Blind faith

Alan Jacobs reviews Roger Scruton's Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, an update of a book originally published in 1985. It discusses a number of individuals who, Scruton argues, have some things in common including that...

.... “they illustrate an enduring outlook on the world, and one that has been a permanent feature of Western civilization at least since the Enlightenment.” That outlook is composed of two major commitments, or proclaimed commitments anyway: to liberation of individuals from oppressive existing structures, especially political, familial, and religious; and to social justice, usually conceived as requiring the elimination of political and economic systems that create inequality.

Scruton rightly notes that much of the internal tension, at times exploding into hatred, among figures of the New Left arises because these two commitments are pretty clearly not compatible: the more fully people are liberated, the more energetically they will create and sustain various forms of inequality, while equality can only be enforced at the cost of placing strict limits on personal freedom. ....

At that time [1985], scarcely anyone imagined that the collapse of the Soviet Union was imminent, and the New Left of that era was often implicitly—less often explicitly—communist in orientation. In the intervening three decades things have changed, and in an important passage I must cite at length, Scruton explains why:

we must recognize that the Marxist spectacles are no longer on the left-wing nose. Why they were removed, and by whom, it is hard to say. But for whatever cause, left-wing politics has discarded the revolutionary paradigm advanced by the New Left, in favour of bureaucratic routines and the institutionalization of the welfare culture. The two goals of liberation and social justice remain in place: but they are promoted by legislation, committees and government commissions empowered to root out the sources of discrimination. Liberation and social justice have been bureaucratized. In looking back at the left intellectuals in the decades before the collapse of the Soviet Union, therefore, I am observing a culture that now survives largely in its academic redoubts, feeding from the jargon-ridden prose that it amassed in university libraries, in the days when universities were part of the anti-capitalist ‘struggle.’

One need to look no further than to the current student protests on American college campuses to see evidence for Scruton’s interpretation. Unlike their radical counterparts from the 1960s, these students have no thought of breaking down and rebuilding the fundamental structures of the university along egalitarian lines; rather, in their dream world, universities are still hierarchical, bureaucratic, and driven by administrative diktat, but the bosses doing the dictating are sympathetic to the students’ politics and willing to persecute the students’ enemies. ....

Late in his book Scruton comments that he has searched these thinkers’ writings “in vain for a description of how the ‘equality of being’ advocated in their fraught manifestoes is to be achieved.” In the end, he says, “We know nothing of the socialist future, save only that is it both necessary and desirable.” But for that reason the socialist faith is a blind faith. .... (more)

Roger Scruton vs. the New Left | The American Conservative

Satanic mendacity

Considering "The Philosophy Of Roger Scruton," Mervyn F. Bendle begins with the epiphany Scruton experienced on May Day in Paris, 1968, as anarchists seemed to threaten the survival of the Fifth Republic:

But what, Scruton asked his visitor, do you propose to put in its place? “What vision of France and its culture compels you?” To which, “she replied with a book: Foucault’s Les mots et les choses, the bible of the soixante-huitards [sixty-eighters] the text which seemed to justify every form of transgression, by showing that obedience is merely defeat”. Michel Foucault’s tome had appeared in 1966 (English translation, 1970, as The Order of Things), becoming de rigueur amongst intellectuals and students desperate to appear aligned with the avant-garde of social theory, despite the fact that Foucault’s structuralist determinism reduced people to the status of elements in a gigantic system and was the antithesis of the libertarian anarcho-communism that the soixante-huitards professed. More often invoked as a magic talisman than read as a coherent work of history, it was an impenetrable exercise in radical scholasticism that established Foucault’s reputation as a “master thinker” of the Left.

For Scruton, The Order of Things “is an artful book, composed with a satanic mendacity, selectively appropriating facts in order to show that culture and knowledge are nothing but the discourses of power” to be condemned as just further forms of oppression. A work not of philosophy but of rhetoric, “its goal is subversion, not truth”, and it perpetrates “the old nominalist sleight of hand that was surely invented by the Father of Lies—that ‘truth’ requires inverted commas, that it changes from epoch to epoch, and is tied to the form of consciousness, the episteme, imposed by the class which profits from its propagation”. This is a core conception of the cultural relativism that is now a taken-for-granted premise of academic discourse, while Foucault’s “vision of European culture as the institutionalized form of oppressive power is taught everywhere as gospel”, as Scruton laments. ....

