Sir Roger Scruton obituary
Philosopher, writer and political thinker with
controversial views on education, hunting and architecture
Jane
O'Grady
Tue 14 Jan
2020 13.54 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/14/sir-roger-scruton-obituary
Roger
Scruton, who has died of lung cancer aged 75, was a philosopher and a
controversial public intellectual. Active in the fields of aesthetics, art,
music, political philosophy and architecture, both inside and outside the
academic world, he dedicated himself to nurturing beauty, “re-enchanting the
world” and giving intellectual rigour to conservatism.
He wrote
more than 50 books, including perceptive works on Spinoza, Kant, Wittgenstein
and the history of philosophy, and four novels, as well as columns on wine,
hunting and current affairs, and was a talented pianist and composer.
A member of
the traditionalist-conservative Salisbury Group, he helped found the Salisbury
Review, which he edited from 1982 to 2001. This quarterly, which was circulated
in the Soviet bloc, often in samizdat form, was criticised in Britain for
having retrograde attitudes. In 1984 it defended Ray Honeyford, the Bradford
headteacher who had disputed the value of multicultural education. Consequent
hostility from colleagues prompted Scruton to abandon in 1992 his professorship
in aesthetics at what is now Birkbeck, University of London, where he had
started as a lecturer in 1971. Though he felt this had scuppered his academic
career, in the event it freed him for activities and adventures on a wider
stage.
In 1978,
Scruton co-founded the Jan Hus Educational Foundation in Prague. Under the
codename Wiewórka, Polish for squirrel (“a tribute to my red hair”), he gave
clandestine lectures, assisted dissident activism, and smuggled banned works
(disguised as unused computer discs) into the Soviet bloc. As a result, he was
arrested and thrown out of Czechoslovakia several times in the 1980s – and,
after the collapse of communism, was awarded medals by the Czech Republic,
Poland and Hungary.
Scruton
held academic posts at Boston University (1992-95) and the Institute of
Psychological Sciences, Arlington, Virginia (2007-09); and he was visiting
professor at Oxford University from 2010, and a professorial fellow in moral
philosophy at St Andrews University (2011-14).
He and his
second wife, Sophie Jeffreys, and their children, Sam and Lucy, eventually
settled down in what he sometimes dubbed Scrutopia, near Malmesbury, in
Wiltshire. He was an ardent Green and countryside supporter – as well as a keen
huntsman – declaring that, while environmentalism has all the hallmarks of a
leftwing cause, it is in fact about conservation, equilibrium and “oikophilia”
(love of home), therefore “quintessentially conservative”.
In 1995, he
and the campaigner for constitutional reform Anthony Barnett, who described the
two of them as “at opposite ends of the political spectrum”, set up the Town
and Country Forum, to tackle rural issues. Scruton was made a fellow of the
British Academy in 2008 and knighted in 2016.
He
exemplified Nietzsche’s aphorism that “every philosophy is a sort of memoir”.
His was spun out of his life – often agonisingly.
Born in
Buslingthorpe, north-east of Lincoln, Roger was the son of Jack Scruton, a
teacher, and his wife Beryl (nee Haynes), and was brought up in a somewhat
uncultured home. After the family moved to Buckinghamshire, he discovered the
delights of high culture in Marlow library and from the Royal grammar school,
High Wycombe, he won an open scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge (for
which, apparently, his father never forgave him). Having changed from science
to philosophy, he gained a double first in 1965, and, in 1973, a PhD in
aesthetics. His thesis formed the basis of his book Art and Imagination (1974).
At the age
of 24, he witnessed the événements of 1968 from a first-floor window in Paris,
but, unlike his friends, was disgusted by the protesting students’
self-indulgent iconoclasm. “I suddenly realised I was on the other side …
wanted to conserve things, rather than pull them down.” He began to read Edmund
Burke, who “summarised ... all my hesitations about progress”, and defended
authority and obedience.
Scruton was
the exact opposite of a champagne socialist: he took terrible risks for his
political beliefs, not just literally, in eastern Europe, but in continually
expressing outrageously reactionary views, which led him to be ostracised by
the “leftwing establishment”.
What he
said in his younger days opposing feminism, liberalism, egalitarianism,
homosexuality and anti-racism could be seen, at the very least, as worrying,
and was constantly invoked against him long after his stance had mellowed with
age and his happy second marriage, or else it was denounced as self-publicising
hyperbole.
Indeed,
lucid and clear-thinking though he was, it was difficult to know what he really
did believe, and what trumped what in his multilayered thinking. He declared
Thatcherism, with its free-market libertarianism, philistinism and contempt for
education, “a betrayal” of cultivated Burkean conservatism, yet went on to
support it.
He returned
to Anglicanism (“my tribal religion – the religion of the English who don’t
believe a word of it”), but it is a moot point whether or not he was an atheist
(as most of his secular friends insisted) or whether, for him, God was part of
what he called “the web of seeming”, the “life-world” (Husserl’s Lebenswelt).
