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Recent Books

My plans and thoughts, Summer 2010

Comment on Recent Events.

After a six-year spell in the United States, I and my family have returned to England, where we will be resident as before in rural Wiltshire, outside Malmesbury. During the last year I was a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and I have been fortunate in having been offered a visiting position to continue on a part-time basis when I am in the US.   I also have an (unpaid) position as visiting professor in the philosophy department at Oxford, and have been appointed to a part-time paid position as research professor in the department of philosophy at St Andrews, where I shall be for some portion of the second semester of each year.

It is a great privilege to be teaching at St Andrews, in what is surely one of the very best philosophy departments in the English-speaking world, and during my time there earlier this year, when I gave the Gifford Lectures, I came to appreciate the town, the university and the quite special spirit of cooperation between staff and students. Although it lacks a music department, St Andrews is one of the most musical universities in Scotland, with a fine orchestra, an excellent choir, and a variety of chamber ensembles. During my visit in the spring I had the privilege of attending a concert performance of my one act opera, The Minister, performed by Ensemble 2021 and St Andrews opera, and conducted by Michael Downes, the resident director of music. This was a highlight in three weeks of intense musical, theatrical and intellectual experiences, which brought home to me what a jewel among universities St Andrews is. After 15 years working outside  British universities, the thought of a 6-8 week residence each year at such an institution gives me great pleasure.

But not everyone, it seems, is quite so pleased. A campaign has been mounted, apparently, to protest against my appointment, on account of my views on homosexuality. Readers of Sexual Desire, first published in 1986, and still in print with Continuum, will know that I have quite complex views about homosexuality, that I do not regard it as a perversion, and that I make a radical distinction between the male and the female versions, the first tending towards sexual pleasure, the second towards emotional involvement. As far as I can tell, the campaign against me makes no reference to that book, but dwells instead on a short article that I wrote defending the Catholic Church’s position on adoption. Others, writing on this blog, have taken me to task for that article, arguing that homosexual couples have as much right to adopt a child as heterosexual couples, and that to deny this is to adopt a posture of ‘discrimination’ towards homosexuals.

My response is that adoption does not concern the rights of the adopting parents, but the needs of the adopted child, and that the Church’s view, that a child needs a mother and a father in a permanent marital relationship, has a lot to be said for it. Of course, a child can get by in other situations and may have a happy childhood being brought up by two mothers or two fathers. But it is reasonable to believe that such cases are exceptional, and that it would be taking a risk that we are not entitled to take, to put a child in the care of an acknowledged homosexual couple.

Our society made a collective choice during the 1960s, a choice that was embodied in the Sexual Offences Act 1967, to de-criminalise homosexual acts between consenting adults. Most people today welcome that choice, whatever they think about the gay ‘scene’, and the culture that it has engendered. They recognise that it is sometimes right that sexual acts of which this or that section of the community disapprove, should nevertheless be decriminalised. It does not follow that these acts cannot be discussed with an open mind and with a view to making a distinction between what is normal and what is abnormal, what is right and what is wrong, what fulfils our sexual nature and what frustrates it. I may be wrong in thinking that the normalisation of homosexuality, which may bring benefits to some, imposes a large social cost, by downgrading the institution of the nuclear family. This is not the place to argue the point. But it is surely not a crime to think in that way? The fast and loose accusation of ‘homophobia’, which is one of those ‘thought crimes’ for which accusation and guilt are not clearly distinguished, and for which prosecutor and judge are always one and the same, is a serious threat to freedom of speech about an issue that is of pressing public concern.

It is worth pointing out that homosexuals have not always pressed for the normalisation of their way of life. From Oscar Wilde to Quentin Crisp many homosexuals have found self-respect in flamboyant abnormality, and the great homosexual artists of the 20^th century – Marcel Proust, André Gide, W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Michael Tippett, Virginia Woolf, Ethyl Smyth, Duncan Grant, Jean Cocteau among a hundred others – were for the most part at peace with a culture that gave a central place to heterosexual marriage. They upheld in their art the institutions that they defied in their life. And nothing was further from their mind than to normalise their defiance. Of course, not all of them respected the nuclear family or the bourgeois order, and one important homosexual writer – Jean Genet – cherished his homosexuality as continuous with the life of crime (for which Sartre devoted a hagiography to him, entitled Saint Genet). I don’t suppose Genet’s powerful Nôtre Dame des Fleurs is very familiar to those who anticipate an ‘atmosphere of intimidation’ in the lectures that I shall be giving in St Andrews. But I am fairly certain that, if there is intimidation, it is I and not they that will be the target.

