Riots And Civil Society

The next step, she writes, is usually: “The government has to do something. We must start a program, create an agency to address juvenile delinquency.” Only that seems to be a joke these days. After all, the youth of London have been programmed, agencied, and social worked to death in the last half century. And still we get riots?

The conservative answer to the failure of the authoritarian welfare state with its programs, its agencies, and its social science experts is “civil society.” That notion goes back to Edmund Burke and his “little platoons.” Berger and Neuhaus addressed it in To Empower People where they argued for “mediating structures,” of family, church, association between the individual and the state.

Recently I have been reading the work of Lawrence Cahoone. His Civil Society: The Conservative Meaning of Liberal Politics is a profound critique of the failure of “neutralist liberalism” and an argument for civil society. Of course, his book is not a font of policy prescriptions, ammo for politicians eager to “do something” in the present crisis. It does little more than describe civil society: What it is, what it means, and what it does.

Even in the chaos of the London riots we can see civil society at work. From the Daily Mail.

In Dalston and Hackney, north-east London, Turkish shopkeepers and their families fought back against looting youths, before spending the night standing shoulder-to-shoulder in an attempt to deter further attacks.

When the chips are down, civil society means, at a minimum, that the men get together to defend their neighborhood.

Cahoone describes civil society in two major chapters of his book. The first, “Civil Society,” describes civil society institutionally; the second, “Civility, Neighborhood, and Culture,” describes it as culture.

The key point is that civil society is informal, a “quasi-independent association of households.” It is not community, for it is not unified. It is not government, but it is an association that relates to government.

In detail, Cahoone describes five characteristics of civil society:

Society is autonomous, for “Society gets its norms from the inside rather than from institutions outside it.”

There are no subjects, only citizens. Aristocrat and commoner are united in their “Frenchness” or “Englishness.”

Civil society is a spontaneous order, not ordered up by political will. No “single agency dominates social life.” There are different types of institutions competing in society and many competing within each type.

Civil “societies must have market economies.” But civil society is not the same as the market; it abuts the market economy and “the rules of civility are not the rules of the market.”

At the cultural level, writes Cahoone, it is important to remember that civil society is not politics. It is primarily “living-with, not talking-with;” It is "membership, freedom, civility, and dignity.” Dignity here means “recognizable worthiness,” a rough equality in which banker and laborer take care to relate as equals.

The essential core of the civil society is its “dialectic of civility and culture.” There cannot be a pure civility; it “must be informed by some cultural tradition.” But not just one tradition. Civil society implies a diversity, a competition of cultural narratives, but a competition that minimizes cultural coercion.

The modern world is a mix of “market, civil society, and nationalism,” writes Cahoone. These are fighting words, for when you think about it, our liberal friends are at war with all three. They want to control the market with their regulations and subsidies; they want to marginalize civil society with their political hegemony, and they want to neuter national identity with their elite cosmopolitanism.

Radio host Dennis Prager always says: “I prefer clarity over agreement.” The more that I learn about civil society, the more I reach clarity about what that city on a hill will look like.

When we conservatives reach clarity on civil society we will be ready to hammer out a new social contract with the American people. It will be based on the simple idea that civil society is at the heart of America. Civil society is the solvent that can soften the endless “creative destruction” of the market and the “civil war by other means” of national politics.

And it will deflate the thugs of the flash mobs.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

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