Burke persuaded him that “societies are not and cannot be organized according to a plan or a goal, that there is no direction to history, and no such thing as moral or spiritual progress”, while all attempts to pretend otherwise must decline into “militant irrationality” as the proponents of such visions struggle to impose their abstract template onto an intractable world. Faced with such resistance, the would-be revolutionaries seek to mobilise the masses around a shared hatred of a real or imagined foe: “Hence the strident and militant language of the socialist literature—the hate-filled, purpose-filled, bourgeois-baiting prose, one example of which had been offered to me in 1968”. ....

Scruton insists that religion plays a vital social role.... At the very least, conservatives recognise “the indispensability, in sound political judgement, of religious ideas—in particular, ideas of original sin, corporate guilt and suffering—and of the ever-present fear of death and retribution”. Such recognition highlights the extent to which conservatives “place politics, culture and morality before economic order and the distribution of power”, as Marxists and other radicals would have it:

[Conservatives] see politics not as the pursuit of some ultimate goal—whether national supremacy, social justice or economic growth—but as the attempt to reconcile conflicting interests, and to establish law, order and peace throughout society.
[more]

The Philosophy Of Roger Scruton — Quadrant Online

Escaping the eye of judgment

Decades ago conversation with someone who had "lost" faith convinced me that at least one reason for atheism is the desire not to be held to account. David Conway provides an interesting and extensive review of Roger Scruton's The Face of God. Scruton, and then Conway:

‘[In] the culture that prevails today… belief in God is widely rejected… But… we lose [more than merely it]… when we lose that belief… [because] atheist culture… is not only an intellectual phenomenon… but also a moral phenomenon…[While] atheists can be thoroughly upright people… there is more than one motive underlying… atheist culture… and the desire to escape from the eye of judgment is one of them. You escape from the eye of judgment by wiping away the face [of God].’

In these opening remarks from his 2010 Gifford Lectures, Roger Scruton suggests something more, and more worrisome, than mere changes of prevailing belief are impelling the West’s current headlong rush towards ever greater secularity. What lies behind it, he intimates, is not simply the intellectual repudiation of God’s existence, but rather an attempt by many to evade the moral corollaries attendant upon its acknowledgement. Among these corollaries, the one from which many are seeking to escape, Scruton is claiming, is the consciousness of always being scrutinized by an all-seeing eye who discerns and judges our every thought and deed. The salutary moral influence of such a form of consciousness was well described by Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, when he wrote:

The idea that, however we may escape the observation of man, or be placed above the reach of human punishment, yet we are always acting under the eye… of God… is a motive capable of restraining the most headstrong passions… The religious man… never acts deliberately but as in the presence of that Great Superior who is finally to recompense him according to his deeds. [Part 111, ch. 5, section 12.]

To evade recognition of that all-seeing eye, contends Scruton, demands expunging all trace of God from our world, and since God’s presence may be detected, at least potentially, wherever beauty and goodness reside, whatever possesses either attribute must be defaced by those seeking to evade Him. The result today, according to Scruton, is the increasing defilement and pollution of our physical and moral world in the endeavor to remove from the face of the earth all trace of God.

Atheists, of course, will deny anything save error becomes lost when religion is abandoned. Scruton disagrees, although he acknowledges individual atheists may possess as much moral integrity as believers. .... [more]

Till We Contemplate Faces | Online Library of Law and Liberty

Adolescent insouciance

From an interesting review essay about Roger Scruton:

.... In his account in Gentle Regrets of how he became a conservative, Scruton writes that “Burke summarized all my instinctive doubts about the cry for liberation, all my hesitations about progress and about the unscrupulous belief in the future that has dominated and (in my view) perverted modern politics.” Scruton sided with Plato and Burke in defending a “form of politics that would also be a form of nurture—‘care of the soul,’” a care that would not forget absent generations. He had no time of day for “adolescent insouciance, a throwing away of all customs, institutions and achievements, for the sake of a momentary exultation which could have no lasting sense save anarchy.” ....

.... Scruton’s philosophy is profoundly anti-totalitarian, opposed as it is to every form of scientism, reductionism, and contempt for the human person. Scruton has always defended three great “transcendentals”—the person, freedom, and the sacred. These are at the core of his metaphysical conservatism. Twentieth-century totalitarianism can be understood as a frontal assault on the bodies and souls of human beings—and of the three great transcendentals that give substance to human dignity. ....

