Photo by Sam Frost
Roger Scruton at home, 2011
The Sacred and the Human
By Roger Scruton
Prospect Magazine 137, August 2007
Edited by Andy Ross
It is not surprising that decent people should be receptive to the
anti-religious polemics of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and others.
What is a little more surprising is the extent to which religion is
caricatured by its current opponents.
For Hegel, myths and rituals
are forms of self-discovery, through which we understand the place of the
subject in a world of objects, and the inner freedom that conditions all
that we do. The emergence of monotheism from the polytheistic religions of
antiquity is not so much a discovery as a form of self-creation, as the
spirit learns to recognise itself in the whole of things, and to overcome
its finitude.
Two thinkers stand out as the founders of a new
intellectual enterprise. Nietzsche and Wagner painted a picture that placed
the concept of the sacred at the centre of the anthropology of religion.
Their attempt to understand the concept of the sacred was taken forward
by René Girard, who observes that religion has its roots in violence.
Dawkins and Hitchens conclude that religion is the cause of this violence
and sexual obsession. Girard argues that religion is not the cause of
violence but the solution to it. The violence comes from another source. The
same can be said of the religious obsession with sexuality.
Nietzsche envisages a primeval human society, reduced to near universal
slavery by the healthy egoists who impose their desires on others by the
force of their nature. The master race maintains its position by punishing
all deviation on the part of the slaves. Because he cannot exact revenge,
the slave expends his resentment on himself, coming to think of his
condition as in some way deserved. For Nietzsche, this explains the entire
theological and moral vision of Christianity.
Girard sees the primeval condition of society
as one of conflict. In primitive societies, as rivals struggle to match each
other's social and material acquisitions, they heighten antagonism and
precipitate the cycle of revenge. The solution is to identify a scapegoat.
According to Girard, the need for sacrificial scapegoating is implanted in
the human psyche. One purpose of the theatre is to provide fictional
substitutes for the original crime, and so to obtain the benefit of moral
renewal without the horrific cost.
Girard argues that this is how we
should see the achievement of Christianity. Girard identifies Christ as a
new kind of victim who offers himself for sacrifice. The climax is not the
death of the scapegoat but the experience of sacred awe, as the victim, at
the moment of death, forgives his tormentors. Christ's submission purified
society and religion of the need for sacrificial murder: his conscious
self-sacrifice is therefore, Girard suggests, rightly thought of as a
redemption.
Girard's account of the Passion is amplified by a
conviction that religion and tragedy are comparable receptacles for the
experience of sacred awe. The experience of the sacred is not an irrational
residue of primitive fears, nor is it a form of superstition that will one
day be chased away by science. It is a solution to the accumulated
aggression which lies in the heart of human communities.
Girard treats his genealogy as a piece of theology. For
him, it is a kind of proof of the Christian religion and of the divinity of
Jesus. And he suggests that the path that has led him from the inner meaning
of the Eucharist to the truth of Christianity was one followed by Wagner and
Nietzsche.
You don't have to follow Girard in order to endorse his
view of the sacred. Birth, copulation and death are the moments when time
stands still, when we look on the world from a point at its edge, when we
experience our dependence and contingency, and when we are apt to be filled
with awe. It is from such moments that religion begins.
AR (August 2007) Some 35 years
ago, when I was a graduate student of philosophy in London, I debated with
Roger, who was then a young lecturer. Still I debate mentally with his
writings. Half of what he says I like, half I feel the need to disown or
contradict. In this review, Roger finds an interesting kernel of truth about
Nietzsche and Wagner but seems to me to make too much of it. A Nietzschean
anthopology of religion covers Christianity and Judaism quite well, Islam
and Hinduism less well, and the more minor cults covered by people like
Pascal Boyer hardly at all. As for the Dawkins and Hitchens crowd, I suspect
they will remain unbowed by what looks almost like a work of Christian
apologetics.
Forgiveness and Irony
By Roger Scruton
City Journal, Winter 2009
Edited by Andy Ross
In the West today, citizenship is an order that confers security and freedom
in exchange for consent. The Muslims who are Arabs are apt to take "Islam"
literally and renounce not only freedom but also the very idea of
citizenship.
Citizenship will endure only if associated with meanings
to which the rising generation can attach its hopes and its search for
identity. The secular order and the search for meaning coexisted quite
happily when Christianity provided its benign support to both. But
Christianity has retreated.
This retreat has left behind it a sense
of emptiness and defeat. It is hardly surprising that so many Muslims in our
cities today regard the civilization surrounding them as doomed. For they
were brought up in a world of certainties.
