Roger Scruton
ISI Online Lectures
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"If you study the opinions that prevail in modern academies, you will
discover that they are of two kinds: those that emerge from the constant questioning
of traditional values, and those that emerge from the attempt to prevent any
questioning of the liberal alternatives. All of the following beliefs are effectively
forbidden on the normal American campus: (1) The belief in the superiority of
Western culture; (2) The belief that there might be morally relevant distinctions
between sexes, cultures, and religions; (3) The belief in good taste, whether
in literature, music, art, friendship, or behavior; and (4) The belief in traditional
sexual mores. You can entertain those beliefs, but it is dangerous to confess
to them, still more dangerous to defend them, lest you be held guilty of "hate
speech"—in other words, of judging some group of human beings adversely.
Yet the hostility to these beliefs is not founded on reason and is never subjected
to rational justification. The postmodern university has not defeated reason
but replaced it with a new kind of faith—a faith without authority and
without transcendence, a faith all the more tenacious in that it does not recognize
itself as such."
-- Roger Scruton, "Whatever
Happened to Reason?"
The
Return of Religion
Not so long ago, God was in residence. You could open a door and discover him,
and join with those who sang and prayed in his presence. Now he, like us, has
no fixed abode. But from this experience a new kind of religious consciousness
is being born: a turning of the inner eye towards the transcendental and a constant
invocation of ‘we know not what’.
Distrust of organised religion therefore goes hand in hand with a mourning for
the loss of it. We are distressed by the evangelical atheists, who are stamping
on the coffin in which they imagine God’s corpse to lie and telling us
to bury it quickly before it begins to smell. These characters have a violent
and untidy air: it is very obvious that something is missing from their lives,
something which would bring order and completeness in the place of random disgust.
Cities
for Living
The city, as we have inherited it from the ancient Greeks, is both an institution
and a way of life, one coterminous with the civilization of Europe. The confluence
of strangers in a single place and under a single law, there to live peacefully
side by side, joined by social networks, economic cooperation, and friendly
competition through sports and festivals, is among the most remarkable achievements
of our species, responsible for most of the great cultural, political, and religious
innovations of our civilization. Nothing is more precious in the Western heritage,
therefore, than the cities of Europe, recording the triumph of civilized humanity
not only in their orderly streets, majestic facades, and public monuments, but
also in their smallest architectural details and the intricate play of light
on their cornices and apertures.
Conservatives
Are Conservationists
Environmentalism has all the hallmarks of a left-wing cause: a class of victims
(future generations), an enlightened vanguard who fights for them (the eco-warriors),
powerful philistines who exploit them (the capitalists), and endless opportunities
to express resentment against the successful, the wealthy, and the West. The
style too is leftist: the environmentalist is young, disheveled, socially disreputable,
his mind focused on higher things; the opponent is dull, middle aged, smartly
dressed, and usually American. The cause is designed to recruit the intellectuals,
with facts and theories carelessly bandied about, and activism encouraged. Environmentalism
is something you join, and for many young people it has the quasi-redemptive
and identity-bestowing character of the twentieth-century revolutions. It has
its military wing, in Greenpeace and other activist organisations, and also
its intense committees, its odium theologicum and its campaigning journals.
Environmentalists who step out of line like Bjørn Lomborg are denounced
at the important meetings, and thereafter demonized as heretics. In short, it
has the appearance of those secular religions, like socialism, communism, and
anarchism, which turned the world upside down during the twentieth century.
Hence conservatives are instinctively opposed to it, and begin to look around
for facts and theories of their own, in order to fortify their conviction that
global warming, loss of biodiversity, rising sea levels, widespread pollution,
or whatever, are simply left-wing myths, comparable to the “crisis of
capitalism” prophesied by the nineteenth-century socialists. However,
the cause of the environment is not, in itself, a left-wing cause at all.
Art,
Beauty, and Judgment
It is impossible to live as though there are no aesthetic values, while living
a real life among real human beings. Manners, clothes, speech, and gestures—all
require careful attention to the way things look. In every sphere of human life,
from laying a table to giving a funeral speech, aesthetic choices are both necessary
and noticed. Without them we cannot solve the vast problem of coordination that
arises when a myriad private individuals crowd into a single public space. Hence,
in the democratic culture, aesthetic judgment begins to be experienced as an
affliction. It imposes an unsustainable burden, something that we must live
up to, a world of ideals and aspirations that is in sharp conflict with the
tawdriness and imperfection of our own improvised lives. It is perched like
an owl on our shoulders, while we try to hide our pet rodents in our clothes.