It may
sound odd for a serious philosopher and intensely sincere person to exalt
illusion, but, quoting Oscar Wilde, Scruton insisted that only someone very
shallow does not judge by appearances.
In The
Aesthetics of Music (1997), he brilliantly described the sense we have of a
musical space in which tones are higher and lower, and the “virtual causality”
that makes it seem inevitable for each particular sound in a musical
composition to follow the previous one.
Permeated
by “spatial metaphor”, our experience of music would be impossible without it.
“If someone said that, for him, there is no up and down in music, no movement,
no soaring, rising, falling, no running or walking from place to place”, would
we count what he is hearing as music?
Similarly,
said Scruton, with reality itself, or at least human reality. If not
experienced through human-made metaphors, meanings and categories, what on
earth could it be? Scruton in fact imitated Kant, but by inverting his
metaphysics.
Kant said
that all we can know is phenomena (“appearances”) of the real
“things-in-themselves” which are tantalisingly, inexorably unknowable. Scruton,
in a beautiful reversal, relegated knowledge of behind-the-scenes reality to
science and declared that the most important task for philosophy now is to
“re-enchant the world”. Because it attempts “to explore the ‘depth’ of human
beings”, science “threatens to destroy our response to the surface”.
But it is
on the surface that we live and act. A smile is “really” only the movement of
facial muscles – except that it is not, any more (as Scruton insisted in Sexual
Desire, 1986) than erotic sex is just the mutual manipulation of body parts.
Scruton
demanded that we “resurrect the human person”, and “replace the sarcasm which
knows that we are merely animals, with the irony which sees that we are not”.
For all his
logical stringency, he had in some ways less an analytic than a continental
style of philosophising. But that style, with its mixture of poetical
metaphysics and subjectivity, runs the risk of being sentimental, which
Scruton, much as he condemned and eviscerated sentimentality, was sometimes
guilty of.
Adamant
that beauty is essential for everyone, he advocated that any architect of
public buildings should consult the aesthetic wishes of their future
inhabitants. Having been appointed honorary chair of the government’s Building
Better, Building Beautiful commission in 2018, he was sacked a few months later
on the strength of an interview he gave to the New Statesman, which was
pronounced to be antisemitic, Islamophobic and anti-Chinese. He was afterwards
reinstated when a recording of the interview emerged and the New Statesman
apologised for the way it had been selectively quoted from on Twitter. He
insisted that his interviewer not be sacked.
He was
capable of tendentiousness himself. In 2002, a leaked email to the company
Japanese Tobacco International asked for an increase of £1,000 on the £4,500 a
month it was already paying him for the placing of articles in the British
press that could be deemed helpful to their marketing. Although Scruton had
been a smoker himself, this did not exactly follow Kant’s categorical
imperative (we should do only what we would be prepared for everyone else to
have to do) of which he was such a clear, fervent expositor.
But he
lacked nothing in courage, refusing to kowtow to popular piety, even if
retaining a piety of his own.
Like
Dostoevsky’s kindly Grand Inquisitor, he promoted illusions that he loved but
could also see through, almost relishing the arcane discernment of reality’s
bleakness. “Whatever its defects,” he wrote, “my life has enabled me to find
comfort in uncomfortable truths.” He was a tormented soul, as manifest in his
rather laboured way of speaking, but also extremely funny.
In 1973 he
married Danielle Lafitte; they divorced in 1979. His marriage to Sophie came in
1996. She and their children survive him.
Roger Vernon Scruton, philosopher, writer and
activist, born 27 February 1944; died 12 January 2020
Account
Roger Scruton, a Provocative Public Intellectual, Dies
at 75
A philosopher, author and columnist, he was an
outspoken hero to conservatives in Britain and recently at the center of, in
his words, a “hate storm.”
By Alan
Cowell
Published
Jan. 16, 2020
Updated
Jan. 17, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/16/books/roger-scruton-dead.html
LONDON —
Roger Scruton, a prominent British philosopher and public intellectual whose
espousal of conservative causes and contentious views elicited both plaudits
and opprobrium, which he likened to “falling to the bottom in my own country,”
died on Sunday. He was 75.
His family
announced the death on his website without providing other details. Mr.
Scruton, who lived for many years on a farm in Wiltshire, in southwest England,
was said to have been treated for lung cancer in recent months.
In the
course of a long academic career, which included spells in the United States,
Mr. Scruton wrote more than 50 books, ranging over topics like art, aesthetics,
architecture, music, philosophy and sexual behavior. On the defining issue of
the new century in Britain, he said, he voted in favor of leaving the European
Union, the so-called Brexit that propelled the Conservative Party’s landslide
victory in elections in December.
He also
wrote four novels in addition to newspaper and magazine columns, in which he
mused on wine, politics and horseback hunting, which he pursued
enthusiastically until his final birthday. As a musician, he composed operas.