If repudiation of its past
and its identity is all that Western civilization can offer, it cannot
survive. But citizenship is an achievement that we cannot forgo if the
modern world is to survive. We should turn away from apologetic
multiculturalism and return to the gifts that we have received from our
Judeo-Christian tradition.
The first of these gifts is forgiveness.
By living in a spirit of forgiveness, we not only uphold the core value of
citizenship but also find the path to social membership. Happiness comes
from sacrifice. And in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the primary act of
sacrifice is forgiveness. The one who forgives sacrifices resentment.
The God of the Koran is not a lenient God. In His Koranic manifestation,
God forgives sparingly and with obvious reluctance. The Koran is no joke.
Another of our civilization's gifts to us is irony. The ironic
temperament is a virtue. I would describe it as a habit of acknowledging the
otherness of everything, including oneself. Irony recognizes that the one
who judges is also judged, and judged by himself.
To forgive the
other is to acknowledge the individual as sovereign over his life and free
to do both right and wrong. A society that makes permanent room for
forgiveness therefore tends toward democracy. Irony amplifies this
democratic tendency.
Forgiveness and irony underlie our conception of
citizenship as founded in consent. This conception of law has little in
common with Muslim sharia, which is regarded as a system of commands issued
by God.
Terrorism and Islam have become associated in the popular
mind. Terrorists pursue a moral exultation radiated by a self-assumed
permission of the kind enjoyed by God. Terrorism of this kind is a search
for meaning that citizenship cannot provide. The Islamist terrorist wants to
belong to God, not to the world. Death is his ultimate act of submission:
through death, he dissolves into a new and immortal brotherhood.
There is nothing we can offer the Islamists that will enable them to say
that they have achieved their goal. If they succeeded in destroying a
Western city with a nuclear bomb, they would regard it as a triumph, even
though it conferred no benefit whatsoever.
The mass of ordinary
Muslims would be appalled at such an event and would regard such mass murder
as an outrage absolutely forbidden by the law of God. However, Muslims show
a remarkable ability to turn a blind eye to the atrocities committed in the
name of their faith and to rally against anyone who disparages it. Muslims
must face up to this fact. Such double standards are the direct result of
the loss of irony.
The confrontation that we are involved in is an
existential confrontation. We can avert the threat only by facing it down.
We must be absolutely convinced that we have a right to exist and that we
are prepared to concede an equal right to our opponents, though only on
condition that the concession is mutual.
To Muslims confronting the
modern world without forgiveness and irony, we should emphasize the
achievements that we have built on our legacy of tolerance. We should
reaffirm the core idea of social membership in the idea of citizenship.
Farewell to Judgment
By Roger Scruton
The American Spectator, June 5, 2009
Edited by Andy Ross
The sciences aim to explain the world. But as universities expanded, the
humanities began to displace the sciences from the curriculum. For subjects
like English, the question of their validity became urgent. English focuses
on the works of dead white European males whose values would be found
offensive by young people today.
People of my generation were taught
to study literature in order to sympathize with life in all its forms. The
central discipline of a subject like English was criticism. The same was
true of art history and musicology. You taught these subjects by way of
introducing students to the great works of our civilization.
Taste
and judgment are faculties that we develop as part of the transition from
youthful enjoyment to adult discrimination. Conservatives often complain
about the politicization of the universities. But they fail to see the true
cause of this, which is the internal collapse of the humanities. When
judgment is marginalized or forbidden, nothing remains save politics.
The restoration of judgment to its central place in the humanities will
require an insistence that the real purpose of universities is not to
flatter the tastes of those who arrive there, but to present them with a
rite of passage into something better. And who has the right to say that one
thing is better than another?
AR I must concede that I
underestimated Roger 35 years ago. Far from being a mere right-wing
ideologue, he has grown and become one of our best philosophers.
By Roger Scruton
Big Questions Online, December 9, 2010
Edited by Andy Ross
Darwinism has invaded the humanities. The whole realm of aesthetic
experience and literary judgement has been explained as an adaptation, a
part of human biology which exists because of the benefit that it confers on
our genes. The theory of natural selection, supplemented by modern genetics,
tells us that if a trait is widespread across our species, then it has been
selected for. The trait is not maladaptive.
But that is a trivial
observation. Mathematics is not maladaptive. Mathematical competence is not
likely to impair a creature's reproductive chances. This does not mean that
we have at last got a theory of mathematics. If we came to think that
mathematics is maladaptive, say because it leads to an obsession with Möbius
bands and transfinite cardinals, that would not undermine it. Mathematics is
understood by applying its proofs.
