Humans and society
‘Humans are social creatures by nature, and we need the sense of belonging and identity that society provides us, as well as the support of its members, to exist.’
‘There is no such thing as a society’. This is possibly the most famous of the quotes of Margaret Thatcher, and it is also the most revealing.
This quote represents a break with traditional conservative thought on the subject of possibly the most important aspect of human life; how we interact with the people around us and how that interaction is structured. Society is, in essence, a community with a common order or set of rules that apply to those who live within it.
To assert that we do not have rules to guide our relationships with the people around us, that we lack bonds of fellowship and obligation to those whom we know, is not merely wrong but a heresy to conservative thought. Just as classical liberals reject the idea that modern liberalism can be described as liberalism, conservatives too should reject the idea that the Conservative Party and the ‘New Right’ ideology of neo-conservatism is conservative. The view of neo-conservatives about human nature, the markets, greed, community and society are contradictory to that of the traditional strain of thought that makes up conservatism.
When Harold Macmillan accused Thatcher of ‘selling off the family silver’ he was right about more than just selling government assets. Society is a natural living thing, a complex web of interdependent relationships in which all people are indebted to each other and owe bonds of loyalty to the separate strands that allow us all to exist.
Humans are social creatures by nature, and we need the sense of belonging and identity that society provides us, as well as the support of its members, to exist. As the social effects of lockdown prove, atomisation kills. Human beings were not designed to be alone and the idea that we all should exist in separate isolated bubbles is dangerous to both the physical and mental health of the individual person. Atomisation divides people into smaller and smaller groups; it fractures society and causes people to have to look elsewhere for a sense of belonging and home. A wealth of different, often clashing, identities are bound to cause conflict between people, leading to communities breaking down into smaller and smaller clashing in-groups.
Much confusion has been made about human nature, especially about the idea that the human race is naturally bad. Too often is it said that humans are naturally greedy and selfish, and from here the argument is made that the human race does not fit well into societies and that we in fact atomise ourselves. This argument is put forward in spite of the fact that we seem to be the only species capable of truly selfless actions; self-sacrifice is a virtue and holds a special place in the psyche of us all, and seems to be present in no other species.
The idea of natural human greed comes from, in my opinion, a misunderstanding of the fallen nature of man. Humans of course, above all, are inherently violent. We are the most violent species on earth and are followed closely by species that are closely related to us, such as chimps. We also tend to kill each other more than other predators who mostly only kill their prey. Furthermore, whilst humans are competitive, we are not so because we are naturally greedy, we are in fact greedy because we are inherently competitive. Human beings have no justification for their competitiveness, we are competitive for the sake of competition and, also, violent for the sake of violence.
This is why we are both capable of extreme horror and extreme kindness at the same time; and that violence is directed away from those we care about towards those we do not. Without society, those who we care about can become a very small group indeed.
