Christina: The philosopher, Sir Roger Scruton
is with me today.
He is one of the most distinguished philosophers
of our age.
Some have called him the greatest conservative
philosopher since Edmund Burke.
He's the author of more than 50 books.
He's also written an opera, several novels.
During the Cold War, he made several trips
to Prague where we had clandestine philosophy
seminars around the city.
He was eventually arrested, expelled from
the country, and placed on an index of undesirable
persons.
Later, when freedom returned, Roger was awarded
the Czech Medal of Merit.
The Factual Feminist is proud to say that
he has been my friend and ally for many years.
Roger, welcome to AEI.
Sir Roger: Well, thank you for inviting me.
Christina: It's so lovely to have you here.
And you were recently knighted by Queen Elizabeth
II, and I wanna congratulate you for that.
I'm not sure what I should call you.
Sir Roger: Well, I think you can still call
me Roger.
Christina: Sir Roger, Lord, Lord Sovereign,
I know.
I immediately wondered about your father,
your late father.
He was from a working-class background and
he had a lot of, let's say, resentment toward
the upper class.
And when you were admitted to Cambridge University,
he was very angry.
How would he feel about knighthood?
Sir Roger: Well, he wouldn't be pleased and
one part of him wouldn't be pleased, but another
part might be pleased, you know because he
was a contradiction.
Like so many people who had come from the
bottom, he felt that it was a great achievement
not to be what he was, but nevertheless, he
must retain the loyalty to what he was, and
seeing me blithely, youthfully, striving ahead
was intolerable for him and I can understand
that.
But in the end, you know, he was awarded an
honor by the queen at one stage because he
was an ardent environmentalist who devoted
a lot of his life to defending our little
local town from the abuse of the developers,
and he organized a local society for the protection
of the town.
And this work was eventually recognized with
the little, you know, the medal, the MBE which
is a much cover to the thing.
Christina: And he was happy with that?
Sir Roger: He had real problems with it.
But he accepted it.
And then on his grave in High Wycombe on a
tombstone, it says, "Jack Scruton, MBE."
You know, we felt that that does actually
recognize what the deep part of him wanted.
Christina: For millennials out there, the followers
of the Factual Feminist are college age or
younger, and they may have been in schools,
universities where conservatism was denigrated
or simply not represented.
So how do you define conservatism and what
are its virtues?
Sir Roger: Well, this has been my life's work
to define conservatism.
At a certain stage, I realized that I was
a conservative, without knowing quite what
it was.
Let's say in May 1968 in Paris when I saw
all the students protesting on behalf of essentially
nothing, not knowing what they wanted, knowing
only what they were against.
I felt this is outrageous that they should
be listened to.
If people's feelings are purely negative,
defining themselves in terms of what they
dislike or even hate, then they are under
an obligation to find something that they
love.
So, I looked around myself for the things
I love, and I decided that they are the things
that I already have, our civilization, the
rule of law.
The ability to close a door and be secured
behind it, all those...
Christina: That we take for granted...
Sir Roger: That we take for granted.
Christina: ...the benefits of civilization.
Sir Roger: Exactly.
But they were threatened then by these crazy
students who'd had all these benefits, of
course.
Christina: Yes.
It was very much an upper-middle class uprising.
Sir Roger: Well, yes, exactly.
I've observed it from my mansard in the street
below in Paris and it was a revolution supposedly
against the bourgeoisie on behalf of the working
class.
I looked down on the street for representatives
of the working class, the only ones I could
see were those poor policemen whom they were
throwing stones at.
Christina: Exactly.
And we've seen this now on some of our college
campuses.
Sir Roger: Exactly.
So, my own thought anyway, over the many years
that I've looked into this question, my thought
is that the essential feature of conservatism
is love of the actual, love of the things
that you've inherited and a desire to reassert
that inheritance.
Not uncritically you know, but it's in the
way that you do with your family, your parents,
your brothers, and sisters.
You know their faults but you love them and
they're a part of you, and it's your primary
duty to affirm that love, then work for any
improvements, of course.
Christina: Now when you say improvements,
I can imagine someone from the left responding
that what are you talking about conserving?
What if what you are conserving is corrupt,
full of injustice, you know, institutions
where women were second class citizens and
so forth, what do you say?
Sir Roger: Everything is imperfect, but the
question is, what parts of what you've inherited
can be improved and amended?
