Looking like an aged Robert Redford, conservative Roger Scruton reveled in controversy and notoriety. Scruton died in 2020. This volume collects some of Scruton’s ephemeral writings.
“We live in troubling times for the conservative conscience. The West is adrift without leadership, anarchy is spreading through Asia and Africa, and the political process in Europe has been absorbed by the fantasy of European Union. Almost everywhere in the civilized world we encounter social decay: the decline in religious observance and local customs; the rise of crime and violence; the pornocratic culture of mass media; the description of love and marriage; the collapse of education and the retreat of the individual into his private pleasure dome.” (p. 31)
While Roger Scruton’s analysis is right on the money, his “solutions”–like those of most contemporary conservatives–are wide of the mark. Reducing the size of government and blaming the government for making problems worse are top strategies in the Conservative Playbook.
I enjoyed Scruton’s writings on music. Here’s a section that will delight Art Scott who used to attend the Proms every year! “The best thing about summer is the Proms, and this year especially on account of Daniel Barenboim’s wonderful performance of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. I have studied that stupendous work for most of my adult life, ever more convinced of its greatness and the truth of its underlying vision.” (p. 24)
If you’re in the mood for short articles on a variety of topics from an intelligent–if wrong–conservative point of view, Against the Tide certainly holds its water. GRADE: B
Table of Contents:
Preface: The Work That Must Be Done — viii
Part One: Who Am I? — 1
My Life Beyond the Pale — 3
Roger Scruton Says ‘Put a Cork in It’ — 8
My Week: July 2005 — 10
My Week: January 2006 — 13
My Week: April 2006 — 16
The Flame That Was Snuffed Out by Freedom — 19
Finding Scrutopia in the Czech Republic — 23
Diary – August 2016 — 26
Part Two: Who Are We? — 29
The Conservative Conscience — 31
The Blair Legacy — 34
A Question of Temperament — 37
The Meaning of Margaret Thatcher — 42
Identity, Marriage, Family: Our Core Conservative Values Have Been Betrayed — 50
What Trump Doesn’t Get About Conservatism — 54
Part Three: Why The Left Is Never Right — 57
The Ideology of Human Rights — 59
Who is a Fascist? — 66
In Praise of Privilege — 69
A Hominist Homily — 72
In Loco Parentis — 75
McCarthy Was Right on the Red Menace — 79
A Focus of Loyalty Higher than the State — 82
The Art of Taking Offence — 85
Part Four: Intimations of Infinity — 89
De Anima — 91
A Matter of Life and Deathlessness — 94
Dawkins Is Wrong about God — 97
Altruism and Selfishness — 101
Memo to Hawking: There’s Still Room for God — 106
Humans Hunger for the Sacred: Why Can’t the New Atheists Understand That? — 109
Part Five: The End of Education — 113
The Virtue of Irrelevance — 115
The Open University and the Closed Mind — 118
The End of Education — 121
The Plague of Sociology — 124
Know Your Place — 128
Universities’ War against the Truth — 133
Part Six: Fraudulent Philosophy — 117
A Note on Foucault — 139
The Triumph of Nothingness — 143
Freud and Fraud — 146
If Only Chomsky Had Stuck to Syntax — 149
Part Seven: The West and the Rest — 153
In Memory of Iran — 155
The Lesson of Lebanon — 158
Decent Debate Mustn’t Be the Victim — 162
The Wrong Way to Treat President Putin — 165
Why Iraq Is a Write-Off — 168
Part Eight: Cultural Corruption — 173
The Art of Motor-Cycle Maintenance — 175
Temples of Anxiety — 178
The Modern Cult of Ugliness — 181
High Culture Is Being Corrupted by a Culture of Fakes — 185
Part Nine: Animal Rights, Pulpit Politics and Sex — 191
Male Domination — 193
The Pestilence of Pulpit Politics — 196
On the Eating of Fish — 199
Obligations of the Flesh — 202
Eat Animals! It’s for Their Own Good — 205
Sextants and Sexting — 208
Tally Ho! Let the Hunt Remind Us of Who We Are — 211
Part Ten: Annus Horribilis and Last Words — 215
Diary — 217
After My Own Dark Night — 220
My 2019 — 224
Index — 233
I have to admit that I put Scruton on my list of negatives when I read his views on religion – my point is:
Religion is the root of all evil!
