Scruton on what children can teach us about art

From the late Sir Roger Scruton’s documentary “Why Beauty Matters”:

“Art needs creativity, and creativity is about sharing. It is a call to others to see the world as the artist sees it. That is why we find beauty in the naïve art of children. Children are not giving us ideas in the place of creative images, nor are they wallowing in ugliness. They are trying to affirm the world as they see it and to share what they feel. Something of the child’s pure delight in creation survives in every true work of art.”

— Sir Roger Scruton

Scruton makes this aside as a point of contrast with modern art—which is intentionally insular, confrontational, transgressive, and over-intellectual if not ideological—but in doing so he makes a broader point about what art is and what it’s for. This description of children’s art is also honestly and accurately observed.

I’ve thought of this passage many times over the last few weeks, ever since my eldest son eagerly presented me with a picture he had drawn. It was a pencil and highlighter drawing that showed me holding my youngest son at the dinner table—a picture of his dad and one of his little brothers. It was drawn from life without my noticing, and joy he took both in drawing and giving it to me, the joy in and care taken over the details, including the stubble of my beard, and the simple, straightforward, honest love in the picture itself have stuck with me. My kids have drawn many things for me, but this one in particular struck me as a clear example of Scruton’s “pure delight” in “sharing.”

Last week I tacked it to the wall of my office at school. May any art I create be motivated as purely as my son’s.

“Why Beauty Matters” is worth your while, as I wrote here almost four years ago following Scruton’s death. You can watch the whole thing on Vimeo here.

Lewis and Scruton on monarchy, titles, and celebrity

I’ve been reading Against the Tide, a posthumous collection of Roger Scruton’s journalism and essays collected by his literary executor, Mark Dooley. It’s good stuff so far, though not as deep or meaty as Scruton’s longer work (like the essays in A Political Philosophy or especially Confessions of a Heretic) owing to the limitations of journalism. But, also owing to the limitations of journalism, these pieces are punchier, more humorously combative. You can feel Scruton winking in some of them in a way you seldom get when he’s unpacking Kant or Wagner.

At any rate, this passage on aristocracy and its vulgar modern ersatz, celebrity, published as a “diary” piece in the Spectator, August 25, 2016, particularly caught my eye:

Of course, in the first-name culture that now prevails, titles might seem merely decorative, and offensive to the cult of equality. The death of the Duke of Westminster has briefly raised the question of what a titled aristocracy does for us. My own view is that titles are much to be preferred to wealth as a mark of distinction, since they give glamour without power. They promote the idea of purely immaterial reward, and represent eminence as something to live up to, not a power to be used. Of course they can be abused, and a kind of snobbery goes with them. Take them away, however, and you have the mean-minded obsessions of ‘celebrity’ culture, the American idolization of wealth or the power cult of the Russian mafia. An inherited title sanctifies a family and its ancient territory. The poetry of this is beautifully expressed by Proust, who wrote of an aristocracy from which everything had been taken except its titles—think of ‘Guermantes’ and compare it with ‘Trump’.

That paragraph caught my eye because it echoes, at a remove of three quarters of a century but with startlingly precise parallels, this favorite passage from CS Lewis’s wartime essay “Equality”—coincidentally also published in the Spectator, and on almost the same date, August 27, 1943:

We Britons should rejoice that we have contrived to reach much legal democracy (we still need more of the economic) without losing our ceremonial Monarchy. For there, right in the midst of our lives, is that which satisfies the craving for inequality, and acts as a permanent reminder that medicine is not food. Hence a man’s reaction of Monarchy is a kind of test. Monarchy can easily be ‘debunked’; but watch the faces, mark well the accents, of the debunkers. These are men whose tap-root in Eden has been cut: whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach—men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, of film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.

You can read the entirety of Lewis’s essay “Equality” at the Spectator’s archives (paywalled) or here. It’s collected in Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays, which is perhaps my favorite short collection of Lewis’s writings. I’ve previously quoted the line about “gobbling poison” as recently as the new year, in this post on Ernst Jünger’s vision of the homo religiosus in The Forest Passage.

Modern architecture—there to be demolished

From the late Sir Roger Scruton’s documentary “Why Beauty Matters,” which I wrote about last year:

When the public began to react against the brutal concrete style of the 1960s, architects simply replaced it with a new kind of junk: glass walls hung on steel frames, with absurd details that don’t match. The result is another kind of failure to fit. It is there simply to be demolished.

You can watch this illustrated with depressing simplicity in this short video on YouTube.

Two recent articles on the topic:

This longish piece by art and architecture critic Catesby Leigh takes Donald Trump’s lame duck mandate of classicism as “the preferred and default style” for federal architecture, especially in DC, as a jumping off point. Leigh then examines a flap over architectural style at the University of Virginia that, years before, prefigured the dustup over Trump’s reform. Leigh strikingly compares the self-consciously “exogenous” and “visually abrasive” modernist buildings at UVA—and many, many other places—with classical architecture, noting that while the classical “is not a ‘style’” properly speaking,

It is a visual language of enduring, objective forms wedded to a coherent syntax, a language whose flexibility has permitted stylistic variations in federal architecture ranging from Palladian classicism to art deco. Classical buildings are composed in a manner analogous to the human body, with an organic hierarchy of parts comprising a legible, resonant whole. We are instinctively drawn to such buildings. The same cannot be said of modernist architecture’s dehumanized forms.

From Scruton again (beginning at 49:27 here):

The same kind of criticism [of classical, representational art] is aimed at traditionalists in architecture. One target is Leon Krier, architect of the Prince of Wales’s model town of Poundbury. Designing modest streets, laid out in traditional ways, using the well-tried and much-loved details that have served us down the centuries, Leon Krier has created a genuine settlement. The proportions are human proportions. The details are restful to the eye. This is not great or original architecture, nor does it try to be. It is a modest attempt to get things right by following patterns and examples laid down by tradition.

Modest, well-tried, much-loved, genuine, restful, and human are, as it happens, virtual antonyms of modern architecture.

In his essay, Leigh goes on to note the roots of the preference for classical architecture in America’s early history: the inspirations from still-standing (I’ll come back to that) Greek and Roman examples, the influence of America’s first ally, France, and the values and virtues the proportion, dignity, and order of the style and its variations were meant to embody and encourage.

Nevertheless, Leigh notes, while “Architecture can have a political role—to ennoble the institutions it houses . . . it runs deeper than politics. Goethe famously referred to it as ‘frozen music.’”

Another important line of argument that Leigh develops—important in this ruthlessly and unimaginatively pragmatic age—is that of cost and return on investment.