He qualified as a barrister, too, but did not practice law.
In the Cold
War years of the late 1970s and ’80s, he transcended the frontiers of formal
Western academia by traveling beyond the Iron Curtain — to Poland, Hungary and
Czechoslovakia — to deliver clandestine lectures and smuggle samizdat works
disguised as blank CDs to Soviet bloc students. In later years he was awarded
medals in recognition of that role.
He was
knighted in Britain in 2016. After his death, Prime Minister Boris Johnson
tweeted, “We have lost the greatest modern conservative thinker — who not only
had the guts to say what he thought but said it beautifully.”
Toward the
end of his life, Mr. Scruton concluded that he had been treated unfairly in his
own land, subjected to what he termed a “hate storm” inspired by critics who
had accused him of Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and disparagement of Chinese
people — allegations that Mr. Scruton called “fantastic and fabricated.”
The
immediate cause of the furor was an article about him in April in the left-wing
magazine New Statesman. Based on an interview with him, the article, which a
New Statesman editor said on social media contained “a series of outrageous
remarks,” prompted an uproar. Mr. Scruton was said to have belittled the term
Islamophobia, spoken stereotypically of Chinese people and evoked a “Soros
empire in Hungary,” referring to the financier George Soros, who is Jewish.
Within
hours of its publication Mr. Scruton was sacked from an unsalaried position he
had held as the head of a government-appointed body that advised on modern
architecture, the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission.
But he was
reappointed after the magazine acknowledged that his views “were not accurately
represented in the tweets” that had been published along with the article. The
magazine apologized.
The episode
recalled Mr. Scruton’s longstanding reputation as an iconoclast. Peter
Stothard, who had been his editor at The Times of London in the 1980s, when Mr.
Scruton wrote a column for the paper on art and politics, was quoted as saying
that “there was no one I ever commissioned to write whose articles provoked
more rage” than Mr. Scruton’s.
Critics
also assailed his views on homosexuality and gender issues. In his interview
with New Statesman, he said that homosexuality was “different” but denied that
he was homophobic. He described the 21st-century debate on gender and identity
as “a kind of theatrical obsession which is being imposed on children whether
or not they understand it.”
Mr. Scruton
dated his conversion to the conservative cause to the Paris student riots of
1968, when, at 24, he observed young people, including his friends, clashing
with the police in the Latin Quarter. “What I saw was an unruly mob of
self-indulgent middle-class hooligans,” he said in an interview with The
Guardian in 2000.
“When I
asked my friends what they wanted, what were they trying to achieve, all I got
back was this ludicrous Marxist gobbledygook,” he continued. “I was disgusted
by it, and thought there must be a way back to the defense of western
civilization against these things. That’s when I became a conservative. I knew
I wanted to conserve things rather than pull them down.”
Roger
Vernon Scruton was born in Buslingthorpe, a village in Lincolnshire, in eastern
England, on Feb. 7, 1944, the son of John and Beryl (Claris) Scruton. His
father was a teacher, his mother a homemaker. The couple also had two
daughters.
Roger was
educated at a grammar school in High Wycombe, West London, and won a
scholarship to Jesus College at Cambridge University, where he studied
philosophy. He met his future first wife, Danielle Laffitte, a teacher, while
traveling in France. They married in 1973, the same year he was awarded his
doctorate. They divorced in 1979.
From 1971
to 1992 he taught at Birkbeck College in London, where, he said, he was the
only conservative on the teaching staff.
In later
years he was sometimes depicted as providing the intellectual spine to
Thatcherism in Britain, although he said he did not share Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher’s devotion to the free market.
In 1982,
Mr. Scruton helped found a conservative journal, The Salisbury Review, which
stirred controversy in 1984 by publishing an article by a headmaster in the
north of England who raised questions about the value of multicultural
education.
Mr. Scruton
published a torrent of books, including “Art and Imagination: A Study in the
Philosophy of the Mind” (1974), “The Aesthetics of Architecture” (1979) and
“Sexual Desire” (1986). His novels included “Notes From Underground” (2014),
based on his experiences behind the Iron Curtain.
In 1992 he
became a professor of philosophy at Boston University; he returned to Britain
in 1995. In 1996 he married Sophie Jeffreys, an architectural historian, with
whom he had two children, Sam and Lucy. They all survive him.
The episode
revolving around the New Statesman article, in the last year of his life, left
Mr. Scruton feeling bruised.
In a column
in the conservative magazine Spectator, under the headline “Roger Scruton: My
2019,” he wrote, “During this year much was taken from me — my reputation, my
standing as a public intellectual, my position in the Conservative movement, my
peace of mind, my health.”
But, he
went on, “Falling to the bottom in my own country, I have been raised to the
top elsewhere, and looking back over the sequence of events I can only be glad
that I have lived long enough to see this happen.”