And calling the EU degenerate or whatever when it is the main reson that we didn’t have the usual war in Europe is ***expletive deleted***.
What I still haven’t found out:
What was his view on sexuality, equal rights for women etc?
He seems to me like a witch hunter who would have enjoyed torturing people …
Wolf, I’m with you on Scruton’s takes on religion. And the EU. He seemed to always be spoiling for a fight.
I have to admit that I put Scruton on my list of negatives when I read his views on religion – my point is:
Religion is the root of all evil!
And calling the EU degenerate or whatever when it is the main reason that we didn’t have the usual war in Europe is ***expletive deleted***.
What I still haven’t found out:
What was his view on sexuality, equal rights for women etc?
He seems to me like a witch hunter who would have enjoyed torturing people …
PS:
His wiki is devastating – he worked for the tobacco industry (got paid a nice sum) to defend smoking.
He was my age but while I was active in the sixties’ student activities (call them a revolution if you like) he was turned into an extreme right winger then as a young guy, really strange.
I would probably call him a sexist homophobic antisemitic fascist …
Now I remember:
We discussed his activities on the Hungarian Spectrum site – he climbed up the Hungarian autocrat Orbán’s behind …
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roger_Scruton
Wolf, Scruton also did some speaking trips in Europe. Apparently, Scruton was popular with some Right Wing political groups. He had strong opinions on many topics.
Yes, he’s very popular in Hungary with the ruling extreme right wing party Fidesz, just like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson eg.
Horrible!
Speaking of which, Wolf, I hope you and yours don’t ever get stranded in the current Hungary.
Nope…nope…nope!
Deb, I suspect fans of Roger Scruton will now gravitate to Trump or the European equivalent.
Just because this guy can write an intelligible sentence doesn’t mean he’s not full of shit.
Michael, truer words were never spoken!
I agree with all of the above. I’ll pass.
Steve, I occasionally check in on the Conservative World just to see what they’re thinking…and planning.
A fascist putsch—and you don’t even have to “check in” with them. They’re saying the quiet part out loud on Fox News, talk radio, and Facebook every day!
Deb, Trump gave the Right Wing the Green Light to come out of the shadows.
I also agree with all of the above. Reading him would make me too angry even if knowing the enemy counts for something.
Patti, I also used to listen to Rush Limbaugh once in a while to hear what nonsense he was peddling to his Ditto Head listeners.
Endlessly repetitively.
Todd, some writers like to beat the drum over and over again…to bang their point home.
Oh, I meant endless repetition was Limbaugh’s trademark.
Todd, plenty of political types on the Left and the Right resort to endless repetition to drive home their points.
Few so inanely and dully as Limbaugh.
Todd, yet “The Ditto-heads” believed everything Rush told them.
Very hard pass. These days “intelligent conservative” is almost an oxymoron.
Jeff, I remember watching FIRING LINE on PBS and was impressed with William F. Buckley even though I didn’t agree with him on practically anything.
Well, there was the formal debate episode in which Buckley and his team argued for the Canal to be turned back over to Panama, and Ronald Reagan and his team made notably stupid arguments for retaining US control of the Canal. Buckley reveled in one bit of refutation of Reagan’s argument, and Reagan gave Buckley that look of naked hatred that Reaganauts seemed to love.
Today, Robert Redford also looks like an aged Robert Redford. As I tell my grandkids, we never get any younger . . .