During last year’s EO controversy, the AIA regurgitated the misleading argument that classical design “can increase the cost of a project (to up to three times as much)” in a letter to Trump. Many laypeople are taken in by this canard, but the truth is that modernism’s proclivity for abstract, unornamented surfaces and details means construction elements must be dimensioned very precisely to keep the weather out. And that is expensive. Classicism allows for greater tolerances because joints can be concealed by pilasters, belt courses, cornices, and so on. Modernist designs can also be harder to make weather-resistant because of their frequent eschewal of time-tested local usages of materials and details. “The end result when compared apples-to-apples (in terms of quality, details, and finished execution),” a gifted classical architect wrote to me not long ago, “is a modern[ist] building will be more expensive, it will have a shorter lifespan, and it will also require higher maintenance and upkeep costs.” This can and should be verified.

Modernist buildings, as Scruton, Tom Wolfe, and others have observed, do not last.

On that point, here’s the second piece that recently caught my eye. At The Critic, Andrew Hunt looks at ugly modernist buildings and their consequences—not only aesthetic and human, but environmental. Hunt:

[Modern politicians] fetishise house-building, but fail to notice that building even a two-bed house creates 80 tonnes of carbon and uses 150 tonnes of materials—the same amount of landfill as an average household creates over 300 years! By comparison, powering your house produces about 2 tonnes of CO2 per year. Even if you could build a truly net zero home tomorrow (which you can’t), it would take forty years to break even.  

A big part of the problem is modern construction materials. Producing concrete (180kg of CO2/tonne) and steel (1.85tonnes of CO2/tonne!) are two of the most ubiquitous and environmentally destructive industries on the planet.

Badly designed and built of poor materials at great cost both financially and in terms of pollution and carbon output, modernist buildings are unloved and rapidly superannuate:

Pre-stressed concrete meanwhile has a lifespan of 50-100 years, meaning many of the first concrete structures have already crumbled into carcinogenic dust. . . . [B]adly built eyesores are being torn down barely a generation after their construction: tower blocks from the 60s, council offices from the 70s and shopping centres from the 90s. That’s billions of tonnes of fossil fuels and mining degradation ending up as landfill.

Hunt links the above to this article, “The problem with reinforced concrete,” and also contrasts problems with modern building materials with the styles and building materials of the past:

sandstone has a carbon footprint of just 77kg/tonne, and wood can be CO2 negative as it locks in carbon. Those old materials last longer as well. There are stone buildings that have been knocking around for more than a millennium—Rome’s Pantheon is 1900 years old. If treated properly, wooden buildings can last almost as long. The world’s oldest inhabited house in the Faroe Islands is 900 years old and built from wood. China’s ornately carved Nanchang Temple has been welcoming Buddhists since the 8th century.

And the kicker, the most striking paragraph in the essay to me, perhaps the most ironic and certainly the bitterest:

Isn’t it odd? Our ancestors built stunning buildings that were environmentally sustainable, have lasted for centuries and are admired and cherished. Almost all of them managed it—Greeks and Romans, Ottomans and Venetians, Tudors and Georgians. Yet they had none of the technology or machinery we have today. In every other sphere of life, we are thrashing our forebears. Why is construction the odd one out? And why have we accepted it for so long?

One hopes we won’t have to for much longer. But, given the vested interests—political, cultural, ideological—noted in both pieces, I’m not holding my breath.

For a gleeful mid-1970s jaunt through modern architecture that slaughters all kinds of sacred cows, starting with the vandals at Bauhaus and continuing through Le Corbusier and accomplices, read Tom Wolfe’s short book From Bauhaus to Our House sometime. In the meantime, watch Scruton’s documentary wherever you can find it, and appreciate the fitting, the settled, and the human wherever it still stands in your neighborhood.

Scruton and the Preacher on foretelling the future

The first book I recall reading by Sir Roger Scruton was The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope—a title and theme that are right up my alley. In the introduction of the book he explains his purpose:

My concern . . . is with certain fallacies that seem to justify hope, or at least to make disappointment bearable. My examples come from many areas, but they share a common characteristic, which is that they show, at the heart of the unscrupulous optimist’s vision, a mistake that is so blindingly obvious that only someone in the grip of self-deception could have overlooked it. It is against this self-deception that pessimism is directed. A study of the uses of pessimism will reveal a most interesting feature of human nature, which is that obvious errors are the hardest to rectify. They may involve mistakes of reasoning; but their causes lie deeper than reason, in emotional needs that will defend themselves with every weapon to hand rather than relinquish the comfort of their easily-won illusions.

He begins the next paragraph with this devastating line:

“The belief that human beings can either foresee the future or control it to their own advantage ought not to have survived an attentive reading of the Iliad, still less of the Old Testament.”

— Sir Roger Scruton, The Uses of Pessimism

That particular line—and especially its allusion to the Old Testament—came back to me yesterday morning during church, when, as I leafed through one of my oldest Bibles, I came across the following verse from Ecclesiastes (which, me being the pessimist that I am, is one of my favorite books of the Bible, along with Job and Jonah). Some version of myself in years past had underlined it in heavy black ink.

“A fool also is full of words: a man cannot tell what shall be; and what shall be after him, who can tell him?”

— Ecclesiastes X, xiv

A lesson that, per Scruton’s observation above, should be obvious from even a cursory familiarity with history or literature. But as the Preacher reminds us near the beginning of his book, “There is no remembrance of former things,” and, lest we get on our high horse, presentists that we are, “neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.”

The reminder we may need most in our technocratic and unscrupulously optimistic age.

Three quotations on the artificiality of civilization

Detail of A View Through Three Arches of the Third Storey of the Colosseum, by CW Eckersberg

First—by artificial I do not mean fake, but rather the product of art in the old sense or craftsmanship, the result of creativity and hard, skilled work.

From Chapter 10, “Primitivism and History,” of Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s 1930 book The Revolt of the Masses:

Nature is always with us. It is self-supporting. In the forests of Nature we can be savages with impunity. We can likewise resolve never to cease being so, without further risk than the coming of other peoples who are not savages. But, in principle, it is possible to have peoples who are perennially primitive. Breyssig has called these “the peoples of perpetual dawn,” those who have remained in a motionless, frozen twilight, which never progresses towards midday.

This is what happens in the world which is mere Nature. But it does not happen in the world of civilisation which is ours. Civilisation is not “just there,” it is not self-supporting. It is artificial and requires the artist or the artisan. If you want to make use of the advantages of civilisation, but are not prepared to concern yourself with the upholding of civilisation—you are done. In a trice you find yourself left without civilisation. Just a slip, and when you look around everything has vanished into air.