...Scruton saw in ideological revolution the self-deification of man through the positing of an “ideal community” that negated the existing order of things. “The worship of an idol”—self-deified man—“becomes a worship of nothing,” the triumph of pure negation. Only the restoration of the claims of a transcendental God can free humanity from a potent and destructive nothingness. ....

.... Religion, unlike scientism, can do justice to the consciousness, freedom, and moral accountability inherent in the human person. In recent years, Scruton has concluded that God is not dead but is “waiting for us to make room for him” .... In Conversations, Scruton calls the Incarnation, the death of a mediating God on behalf of sinful man, a “profound thing” since God himself reconciles us to our own deaths. He also writes movingly about the penitence and forgiveness at the heart of the Christian dispensation. ....

...Dooley asks Scruton if he is hopeful “about the cause of conservatism generally.” Scruton responds that he is not. Yet he adds that the other side, the academic and cultural Left, has nothing to offer except “the repudiation of this feature of our inheritance, now of that.” Scruton ends on an elevating note. Despite everything, we must hold on to what we “know and love.” We must be practitioners of the Platonic “care of the soul” and upholders of the great and primordial Burkean “contract” that connects the living, the dead, and the yet to be born. Above all, we must be sensitive to the “glimmers of transcendence” that emanate from “the edge of things.” ....

Dialogues in Scrutopia

Conservatism

Another book I need to buy is Roger Scruton's Conservatism: Ideas in Profile. I think conservatism will survive Trumpism since it has survived worse. From a review online:

Sir Roger Scruton’s new book on Conservatism: Ideas in Profile is a 176-page treat for anyone who is interested in ideas. .... Conservatism: Ideas in Profile is a page turner. I hung on every syllable, every word, every oxford comma, and every semicolon (isn’t the semicolon the femme fatal of the punctuation world?).

The blue and white cover of this book is pleasing to the eye, and when I turned to the inside sleeve, Sir Roger is described as ‘the man who, more than any other, has defined what conservatism is’. Indeed, this is quite right since perhaps Edmund Burke. Burke who quite rightly has a prominent place in the book is seen as the founder of modern day conservatism. ....

Sir Roger explores a plethora of conservative thinkers and the thoughts of great people such as Thomas Hobbes, Michael Oakeshott, Benjamin Disraeli, the Earl of Salisbury, Winston Churchill, and Margaret Thatcher among others.

The book is arranged over six delightful chapters starting with 'Pre-History' and concluding with 'Conservatism Now'. Furthermore, there are chapters on 'The Birth of Philosophical Conservatism', 'Cultural Conservatism', the ‘Impact of Socialism' and 'Conservatism in France and Germany'. The chapter on Conservatism in France and Germany (which also includes the Spanish thinker José Ortega y Gasset) is a great strength of this book. The inclusion of great German thinkers such as Kant and Hegel, and the French Joseph de Maistre, is a demonstration of conservatism’s wider and deeper intellectual roots beyond the anglosphere. ....

I would suggest that the most interesting chapter is on cultural conservatism, which focuses on the anxieties over the loss of religious roots in society, the worrisome dehumanising effect of the Industrial Revolution, and the consequential damage that was being inflicted upon the settled way of life. In this chapter, Sir Roger explores the thoughts of Coleridge, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and T.S. Eliot among others. These thinkers shared a revulsion towards the new forms of so-called ‘progressive’ opinion, which they found disconcerting. Scruton also explores the worry expressed by the aforenoted thinkers regarding ‘progressive’ opinions’ propensity to treat questions of morality and law as mathematical puzzles to be solved, which of course they are not.

The book comes to its conclusion, its cessation, its climax, on a chapter called 'Conservatism Now'. In this chapter, Sir Roger suggests that the most recent attempts to define conservatism has been to define it as the champion of Western civilisation against its enemies. These two main enemies are: political correctness and religious extremism, especially the militant Islamism promoted by the Wahhabi–Salafi sects. ....

Conservatism: Ideas in Profile Review | The Conservative Online

Desecration is a defense against the sacred

Roger Scruton on "Beauty and Desecration":

At any time between 1750 and 1930, if you had asked an educated person to describe the goal of poetry, art, or music, “beauty” would have been the answer. And if you had asked what the point of that was, you would have learned that beauty is a value, as important in its way as truth and goodness, and indeed hardly distinguishable from them. Philosophers of the Enlightenment saw beauty as a way in which lasting moral and spiritual values acquire sensuous form. And no Romantic painter, musician, or writer would have denied that beauty was the final purpose of his art.