What is this dope talking about? Thanks to Nixon, Reagan, Gingrich, two Bushes, Trump and their allies in the other two branches of government and their American Medici patrons, and feeble (if that) resistance from the Dems, we’ve had 50 years of “limited government” and a free pass for vultures in the free market. So we now have woefully (and wilfully) unfunded public education, a rotting infrastructure, the triumph of hateful demagoguery, and the list goes on.
Fred, we need more political action to reverse these trends. It’s ironic that will all the 24/7 cable news networks, thousands of blogs, Internet news, etc. the politics of our nation becomes more murky. Dark money and Fake News and disinformation bots are just some of the culprits.
George, I bet you’re enjoying today’s weather more than yesterday’s. We had 88 degrees yesterday and it is 65 today, windy and cool, just the way George likes it.
Jeff, you’re exactly right! Friday’s weather in NYC was hot and humid. But, we didn’t have far to travel for dinner or the Broadway musical. Saturday in NYC was ideal (for me at least!) with cool weather. We did more walking. Patrick took us to Pier 17 and Diane enjoyed the outdoors market. Father’s Day was a perfect day to travel! We flew out of Newark on time and landed in Buffalo 48 minutes later! But, because we arrived at the Buffalo Airport 25 minutes early, there was no gate for our plane. We sat on the tarmac for a half an hour until a gate finally opened up!
Never heard of him, and don’t think I’ve missed anything
Maggie, Roger Scruton influenced many Conservative groups. I don’t agree with Scruton on many issues, but he had a hand in plenty of political battles like BREXIT.
These days, we can be mildly grateful for the occasional sane reactionary, such as Rep. Cheney, at least in the context of her contempt for Trump and his gang. Not finding her all that attractive in Nearly All of her policies, as I’m a non-reactionary, but at least she takes her job seriously.
Meanwhile, this:
“The West is adrift without leadership,”
–what “leadership” has the West ever uniformly had, and when has it as a whole not been “adrift”? Certainly oligarchs of various stripes retain their outsized power, as they have throughout the last century and more, though some countries with strong labor movements (augmented by class distinctions that no one was allowed to escape) have made their societies a bit less onerous for nearly all their populations, as opposed to, say, the US.
“anarchy is spreading through Asia and Africa,”
More like dictatorship and fascism (using the “small f” to denoted a less than simon-pure Mussolini vision of melding state power and tradition to back it) is efflorescing throughout the world. Including Asia (not least in both Russia and China) and Africa…and West Asia, aka Europe.
“and the political process in Europe has been absorbed by the fantasy of European Union.”
As Wolf notes, the clumsinesses and slow progress when there is of the EU has generally been less disruptive and stultifying than the fantasy of Each Country Tending To It’s Own Conservative Traditions while peacefully fuddling along, a mere war or two every few years to help us keep the blood up.
“Almost everywhere in the civilized world we encounter social decay: the decline in religious observance and local customs;”
Probably because a lot of local customs have been pernicious, and state religions even more so…even my paleoconservative and Greek Orthodox friend somewhat ruefully agrees with James Madison that State Religions lead to nothing but bloodshed, and the hypocrisy of too many churches tends to put off all but the most devout.
“the rise of crime and violence;”
Or, perhaps more accurately, the increased reporting of crime and violence, as less of it is hushed up or happens to Those Who Don’t Matter in these slightly more egalitarian, and definitely What Bleeds Leads culture…
“the pornocratic culture of mass media;”
Pornocracy, as Jeffrey Epstein’s career continued to demonstrate, goes far beyond the Mass Media…as it has even before there was any mass media.
“the description of love and marriage;”
Oh, the horror, that people unlike Mom and Dad might be able to engage in such things…
“the collapse of education”
Hard to argue with; impossible to argue that even true-blue Tory Conservatives haven’t done their damnedest to poison this well.
“and the retreat of the individual into his private pleasure dome.”
Why can’t the Simple Folk do what they’re told by We wiser heads, laments our poor suffering Scruton.
Well, “our current, slightly more egalitarian, and definitely What Bleeds Leads culture…” anyway.