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Recent Books

‘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

How society lost its voice

In the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, from where I have just returned, you cannot go to a party or church service without encountering the songs of the region, some of them dating from the civil war, some from the first settlements of the Irish and Scots, some composed yesterday for the use of the local bluegrass bands. People sing in two- or three-part harmony, and they accompany themselves on banjo, bass and guitar, to which they have added the Celtic fiddle, the Spanish mandolin and the Dobro guitar, held flat and played with a Hawaiian slide. I am reminded of the England in which I grew up, where music-making was woven into the fabric of everyday life — hymns in school assembly, choir in church, carol-singing at Christmas and in every other living room an upright piano.

Music is no longer something you produce. It is something you consume.

Full article published Sunday 11th January in the magazine of the

The Sunday Times

Can virtual life take over from real life?

The medium is the message, Marshall McLuhan famously said. And by changing the message we change ourselves. Never has this observation been so relevant as it is today, when many people spend their days at the computer, conducting friendships through Facebook and MySpace, posting videos on their websites, going into real society shielded by an iPod, or simply sending their avatar across the Grid in Second Life, looking for virtual relationships, virtual excitement and even virtual sex. Some welcome this, as a form of liberation. Shy people used to go trembling into society, hand in mouth; now they can go boldly into virtual society, hand on mouse.

Full article published in The Sunday Times November, 16th 2008