At some time during the aftermath of modernism, beauty ceased to receive those tributes. Art increasingly aimed to disturb, subvert, or transgress moral certainties, and it was not beauty but originality—however achieved and at whatever moral cost—that won the prizes. ....

.... It is not merely that artists, directors, musicians, and others connected with the arts are in flight from beauty. Wherever beauty lies in wait for us, there arises a desire to preempt its appeal, to smother it with scenes of destruction. Hence the many works of contemporary art that rely on shocks administered to our failing faith in human nature—such as the crucifix pickled in urine by Andres Serrano. Hence the scenes of cannibalism, dismemberment, and meaningless pain with which contemporary cinema abounds, with directors like Quentin Tarantino having little else in their emotional repertories. ....

Those phenomena record a habit of desecration in which life is not celebrated by art but targeted by it. Artists can now make their reputations by constructing an original frame in which to display the human face and throw dung at it. ....

.... The current habit of desecrating beauty suggests that people are as aware as they ever were of the presence of sacred things. Desecration is a kind of defense against the sacred, an attempt to destroy its claims. In the presence of sacred things, our lives are judged, and to escape that judgment, we destroy the thing that seems to accuse us.

Christians have inherited from Saint Augustine and from Plato the vision of this transient world as an icon of another and changeless order. They understand the sacred as a revelation in the here and now of the eternal sense of our being. .... Every now and then...we are jolted out of our complacency and feel ourselves to be in the presence of something vastly more significant than our present interests and desires. We sense the reality of something precious and mysterious, which reaches out to us with a claim that is, in some way, not of this world. .... [more]

In his description of beauty Scruton uses an example that reminded me of C.S. Lewis's use of Sehnsucht — the longing for something more, something beyond, that an experience can inspire. Scruton:

....Here is an example: suppose you are walking home in the rain, your thoughts occupied with your work. The streets and the houses pass by unnoticed; the people, too, pass you by; nothing invades your thinking save your interests and anxieties. Then suddenly the sun emerges from the clouds, and a ray of sunlight alights on an old stone wall beside the road and trembles there. You glance up at the sky where the clouds are parting, and a bird bursts into song in a garden behind the wall. Your heart fills with joy, and your selfish thoughts are scattered. The world stands before you, and you are content simply to look at it and let it be. ....

The Constable Salisbury Cathedral illustration was my choice.

Beauty and Desecration by Roger Scruton, City Journal Spring 2009

Respectability

On the anniversary of Roger Scruton's death in 2020, Patrick Kurp:

In England: An Elegy (2001), Sir Roger Scruton aligns himself with one of the summits of the English conservative tradition. If such a tradition were a church, Johnson would number among its saints. ....

Johnson’s life represents a mingling of poverty-induced bohemianism (“the shabbiest of English eccentrics”) and a dignified respect for traditional norms. Scruton identifies an “anti-bohemian respectability” strain among such modern writers as T.S. Eliot, Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, and such composers as Vaughan Williams and Edmund Rubbra:

—all of them respectable citizens, often with conservative, even reactionary, opinions, upholders of the moral order, and unassuming members of the long-suffering middle class. This anti-bohemian respectability was not a novel feature of the national culture. The leading artistic spirits among Englishmen have almost always been prepared not only to belong to the respectable classes, but also to defend the values which make respectability respectable.

(more)

"The Values Which Make Respectability Respectable," Anecdotal Evidence, January 12, 2022.

Order and beauty

A graduate student, an admirer of Roger Scruton — "author of more than thirty-five books and hundreds of essays, currently visiting professor at both Oxford and St. Andrews" — is dumbfounded when, in an autobiographical essay, he reads “I do the cooking and the housework; she looks after the animals.” The student wonders how he too could manage to do all of that. Writing to Scruton he asks for advice:

.... He, being rather wise, didn’t give me what I asked for. Instead, he wrote to explain how he approached cleaning and cooking. Not a chore for him; they are “aesthetic undertakings.” Beauty and order are intertwined such that one brings about the other. The beautiful is orderly and the orderly is beautiful. Cleaning the house creates order, and therefore creates beauty. No one need undertake the task of rearranging matter as a draining labor to be endured. Cleaning is an art to be cultivated.

