Roger Scruton has new book Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left. He is an older, conservative Brit with some despair, it seems. He was interviewed recently by Mick Hume of "Spiked." ("Spiked" is a small, free speech publication and their handling of Scruton was quite fair.) There were some interesting things in the piece as Scruton struggles with the modern world's changes. He is particularly interesting as he presents what seems to be a Burke-like view of conservatism. (Don't know this guy well so I might be wrong.) Here are some of the more interesting selections:
‘Conservatives are by their nature people who are trying to defend and maintain existence without a cause’. Simply to keep things as they are? ‘We obviously all want to change things, but recognising that human life is an end in itself and not a means to replace itself with something else. And defending institutions and compromises is a very difficult and unexciting thing. But nevertheless it’s the truth.’
‘Conservatives are by their nature people who are trying to defend and maintain existence without a cause’. Simply to keep things as they are? ‘We obviously all want to change things, but recognising that human life is an end in itself and not a means to replace itself with something else. And defending institutions and compromises is a very difficult and unexciting thing. But nevertheless it’s the truth.’
...‘the original slogan of the French Revolution – liberté, égalité, fraternité – was just a slogan, and nobody troubled to ask themselves whether liberté and égalité were compatible in practice. Really the subsequent history has been an illustration of that conflict between them.
But these great ideals, for which people did fight and die, were changed under the pressure of 20th-century politics into bureaucratic processes, that are constantly equalising, constantly passing little bits of legislation to ensure that anybody is not discriminating, not standing out, not learning something that puts them in a higher category than anybody else. And, likewise, liberté has been bureaucratised in the sense that it doesn’t any more represent the freedom of people to break out, to do the thing that they really want to do. Rather it’s conceived as a form of empowerment – the state gives you this in the form of vouchers or privileges, privileges, for example, that you might have as a gay, or a woman, or an ethnic minority. So in all these ways, both those ideals have ceased to be ideals and become the property of the state, to distribute among people according to the fashion of the day.’
‘The question of maintaining a serious moral order while allowing economic freedom has, I think, troubled people right from the beginning of history, and has always been a tension within conservative thinkers, going right back to [Edmund] Burke. The traditional way of reconciling these two things was through religion, which would remove certain things from the market.
...legalising gay marriage? ‘The arguments in favour of offering something to a previously disprivileged group are all very well and they do have weight. But much more important is the effect of this on the institution of marriage. My view is that here we need some serious anthropology. You have to recognise that rites of passage are not personal possessions, they are possessions of the whole community, they are the ways in which the community defines itself and defines its obligation towards the next generation. So you don’t make these radical, metaphysical alterations to an institution such as marriage without there being long-term consequences. And nobody seemed to want to talk about the long-term consequences.’
‘I think that obedience, properly understood, is if not the highest virtue (that would make me an Islamist) the one that is presupposed by all the others – obedience to the law, to morality, to authority, to those you love and those who depend on you. That is what freedom consists in, as Kant wisely saw.’
But these great ideals, for which people did fight and die, were changed under the pressure of 20th-century politics into bureaucratic processes, that are constantly equalising, constantly passing little bits of legislation to ensure that anybody is not discriminating, not standing out, not learning something that puts them in a higher category than anybody else. And, likewise, liberté has been bureaucratised in the sense that it doesn’t any more represent the freedom of people to break out, to do the thing that they really want to do. Rather it’s conceived as a form of empowerment – the state gives you this in the form of vouchers or privileges, privileges, for example, that you might have as a gay, or a woman, or an ethnic minority. So in all these ways, both those ideals have ceased to be ideals and become the property of the state, to distribute among people according to the fashion of the day.’
‘The question of maintaining a serious moral order while allowing economic freedom has, I think, troubled people right from the beginning of history, and has always been a tension within conservative thinkers, going right back to [Edmund] Burke. The traditional way of reconciling these two things was through religion, which would remove certain things from the market.
...legalising gay marriage? ‘The arguments in favour of offering something to a previously disprivileged group are all very well and they do have weight. But much more important is the effect of this on the institution of marriage. My view is that here we need some serious anthropology. You have to recognise that rites of passage are not personal possessions, they are possessions of the whole community, they are the ways in which the community defines itself and defines its obligation towards the next generation. So you don’t make these radical, metaphysical alterations to an institution such as marriage without there being long-term consequences. And nobody seemed to want to talk about the long-term consequences.’
‘I think that obedience, properly understood, is if not the highest virtue (that would make me an Islamist) the one that is presupposed by all the others – obedience to the law, to morality, to authority, to those you love and those who depend on you. That is what freedom consists in, as Kant wisely saw.’
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