.

The American philosopher James Burnham criticised liberalism as being an ethic too distant to engender real commitment, not offering compelling “motives for personal suffering, sacrifice and death… liberalism proposes a set of pale and bloodless abstractions - pale and bloodless for the very reason that they have no roots in the past, in deep feeling and suffering”. Can the same be said about conservatism today? 

Liberal thinkers of the 20th century, most notably John Rawls, embraced the notion that society’s role is to provide fair and equitable conditions in which individuals can freely create their own meaning, as long as this meaning is not in breach of the livery of others. This is in opposition to the idea of a common good - impossible in an age of pluralism - busying itself instead with identifying the bonds of obligation. 

In public life, social contract theory is everywhere. The pursuit of atomised happiness, free from nagging obligation or communitarian constraint, is accepted as a foundational intuition. But it is difficult to argue that this philosophy, open to critique though it is, is truly the one experienced in modern Britain. 

We may be personally atomised, and personally follow the moral doctrine of self-actualisation, but we do not live under such constraints politically. This is the worst of both worlds: obligation without acceptance, constraint without tradition. The threads of continuity have snapped. You cannot revive a set of traditions that you need a history degree even to know existed. 

Do we want to live in a society that will impose its values upon us and dictate how we live our lives? Is the creation of such a society even still possible? I cannot objectively answer the first question, but I can the second. We are living under such a society, after all. 

There is a distinguishing point between legalistic human rights-driven statism and virtue-driven communitarianism, with the latter drawing on a rich tradition of thought tracing back to Aristotle and the former best encapsulated by Charles Taylor and John Macmurray, united in the elevation of the ordinary life over the conception of the ‘good’. 

To follow the famous phrase of Anthony Giddens, there are ‘no rights without responsibilities’. But what rights are afforded to us, and how are responsibilities imposed?

This simplistic framework is not reflective of legislation. Cast your mind back to the summer of 2020, where Britain languished under lockdowns. Following the death of George Floyd, a series of riots erupted throughout the country, culminating in a huge Black Lives Matter demonstration in London and the defiling of the Cenotaph. 

One has the justification for breaking the national social contract for the narrower community-based one. This is not necessarily an issue - many, if not most, would put family above all else - but becomes problematic when we examine how these conflicting responsibilities have been formed. The state has a responsibility to promote ethnic harmony, formalised through legislation - beginning with the 1976 Race Relations Act and reaffirmed by the 2010 Equality Act. 

Now is not the time to apportion responsibility for this social reconstruction. Contemporary conservatism is too often an exercise in blame-placing, conjuring an image of destitute former inhabitants of a stately home burnt to ashes years prior, bickering over whose responsibility it was to grab the fire extinguisher. In truth, all modern political ideas are unmoored from their historical setting. 

The state and citizens have failed in their reciprocal obligations. Much is made of the disengagement of the individual from the obligation of nationhood, as traditionally understood. We have the slowest rate of return to post-pandemic work in Europe, driven predominantly by the explosion in mental-health related PIP claimants. This extraordinarily high rate of economic inactivity doesn’t show any signs of easing in the near future. 

Poll after poll shows that most Britons would not fight in service to their country. Even the monarchy, limping along in the very degenerated state designed to engender popular warmth, hardly registers interest among the young. It is little surprise that the Conservative Party, as a shieldbearer for a cultural memory of long since distorted, hardly warrants a glance from my generation. 

Yes, people want real, face-to-face community - but they don’t want the new bonds created by material necessity destroyed in the process. The internet, a place that can still facilitate voluntary association of like-minded individuals faces immense regulatory scrutiny. This scrutiny is justified in communitarian terms, invoking the language of harm and division. 

The Blairite revolution reckoned with the tradeoffs inherent with the multicultural participatory society in which they hoped to build. Free association was restricted under the 2010 equality act, free speech under the 2003 communications act. The slogans ‘solidarity’, ‘community development’ and ‘empowerment’ dissolving the already atomised state-citizen dichotomy into a more ominous struggle for consumption goods and state sinectures. 

British governance has a decidedly authoritarian bent, remarkable even by the standards of europe. I speak often with American conservatives, many of whom rail publicly against the consequences of ‘the permissive society’ and seem incessantly to demand more restrictions placed upon human behaviour for the good of the whole. And yet, when I speak of the circumstances of Britain, they appear genuinely shocked. 

I can think of no better example of this paradox than in our immigration ‘debate’. Take eminent professor Tim Bale who, with seeming sincerity, labelled our ruling government as “Enoch Powell’s party”, even as internal data predicts that our rate of inward migration will exceed a million in a year. 

I don’t mean to call into question the intentions of those who smear Home Secretary Suella Braverman and her fellow travellers as being far-right demagogues. It appears that they genuinely believe it to be true. To borrow a term from my generation, this is ‘gaslighting’ on a governmental scale. What little legitimacy and goodwill remained has been squandered - all in service of nothing. 

Is there any surprise that we’ve become so polarised? The state refuses to fulfil its obligations to the citizenry. As a consequence, we turn to the more tangible bonds of our political and social allies. How can one have a concept of the nation when the rulers of said nation can hardly define what it is, what it stands for? It is no surprise, then, that identity politics becomes so intoxicating. The language of grievance is at least an explicit communication of dissatisfaction. 

So we come to a crossroads. We feel an instinctive love for the established order of things, by virtue of our creed, but find ourselves pushed by circumstance into a reactionary position. We, as conservatives, will also seek to add some constraints onto public life, where they may be justified. But attempting this process without acknowledging and, wherever possible, rolling back the over-reach of previous political movements is folly. 

Look to the state response to the Covid-19 pandemic, with the weaponising of state capacity to fulfil Common Good paradigms. In practice, this meant locking down the young under the banner of protecting the vulnerable in communities, raising taxes on these same economically productive centres, and the massive infusion of taxpayer money into propping up cultural institutions through the furlough scheme.

Figures like Miriam Cates and Danny Kruger have succeeded in presenting a clear set of principles. But we face a brutal battle to bring on board the majority. If we do not fix the problem of stakeholderism at the root, ruthless individualism is the rational response. We cannot allow our political vision to be reduced to the banal and personally intrusive. Offering social conservatism as a doctrine of pure restriction will condemn it to failure.