The temptation is to turn on it and shoo it away.
The
sacred and the human
It is Girard's theory, it seems to me, that most urgently needs to be debated,
now that atheist triumphalism is sweeping all nuances away. For it helps us
understand questions that even atheists must confront, and that their dogmatic
certainties otherwise obscure: what is religion; what draws people to it; and
how is it tamed?
A
Righter Shade of Green
While the Left pursues environmentalism to advance its global agenda,
Roger Scruton advocates the conservative solution that conservation is best
entrusted to local stewardship.
The
glory of the West is that life is an open book
Although it was probably no
part of Said’s intention, the combined effect of his attack on western
“orientalism”, Foucault’s attack on bourgeois “discourse”,
Derrida’s “deconstruction” and the general crushing of the
old curriculum under a weight of inquisitorial “theory” has led
to an orthodoxy of nihilism in the western academy. The effects of this nihilism
are widespread, as in the addictive drumbeats and soundbites that form the background
of popular culture.
The
Decline of Laughter
The ability of the self-appointed censors to discern ideological sins and heresies
has been vastly enhanced by their daily exercises in resentment. Such accusers
know how to discern racist, sexist, and homophobic thought-crimes in the most
innocent-seeming small talk. And they know no forgiveness, since they are cut
off, like all humorless people, from the process of self-knowledge. The desire
to accuse, which brings with it a reputation for virtue without the cost of
acquiring it, takes over from the normal flow of human forgiveness, creating
a wooden personality familiar to all who have had to deal with the lobbies that
now control public opinion in America. What should be our response to this?
Better
off without religion?
The rituals of religion are shared; and those who participate in them are drawn
into another kind of relationship with their neighbours than those that prevail
in the world of 'getting and spending'. People hunger for this kind of membership,
and the power of religion resides in its ability to provide it.
Stealing
from Churches
My years as a voyeur of holiness brought me into contact with true believers,
and taught me that faith transfigures everything it touches, and raises the
world to God.
Who Is
Noam Chomsky?
Someone who should have stuck to syntax. WSJ (Sept 26, 2006)
The
great hole of history
The problem revealed by 9/11, far from resolved five years on, is of a radical
Islamism driven by "transferable grievance"
Should
he have spoken? Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood'
The New Criterion, Volume 25, September 2006, page 22
'Islamofascism':
Beware of a religion without irony
Wall Street Journal (August
20, 2006)
"Old Profession, New Toleration", National Review (June 19, 2006)
"Sacrilege and Sacrament" in The Meaning of Marriage: Family, State, Market, and Morals
PDF file: Scruton on Fukuyama [PDF file: Fukuyama's new afterword to The End of History]
Roger Scruton on Immigration, Multiculturalism and the Need to Defend the Nation State
In the Footsteps of Moll Flanders, Banished to Rappahannock
"Thoroughly Modern Mill", Wall Street Journal (May 19, 2006)
"The Dangers of Internationalism", The Intercollegiate Review (Volume 40, Number 2; Fall/Winter 2005)
"The Political Problem of Islam", Intercollegiate Review: A Journal of Scholarship and Opinion (Fall 2002)
"How to be a Non-Liberal, Anti-Socialist Conservative", Intercollegiate Review: A Journal of Scholarship and Opinion (Spring 1993)
"Armchair moralising", New Statesman (22 Jan 2001): Scruton demolishes Peter Singer
Read Roger Scruton, regular wine columnist at the New Statesman
(Scruton also blogs irregularly at RogerScruton.com and at Right Reason)
Noteworthy Publications:
Immanuel Kant and the Iraq war
The Joy of Conservatism: Interview in the New Pantagruel
An Interview with Roger Scruton (Part I)
Wagner:
moralist or monster?
The New Criterion, February 2005
Know Your Place
The Spectator, 27 Nov 2004
The United States, the United Nations, and the Future of the Nation-State
Friends, Muslims, countrymen, lend us your ears
American Conservatism in the New Century
Godless Conservatism
Wall Street Journal, Friday, April 5, 1996, p. 8.
National Review articles:
The Moral Birds and Bees: Sex and marriage, properly understood
On Loyalty: The uses and abuses of a complicated virtue
The sex files - American attitudes toward sex are confused
A philosophy of pleasure - A Guide to Pleasure
Roger Scruton, The West and the Rest
(ISI Books, 2002).