“Coming
close to death you begin to know what life means,” he added, “and what it means
is gratitude.”
After a
long career as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times based in Africa,
the Middle East and Europe, Alan Cowell became a freelance contributor in 2015,
based in London.
A Liberal’s Ode to Sir Roger Scruton
At 75, a colossus of conservative philosophy has died.
A young liberal reflects on this great man’s life and legacy.
Ross
Anderson
That Ross
Chap
Ross
Anderson
https://medium.com/thatrosschap/a-liberals-ode-to-sir-roger-scruton-964b2780cd8c
Published
in
That Ross
Chap·
Jan 13,
2020
Blue page
numbers. The first book of Sir Roger Scruton’s that I read cover to cover was
How To Be A Conservative. Released in 2014, this brief read, written in tight
and masterful prose, distilled a life’s thinking on the nature of conservatism
into one accessible, entertaining little book. A book with blue page numbers.
Of all the
elaborate covers this titan could have chosen, he went for an understated solid
blue with white text. Subtly fitting a book on conservativism. And yet, he had
it published with those blue page numbers so that every single page used colour
ink; no doubt at great bother and cost. This was what sold me on Scruton; a
deep care for detail and beauty, told with a light smirk and gentle wit.
A
philosophy professor on aesthetics, he released several books on the subject,
including Art And Imagination, The Aesthetics of Architecture, The Classical
Vernacular, The Aesthetics of Music, Beauty, and Understanding Music. This
culminated in his BBC documentary aptly titled Why Beauty Matters. In it, he
advocates for the meaning and significance of art and looks at that which
dismisses it — Duchamp’s infamous urinal — with a quiet despairing hatred.
His form of
conservativism is bound in and born of this love of beauty. Repulsed by the
wayward destruction of the 1968 French university protests and riots, he was
stuck by the carelessness of the progressive drive. That in the aim to tear
down the old order and build a new better world, so often we lose what came
before, much of which is of crucial value. If this strikes you as Burkean, it
should; his political philosophy is grounded in Burke’s line that society was:
“a
partnership… between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who
are to be born”
For
Scruton, this meant the preservation of that which is meaningful in an
objective, graspable sense. In his eyes, beauty - in classical architecture,
painting, and music — was key to this:
“Beauty is
a value, as important as truth and goodness… The beautiful work of art brings
consolation in sorrow and affirmation in joy. It shows human life to be
worthwhile”
And, as
with truth and goodness, it is one of the clearest signs of objective meaning:
“Beauty
makes a claim on us; it is a call to renounce our narcisissm and look with
revererence on the world.”
This is
bound to his belief in national identity - in a national soul. Contrary to a
relativistic position, he argues that countries are not bound together merely
by arbitrary in-group/out-group divisions. Rather, their people are tied to
their lands by shared meaning, tradition, and culture. Science may explain the
cosmos but it definitionally lacks soul. On the other hand, beauty and meaning
nurture the soul.
This is not
to say that art must be stagnant. Of course not. Rather, meaningful progress is
only possible in tandem to that which we inherit. As he wrote in Modern
Culture:
“Without
tradition, originality cannot exist: for it is only against a tradition that it
becomes perceivable. Tradition and originality are two components of a single
process, whereby the individual makes himself known through his membership of
the historical group”
And it is
in this that you find his conservatism. Scruton best distilled this in a key
passage from that little book with blue page numbers:
“Conservatism
starts from a 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.”
Too often
do those on the left characterise the right as being curmudgeonly, uncaring for
the poor, held hostage by nostalgia, and disconnected from the issues of today.
It is something I in the past have been guilty of. And yet, any fair reading of
Scruton and what grounds his philosophy reveals anything but that ‘Nasty Party’
image. Rather, his philosophy is firmly rooted in his love of beauty, heritage,
and the passing of knowledge.
Lest his
prolific writing and populated library not be evident enough, his love of books
is most aptly shown in this wonderful little anecdote:
Humour
arises from incongruity. With our mental faculties having evolved as a tool to
best hunt bison and not ponder the nature of the universe, we and our thoughts
on ourselves are full of contradictions. So, it’s unsurprising that much truly
meaningful philosophy is rather funny. An example of this comes from another
witty Englishman, Christopher Hitchens. When asked whether he believes in free
will, his answer was; “I have no choice but to”.
Whilst much
of Scruton’s writing contains a delicate wit, that which made me smile widest
was the premise of his slim volume, Animal Rights and Wrongs (2000). Facing the
dour ideas of the overly literal Peter Singer, Scruton responds that it’s
because he loves animals that he eats them. As though enough feathers hadn’t
been ruffled, he ends his preface with:
I am
indebted to creatures who have no idea of the fact — to Puck, who guards the
gate, to George, Sam and Rollo who live in the stables, to the nameless carp in
the pond across the field, to the cows next door and to Herbie, who has now
been eaten.