.... Every blade of grass cut, every circuit wired, every dish washed, every carpet vacuumed is an ongoing work of the highest art: art that aspires to create beauty rather to mock it. .... [more]

What Roger Scruton Taught Me about Chores | Intercollegiate Review

Modern times

In his Conservatism (2017) Roger Scruton contrasts the experience of an American conservative with one in Britain by observing that an American "can confess to being a conservative without being socially ostracised." Maybe, but it probably depends on where the American lives or works. Scruton:

...Orwell's political fables contain an accurate and penetrating prophecy of the political correctness that has since invaded intellectual life in both Britain and America. The humourless and relentless policing of language, so as to prevent heretical thoughts from arising, the violence done to traditional categories and natural ways of describing things, the obliteration of memory and assiduous policing of the past — all these things, so disturbingly described in Nineteen Eighty-Four, are now routinely to be observed on university campuses on both sides of the Atlantic, and those conservatives who draw attention to the phenomenon, as Allan Bloom did in his influential book The Closing of the American Mind (1987), are frequently marginalised or even demonised as representatives of one of the forbidden 'isms' or 'phobias' of the day — racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, etc. In a society devoted to 'inclusion' the only 'phobia' permitted is that of which conservatives are the target.

This situation, which puts conservatives at an enormous disadvantage in the intellectual world, has inevitably changed their way of defining themselves, and made the 'culture wars' central to their sense of what they are fighting for and why. Understanding political correctness and finding the ways to combat it have therefore become prominent among conservative causes. Is political correctness simply the final stage of liberal individualism — the stage at which all barriers to a self-chosen identity are to be removed? If so, which of those barriers can conservatives still defend against the onslaught, and how can they justify the attempt? Or is it rather a derogation from the great liberal tradition, a way in which equality has become so urgent and dominating a cause that nothing of liberty remains, and all social life is absorbed into a relentless witch-hunt against the defenders of social distinctions? ....

Roger Scruton, Conservatism, Chapter 6, "Conservatism Now," Profile Books, 2017.

Sehnsucht

From "Beauty and Desecration," in his description of beauty here Roger Scruton used an example that reminded me of C.S. Lewis's use of Sehnsucht — the longing for something more, something beyond, that an experience can inspire. Scruton:

....Here is an example: suppose you are walking home in the rain, your thoughts occupied with your work. The streets and the houses pass by unnoticed; the people, too, pass you by; nothing invades your thinking save your interests and anxieties. Then suddenly the sun emerges from the clouds, and a ray of sunlight alights on an old stone wall beside the road and trembles there. You glance up at the sky where the clouds are parting, and a bird bursts into song in a garden behind the wall. Your heart fills with joy, and your selfish thoughts are scattered. The world stands before you, and you are content simply to look at it and let it be. ....

Beauty and Desecration by Roger Scruton, City Journal Spring 2009

The intrinsic value of individuals

Standpoint provides a very interesting and wide-ranging conversation between Raymond Tallis [author of Enemies of Hope, 1997] and Roger Scruton [author of The Uses of Pessimism], which they title "Staving Off Despair: On the Use and Abuse of Pessimism for Life." One of the many topics they touch on is the ubiquity of sex in the culture:

Daniel Johnson: We have a culture now in which sex plays a central role, and yet it's strangely bloodless, isn't it?

Raymond Tallis: I strongly share Roger's point of view over this. We live in a world in which pornography or at least sexual allusion is almost wall-to-wall. You can't open a copy of The Times without seeing a naked woman and that to me is the marker of where we are at. It's as if sex has become shallower and shallower as it has become spread more widely. Sex as a consumer item increasingly dominates over sex as an encounter with the utter mystery of another person, with a profound sense of love and compassion for them. These are marginalised by the ubiquitous culture of pornography.

Roger Scruton: I agree. One of the social functions of religion is that of withdrawing certain things from the market. We fence them round and say that here is a realm where things are not exchanged, bartered, paid for or taken, but it's still a realm where things can be given in a special way.

That is the idea of a sacrament: certain ways in which human beings give to each other have a sort of blessing from another realm, and only then can they be fully themselves. It's not just sex that religion withdraws from the market — people too. At least in Christianity, people are not to be used and sold, they are to be understood as objects of intrinsic value. This intuition was rephrased by Kant in terms of his categorical imperative but it's there in Aquinas and all Christian thinking. It is there in the Old Testament too. .... [more]

Staving Off Despair: On the Use and Abuse of Pessimism for Life | Standpoint

"True but boring, ...exciting but false"

Roger Scruton authored some fifty books. I've read only a few. One that I haven't has been among those often recommended in the days since his death. How to be a Conservative (2014) just arrived in the post. From his Preface in the "New Edition":