Followers of this site will be interested to know that, while a resident scholar at AEI during the past year I finished a book on the environment, provisionally entitled Green Philosophy, in which I attempt to wrestle some sense out of current confusions. I defend a position that I call oikophilia – the love of the oikos or settlement – and believe that the current emphasis on economic solutions makes sense only when we have learned to put the oikos back in oikonomia. For your interest here is an extract from the preface:

The problems of the environment seem so far beyond our reach that we lurch from opinion to opinion and policy to policy with nothing to cling to, save the thread of our shared concern. We believe the scaremongers, since no one can be as gloomy as that without a reason. We believe the sceptics, since they offer hope, and remind us that the scaremongers have made an emotional investment in their gloom. And we watch as governments, NGOs and pressure groups both exploit our anxieties and offer to assuage them.

Without the resources of government it is hard to address such problems as climate change, oil spills, plastic pollution, and the loss of bio-diversity. But history tells us that large-scale projects in the hands of bureaucrats soon cease to be accountable, and that regulations imposed by the state have side effects that often worsen what they aim to cure. Moreover, the same people who promise vast schemes for clean energy and reduced pollution, also promise vast schemes to expand airports, build roads, and subsidize the motor industry. The fact is that, when problems pass to governments, they pass out of our hands. Our own understanding was shaped by local needs, not global uncertainties: it is the product of day-to-day emergencies, and its wisdom is the wisdom of survival.

But there is a lesson in this for the environmentalists. No large-scale project will succeed if it is not rooted in our small-scale practical reasoning. For it is we in the end who have to act, who have to accept and cooperate with the decisions made in our name, and who have to make whatever sacrifices will be required for the sake of future generations. It seems to me that current environmental movements, many of which demand far-reaching and even unimaginable government projects, as well as fundamental changes in our way of life, have failed to learn this lesson. Their schemes, like their cries of alarm, frighten the ordinary citizen without recruiting him, and he stands in the midst of a thousand warnings hoping to get through to the end of his life without going insane from the noise.

In this book I develop another way of looking at environmental problems, one that is, I hope, in keeping with human nature and also with the conservative philosophy that springs from the routines of everyday life. I do not offer detailed solutions to particular problems. Instead I propose a perspective on those problems that will make them seem like our problems, which we can start to solve, using our given moral equipment. That, it seems to me, is the enduring message of conservatism. And if it is greeted with hostility by those who cannot encounter a problem without advocating radical solutions with themselves in charge, then that is only further proof of its validity.

My intention in this book is to present the environmental question as a whole and in all its ramifications. Hence I have drawn on philosophy, psychology and economics, as well as on the writings of ecologists and historians. 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, and the task of government is to create the conditions in which the right kind of motive can emerge and solidify. I describe this motive (or rather, family of motives) as oikophilia, the love and feeling for home, and I set out the conditions in which oikophilia arises and the task of the state in making room for it. I defend local initiatives against global schemes, civil association against political activism, and small-scale institutions of friendship against large-scale and purpose-driven campaigns. Hence my argument runs counter to much of the environmental literature today, and may be greeted with scepticism by readers who nevertheless share my central concerns. For this reason I have explored the first principles of practical reasoning, and the ways in which rational beings can reach cooperative solutions to problems that cannot be addressed either by the individual or by the centralised state. I am critical equally of top-down regulations and goal-directed movements, and see the environmental problem as arising from the loss of equilibrium that ensues, when people cease to understand their surroundings as a home. This loss has many causes; but not the least among them is the wrong use of legislation, and the fragmentation of society that comes about, when the bureaucrats take charge of it.

The book will be published in the spring by Grove Atlantic. The argument is more philosophical than practical, but the conclusions coincide with many of those offered by Zac Goldsmith in The Constant Economy, also published by Grove Atlantic. The election of Goldsmith to Parliament is one of the pleasing results of the recent election.

My time in America also involved teaching at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Arlington – a Catholic graduate school, preparing students for the Masters degree and for the doctorate in Psychology. I was greatly stimulated by this close contact with dedicated students for whom faith and healing are two aspects of a single life-path. At one point, because we were studying the effect of the internet on human relations, I made the mistake of joining Facebook. At first I was intrigued by the ease with which strangers would approach me and ask to be my friend. After a while, however, the whole thing became alarming and a trifle insane. At the point when I had 230 unanswered friend requests or requests to join or follow this or that, I finally discovered how to get off Facebook and lead a normal life. It was like discovering White Burgundy all over again.