The wit of
it comes from its unexpected but clear truth, oxymorons retained. Another
example is from his introduction to modern philosophy, where he disregards
relativists with two deft lines:
“A writer
who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is
asking you not to believe him. So don’t.”
Even the
titles of his more than 50 books display this, most notably ‘I Drink Therefore
I Am: A Philosopher’s Guide to Wine’ — a favourite line of which being:
“... while
we are familiar with the adverse effect of drink on an empty stomach, we are
now witnessing the far worse effect of drink on an empty mind.”
He carried
this love of wine, culture, and beauty in his Scutopia Summer School: a 10-day
course consisting largely of sitting around discussing philosophy whilst
drinking fine wine, eating good food and “evenings [involving] concerts,
readings, or further discussion over wine.” The 25 students paid £3000 for the
privilege.
I envy
every one of them.
To note his
wit is not to say he was not serious or invested. He was, both in his thinking
and life. I cite Animal Rights and Wrongs for the amusement I found on
beginning it, but that isn’t to say it’s frivolous and to be easily dismissed.
Scruton brings the simplistically literal Singer to task in a way few have done
on this subject, arguing his texts:
“contain
little or no philosophical argument. They derive their radical moral
conclusions from a vacuous utilitarianism that counts the pain and pleasure of
all living things as equally significant and that ignores just about everything
that has been said in our philosophical tradition about the real distinction
between persons and animals.”
Whilst my
conclusions align closer to Singer’s on animal rights, Scruton makes a thorough
case against it, largely reliant on the relationship that rights have with
obligations. Too often the word ‘rights’ is invoked without a thorough
consideration of what something being a right entails — think of the many
politicians running for office who say “X is a human right”. Paired with his
clear delineations on the differences between humans and animals, he makes a
sharp case that you have to answer if you are to hold that animals have rights.
Whilst
unbound by political orthodoxy, it is worth noting that Scruton was anything
but a simplistic contrarian. The depth of his thought seems incompatible with
it anyhow. Not only a sharp critic of the cultural left, he also raising the
spectre of issues many conservatives have abandoned; namely environmentalism
(chiefly discussed in his book Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About
the Planet). Rather than dismiss the issue, as too many on the political right
do, Scruton wrote that it was among the most important political issues of our
era and that:
“There is
no political cause more amenable to the conservative vision than that of the
environment.”
However,
aligned with the importance he placed on personal responsibility, Scruton
wrote:
“I argue
that environmental problems must be addressed by all of us in our everyday
circumstances, and should not be confiscated by the state. Their solution is
possible only if people are motivated to confront them.”
Outside of
the world of letters, Scruton’s dedication can be seen no more greatly than his
courage during the Cold War. Recalling his efforts during this period, Anne
Applebaum (expert for Russia, writing at The Washington Post and The Atlantic),
recalls:
Recalling
the period, Scruton wrote last year:
“In 1979,
when teaching philosophy at the University of London, I responded to an
invitation to address a private seminar in Prague. I travelled from Poland,
already inwardly frozen by the eerie chill of Communism — and Communist Prague
did nothing to raise my spirits.
… I was
addressing a room of criminals whose ‘crimes’ consisted of uttering the wrong
word, reading the wrong book, belonging to the wrong network, and in general
trusting in the free life of the mind.”
He was
‘guilty’ of the same ‘crimes’. And yet, risking imprisonment, Scruton travelled
behind the Iron Curtain to support fellow writers and thinkers within Poland
and Czechoslovakia. With them, he set up an ‘underground university’ to spread
knowledge against the wishes of the totalitarian regime. For this, he was
awarded the Medal of Merit (First Class) by the Czech Republic in 1998. And,
after a lifetime of appreciation abroad, the country he called home finally
recognized one of its leading minds in 2016 with a knighthood.
Having
defended those persecuted for thought crimes and false accusations on their
words, it is only fitting that a smear merchant (George Eaton) at the New
Statesman would attempt to ‘cancel’ the professor. Deliberately ripping from
context comments Scruton made about China and Hungary, Eaton attempted to make
him look like a racist. Unsurprisingly, Scruton’s comments revealed anything
but racial hatred; he was continuing his lifelong defence of those robbed of
freedom, namely those living under the rigid constraints of the Chinese
Communist Party. For this smear, Scruton was fired from an unpaid position in
the government consulting on architecture, which Eaton celebrated with
champagne on Instagram. The New Statesman would later issue an apology and Scruton’s
position was reinstated. As Douglas Murray states on the affair:
“…if there
was a reason why such attempts at ‘gotchas’ consistently failed it was because
nobody could reveal a person that did not exist. Of course Roger could on
occasion flash his ideological teeth he was one of the kindest, most
encouraging, thoughtful, and generous people you could ever have known.”
For a
fuller summary of the issue, I would recommend this piece of his on the matter.