The conservatism I shall be defending tells us that we have collectively inherited good things that we must strive to keep. In the situation in which we, the inheritors both of Western civilization and of the English-speaking part of it, find ourselves, we are well aware of what those good things are. The opportunity to live our lives as we will; the security of impartial law, through which our grievances are answered and our hurts restored; the protection of our environment as a shared asset, which cannot be seized or destroyed at the whim of powerful interests; the open and enquiring culture that has shaped our schools and universities; the democratic procedures that enable us to elect our representatives and to pass our own laws — these and many other things are familiar to us and taken for granted. All are under threat. And conservatism is the rational response to that threat. Maybe it is a response that requires more understanding than the ordinary person is prepared to devote to it. But conservatism is the only response that answers to the emerging realities, and in this book I try to say, as succinctly as I can, why it would be irrational to adopt any other.

Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created. This is especially true of the good things that come to us as collective assets: peace, freedom, law, civility, public spirit, the security of property and family life, in all of which we depend on the cooperation of others while having no means singlehandedly to obtain it. In respect of such things, the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation slow, laborious and dull. That is one of the lessons of the twentieth century. It is also one reason why conservatives suffer such a disadvantage when it comes to public opinion. Their position is true but boring, that of their opponents exciting but false.

Because of this rhetorical disadvantage, conservatives often present their case in the language of mourning. Lamentations can sweep everything before them, like the Lamentations of Jeremiah, in just the way that the literature of revolution sweeps away the world of our frail achievements. And mourning is sometimes necessary; without 'the work of mourning' as Freud described it, the heart cannot move on from the thing that is lost to the thing that will replace it. Nevertheless, the case for conservatism does not have to be presented in elegiac accents. It is not about what we have lost, but about what we have retained, and how to hold on to it. Such is the case that I present in this book. ....

Roger Scruton, How to be a Conservative, Bloomsbury Continuum, 2019.

"It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves"

On the occasion of Roger Scruton's seventieth birthday Brian Miller provides several quotations from his work, including this on the Hundredth Psalm:

Perhaps there is no more direct challenge to secular ways of thinking than the famous Hundredth Psalm, the Jubilate Deo, as translated in the Book of Common Prayer. .... The psalmist enjoins us to be joyful in the Lord, to serve the Lord with gladness and to come before his presence with a song. ....

Once we came before God’s presence with a song; now we come before his absence with a sigh. The triumphs of science and technology, the vanquishing of disease and the mastery over nature — these things coincide with a general moroseness, the origin of which, I believe, is religious. Someone who turns his back on God cannot receive his gifts with gratitude, but only with a grudging resentment at their insufficiency. No scientific advance will bestow eternal youth, eternal happiness, eternal love or loveliness. Hence no scientific advance can answer to our underlying religious need. Having put our trust in science we can expect only disappointment. And seeing, in the mirror raised by science, our own aggrieved and sullen faces, we are turned to disaffection with our kind. That is why the singing stops.

The psalmist goes on to remind us of the remedy: ‘Be ye sure that the Lord he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves.’ This sentence contains all of theology. .... [more]

Roger Scruton Turns 70

Good intentions

From an interesting and wide-ranging 1998 interview with Roger Scruton:

In America the assumption is usually that the conservative is an apologist for the rich, or a religious fanatic, if not an abortion clinic bomber. Where liberals are seen as, at worst, well-intentioned but wrong.

That's a very parochial view, of course. Obviously, one element in conservatism must be that to be successful is not a sin, and I think conservatives on the whole have more patience with the idea of human success, and more desire to create a world where success is rewarded. Whereas it's true that what you call liberals — our left — is much more interested in supporting the underdog and usually believes some philosophy to the effect that the sufferings of the underdog are caused by the wealth and privilege of the successful, Marxism being the archetype of all such philosophies. And I think that's all nonsense — that the sufferings of the underdog are not caused by the fact that some people have managed to rescue themselves from this predicament. On the contrary, the more people who rescue themselves, the better. They create opportunities in their wake.

That's not the way liberals see it. If you are a purely materialistic person who sees everything human in terms of how much money is involved, then all you will see about conservatives is that they favor the rich, because you don't see any other difference between people than the amount of wealth they have. I take the view that conservatism has nothing fundamentally to do with wealth. It has to do with social order. Of course if you're in favor of the forces that create social order, you're in favor of the forces which make it possible for people to become wealthy. But that's a byproduct. I do agree that liberals have this reputation for being nice and conservatives for being nasty.