Ortega’s concern throughout The Revolt of the Masses is with the “mass-man,” the creature of the West’s middle class following the explosion of industry, technology, and prosperity in the 19th century, and most especially with the fact that the mass-man takes civilization and everything that has made his life possible for granted:

The mass-man believes that the civilisation into which he was born and which he makes use of, is as spontaneous and self-producing as Nature, and ipso facto he is changed into primitive man.

When I read these passages they reminded me of the following from CS Lewis’s essay “The Necessity of Chivalry,” which I have revisited many times over the last few years. Having begun with a quotation from Malory on the character of Sir Launcelot, “Thou wert the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies; thou wert the sternest knight to they mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest,” Lewis meditates on the fusion of meekness and sternness:

The medieval ideal brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate towards one another. It brought them together for that very reason. It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson. It demanded valour of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop.

Like Ortega, Lewis has a clear picture of the consequences of neglecting, of not maintaining this artificial work:

If we cannot produce Launcelots, humanity falls into two sections—those who can deal in blood and iron but cannot be ‘meek in hall’, and those who are ‘meek in hall’ but useless in battle—for the third class, who are both brutal in peace and cowardly in war, need not here be discussed. When this dissociation of the two halves of Launcelot occurs, history becomes a horribly simple affair. The ancient history of the Near East is like that. Hardy barbarians swarm down from their highlands and obliterate a civilisation. Then they become civilised themselves and go soft. Then a new wave of barbarians comes down and obliterates them. Then the cycle beings over again. Modern machinery will not change this cycle; it will only enable the same thing to happen on a larger scale. Indeed, nothing much else can ever happen if the ‘stern’ and the ‘meek’ fall into two mutually exclusive classes. And never forget that this is their natural condition. The man who combines both characters—the knight—is a work not of nature but of art; of that art which has human beings, instead of canvas or marble, for its medium.

Finally, the line from the late Sir Roger Scruton that served as the keystone of his thought:

Good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.

I’m reading the authorized English translation of Ortega’s Revolt of the Masses, which is available in its entirely online here. You can watch CSLewisDoodle’s rendition of “The Necessity of Chivalry” here. It is collected in Present Concerns, which is where I first read it. Perhaps the best place to start with Scruton’s thought as encapsulated in that last line is Culture Counts: Faith & Feeling in a World Besieged, which I read last year.

2020 in books: Roger Scruton

The late Sir Roger Scruton interviewed on Uncommon Knowledge in 2017

Today marks the first anniversary of Sir Roger Scruton’s death. When he died, the foremost voice for a traditional conservatism rooted in virtue, a proper understanding of human nature, and love of home—in traditions and ideas rather than personalities and slogans—died with him.

His death came as a shock to me. I had received an invitation to an event to be held in his honor in 2019 but couldn’t afford to go and passed it up, thinking there would come another chance someday. Now I know there won’t. But what I did have were many of Scruton’s books—some of which I had read, many of which I just hadn’t gotten around to yet. With his passing I decided to set myself a project of reading as many of them as I could in the remainder of 2020.

It turned out to be a good year for it.

The Sir Roger Scruton Farewell Tour

I called my project “the Sir Roger Scruton Farewell Tour” both as a wry joke and as a way to draw out the goodbye. Learning of his death was an unwelcome surprise; a “farewell tour,” on the other hand—that would take a while, offering a chance for appreciation. I enjoyed it greatly, and ended the year more grateful than ever for Scruton’s life and work.

I read twelve books as part of the tour. All of them were good, but five were standouts even among the Scruton books I’ve read. I’ve given that top five its own section below. But first, here are the other seven:

Runners up

The Soul of the World—A dense but strongly and beautifully argued case against the scientific reductivism of modern atheism and a careful examination of the many hints of the transcendent that fill our lives—whether art, music, the world around us, or simply living with and knowing other people. This book builds upon his 2010 Gifford lectures, published as The Face of God, and is further refined by On Human Nature.

How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism—The longest of Scruton’s books that I’ve read, this one argues that conservation of the environment is, properly speaking, a conservative issue, and notes the irony of environmentalism’s place among the odd assortment of other modern progressive causes. He offers trenchant critiques of the dogmatism of activists and their search for universally applicable top-down solutions, as exemplified by the bungling environmental measures undertaken by the unaccountable bureaucracy of the EU. Scruton’s view of conservation and the environment, by contrast, is one rooted in what he calls oikophilia, love of home, and piety toward our inheritance. Conservation must be local and meet local needs. Long and detailed but compellingly argued. I shared a passage from this book on the blog back in the spring.

Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left—A recently revised edition of his most controversial book, Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands works through the most important Leftist ideologues of the twentieth century, from the New Left’s roots in pre- and immediately post-War German philosophy through its flowering in first French and then American universities. Scruton is most concerned with what he, borrowing from Orwell, calls “Newspeak,” which is the leftist use of language to conjure or cast spells rather than to describe an independent reality. Dense but rewarding reading, with clear and scathingly written critiques of the ideologies that have birthed the worst of our modern mental confusions. I posted a selection of excerpts on the blog over the summer.

An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy—A good short guide to major issues in modern philosophy, written in a friendly conversational style.

The West and the Rest: Globalisation and the Terrorist Threat—A short, compelling response to September 11. Scruton considers the post-Enlightenment political and social trends of the West that created a world in which non-Westerners, confronted with the rapidly spreading global challenge of secular liberal politics and culture, could find terrorism a viable response, and in which non-Westerners and the West would respond half-heartedly and with incomprehension. A considerably more nuanced assessment than most offered either in the aftermath or since.

Beauty: A Very Short Introduction—One of Scruton’s best and most accessible books, a witty and wide-ranging introduction to the concept of beauty—what it is, how to judge it (and whether we can judge it), why it matters, and what it says about us as human persons. Possibly the best starting point for reading Scruton.

Souls in the Twilight—The first of Scruton’s fiction that I’ve read, a collection of short stories about individuals struggling to find meaning in a world in which all of the old avenues to transcendence—family, community, faith—have disappeared, replaced with nihilism. Bleak but well written, this set of stories sold me on his fiction—I have his novels Notes from Underground and The Disappeared on standby now.