Scruton’s
work means a lot to me. Those most intelligent people who you disagree with
have the greatest opportunity to reveal truths previously hidden from you. That
they are simultaneously brilliant and yet, to your mind, wrong is both humbling
and exhilarating. It is from such people that you learn the most. And there is
no subject where Scruton influenced me more than his discussion of beauty:
“ Beauty
can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating,
appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of
ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference: beauty demands to be noticed;
it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend. If there are
people who are indifferent to beauty, then it is surely because they do not
perceive it.”
Scruton did
not share my love for the artistry in hip-hop, pornography, or smartphone
design. I doubt Shame or The Neon Demon would have done much for him either.
But that’s
beside the point.
Few showed
the philosophical and ethical importance of beauty greater than Scruton. It’s
because of his work that I place such importance in great works even in areas
he would not approve of. It’s because of this that I wear a suit every day;
that I work hard to own beautiful items, and stop and admire that of others. He
would never praise Kanye West’s ‘Gorgeous’, the work of Vixen or PlayBoy, or
the Essential Ph-1. But without his thoughts, I would be robbed of some of
their artistic significance.
This is not
to claim my seeing porn or rap differently than Scruton arises from blindness
on his part. Not at all; accusing Scruton of ignorance is a claim borderline
impossible to justify. But nor do I think I am incorrect.
Rather,
there are giants who raise us up, give us the tools and perspective to see the
world radically differently than we ever could before. Sometimes they show a
completely different world. Other times they recontextualise it. Or perhaps
they lift us above the clouds and allow us to see what we knew was there but
was just out of sight. Once given this new perspective, this new height, we may
see something different than that of the giant who raised us. That doesn’t
invalidate either position. But it is to acknowledge that they are giants and
we are but mere people. And that we see by standing on their shoulders.
And so,
with the passing of Sir Roger Scruton, a giant died yesterday. Amongst
conservatism, he carried the torch from Edmund Burke and Michael Oakshott. For
beauty, few defended it as passionately and thoroughly. And interpersonally, be
they in agreement with him or not, all records show him to be as kind, gentle,
courageous and humorous as he was brilliant.
As stated
by the Prime Minister:
Reflecting
on the life of his friend, Douglas Murray writes:
“One of my
first grieving thoughts on hearing the news was how much I still had to ask
him. But in that spirit which he encouraged I will instead turn to the shelves
I have full of his books and marvel again instead about the huge amount he gave
us.”
And it’s in
the libraries that Scruton loved that his legacy is to be found. A man who
spent a lifetime defending the importance of history, of tradition, of speech,
of ideas, of writing, who carried the baton of knowledge from those who
proceeded to hand to those who will follow, he has left a legacy of thoughts
that will influence many generations to come. With simple covers, blue page
numbers and black ink, his legacy lies within book covers and the minds and
lives of those he influenced. And that those books proudly sit on the
bookshelves of a young liberal, I think says it all.
Confessions of a Heretic – Roger Scruton
(Notting
Hill Editions 2016)
by R.J.
Rasmussen
https://traditionalbritain.org/blog/book-review-confessions-of-a-heretic-roger-scruton/
Roger
Scruton is probably the most widely read and respected of modern conservative
writers, having written widely on subjects such as religion, art, music,
aesthetics, political philosophy, hunting and wine. He is also a bona fide heretic; bona fide in
the sense that he has genuinely suffered for the heresies that he is alleged to
have committed. His editorship of The
Salisbury Review, for example, brought him untold heartache in the form of
lawsuits, character assassinations, and the loss of what would have been a
glittering academic career in Britain, such that he had to retreat to the
States to practice his trade. He has
earned the contempt of conservatives and liberals alike and endured police
scrutiny over the Ray Honeyford affair.
However, he maintains that it was all worth it for “the sheer relief of
uttering the truth”. The mark of the
true heretic is the willingness to suffer and the unwillingness to recant, and
it is arguably because of this, as well as his considerable intellectual talent
that Scruton has undergone something of a renaissance in recent years, having
been allowed back into the journalistic fold in print and even at the BBC. To cap it all he has recently been knighted.
In this
collection of essays, which span a decade of engagement with the public culture
in Great Britain and America, Scruton describes what I would call gentle
heresies; truths that remind us of what we have lost in the tumult of latter
modernity, and what we can retrieve from the ruins of tradition. Many of these ideas are unpopular and
scorned, and if Scruton’s critics are to be believed, ought to have been kept
to himself, but because they are eternal they always recur at some point in
time or other. Beauty, objective truth,
organic community, moral tradition, hierarchy and the redemptive power of love
are some such ideas that won’t get you burned at the stake, but may earn you
unending derision no matter how obvious it is that we cannot live our lives
without them.