Isn't that a terrible PR problem? The liberals own the good intentions.

The fact is if you really want to think in terms of good intentions, Lenin and Hitler and Mao had thousands of them. But of what relevance are intentions? Intentions imposed in this belligerent and self-righteous way on the rest of us are actually deeply offensive, I think. It's true that liberals find liberals to be very nice and conservatives very nasty. But that's part of the narrow-mindedness of liberals. Conservatives in my experience are much more able to find moral value in liberals than liberals are in conservatives, because liberals, while believing themselves to be the most open-minded of people, are unable to see conservatism, or any opposition, as anything more than a moral failing.

Roger Scruton - Ray Sawhill

"A sanctified somewhere"

From an appreciation of Roger Scruton:

.... From him most of all I took my own idea of what conservatism is, the attempt to preserve or recover a home in this world — a place of consolation, a sanctified somewhere that connects us to the dead, the unborn, and our neighbors through love, memory, and sacrifice. A place that belongs to us and implants in us a longing for the true home that can never be destroyed by storms, war, neglect, or the encroachment of speculative exurban developers who want to replace our homes with parking lots and Panera Bread. We put in our labors to preserve freedom, decency, and culture, so that our children receive this somewhere as a place prepared for me by my father. ....

Remembering Roger Scruton: Greatest Conservative Philosopher of a Generation | National Review

Blessed are those who mourn

From an essay by Roger Scruton, "The Work of Mourning":

.... We lose many things in our lives. But some losses are existential losses. They take away some part of what we are. After such a loss we are in a new and unfamiliar world, wherein the support on which we had—perhaps unknowingly—depended is no longer available. The loss of a parent, especially during one’s early years, is a world-changing experience, and orphans are marked for life by this. The loss of a spouse is equally traumatic, as is the loss of children, who take with them into the void all the most tender feelings of their parents.

Nevertheless, however grievous the blow, mourning is a therapy that points toward survival. Through mourning we bury the dead. But we also raise them from the dead, not as living beings, but as purified images, washed clean of their faults and transfigured by our mutual forgiveness. ....

.... We are far more likely to be interested in what the deceased person ­owes to us by way of a legacy than what we owe to him or her in the way of mourning. Of course, we still offer funerals to our dead, though we expect them to budget for this while still alive. And we grieve for them as we must. But it is increasingly rare to raise a monument, or even to lay our dead to rest in a grave that we might subsequently visit. The habit of cremating the dead and then scattering their ashes reflects our post-religious conception of what they become by dying, namely nothing. We briefly snatch at their nothingness and then watch them fade from our empty hands. .... Since the obligation is unreal, its fulfillment becomes a kind of ritualized pretense, an opportunity for displays of kitsch emotion. ....

The Western response to loss is not to remove yourself from the world. It is to bear it as a loss, to mourn it, and to strive to overcome it by seeing it as a form of consecrated suffering. Religion lies at the root of that attitude. Religion enables us to bear our losses not, primarily, because it promises to offset them with some compensating gain, but because it sees them from a transcendental perspective. Judged from that perspective they appear not as meaningless afflictions but as sacrifices. Loss, conceived as sacrifice, becomes consecrated to something higher than itself....

.... The loss of religion makes real loss difficult to bear; hence people begin to flee from loss, to make light of it with Disneyfying ornaments, or to expel from themselves the feelings that make it inevitable. .... This is why, in a society without religion, we see emerging a kind of contagious hardness of heart, an assumption on every side that there is no tragedy, no grief, no mourning, for there is nothing to mourn. There is neither love nor happiness—only fun. The loss of religion, one might suggest, is the loss of loss. .... (more)

Roger Scruton, "The Work of Mourning," First Things, Oct., 1022.

Irrelevant subjects

From Patrick Kurp's blog post today, on the value of a liberal education:

At the library I found a posthumously published collection of essays and articles by Roger Scruton, Against the Tide (ed. Mark Dooley, Bloomsbury, 2022). Included is a column Scruton wrote in 1983 for The Times, “The Virtue of Irrelevance.” It’s a bracing assault on the ongoing trivialization of education, now underway for more than half a century. Universities have turned into nursery/vocational schools. Scruton is ever the genteel contrarian in his defense of the humanities:

The more irrelevant a subject, the more lasting is the benefit that it confers. Irrelevant subjects bring understanding of the human condition, by forcing the student to stand back from it. They also enhance the appetite for life, by providing material for thought and conversation. This is the secret which civilisation has guarded: that power and influence come through the acquisition of useless knowledge.