The attempt to explain the
humanities as adaptations is both trivial as science and empty as a form of
understanding. It tells us nothing of importance about the humanities. It
merely persuades ignorant people that there is nothing about them to
understand, since they have all been explained away.
AR Mathematics defines the
frame within which the logic of Darwinian adaptation can unfold. That logic
maps well into the cumulative hierarchy of my set-theoretic metaphysics. As
a matter of historical fact, I founded that metaphysics after a student decade of obsessing about "Möbius bands
and transfinite cardinals" and their deeper meaning :-)
Green Philosophy
By Simon Jenkins
The Sunday Times, January 1, 2012
Edited by Andy Ross
Roger Scruton is a passionate conservative and equally passionate
conservationist. He resents the fact that free markets are blamed for
pollution and climate change, while socialism is seen as their antidote.
Green, he cries, should be blue not red.
Scruton considers global
warming. In a savage survey of green politics, he examines attempts so far
to reduce greenhouse gases. If the risk of global warming is as overwhelming
as is claimed, he says, the requisite enforcement would be draconian. Do we
want America to bomb China's power stations?
People resist being told
what to do by distant and unaccountable regimes, when it is not in their
clear interest. They continue to burn coal, drive cars and chop down trees,
and to hell with what someone says in Rio, Tokyo or Durban.
Scruton
advocates "solving environmental problems not by appointing someone to take
charge of them but by creating the incentives that will lead people to solve
them for themselves". Conservatism must fuse with conservation in nimbyism.
Salvation comes from the bottom.
I would rather face Armageddon as a
Scrutopian nimbyist than under the grim yoke of state command.
AR More fool Simon — improve the state,
you curmudgeon!
Three Brain Books
Reviewed by Roger Scruton
Prospect, January 25, 2012
Edited by Andy Ross
Beyond
Human Nature: Jesse Prinz argues that there is little reason to think
that biology has a major impact in accounting for human differences. He
argues that gender difference is to a great extent acquired and that
emotions are socially constructed. But the division of roles between men and
women has deep roots in biology. A species whose young are as vulnerable as
human children needs both organised defence and serious home building if it
is to reproduce itself. On that granite foundation is built the romantic
castle of sexual difference.
Incognito: David Eagleman argues that concepts like responsibility and
freedom cannot survive intact from the advances of neuroscience. Whether it
is nature or nurture that wired up the brain, the wiring is for the most
part none of our doing, and nothing for which we can be praised or blamed.
But his picture of the fragile "I" riding the elephant of grey matter while
pretending to be in charge of it misrepresents the nature of self-reference.
The "I" is one term of the I-You relation, which is a relation of
accountability in which the whole person is involved. To use the
first-person pronoun is to present myself for judgement. It is to take
responsibility for my acts and account for them in terms of freedom and
choice.
You and Me: Susan Greenfield emphasises that our brains are plastic and
can be influenced in ways that pose a risk to our moral development. We can
bring up children on passive and addictive entertainments that stultify
their engagement with the real world and rewire the neural networks on which
their moral development depends. But if we bring up our children correctly,
a sense of responsibility will emerge. They will become free agents and
moral beings, and learn to live as persons.
By Roger Scruton
Prospect, February 2013
Edited by Andy Ross
The idea that all human beings are equal is questionable. Equality demands
equal treatment for disadvantaged and advantaged children, and therefore
exams that make no real distinctions between them. It demands equal
treatment for nationals and for migrants, and therefore the abolition of
effective border controls. It demands equal treatment for gay and straight
people, and therefore gay marriage.
It is also questionable whether
human beings are or ought to be free. In the name of freedom men abandon
their families, schools abandon discipline, and universities abandon the old
and tried curriculum. Freedom means opportunity. Individual freedom cries
out for top-down control. Yet freedom also opens the road to the rest of us.
Freedom in this sense is a good thing, unless it is abused.
Conservatism is about conserving the foundations of civil society. The
Conservative party has defined the customs and institutions that it is
seeking to conserve in terms that a large proportion of electorate broadly
agree with: it has been the party of monarchy, of the family, of the Church
of England, of law and order, of the common law, of the armed forces, and of
the pomp and circumstance of old England. So understood, England is a moral
idea.
The modernization wing of the Tory party is hoping for a new
kind of conservatism which conserves nothing, changes everything, and is
guided by the rhetoric of equality and human rights. If that is where we
are, then conservatism is dead.