For
example, in the essay “Faking It”, Scruton tackles the themes of originality,
beauty and kitsch in culture, more specifically art, and more specifically
still, visual art. As religion declined
in the 19th century the romantic poets and painters turned their backs on God
and embraced the cult of the artist as a God-like substitute, a tradition which
endures to this day. Since the time of
the romantics, however, beauty itself turned into kitsch and fake
originality. Popular taste quickly
became corrupted as the egoism of the artist created each new work as an
‘original’, and in a society where art is valued as the highest cultural good,
the motive to fake it was strong. The
early modernists, such as Stravinsky and T.S. Eliot attempted to rescue truth,
sincerity and genuine emotion from the plague of fakery, but then this quickly
gave way to fakery itself in the form of the transgressive artist whose
statements of offence, such as Duchamp’s urinal quickly turned into hackneyed
clichés. Then came the supposedly
sophisticated parodies of kitsch, such as Andy Warhol’s brillo pads and the art
of Jeff Koons. Who could say something so self-consciously mocking of itself
was kitsch anymore?
In order to
rescue art from this never-ending cycle of narcissism and banality Scruton
suggests we recapture the ideas of beauty, form and redemption. Kitsch is a means to cheap emotion, by
transferring it from the thing observed to the observer. It matters not what I feel about the tortuous
excretions of some avant-garde painter or other, only the sheer fact of my
feeling it. Beauty on the other hand is
an end itself, and an end that is hard won. Formal perfection requires
knowledge (which implies tradition), discipline and attention to detail. It is not simply a question of turning on the
taps and letting it all flow out. Beauty
is also a redemptive presence in our lives; a reassurance that our life is
meaningful and suffering is not pointless, but a restoration of the moral
equilibrium. Tragedy reminds us that
beauty and thus love, both filial and erotic, is redemptive. Much of this kind of thought can be found in
the mature operas of Wagner.
It is the
moral burden of love and the flight from genuine emotion which is the key theme
of ‘Loving Animals’. Scruton argues here
that a sentimental, cloying affection for animals as pets has gradually
replaced the genuinely burdensome act of loving one another. The latter kind of love is not cost-free - it
positions us in a relation of individuals I to I that assumes that both subject
and object are morally invested and obligated in such a way that there is no
easy out without genuine human suffering.
That is the nature of the moral sphere we inhabit, and animals simply
cannot enter into it. However the idea
that we can love animals as equals (impervious to the impossibility of their
reciprocation) has given rise to the liberal industry of animal rights. But rights, duties, obligations and virtues
depend on the essential quality of self-consciousness that humans possess and
animals lack, which is why Kant maintained that humans are not really part of
nature at all. Thus those who espouse
the ideology of animal rights, such as Peter Singer in Animal Liberation
elevate animals to a moral plain they are by nature prohibited from
understanding, which in turn corrupts both them and us. Albeit counter intuitively this ascribing of
rights to animals actually gives way to an unscrupulous favouritism which makes
it a crime to shoot a cat, the most destructive of all alien species, but
praiseworthy to poison a mouse and thus infect the whole food chain upon which
other less favoured animals depend. A
proper love for animals involves a respect for natural hierarchy and the wider
environment. The hierarchy that the ideology of animal rights has as its core
assumption is based on an anthropomorphic sentimentality which assumes animals
can be moral subjects in the same way humans can.
There are
many more such instinctive conservative positions eloquently defended, such as
the natural distrust of big government that overreaches, and an appeal to the
idea of government as the free consent of responsible individuals of a
particular community, who are free not because the state is absent, but because
of the natural human disposition to hold one another to account. This is not a rejection of overarching
government, which must take over when the capacities of what might be called
Burke’s “little platoons” have been exhausted, but a rejection of the liberal
abuse of government, which has designed it as a kind of redistributive machine,
in which the state allocates the social good according to supposed principles
of “fairness”. This is the liberal idea
of government most notably espoused by John Rawls. It is perhaps a peculiarly Western tradition:
what might be called the ‘associative habit,’ which was exemplified by the
pioneering communities of America who formed clubs, schools, committees and
other bodies to deal with the issues they could not deal with alone. This is government by consent, and any
leader’s authority derives from the consent of those over whom he holds sway. As Tocqueville saw, this is not just an
expression of freedom, but an instinctive move towards government. Contrast this with the Arab world, where the
basic relation of accountability is absent.
This was observed during the ‘Arab Spring’ which left a void of power in
its wake, since there were no offices, customs or traditions to embody the
relation of accountability beyond that of family, mosque or tribe.
Further
‘gentle heresies’ that are dared to be expressed are the celebration of the
Apollonian art of traditional communal dancing in which participation was an
invitation to join a community dancing to rhythms and melodies handed down over
centuries, as contrasted with the individualistic, spasmodic jerking and
twerking which passes for dancing today, practised in the clubs and disco
halls, and driven by computer generated sounds.