Soul Music

How we describe pop music proves that we find moral significance in music. How do we tell what music we should and should not encourage?

“The ways of poetry and music are not changed anywhere without change in the most important laws of the city.” So wrote Plato in The Republic (4.424c). And Plato is famous for having given what is perhaps the first theory of character in music, proposing to allow some modes and to forbid others according to the character which can be heard in them. Plato deployed the concept of mimesis, or imitation, to explain why bad character in music encourages bad character in its devotees. The context suggests that he had singing, dancing, and marching in mind rather than the silent listening that we know from the concert hall. But, however we fill out the details, there is no doubt that music, for Plato, was something that could be judged in the same moral terms we judge one another, and that the terms in question denoted virtues and vices like nobility, dignity, temperance, and chastity on the one hand, and sensuality, belligerence, and indiscipline on the other.

Article published in The American February 2010

A little about my philosophy of everyday life

‘On Beauty and Consolation’ an interview with Wim Kayser for Dutch TV

This film says a little about my philosophy of everyday life, in the form of an interview, made for a series which first appeared on Dutch television in 1995. 

            All the best for the new year,

            Roger

‘Why Beauty Matters’

This post is just to thank all the many people who have contacted me, either here or by e-mail, to comment on the film, Why Beauty Matters, which I wrote and presented and which was shown last Saturday on BBC2. Most of the comments have been favourable, and I have been very touched by the many viewers who felt that the film renewed their own love of, and need for, beauty.

Some viewers criticised the film for seeming to imply that there is no good modern art or architecture, and that the rubbish which should be consigned to the dust-heap of history (i.e. to Charles Saatchi’s collection) is all that is now being produced. I agree that it would be quite wrong to imply this, and I had hoped to distance myself from any such implication. Alas, however, the extremely tight constraints on time meant that any attempt to be more nuanced than I was would have ended making no point at all. Of course there are plenty of artists practising now who are pursuing aesthetic and spiritual goals, and who have the redemption rather than the desecration of human life as their underlying purpose. David Inshaw, for example, the American Steven Assael, and people like David Hockney and Lucien Freud. Nor would I wish to dismiss the best of modern architecture – even if I believe that modern architecture, taken as a whole, has been part crime, part failure, largely because of the egoism of its practitioners. I respect neo-classicists like Quinlan Terry, Allen Greenberg and Leon Krier, eclectics like Robert Stern and clean-line modernists of the kind that still exist in Scandinavia, holding their own against the producers of computerised gadgets. The important point, however, is not to come up with lists of good guys and bad guys, but to take examples, to show why beauty matters, and to make judgements. That was what I tried to do.

If the film is in any way a success it is largely due to the director, Louise Lockwood, who found images to match the words, and who made the images speak even when the words failed to do so.

The flame that was snuffed out by freedom |

The flame that was snuffed out by freedom | Roger Scruton – Times Online. November 7, 2009.

For ten years before 1989 I was in the habit of visiting Eastern Europe to support the fragile underground educational networks there. I would meet my contacts on street corners at prearranged times, to be taken by tram to some smoke-filled room in an outlying apartment, where a group of whispering “students” had gathered to meet me.

Every knock on the door was followed by a frozen silence and, from time to time, someone would lift a corner of the curtain and peer anxiously into the street. Books in many languages lined the walls and as often as not, a crucifix would be fastened to the wall above the shelves.

Full article

Thanks to everyone

Very interesting comments, and I apologize for being out of touch for so long – a lot has been happening which has taken my attention away from the discussions on this site. But I now have a new position, at the American Enterprise Institute, and some help with the secretarial side of things. So I will do my best to respond henceforth to the many serious thoughts that people have been sending in. It will take some time to clear the back-log, but meanwhile thank you all for your patience.

Also thank you to photographer Sherry Loveless for glorious picture of the trees in Virginia.

Roger Scruton

Islam and the West: Lines of Demarcation

Azure Winter Issue, 5769 /2009, No. 35

The West today is involved in a protracted and violent struggle with the forces of radical Islam. This conflict is intensely difficult, both because of our enemy’s dedication to his cause, and also, perhaps most of all, because of the enormous cultural shift that has occurred in Europe and America since the end of the Vietnam War. Put simply, the citizens of Western states have lost their appetite for foreign wars; they have lost the hope of scoring any but temporary victories; and they have lost confidence in their way of life. Indeed, they are no longer sure what that way of life requires of them.