Top five

While I would recommend any of the books in this post, these five were my favorites—the ones I most enjoyed and that gave me the most food for thought, both as I read them and in the months since. Presented in no particular order, my five favorite Scruton books of the farewell tour:

A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism

An excellent collection of essays on a variety of topics of political importance, including marriage, evil, animal rights and vegetarianism, and the obscure bureaucratese of unaccountable government agencies. The best essay in the collection, and one especially relevant to our moment, is “The Totalitarian Temptation,” a critique of totalitarian government, an examination of its origins, and a warning against the appeal of power driven by resentment. Scruton delivered this address in 2003 but it reads like an explanation of all that has happened over the summer of 2020. You can read my more detailed Goodreads review here.

Confessions of a Heretic

Another excellent essay collection, this one ranging more broadly than mere politics. In each essay Scruton offers his “heretical” opinions on a given subject, whether art, dancing, modern architecture, conservationism, the proper role of government, Western civilization and its defense, or death. Every essay is wittily argued, gracefully written, and offers sometimes surprising insight into familiar topics. This may be the Scruton book I most enjoyed this year.

Culture Counts: Faith & Feeling in a World Besieged

An excellent short account of Scruton’s views on culture, especially its collapse into ephemera, vulgarity, and vandalism in the modern world. This is also one of his most concise, clearly stated arguments against what he called “a culture of repudiation,” a culture we saw running in high gear through much of 2020. It’s excellent—a great starting point for Scruton’s philosophy and cultural critiques if you’re just beginning to read him. As a bonus, when Scruton summarizes he is at his wittiest and most trenchant, making this book a good deal of fun.

Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

This was the first book in the Farewell Tour, read before I even knew it would be the farewell tour. I finished it three days before Scruton died. It’s excellent.

Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition offers the reader a guide to the prehistory and origins of conservatism, from Aristotle and Cicero in the ancient world to Burke, the father of the modern movement, and traces multiple sometimes competing lines of conservative thought from Burke to the present. Along the way Scruton examines such disparate figures as Hegel and De Maistre, Chateaubriand and Tocqueville; cultural conservatives like Coleridge, TS Eliot, GK Chesterton, and CS Lewis; and Americans like John Crowe Ransom and the Southern Agrarians or William F Buckley and Russell Kirk, opposite sides of the fusionist conservative coin. Especially helpful are Scruton’s examinations of the way conservatism, as an anti-ideology, has pivoted to account for or counteract new threats, from liberalism and radicalism in Burke’s day to socialism in the late 19th and early 20th century to the Soviet Union and big government liberalism in the post-war United States. Scruton’s Conservatism is a big-tent review of centuries of thought, and makes clear the variety and richness of the tradition. (Every conservative will find at least one person profiled here that they don’t think belongs.) It’s also short and deftly written, making it an excellent introduction to a movement far richer and deeper than is often credited.

The book includes a long list of recommended reading at the back, so that if any one of the numerous thinkers outlined here piques your interest you can follow that trail deeper in. A few months after reading the book I borrowed the audiobook, read by Mark Meadows, from the library via Hoopla and listened to it on my daily walks. Excellent the second time around, too.

Conversations with Roger Scruton, with Mark Dooley

The last book I read in the Farewell Tour, and appropriately so. This book, though written several years ago based on a few days’ worth of talk with Scruton while Dooley stayed at his farm in Wiltshire, feels like a sendoff. Nevertheless the book is light and hopeful, wonderfully brisk and—as I’ve said so many times before of the other books in this post—wide-ranging. Think of this as a Roger Scruton sampler.

Conversations begins with Scruton’s life story, growing up in urban Britain with a resentful Labour Party father and discovering literature, art, and music; discovering, thanks to the student protests of 1968, which he witnessed, that he was a conservative; and following from there his forty years of academic and journalistic work in support of conservative philosophy. Scruton touches on specific books; works through the growth and development of his ideas over time; describes his repeated denunciations—both as an academic and a journalist—by Leftist colleagues and total strangers; and talks about work for underground universities behind the Iron Curtain in Communist Europe, work that got him arrested by the secret police in Czechoslovakia and honored, years later, by Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic for his efforts.

There’s much, much more. I ended the book struck by the busyness and variety, the ups and downs, of his life, something he himself comments on a number of times.

Throughout Scruton is frank, humorous, understated, and self-effacing. Dooley also gives us some nice vignettes of Scruton at home on his farm with his family, giving the reader some sense of the environment which Scruton—this man to whom the oikos, the home, is so fundamentally important—has fashioned with his wife and children. When the conclusion comes, it’s hard not to want to stay.

I highly recommend Conversations with Roger Scruton. It would probably help to be somewhat familiar with Scruton’s work beforehand, but if you’re not this book could work as an excellent, friendly and accessible introduction both to his ideas and to the man himself. This intimate and personal book was, for me, a most welcome way to end the Farewell Tour.

Previously read

One reason I embarked on this Farewell Tour was because, despite my appreciation of Scruton, I felt like I had only read a fragment of what he had written. Which is not to say that what I had previously read was unsatisfactory. Far from it. I needed to make up for lost time.

Here, in no particular order, are the five books I remember reading before 2020. I would recommend any one of them:

• The Uses of Pessimism and the Danger of False Hope—The first book by Scruton I read, a caution against unwarranted and uncritical optimism and an argument in favor of low expectations. Full of wry wit. Right up my alley.

• The Face of God—Scruton’s 2010 Gifford Lectures. A critique of scientific reductionism. Thoughts established here are further developed in The Soul of the World (see above).

• On Human Nature—Clarifies and further develops some ideas from The Soul of the World (see above). I read these three way out of order. One of these days I’m going to go back through chronologically.

• Modern Culture—Much of Scruton’s pithy cultural critique in Culture Counts (see above) is foreshadowed here in deeper, more detailed and specific form. An excellent examination of the fragmentation and vulgarity of modern culture.

• How to Be a Conservative—Perhaps Scruton’s most famous book, this is an excellent introduction to conservatism via chapters explaining the truth and the error in prominent modern ideologies. Linked below are a couple of interviews Scruton gave specifically about this book. They’re worth your while.

Video and audio

Scruton not only wrote every day, he appeared frequently in interviews, documentaries, and recorded lectures until not long before he died. The following is a selection of my favorites, ranging from ten-minute audio essays from BBC Radio to full length lectures with Q&A sessions.

• Why Beauty Matters—One of his greatest legacies. In a number of interviews in his last few years Scruton mentioned that this documentary was one of the projects that students, correspondents, and others mentioned most often to him, the documentary having “found a second life” online. I blogged about this wonderful one-hour film last fall. You can read that here; Why Beauty Matters is embedded in a Vimeo player in that post.