Scruton dismisses such fashionable silliness as “women’s studies” and concludes:

The value of such a subject is precisely that it destroys education. It keeps the student's mind so narrowly focused on his random and transient political convictions that, when he ceases to be obsessed with them, he will lack the education through which to discover what to put in their place.

Patrick Kurp, "The Acquisition of Useless Knowledge," Anecdotal Evidence, Dec. 2, 2022.

"We have within ourselves..."

From a review of a new collection of essays by Sir Roger Scruton: Against the Tide, "a concise but rich selection of some of Scruton’s writings for various journals, magazines, and newspapers." Scruton in 1994:

It is good to have been born in this time of decay. Our generation was granted a privilege that future generations may never know—a view of Western civilization in its totality, and a knowledge of its inner meaning. We were given the pure truths of the Christian religion, and the morality of sacrifice which turns renunciation into triumph and suffering into a secret joy. We also had the chance to see what will happen should we lose these gifts. ... Of course it is hard to feel the full confidence that those teachings require. But they are addressed to each of us individually, and their validity is not affected by what others think or do. We have within ourselves the source of our salvation: all that is needed is to summon it, and to go out into the world.

Douglas Murray, "Scrutonian selections," The New Criterion, April, 2022.

“There are no lost causes..."

About a book I first read in the '60s:

By reason of longevity alone, The Conservative Mind, as of 2023 a septuagenarian, is a classic. But “maturity” is more than a chronological marker. It describes a quality of mind, a force of habit, a disposition and refinement of what Kirk, following Burke, would not have been too shy to call “prejudice.” By that standard, The Conservative Mind is like some lexical Athena. It was born mature, fully-armed and ready for battle. ....

The philosopher Roger Scruton once observed that Kirk showed that conservatism is fundamentally not an economic but a cultural outlook, and that conservatism “would have no future if reduced merely to the philosophy of profit. Put bluntly,” Scruton said, “conservatism is not about profit but about loss: it survives and flourishes because people are in the habit of mourning their losses, and resolving to safeguard against them.” I think that is correct. ....

Kirk’s book helped restore conservatism’s patent of intellectual respectability. A brief introduction outlines the six touchstones of Kirk’s conservative vision: “belief in a transcendent order”; “affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence”; a commitment to ordered liberty; a recognition that “freedom and property are closely linked”; faith in prescription against the putative expertise of the “sophisters, calculators, and economists” that Burke memorably anathematized in Reflections on the Revolution in France; and the understanding that change is not synonymous with improvement (Kirk would have liked Lord Falkland’s observation that “when it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change”). ....

Kirk was almost Chestertonian in his fondness for paradox. One of my favorite Kirkian observations is that he was a conservative because he was a liberal. What goes under the banner of “liberalism” today has so thoroughly cut itself off from such traditional animating liberal imperatives as free speech, disinterested inquiry, and advancement according to merit that it is easy to regard Kirk’s declaration as merely paradoxical. But it was not paradoxical so much as it was admonitory, recalling us to springs of freedom that only an embrace of tradition can nourish. .... (more)

Roger Kimball, "The Conservative Mind at 70," University Bookman, November 12, 2023.

Confession and forgiveness

Continuing to read Scruton:

...[I]t is by seeing our world in Christian terms that I have been able to accept the vast changes that have shaken it. Acceptance comes from sacrifice: that is the message conveyed by so many of the memorable works of our culture. And in the Christian tradition the primary acts of sacrifice are confession and forgiveness. Those who confess, sacrifice their pride, while those who forgive, sacrifice their resentment, renouncing thereby something that had been dear to their hearts. Confession and forgiveness are the habits that made our civilization possible.

Forgiveness can be offered only on certain conditions, and a culture of forgiveness is one that implants those conditions in the individual soul. You can forgive those who have injured you only if they acknowledge their fault. This acknowledgement is not achieved by saying 'yes, that's true, that's what I did' It requires penitence and atonement. Through these self-abasing acts, the wrongdoer goes out to his victim and re-establishes the moral equality that makes forgiveness possible. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition all this is well known, and incorporated into the sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church as well as the rituals and liturgy of Yom Kippur. We have inherited from those religious sources the culture that enables us to confess to our faults, to make recompense to our victims, and to hold each other to account in all matters where our free conduct can harm those who have cause to rely on us. ....

Roger Scruton, How to be a Conservative, Bloomsbury Continuum, 2019.