Today the failures prevail: and this is one source of our present
danger. For failure is no longer localized in the place that produced it, but
carries its burden of resentment around the world.
Roger Scruton, Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred (Oxford UP, 2003).
Roger Scruton, News
From Somewhere: On Settling (Continuum, 2004).
ROGER SCRUTON is a conservative, but not the true-blue kind:
he's too green for that. His turquoise Toryism, keen on rural
traditions and against money-grubbing modernity, chimes with many people's love
for the countryside as a source of cultural, aesthetic and spiritual solace.
BOOK
REVIEW: The English countryside (Economist, 27 May 2004)
Roger Scruton, The
Need for Nations (Civitas, 2004).
The nation state provides us with the surest model for peace,
prosperity, and the defence of human rights. In spite of this, the idea of the
nation state is under attack, derided as a cause of conflict, and destined to
be replaced by more 'enlightened' forms of jurisdiction. This is in spite of
the fact that all recent attempts to transcend the nation state into some kind
of transnational political order have ended up either as totalitarian dictatorships
like the former Soviet Union or as unaccountable bureaucracies like the European
Union.
Bibliography:
Essays in City Journal:
Roger Scruton, "Becoming a Family," City Journal (Spring 2001 | Vol. 11, No. 2)
Roger Scruton, "What Is Acceptable Risk?" City Journal (Winter 2001 | Vol. 11, No. 1)
Roger Scruton, "Bring Back Stigma," City Journal (Autumn 2000 | Vol. 10, No. 4)
Roger Scruton, "Animal Rights," City Journal (Summer 2000 | Vol. 10, No. 3)
Roger Scruton, "After Modernism," City Journal (Spring 2000 | Vol. 10, No. 2)
Roger Scruton, "Real Men Have Manners," City Journal (Winter 2000 | Vol. 10, No. 1)
Roger Scruton, "Modern Manhood," City Journal (Autumn 1999 | Vol. 9, No. 4)
Roger Scruton, "Sleeping Cities," City Journal (Summer 1999 | Vol. 9, No. 3)
Roger Scruton, "Whatever Happened to Reason?," City Journal (Spring 1999 | Vol. 9, No. 2)
Roger Scruton, "Kitsch and the Modern Predicament," City Journal (Winter 1999 | Vol. 9, No. 1)
Roger Scruton, "Youth Culture's Lament," City Journal (Autumn 1998 | Vol. 8, No. 4)
Roger Scruton, "Communitarian Dreams," City Journal (Autumn 1996 | Vol. 6, No. 4)
Roger Scruton, "Why Lampposts and Phone Booths Matter," City Journal (Summer 1996 | Vol. 6, No. 3)
Roger Scruton, "Decencies for Skeptics," City Journal (Spring 1996 | Vol. 6, No. 2)
Misc. Articles by Roger Scruton:
Roger Scruton, "On the Mend," The Financial Times
Roger Scruton, "The Beauty of the Beasts," The Times, July 6, 1996
Roger Scruton, "A philosophy of pleasure," National Review, April 18, 1994 v46 n7 pS1(2)
Roger Scruton, "Kiss
Me, Cate," Vol. 45, National Review, 11-01-1993, pp 61
Review of Only Words, by Catharine A. MacKinnon (Harvard, 152 pp., $14.95)
Roger Scruton, "Picasso: Creator and Destroyer," National Review, Dec 9, 1988 v40 n24 p46(3)
Roger Scruton, "Robert Nozick, anarcho-capitalist"
Roger Scruton, "Fox Hunting: The Modern Case"
Oxford Union Debate on Hunting: Scruton speaks (Real Audio)
Salon Interview with Roger Scruton by Ray Sawhill
Book Introductions:
Leisure: the
Basis of Culture
by Josef Pieper.
New Introduction by Roger Scruton. 1998
New Translation by Gerald Malsbary.
St. Augustine's Press
Edmund
Burke: A Genius Reconsidered
by Russell Kirk.
Introduction (PDF)
by Roger Scruton.
Published Letters:
Roger Scruton in The New York Review of Books
Roger Scruton on Christopher Hitchens on Isaiah Berlin in The London Review of Books
Review: Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde
This bibliography of Internet resources on Roger Scruton is maintained by Christopher S. Morrissey