• Apprehending the Transcendent—Another video that I’ve blogged about before, Apprehending the Transcendent is the title of the moderated discussion Scruton had with psychologist Jordan Peterson at Cambridge a few years ago. A thoughtful and wide-ranging set of critiques and meditations. You can read my blog post about it here; the discussion is embedded in a YouTube player.

• BBC audio essays—A number of Scruton’s audio opinion pieces are available on YouTube. These are a goldmine. Here are a few that offer short (usually ten minutes or less), pithy introductions to some of his representative concerns, especially art and its relation to human nature and society: “The Tyranny of Pop Music,” “Art Today, Fake & Kitsch,” “On Harry Potter,” “Offensive Jokes,” “Animals,” “The Religion of Rights,” and “The Witch-hunt Culture.”

• Uncommon Knowledge: How to Be a Conservative—A good interview with Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution on Scruton’s book. Watch the interview here.

• Christian Humanist Profiles: How to Be a Conservative—An especially good podcast interview from 2016 conducted by my friend Nathan Gilmour of the Christian Humanist Podcast. Listen here.

• On The Future of Conservatism & Debate—A friendly conversation between Scruton and Spectator editor Douglas Murray. This wide-ranging discussion is especially worthwhile because of the wry, sometimes mordant British wit both men wield so well. Watch here.

• A Thing Called Civilization—In 2019, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute selected Scruton for its Defender of Western Civilization award. Scruton recorded his gracious acceptance speech on video. As far as I know this was his last semi-public appearance—an appropriate note for his career to end on. Watch here.

There is much, much more good stuff from Scruton out there; these are just the best places to start.

Conclusion—what Scruton has to teach us

Scruton is missed. We need his insight, his careful work, and the model he offered of a thoughtful conservatism grounded in virtue and ideas more than ever. If I were to summarize what we need most of Scruton right now, it might be:

• A proper understanding of human nature—what we are and what we need as rational and transcendent beings

• Love of home—not as mere places to exist, but places where human persons are rooted and connect with each other

• An understanding that persons are not free-floating individuals but exist in community

• An understanding of tradition and organic development rather than revolution as the source of freedom

• The necessity of order and the rule of law and its derivation from the bottom up, from a place and its people

And, finally, his most frequently repeated reminder, learned as he watched student revolutionaries trash Paris in 1968, that:

• Good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.

There is much, much more to Scruton’s philosophy than these, but these are good starting points. It is clear, after not only the last week but the last year—or perhaps decade—that even those who claim the title of “conservative” need to start over from fundamentals.

Appropriately, Scruton died on the birthday of Edmund Burke, the father of conservatism. Burke took a set of traditions, intuitions, and dispositions and gave them coherent shape as a response to ideological radicalism, revolution, and political violence. That response has survived, in one form or another, to the present, though it is now in a bad way—certainly in America. My hope is that Scruton’s legacy will prove a similar cohering influence, shaping of a new generation of real conservatism in the face of a new generation of vandals menacing our homes from all sides.

Roger Scruton, RIP.

Why Beauty Matters

Sir Roger Scruton (1944-2020) inspects Marcel Duchamp’s urinal.

I learned of Sir Roger Scruton’s death just a day or two after finishing his pithy short book Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition. His death came as a shock, and is one of the few events this year that I was—and remain—genuinely sad about. Scruton wrote prolifically and I had many of his books sitting unread on my shelf, so since his death I’ve embarked on what I wryly think of as “The Sir Roger Scruton Farewell Tour,” making it my mission this year to read through as many of those unread books as I can, even adding to the collection as I go. So far I’ve read nine. I mean to write about the whole project at the end of the year.

As much as I’ve enjoyed and learned from Scruton’s books, one of his works that I return to most often, and have watched at least twice this year, is his 2009 documentary “Why Beauty Matters.”

In “Why Beauty Matters” Scruton makes the case for beauty, a concept that he demonstrates has been corrupted and robbed of meaning—in a word, vandalized—in the modern era. Beginning in the world of art and philosophy, Scruton argues that beauty has, for most of the history of Western civilization, been a reflection of the divine and therefore an end in itself rather than a means to some other end or some kind of nice bonus feature gained through other endeavors.

But modernists and their descendants in the world of art, having first abandoned the transcendent, abandoned and actively strove against beauty. They treated it as a joke, an outmoded and meaningless pursuit or even a symbol of oppression, and substituted for beauty the transgressive anti-virtues of shock, accusation, or profanation, all laced with a self-reflexive irony that brooks no sincerity. This century-long trend has created, as Scruton calls it, a “cult of ugliness.” Young artists working in traditional forms, we see late in the documentary, are told by their instructors to vandalize their own work in order to make it “interesting.”

But the results of the abandonment of beauty as a legitimate object of art are not confined to the art world, a world now so rarefied and set apart from the concerns of ordinary people as to be extraterrestrial. The place everyone, regardless of education or class, used to encounter beauty was in their day to day environment—in the structures and fabric of their homes, towns, streets, and places of work and worship.

Scruton’s critique of modern architecture—the field that combines the twin “cults” of ugliness and utility—is scathing. He notes the abandonment of beautiful buildings, constructed of local materials in native styles and human proportions, in favor of functional buildings of universally-applied designs, buildings that are bland-looking at best and prove useless as soon as they outlive their original function. “The result proves as clearly as can be,” Scruton says, “that if you consider only utility, the things you build will soon be useless.”

Images of Scruton’s hometown—full of pragmatically designed modernist stores and apartment blocks, now abandoned to crumble under layers of graffiti—are heartbreaking. “This place was built by vandals,” Scruton says, “and those who added the graffiti merely finished the job.”

“I think we are losing beauty. And there is a danger that, with it, we will lose the meaning of life.”

— Sir Roger Scruton, “Why Beauty Matters”

So why does any of this matter?

Something that has become clear to me over years of reading Scruton’s books is the centrality of his anthropology—his understanding of human nature—to his philosophy. Humans are particular kinds of creatures and therefore have particular needs, needs that set them apart from all other creatures. Beauty is among the foremost of these needs. Deprived of beauty, forced to live in “a spiritual desert,” mankind suffers and cannot flourish, and will grow warped and perverted—especially where the perversion is intentional, as in modern art.

This is, as Scruton argues, because beauty is a shared language of transcendence, something that connects all of us to the eternal and prompts us to consider more than merely earthly concerns. So not only is beauty actually useful, people possessed of beauty, of open, unironic, artful expressions of seeking, will be more wholly themselves, and more likely to connect both to each other and to the transcendent—and to pass something of that on to their heirs.

Roger Scruton - Why Beauty Matters (2009) from Mirza Akdeniz on Vimeo.

