...it raises the real questions of our times, which are these: can we reject the idea of a benevolent God and still hold on to our inherited morality, founded on respect for the other and the absolute authority of truth? Can we adopt the posture of forgiveness...without turning to the supreme example that was once given to us? Can we re-learn the habits of polite disagreement, and address each other as rational beings, capable of forming real communities in which differences are respected and decencies honoured?

More than 2,300 years ago Aristotle was prescient describing the strategies of our wannabe Overlord Big Brother Ruling Class, in 2021:

“The three aims of the tyrant are, one, the humiliation of his subjects; he knows that a mean-spirited man will not conspire against anybody; two, the creation of mistrust among them; for a tyrant is not to be overthrown until men begin to have confidence in one another — and this is the reason why tyrants are at war with the good; they are under the idea that their power is endangered by them, not only because they will not be ruled despotically, but also because they are too loyal to one another and to other men, and do not inform against one another or against other men — three, the tyrant desires that all his subjects shall be incapable of action, for no one attempts what is impossible and they will not attempt to overthrow a tyranny if they are powerless.”

Aristotle, (384-322 BC),

Politics: Book 5 Chapter 2

In all of his political writings, Scruton takes on the Left for scorning existing norms and customs, and for promoting a “culture of repudiation.” The Left is “negative.” It dismisses “every aspect of our cultural capital” with the language of brutal invective: accusing every defender of human nature and sound tradition of “racism,” “xenophobia,” “homophobia,” and “sexism.” Like 1984’s “two minutes of hate,” this language tears down, intimidates, and can never build anything humane or constructive—it is nihilistic to the core. At the same time, Scruton wants to reach out to reasonable liberals who eschew ideology and who still believe in civility and the promise of national belonging. His conservatism can discern the truth in liberalism (another Aristotelian trait) while the partisans of repudiation see half the human race as enemies.

Daniel J. Mahoney

 Roger Scruton (1944-2020) understood some of the issues foundational to liberty and human civilization. Here are some expressions of his thought from a variety of essays and books:

“Just as those who lose their religion feel an urge to mock the faith they have lost, so do artists today feel an urge to treat human life in demeaning ways and to mock the pursuit of beauty. This willful desecration is also a denial of love, an attempt to remake the world as though love were no longer a part of it. And this, it seems to me, is the most important part of our post-modern culture: that it is a loveless culture, determined to portray the human world as unlovable.”

“…And then we might conclude that it is just as absurd to say that the world is nothing but the order of nature, as physics describes it, as to say that the Mona Lisa is nothing but a smear of pigments. Drawing that conclusion is the first step towards understanding why and how we live in a world of sacred things. Nothing brought this home to me more vividly than the experience of communism, in places where there was no other recourse against the surrounding inhumanity than the life of prayer. Communism made the scientific worldview into the foundation of social order: people were regarded as ‘nothing but’ the assembled mass of their instincts and needs. Its aim was to replace social life with a cold calculation for survival, so that people would live as competing atoms, in a condition of absolute enmity and distrust. Anything else would jeopardize the party’s control. In such circumstances people lived in a world of secrets, where it was dangerous to reveal things, and where every secret that was peeled away from the other person revealed another secret beneath it. Nevertheless the victims of communism tried to hold on to the things that were sacred to them, and which spoke to them of the free and responsible life. The family was sacred; so too was religion, whether Christian or Jewish. So too was the underground store of knowledge – the forbidden knowledge of the nation’s history and its claim to their loyalty. Those were the things that people would not exchange or relinquish even when required by the party to betray them. They were the consecrated treasures, hidden below the desecrated cities, where they glowed more brightly in the dark. Thus there grew an underground world of freedom and truth, where it was no longer necessary, as Havel put it, ‘to live within the lie’.

  Recently I assembled some of my impressions of that world, and the result is Notes from Underground, a novel set in Czechoslovakia in the mid-1980s, which explores love between two young people who stumble over each other in the catacombs, and who, in the ambient twilight, find the meaning that the system had tried to wipe away. We live today in the glare of affluence, and cannot easily discern sacred things, which glow more clearly in darkness. But we need the sacred as much as the young people of my story. One way to understand this is to look back at that place where truth and trust were crimes and love a reckless departure from routine calculation. I can observe it now from a position of safety, and am glad that those times of fear have gone. But I also regret that they are fading from our collective memory and that their lesson has still to be learned.”

