… so impractical is a purely rationalist politics, that the new man, lately risen to power, will often be found throwing away his book [-learned technique and rational ideology] and relying upon his general experience of the world as, for example, a business man or a trade union official.
This experience is certainly a more trustworthy guide than the book – at least it is real knowledge and not a shadow – but still, it is not a knowledge of the political traditions of his society, which, in the most favourable circumstances, takes two or three generations to acquire.
Nevertheless, when he is not arrogant or sanctimonious, the Rationalist can appear a not unsympathetic character. He wants so much to be right. But unfortunately he will never quite succeed.
He began too late and on the wrong foot. His knowledge will never be more than half-knowledge, and consequently he will never be more than half-right. Like a foreigner or a man out of his social class, he is bewildered by a tradition and a habit of behaviour of which he knows only the surface; a butler or an observant house-maid has the advantage of him.
And he conceives a contempt for what he does not understand; habit and custom appear bad in themselves, a kind of nescience of behaviour. And by some strange self-deception, he attributes to tradition (which, of course, is pre-eminently fluid) the rigidity and fixity of character which in fact belongs to ideological politics.
…
Apprenticeship, the pupil working alongside the master who in teaching a technique also imparts the sort of knowledge that cannot be taught, has not yet disappeared; but it is obsolescent, and its place is being taken by technical schools whose training (because it can be a training only in technique) remains insoluble until it is immersed in the acid of practice.
Again, professional education is coming more and more to be regarded as the acquisition of a technique, something that can be done through the post, with the result that we may look forward to a time when the professions will be stocked with clever men, but men whose skill is limited and who have never had a proper opportunity of learning the nuances which compose the tradition and standard of behaviour which belong to a great profession.
One of the ways in which this sort of knowledge has hitherto been preserved (because it is a great human achievement, and if it is not positively preserved it will be lost) and transmitted is a family tradition. But the Rationalist never understands that it takes about two generations of practice to learn a profession; indeed, he does everything he can to destroy the possibility of such an education, believing it to be mischievous.
Like a man whose only language is Esperanto, he has no means of knowing that the world did not begin in the twentieth century. And the priceless treasure of great professional traditions is, not negligently but purposefully, destroyed in the destruction of so-called vested interests.
Michael Oakeshott – Rationalism in Politics (1947)
See also:
Marcus Borg on unending conversation
Hannah Arendt on action, story, history and invisible hands
Lesslie Newbigin and Michael Polanyi on objectivity, personal knowledge, nihilism and tradition
Inheritance: unearned
Leslie Newbigin on The Heretical Imperative
Remember the name: Persistence of wealth through China’s revolutions
Michael Oakeshott on political activity and continuity
Tomáš HalÃk on Modernity, Optimism and Naked Hope