There is much, much more I’d like to say in appreciation of this documentary—it is not wholly concerned with critique, but with making a positive, indeed beautiful, case for beauty as well—but the more time you spend reading me the less time you will have to watch it.

[Update: The documentary is once again available in fairly high quality on Vimeo, and I’ve embedded it in this post. You can also choose to watch it at this Facebook page. —JMP, November 29, 2022] If you like what you see in this documentary, you can find many of the same ideas developed in greater detail in Scruton’s books Beauty: A Very Short Introduction and Modern Culture.

I hope y’all will take an hour this weekend to watch Scruton’s documentary. It’s worth your while and will, I hope, either renew within you or introduce for the first time a sense of true beauty and its meaning.

Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands

Sir Roger Scruton (1944-2020)

Since Sir Roger Scruton died in January, I have been on what I call the Roger Scruton Farewell Tour, reading those books of his that had until then sat unread on my shelf—and then some. Last night I finished Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, a hefty critique of leftist philosophers and theorists. Rather than write a more traditional review of the book, I wanted to offer some choice bits.

This is a long post. It could be longer. If you read no further, at least least my recommendation of the book: it’s excellent.

On Newspeak

One of the through-lines of Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands is the origin and development of Newspeak. While it was Orwell who coined the term, “the capture of language by the left is far older, beginning with the French Revolution and its slogans.” The variety parodied by Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four was that of “the Socialist International and the eager engagement of the Russian intelligentsia,” but Newspeak is a worldwide phenomenon.

Newspeak occurs whenever the primary purpose of language—which is to describe reality—is replaced by the rival purpose of asserting power over it. The fundamental speech-act is only superficially represented by the assertoric grammar. Newspeak sentences sound like assertions, but their underlying logic is that of the spell. They conjure the triumph of words over things, the futility of rational argument, and also the danger of resistance.

And, later in the book, in response to a blanket dismissal of most modern philosophers—thinkers as different as Descartes, Hegel, and Kant—as “empiricists” by the French leftist (n.b. the worst kind of leftist) Louis Althusser:

“Someone acquainted with the real history of philosophy might be so astounded by this travesty as to overlook the purpose of Newspeak, which is not to describe the world as it is, but to cast spells.”

Newspeak is the language of repudiation and denunciation, of argument by assertion and the sorting of the world into immutable good and bad categories. Where “ordinary language warms and softens; Newspeak freezes and hardens.” It imposes ideological rigor on the messy world, with which ideologues only dare engage at arm’s length anyway. Reality destroys their plans, and their language is actively at war with reality, seeking both to reshape it and to prevent its being understood (almost exactly Orwell’s depiction of Newspeak).

On Newspeak and its plans:

Newspeak does not merely impose a plan; it also eliminates the discourse through which human beings can live without one. If justice is referred to in Newspeak, it is not the justice of individual dealings, but ‘social justice’, the kind of ‘justice’ imposed by a plan, which invariably involves depriving individuals of things that they have acquired by fair dealing in the market. . . . It is not the expression of a pre-existing social order shaped by our free agreements and our natural disposition to hold ourselves and our neighbors to account. It is the creator and manager of a social order framed according to an idea of ‘social justice’ and imposed on the people by a series of top-down decrees.

Why would this appeal to self-described intellectuals, and why have they spent so much time in the twentieth century (and before) thinking about, writing about, and agitating for it?

“Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.”

Scruton’s humor

Which brings me to Scruton’s sense of humor. As I’ve written before, Scruton’s wry, understated wit is one of his best and most underappreciated traits. He expertly seasons his writing and speaking with it, offering up subtle one-liners to emphasize a point, to give important ideas an intellectual hook to hang on, or simply for comic relief, a generous concession from someone who handles such heavy ideas.

But in the service of critique, his humor could have a razor-blade-and-turpentine bite. Here’s Scruton on the endlessly uncoiling mass of jargon and obscurantist vocabulary typical of leftist theory:

‘[R]eification’ became an important cult word in 1968 in Paris. But the subsequent discussions of the term in the New Left Review added nothing to the rhetoric except pseudo-theory: a morose prowling of the intellect around an inexplicable shrine. The lamest observation, expressed in the language of subject and object, could excite the most solemn respect. Marx’s declaration that ‘the bureaucrat relates himself to the world as a mere object of his activity’ is typical: trite, snobbish and slightly precious in suggesting that one is less an object the more time one spends in the British Museum Reading Room.

Burn.

Here’s another, of Slovenian Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek:

If he had stayed in Slovenia, and Slovenia had stayed Communist, Zizek would not have been the nuisance he has since become. Indeed, if there were no greater reason to regret the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, the release of Zizek on to the world of Western scholarship would perhaps already be a sufficient one.

The following comes from a passage describing György Lukács’s contention that “the knowledge yielded by the standpoint of the proletariat stands on a higher scientific plane objectively,” an assertion that, with a heaping helping of Foucault, certainly led to the modern obsession not with truth but with who is saying what from what position and with what identity, and the straight-faced assertions that some identities must be believed:

Lukács expands on this idea at considerable length, in prose of supererogatory greyness. But what is he asking us to believe? Apparently the working class, unlike the bourgeoisie, ‘always aspires towards the truth, even in its ‘false’ consciousness, and in its substantive errors’. To understand our situation, therefore, we must see it through proletarian eyes.

Who then should be our authorities—the articulate offspring of the true working class? D.H. Lawrence, Conrad, Céline? Don’t be ridiculous? says Lukács, who devotes many pages to anathematizing such counterrevolutionary lackeys of the bourgeoisie. It seems that proletarian thinking is not to be found in the works of proletarian writers, but only in the Marxist classics. . . . But when did Marx dirty his hands with manual labor? Or Engels, the factory owner, or Lenin, the gentleman in exile? Or Lukács himself—hereditary baron of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, heir to a banker’s fortune, scholar, aesthete and relentless conspirator among the ruling elites? A proletarian thinker? Consider his remedy for reification:

It can be overcome only by constant and constantly renewed efforts to disrupt the reified structure of existence by concretely relating to the concretely manifested contradictions of the total development, by becoming conscious of the immanent meanings of these contradictions for the total development.

Is that an authentic proletarian utterance? Come off it, mate!

That stinger actually made me laugh out loud when I read it. And coming as it does at the tail end of this summary of a tendentious and—as we are now seeing—dangerous set of ideas, flavored throughout with a condemnation of leftists for their (concealed) self-loathing and (obvious) hypocrisy, it really stung.