Roger Scruton, 2014

“Newspeak occurs whenever the primary purpose of language – which is to describe reality – is replaced by the rival purpose of asserting power over it.“

“If we look at rights in this way, as instruments that safeguard sovereignty, and so make free dealings between sovereign partners into the cement of society, then we see immediately why freedom rights have the best claim to universality, and why claim rights – detached from the moral law and from any specific history of responsibility and agreement – present a threat to the consensual order. A claim against another, if expressed as a right, is an imposition of a duty. If this duty arises from no free action or chain of responsibility that would provide a cogent ground for the claim, then by expressing it as a right we override the other’s sovereignty. We say to him: here is something you must do or provide, even though your duty to do so arises from nothing you have done or for which you are responsible, and even though it is not a duty that follows from the moral law. This is simply a demand that you must satisfy. How different such a case is, at least, from that of freedom rights. For these are by their very nature ‘sovereignty protecting’ devices. They are vetoes on what others can do to me or take from me, rather than demands that they do something or give something that I have an interest in their doing or giving. The duty that they define is one of non-interference, and the interest that they protect is the most fundamental interest that I have, namely my interest in retaining the power to make decisions for myself in those matters that most closely concern me...

Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created. This is especially true of the good things that come to us as collective assets: peace, freedom, law, civility, public spirit, the security of property and family life, in all of which we depend on the cooperation of others while having no means singlehandedly to obtain it. In respect of such things, the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation is slow, laborious and dull. That is one of the lessons of the twentieth century..."

 "...it raises the real questions of our times, which are these: can we reject the idea of a benevolent God and still hold on to our inherited morality, founded on respect for the other and the absolute authority of truth? Can we adopt the posture of forgiveness that Murray is so keen to advocate, without turning to the supreme example that was once given to us?

Can we re-learn the habits of polite disagreement, and address each other as rational beings, capable of forming real communities in which differences are respected and decencies honoured? I want to answer yes to those questions. But as someone who has suffered more than most from the prevailing madness I have my doubts.

My own solution — which is to ignore social media and to address, in my writings, only the interest in the true and the false, rather than in the permitted and the offensive — confines me within a circle that is considerably narrower than the Twittersphere. But here and there in this circle, there are people who do not merely see the point of truthful discourse, but who are also eager to engage with it. And I cling to the view that that is enough, as it was for the Irish monks who kept the lamp of learning alight during the Dark Ages. They may have thought they were losing, but they won in the end.

...The final argument that impressed me was Burke’s response to the theory of the social contract. Although society can be seen as a contract, he argued, we must recognize that most parties to the contract are either dead or not yet born. The effect of the contemporary Rousseauist ideas of social contract was to place the present members of society in a position of dictatorial dominance over those who went before and those who came after them. Hence these ideas led directly to the massive squandering of inherited resources at the Revolution, and to the cultural and ecological vandalism that Burke was perhaps the first to recognize as the principal danger of modern politics. In Burke’s eyes the self-righteous contempt for ancestors which characterized the Revolutionaries was also a disinheriting of the unborn. Rightly understood, he argued, society is a partnership among the dead, the living, and the unborn, and without what he called the “hereditary principle,” according to which rights could be inherited as well as acquired, both the dead and the unborn would be disenfranchized. Indeed, respect for the dead was, in Burke’s view, the only real safeguard that the unborn could obtain, in a world that gave all its privileges to the living. His preferred vision of society was not as a contract, in fact, but as a trust, with the living members as trustees of an inheritance that they must strive to enhance and pass on.

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2003/2/why-i-became-a-conservative

Death and Transcendence:

Natural science tells us that death is a dissolution, a disappearance of a small vortex of resistance to the entropy that is sweeping all things before it into the void. And because death is an event in nature, that is all we can know of it. Or almost all. Saint Paul saw Christ’s sacrifice as a redemption—a way by which Christ purchased our eternal life, through taking our sins upon himself. This idea is strange, perhaps not wholly intelligible: for how can the suffering of the innocent pay the moral debt of the guilty? Saint Paul also told us that now we see as through a glass darkly, but then face-to-face. And by “then” he meant after we had passed the threshold of death.

Richard Crashaw, in a long poem inspired by Aquinas, put the thought in the following words:

Come love! Come Lord! and that long day

For which I languish, come away.