At the same time, they have been confronted with a new opponent, one who believes that the Western way of life is profoundly flawed, and perhaps even an offense against God. In a “fit of absence of mind,” Western societies have allowed this opponent to gather in their midst; sometimes, as in France, Britain, and the Netherlands, in ghettos which bear only tenuous and largely antagonistic relations to the surrounding political order. And in both America and Europe there has been a growing desire for appeasement: a habit of public contrition; an acceptance, though with heavy heart, of the censorious edicts of the mullahs; and a further escalation in the official repudiation of our cultural and religious inheritance. Twenty years ago, it would have been inconceivable that the archbishop of Canterbury would give a public lecture advocating the incorporation of Islamic religious law (shari’ah) into the English legal system. Today, however, many people consider this to be an arguable point, and perhaps the next step on the way to peaceful compromise.

All this suggests that we in the West stand on the edge of a dangerous period of concession, in which the legitimate claims of our own culture and inheritance will be ignored or downplayed in an attempt to prove our peaceful intentions. It will be some time before the truth will be allowed to play its all-important role of rectifying our current mistakes and preparing the way for the next ones. This means that it is more necessary than ever for us to rehearse the truth and come to a clear and objective understanding of what is at stake.

Why can’t we clean up our act?

Why can’t we clean up our act? Sunday Times  Magazine, Sunday, 1st March, 2009.

The problems of the environment seem so far beyond our reach that we lurch from opinion to opinion and policy to policy with nothing to cling to save the thread of our shared concern. We believe the scaremongers, since nobody can be as gloomy as that without a reason. We believe the sceptics, since they offer hope, and remind us that the scaremongers have made an emotional investment in their gloom. And we watch as governments both exploit our anxieties and offer to assuage them. More windmills, more recycling, more carbon trading, more global treaties: huge solutions for huge problems, and all of them involving a vast increase in government power and a rough way with dissenters.

We are not reassured by this. History tells us that large-scale projects in the hands of bureaucrats soon cease to be accountable. And the same people who promise vast schemes for clean energy and reduced pollution promise vast schemes to expand airports, build roads and subsidise the motor industry. The fact is, when problems pass to governments, they pass out of our grasp. Our understanding was shaped by local needs, not global uncertainties: it is the product of day-to-day emergencies and conflicts, and its wisdom is the wisdom of survival. But there is a lesson in this for the environmentalists. No large-scale project will succeed if it is not rooted in our small-scale emotions.

Roger Scruton

Forgiveness and Irony

Wherever the Western vision of political order has gained a foothold, we find freedom of expression: not merely the freedom to disagree with others publicly about matters of faith and morality but also the freedom to satirize solemnity and to ridicule nonsense, including solemnity and nonsense of the sacred kind. This freedom of conscience requires secular government. But what makes secular government legitimate?

That question is the starting point of Western political philosophy, the consensus among modern thinkers being that sovereignty and law are made legitimate by the consent of those who must obey them. They show this consent in two ways: by a real or implied “social contract,” whereby each person agrees with every other to the principles of government; and by a political process through which each person participates in the making and enacting of the law. The right and duty of participation is what we mean, or ought to mean, by “citizenship,” and the distinction between political and religious communities can be summed up in the view that political communities are composed of citizens and religious communities of subjects—of those who have “submitted.” If we want a simple definition of the West as it is today, the concept of citizenship is a good starting point. That is what millions of migrants are roaming the world in search of: an order that confers security and freedom in exchange for consent.

Full article published winter issue 2009 vol. 19, no. 1 of City Journal

The Flight from Beauty

Today, provocations and transgressions of borders are celebrated as aestetic ideals. Early modernists like T S Eliot, Matisse and Schönberg, however, did not try to destroy tradition – but to reconquer it.

The disruptive, the transgressive and the disturbing are celebrated by the art of our time, with beauty often downgraded as something too sweet, too escapist and too far from realities to deserve our undeceived attention. Qualities that previously denoted aesthetic failure are now cited as marks of success; while the pursuit of beauty is often regarded as a retreat from the real task of artistic creation, which is to challenge orthodoxy and to break free from conventional constraints. Arthur Danto has even argued that beauty is both deceptive as a goal and in some way antipathetic to the mission of modern art. (The Abuse of Beauty.)

Published in Axess Magazine Issue no. 7, October 2008