Apropos of nothing

And that brings me here, to a few passages that don’t at all remind me of anything going on right now.

Naturally, most of the mid- and late-twentieth century Marxists and other assorted leftists Scruton critiques are obsessed with class. Why class?

By seeing society in class terms we are programmed to find antagonism at the heart of all the institutions through which people have attempted to limit it. Nation, law, faith, tradition, sovereignty—these ideas by contrast denote things that unite us. It is in terms of them that we attempt to articulate the fundamental togetherness that mitigates social rivalries, whether of class, status or economic role. Hence it has always been a vital project on the left . . . to show these things are in some way illusory, standing for nothing durable or fundamental in the social order.

For class substitute identity—any form of identity and, as we have seen, if you are unhappy with the selection you can always create your own!—and you have much of today’s impassioned, aggressive non-discourse, Newspeak motivated by resentment and a furious demand that one’s subjective feelings be granted the status of Newtonian law.

Subjectivity is the order of the day. When Pilate asked Jesus “What is truth?” at least he was inquiring. Truth is a matter of virtually no concern now. At least some of this attitude we owe to Richard Rorty. In response to Rorty’s argument for what he called pragmatism, an “intersubjective agreement” as a replacement for “a natural and trans-cultural sort of rationality”—that is, objective truth accessible to reason regardless of one’s background or present context—Scruton writes:

There is no point to the old ideas of objectivity and universal truth; all that matters is the fact that we agree.

But who are we? And what do we agree about? Turn to Rorty’s essays, and you will soon find out. ‘We’ are all feminists, liberals, advocates of today’s radical causes and the open curriculum; ‘we’ do not believe in God, or in any inherited religion; nor do the old ideas of authority, order and self-discipline carry weight for us. ‘We’ make up our minds as to the meaning of texts, by creating through our words the consensus that includes us. There is no constraint on us, beyond the community to which we have chosen to belong. And because there is no objective truth but only our own self-engendered consensus, our position is unassailable from any point of view outside it. Pragmatists not only decide what to think; they protect themselves from whoever doesn’t think the same.

Later:

In place of objectivity we have only ‘inter-subjectivity’—in other words, consensus. Truths, meanings, facts and values are now regarded as negotiable. The curious thing, however, is that this woolly-minded subjectivism goes with a vigorous censorship. Those who put consensus in the place of truth quickly find themselves distinguishing the true from the false consensus. And inevitably the consensus is ‘on the left’. . . .

Thus the ‘we’ of Rorty rigorously excludes all conservatives, traditionalists and reactionaries. Only liberals can belong to it; just as only feminists, radicals, gay activists and anti-authoritarians can take advantage of deconstruction. . . . The inescapable conclusion is that subjectivity, relativity and irrationalism are advocated not in order to let in all opinions, but precisely so as to exclude the opinions of people who believe in old authorities and objective truths. This is the short cut to Gramsci’s new cultural hegemony: not to vindicate the new culture against the old, but to show that there are no grounds for either, so that nothing remains save political commitment.

And, later, more on that spirit of censorship:

And that is why, paradoxically, the postmodern curriculum is so censorious—in just the way that liberalism is censorious. When everything is permitted, it is vital to forbid the forbidder. All serious cultures are founded on the distinctions between right and wrong, true and false, good and bad taste, knowledge and ignorance. It was to the perpetuation of those distinctions that the humanities, in the past, were devoted. Hence the assault on the curriculum, and the attempt to espouse a standard of ‘political correctness’—which means, in effect, a standard of non-exclusion and non-judgement—is also designed to authorize a vehement kind of judgement, against all those authorities that question the orthodoxy of the left.

Unsurprisingly, if there is no objective truth and all that remains is a totalizing political commitment, base feelings will rise to the surface as motivation. Chief among these—manifested in the French Revolution and Marx, the Bolsheviks and the Nazis, the Parisian students of 1968 and the radical activist movements now—is resentment. Scruton addresses resentment thus, which I quote at length:

Resentment is not a good thing to feel, either for its subject or its object. But the business of society is to conduct our social life so that resentment does not occur: to live by mutual aid and fellowship, not so as to be all alike and inoffensively mediocre, but so as to gain others’ cooperation in our small successes. Living in this way we create the channels through which resentment drains away of its own accord: channels like custom, gift, hospitality, shared worship, penitence, forgiveness and the common law, all of which are instantly stopped up when the totalitarians come to power. Resentment is to the body politic what pain is to the body: it is bad to feel it, but good to be capable of feeling it, since without the ability to feel it we will not survive. Hence we should not resent the fact that we resent, but accept it, as a part of the human condition, something to be managed along with all our other joys and afflictions. However, resentment can be transformed into a governing emotion and a social cause, and thereby gain release from the constraints that normally contain it. This happens when resentment loses the specificity of its target, and becomes directed to society as a whole. That, it seems to me, is what happens when left-wing movements take over. In such cases resentment ceases to be a response to another’s unmerited success and becomes instead an existential posture: the posture of the one whom the world has betrayed. Such a person does not seek to negotiate within existing structures, but to gain total power, so as to abolish the structures themselves. He will set himself against all forms of mediation, compromise and debate, and against the legal and moral norms that give a voice to the dissenter and sovereignty to the ordinary person. He will set about destroying the enemy, whom he will conceive in collective terms, as the class, group or race that hitherto controlled the world and which must now in turn be controlled. And all institutions that grant protection to that class or a voice in the political process will be targets for his destructive rage.

That posture is, in my view, the core of a serious social disorder.

Thus far all of this has played out in the academy, where leftism has triumphed in the United States, and in what are broadly called the culture wars. The self-loathing of the university elite and their embrace of subjectivism and resentment-driven radicalism “have ended in America in a near-universal victory for the left. Many of those appointed as the guardians of Western culture will seize any argument, however flawed, and any scholarship, however phony, in order to denigrate their cultural inheritance.” One thinks of the 1619 Project, perhaps the most mendacious journalism to appear in the New York Times since Walter Duranty, an ahistorical, ideologically motivated attempt to create an utterly new conception of American history—Scruton’s description of Newspeak “casting spells” and “conjuring” again—a project that has already borne fruit. Scruton writes:

“The final result of the culture wars has been an enforced political correctness, by which the blasted landscape of art, history and literature is policed for the residual signs of racist, sexist, imperialist or colonialist ways of thinking.”

Anyone who is paying any attention—to the university, to the media, to popular literature (especially the cesspit of YA), to the arts, and to public commemoration—will recognize the truth in this description. But of course this “enforced political correctness” no longer plays out solely in academic institutions. One wonders what the next stage of this will look like. We are already seeing some of it.