Such ‘dancing’, which is nothing more than a full-body dry heave set to
music, has become an overtly sexual phenomenon, in which couples eventually
pair off and perform something akin to a public foreplay ritual. Another is the defence of traditional
architecture and the ‘New Urbanism’ movement of Krier, which attempts to build
settlements along classical or neo-classical lines, in which instead of
encouraging urban sprawl extending to the suburbs, encourages centripetal
development, where commerce and dwelling exist as one. A good example of such a dwelling is
Poundbury, on the outskirts of Dorchester.
However, of
all the heresies that the author dares to speak, and that which will probably
chime most forcefully with readers is the idea that Western civilisation itself
is under threat, and that the proper response to this is to cherish and defend
it. The particular and primary threat we
face here in the West is the proliferation of Islam, aided by our constant
efforts to appease it. This threat is
not only embodied in the form of the violent jihadist, armed with bombs and
guns, but that of the creeping colonisation of much of Western Europe by a
conquering theocracy which has a civilizational project in mind, and a
repressive legal framework to impose.
Scruton
suggests we are entering a dangerous period of appeasement in which the
legitimate claims of our own culture and inheritance are ignored in order to
prove our peaceful intentions, since we have lost our appetite for war. He identifies several critical features of
our Western inheritance that are in conflict with Islam which go to some
lengths to explain why this is an incompatible belief system that we need to
defend our civilisation against. In
summation these are: Citizenship, nationality, Christianity, irony,
self-criticism, representation and alcohol.
The reader can explore the arguments for himself, since there is no need
to rehearse them here, but there is one aspect in particular with stands out as
possibly the most fundamental and that is the idea of citizenship.
In the West
we define citizenship as the right and duty of consensual participation in the
making and enacting of law. Laws are
made legitimate by the consent of those who obey them, which is our duty to do,
and our right is conferred within the substance of these laws. This is how we can draw a distinction between
Western and Islamic societies: the former are secular communities of citizens,
whereas the latter are religious communities of subjects. The former consent and the latter
submit. Indeed, ‘submitted’ is the
primary meaning of the word ‘Islam’. In
essence it is the conception of law (since laws are what we freely consent to
be governed by in the West) that illustrates the most fundamental divide
between Western societies and Islamic ones.
In Islam, the law is a system of commands laid down by God, and their
legitimacy does not originate from a freely given consent to obey them, but
exists purely in virtue of the fact that God has ordained it so.
As our law
in the West has developed, particularly due to the system of common law that
has grown up over centuries in Great Britain and America, religion and morality
have gradually been privatised. For
instance, it seems absurd to us that the ‘sin’ of adultery should have a legal
sanction, despite the fact we may recognise adultery as inherently sinful. In Islam however, and according to the
shari’ah, there is no such distinction; both morality and law are one and have
God as their source. There is some
mitigation in the system of recommendations that is contained within the
shari’ah but this does not alter the fact that there is no room for the private
moral life, let alone the religious one, and it is typically women who suffer
the most in this system, as obvious crimes visited upon them are taken to be
judgements upon their virtue.
However it
is Scruton’s prescription for dealing with this threat to our political and
cultural inheritance (he assumes that our territorial one is not at issue,
although it soon may be) which constitutes the only criticism of any substance
I can raise against him in this whole volume.
While arguing that we must never show weakness, or a willingness to
apologise for who or what we are, he inadvertently invokes that very defect in
his suggested response. The argument is
that resentment animates the terrorist, and it is by the Christian gift of
forgiveness that we overcome it. The
actions of Islamic terrorists are discredited by our looking soberly on them
and by our example of forgiving them.
Firstly,
the idea of forgiving terrorism of any form will be offensive to many, and this
is an easy criticism to level. But
secondly and more importantly we protect ourselves against these actions in the
normal course of our lawmaking and enforcing.
In fact, the terrorist is not the real threat and should not be the
focus of our attentions at all. The real
challenge is the ideology of Islam itself, and what most Western appeasers of
this religion see as its benign influence and proliferation. Forgiveness on the battlefield of what is
really at heart a cultural and religious war is ridiculous and useless.
So instead,
I would argue that instead of employing one of Christianity’s more useless and
naïve assumptions, we should step back and realise that it is Christianity
itself that is our strongest weapon.
Surely this is the religious inheritance we can draw upon in order to
re-assert our identity and reclaim our heritage. The terrorist, or for that matter any
follower of Islam does not envy or resent our Western traditions, especially
our religious ones. Many Muslims regard
Catholics, for example, as one step away from them; on the brink of
conversion. It is in fact the withering
of our Christian tradition and the atheistic individualism and liberal
materialism that has resulted that has created the spiritual vacuum into which
Islam has seeped. Our moral and
religious compass points to nowhere save greed, decadence and vapidity. It may be a hard pill to swallow, but both
Islamists and Muslims alike do not resent one iota of our culture. In actual fact, they are disgusted by it, as
we should be too.
The book
itself is presented in a small, attractive casewrap hardcover from Notting Hill
Editions.