When this dry soul those eyes shall see,

And drink the unseal’d source of thee.

When Glory’s sun faith’s shades shall chase,

And for thy veil give me thy Face. 

Here, it seems to me, is a way in which faith verges on hope. We can shun death as an annihilation, or greet it as a transition. We can see it as a loss of something precious, or as the gain of another way of being. It is, in a sense, up to us. When we live in full awareness and acceptance of our mortality, we see the world as making a place for us. We open ourselves to death, and accept death as our completion. Simone Weil puts the point in terms of the Christian myth of origins: 

Man placed himself outside the current of Obedience. God chose as his punishment labour and death. Consequently labour and death, if Man undergoes them in a spirit of willingness, constitute a transference back into the current of Supreme Good which is Obedience to God. 

The afterlife, conceived as a condition that succeeds death in time, is an absurdity. For succession in time belongs within the causal envelope, in the space-time continuum that is the world of nature. If there is any message to be extracted from my arguments, it is that the idea of salvation—of a right relation with the creator—in no way requires eternal life, so conceived. But it does require an acceptance of death, and a sense that in death we are meeting our creator, the one bound to us by covenant, to whom we must account for our faults. We are returning to the place whence we emerged and hoping to be welcomed there. This is a mystical thought, and there is no way of translating it into the idiom of natural science, which speaks of before and after, not of time and eternity. Religion, as I have been considering it, does not describe the natural world but the Lebenswelt, the world of subjects, using allegories and myths in order to remind us at the deepest level of who and what we are. And God is the all-knowing subject who welcomes us as we pass into that other domain, beyond the veil of nature. To approach death in such a way is therefore to draw near to God: we become, through our works of love and sacrifice, a part of the eternal order; we “pass over” into that other place, so that death is no longer a threat to us. The veil to which Crashaw refers, that hides the face of God, is the “fallen world,” the world of objectified being. The life of prayer rescues us from the Fall, and prepares us for a death that we can meaningfully see as a redemption, since it unites us with the soul of the world.”

"Whatever our religion and our private convictions, we are the collective inheritors of things both excellent and rare, and political life, for us, ought to have one overriding goal, which is to hold fast to those things, in order to pass them on to our children."

- Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative 

“…the ancient instinct was wise. The more irrelevant a subject, the more lasting is the benefit that is confers. Irrelevant subjects bring understanding of the human condition, by forcing the student to stand back from it. They also enhance the appetite for life, by providing material for thought and conversation. 

  This is the secret which civilization has guarded: that power and influence come through the acquisition of useless knowledge. The answer is, therefore, to destroy the effect of education by making it relevant. Replace pure by applied mathematics, logic by computer programming, architecture by engineering, history by sociology: the result will be a new generation of well-informed philistines, whose charmlessness will undo every advantage that their learning might otherwise have conferred. Not surprisingly, the main objects of this attack have been the humanities. A person who knows only engineering or microbiology finds himself hampered by his knowledge, which casts little light on his experience and leads to no new communication with his fellow humans. A person with a classical or literary education, however, inhabits a transformed world and sees meaning where others see facts. He is equipped not just to change the world but to interpret it. Hence he will interpret it in his own favour and become master of his condition. The major task is to destroy the majestic irrelevance that confers this power. Considerable ingenuity has been spent in inventing ‘relevant’ humanities. The problem has been to conserve the outward prestige of education, as an embodiment of the reasonable approach to life’s problems, while persuading the uneducated that there is a learning addressed to interests that they already have. The answer has been found to lie in the word ‘studies’...

The Virtue of Irrelevance, 1983

We can do nothing unless we first amend ourselves. The task is to rediscover the world which made us, to see ourselves as part of something greater, which depends upon us for its survival—and which still can live in us, if we can achieve that “condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything),” to which Eliot directs us.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Such is the conservative message for our time. It is a message beyond politics, a message of liturgical weight and authority. But it is a message which must be received, if humane and moderate politics is to remain a possibility.

from Roger Scruton’s essay on T.S.Eliot

https://voegelinview.com/t-s-eliot-as-conservative-mentor/

Falling to the bottom in my own country, I have been raised to the top elsewhere, and looking back over the sequence of events I can only be glad that I have lived long enough to see this happen. Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.

Scruton's last entry in his diary in 2019.