Regardless, in Scruton’s assessment:

“We have entered a period of cultural suicide.”

In conclusion

That’s a grim note to leave off on, but I’ll conclude here. I could triple or quadruple the length of this post with more quotations. Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands is an excellent book. It’s going to continue to be relevant longer after our day, but in the meantime it offers an excellent critique of the schools of thought—and Newspeak—that have led us to where we are now.

And Scruton does not end on the note of doom and gloom that I do here. He proposes his own vision of an alternative—indeed, an alternative that can actually exist and actually has—a society founded on free association, private institutions, tradition, and meaning. He notes as well that the leftists profiled in his book are engaged in an essentially religious project, and that the resentment and violence they spawn come from the attempt to meet a religious need with thoughts that give no place to religion, and that this leftist faith—detached from any mediating institution or tradition, but with nothing like reason or a belief in truth to hang onto—blinds them. He does not directly address an alternative to this attempt to meet this need, but his silence on the point is powerful.

Scruton on risk aversion

From How to Think Seriously About the Planet, in a chapter entitled “Radical Precaution.” Scruton is critiquing the precautionary principle, a principle as vague, irrational, and inevitably absolutist, favoring stifling schemes (summarized as “Don’t!”) to reduce already remote risks to zero, shrouding real crises in fogs of non-negotiable regulation that often prevent decisive action, “confiscating” problems from those directly affected by them and tasking detached and unaccountable international agencies with finding universally applicable solutions. Scruton provides several discouraging examples.

Worse are the precautionary principle’s effects when it trickles down from being the guiding idea of governments and activists to being the way ordinary people approach the decisions they make in their lives. Scruton, arguing from experience, describes the breakdown of real communities and relationships wrought by the absolute Don’ts created by precautionary regulatory programs.

Building on those examples and elaborating upon those worries, Scruton writes, in response to arguments in favor of the precautionary principle based on the prioritization of needs over wants or desires, a prioritization that favors “a ‘heuristics of fear’, always focusing on worst-case scenarios and the costs that we might endure, rather than the benefits, however great, that might otherwise cast them in shadow,” that:

Distinguishing needs from desires is simply one part of the process of weighing reasons. And we should be clear that we do, in our ordinary reasoning, bargain with both life and need, and that the attempt to prevent this is rarely successful. Human beings risk their lives in skiing, hunting, driving and competitive sport; they happily exchange health for whisky and safety for love; they leap to the defence of their family and their country and throw caution to the winds. And sometimes they are prepared to risk the end of everything, in defence of a way of life that they refuse to jettison. The prefect of a Roman city besieged by Vandals or Huns would often choose to resist rather than surrender, even though the cost of failure would be total destruction, and the cost of surrender a negotiable servitude. We do not regard the choice as irrational, or as an immoral imposition on the citizens for whom the prefect stood as guardian. Indeed, we look with suspicion on those who are unwilling to risk death in defence of a shared way of life, and we recognize sacrifice as a fundamental component in the resilience of human communities. The Roman Empire lasted because it schooled its citizens in sacrifice; and the principle that governed the beleaguered cities was not ‘to save everything, risk nothing’, but ‘to save the best things, risk everything’. We should not, therefore, ring-fence our needs and our lives from the business of risk-taking. Whatever we do, the risk of death—our own death, but also the death of those who depend on us and whom we are duty-bound to protect—is real, however small. And to forbid us to bargain with this risk, as we bargain with all others, is to deprive us of our most important weapon in confronting it. Indeed, rational beings, it seems to me, can flourish only when they have risks to confront and responsibilities to assume. The risk-free life is not a life in which we are or can be fulfilled. Any pattern of thought that seeks to extinguish risk and to lift our responsibilities in the face of it is, therefore, one that threatens a primary human need.

I can’t remember where, but several times I’ve heard people say something like: “Sociology has spent the last fifty years proving that everything your grandmother said was true.” I see two grandma sayings in the passage above: “Need ain’t the same as want” (or one of a thousand variations on that theme), which is indisputably true, but when elevated to an absolute, universal guiding principle “throws the baby out with the bathwater.”

We live in an increasingly risk-averse culture (sometimes, as now, for good reasons), and Scruton’s counterpoint, coming back as he so often does to the nature of persons and their lives in community, is welcome food for thought.

Benign shabbiness

Apropos of yesterday’s post, several days after I had dug up that line from Tocqueville and read the Akallabêth, I ran across the following from the late Sir Roger Scruton. In reflecting on old age and especially the widespread anxiety of becoming senile and being neglected, Scruton reflects on the various modern responses to those problems, from the nursing home to euthanasia to manias for health and wellness. As he often does, he finds the root of these problems in a flawed view of humanity and whimsically suggests an alternative ordered to the truth.

From “Dying in Time,” collected in Confessions of a Heretic:

Courage therefore is the sine qua non of any attempt to deal with the threat of senility—courage to face the truth, and to live fully in the face of it. With courage a person can go about living in another way . . . This other way is not the way of the welfare culture in which we are all immersed. It does not involve the constant search for comforts or the obsessive pursuit of health. On the contrary, it is a way of benign shabbiness and self-neglect, of risky enjoyments and bold adventures. It involves constant exercise—but not of the body. Rather, exercise of the person, through relationships with others, through sacrifice, through the search for opportunities to be involved and exposed. Such, at least, is my intuition. The life of benign shabbiness is not a life of excess. Of course you should drink, smoke, eat fatty foods—but not to the point of gluttony. . . . The risks you take should not damage your will or your relationships, but only your chances of survival. Officious doctors and health fascists will assail you, telling you to correct your diet, to take better forms of exercise, to drink more water and less wine. If you pursue a life of risk-taking and defiance the thought-police will track you down, and your life style will be held up to ridicule and contempt. It is not that anyone intends you to live beyond your time. Rather, to use Adam Smith’s famous image, the old people’s gulag arises by an invisible hand from a false conception of human life—a conception that does not see death as a part of life, and timely death as the fruit of it.

An altogether English vision, unfussy and without vanity, with plenty of room for eccentricity. It reminded me—and here’s the almost purely subjective Tolkien connection—of the sheer enjoyment of life typical of hobbits. “Benign shabbiness” perfectly describes them, with their gardens and larders and tobacco and six meals a day and evenings at the Green Dragon. And not a surgeon general’s warning to be found.

“The main point, it seems to me,” Scruton says in conclusion, “is to maintain a life of active risk and affection . . . remembering always that the value of life does not consist in its length but in its depth.”