What parts must be thrown away?
But what parts are necessary if you're to
do any improving at all?
Edmund Burke said you know, "We reform in
order to conserve."
If we don't do it that way, then we are at
risk losing the whole motive for reforming
in the first place because we throw away our
identities as social beings.
Christina: And it's much easier to tear something
apart than to...
Sir Roger: Well, of course.
Christina: ...build it.
And so heedlessly, we've seen denigrations
of beauty in contemporary life and in education.
Where young people aren't introduced to great
works of the past or even something like the
beauty of the common law.
There's not an understanding of where our
laws come from.
I see students today that suddenly want to
dispense with due process or have, you know,
they would like to change the first amendment,
no understanding of how these came into being
and...
Sir Roger: No, that's right.
Well, I think this is where one has to steer
a middle course between saying, "Look, this
is our inheritance.
Accept it."
And saying, "Get rid of all that and let's
start again."
All attempts to get rid of everything and
start again like the French Revolution or
the Russian Revolution or the Nazi Revolution,
end up as genocide because the controls that
prevent people from exercising their basic
resentment and anger are taken away.
So, you have to begin from the point that
we have inherited something that defines what
we are, let's see now whether we want to improve
it in this or that respect, and which parts
of it are absolutely fundamental to our being
what we are.
And you mention the common law which, of course,
is part of the shared inheritance of my country
and yours, which most young people don't fully
understand.
They don't see the amazing achievement of
a legal system that has grown out of the resolution
of individual conflicts.
And then the extraction of principles from
that so that it's sensitive at every point
to the actuality of human beings.
Christina: And developed organically from
the ground up rather than from on high.
Sir Roger: Yeah, imposed.
See, but it's a natural instinct in intellectuals
and the reason why intellectuals are so dangerous,
is to impose things from on high to say, "Look,
we understand everything.
We've got the answer to the human problem.
Here are the principles.
Those are gonna be accepted and we'll deduced
from that the application in the individual
case."
And that's the opposite of how human conflicts
are resolved.
That the principles are deduced from the particular
case and not the other way around.
Christina: Not the other way around.
And you have seen this, for example, in the
area of art and art history how there was
a tradition of beauty and works of genius
and younger people were taught to appreciate
and younger artist to emulate.
And then suddenly, there were...well, it wasn't
sudden, but there was a gradual move in modernity
and then post-modernity and something was
lost, and you talked about this in...
Sir Roger: Yes.
Yeah.
This is something that has troubled me because
I've always been interested in the arts.
And for me when I was growing up, like many
of my generation, I was looking for something
that would represent the civilization that
had almost destroyed itself in the Second
World War.
And what was so great, what is the symbol
of that that I would really want to hold onto?
Of course, art, music, and literature became
symbols for me.
And then I was faced, as all my generation
were faced with the strange puzzle that at
a certain stage, artists themselves seemed
to be turning against their vocation.
The vocation of art as I see it, is to produce
beautiful things through the beauty of which
we understand our own predicament.
You know, the human condition, as we know,
is full of woes, full of tragedy and full
of...
Christina: Mystery.
Sir Roger: ...mystery and one of the tasks
of art is to reconcile us to this, to show
that in the very depths of despair, there
is beauty which redeems us.
And all the great art of the past, you know,
right up to Van Gogh and Cézanne and so on,
was devoted to this transcendental goal.
Suddenly, there was a kind of culture of repudiation
that came about, that we don't want this,
we can't do it, therefore, we're going to
condemn it.
And you get art like de Kooning and people
like that which became very fashionable in
America, devoted to the goal of desecrating
in the human condition rather than redeeming
it.
And I think that that was, you know, a religious
person would say, "That was the devil's work,"
but I don't want to put it quite in that way.
But there is something in us which wants to
destroy, as well as the other thing that wants
to affirm.
And artists are particularly vulnerable to
this because, you know, let's face it.
At a certain stage in our civilization, the
artist became a kind of hero.
He was adulated, he was made into the representative
of the human spirit for our times.
And to get that status became, you know, an
object of great desire.
Christina: Coveted.
Sir Roger: Yeah.
People coveted the status of artist.
And so any way of getting attention at a certain
stage seemed good.
So, you've got all that pop art stuff or worse,
you know, like Tracey Emin putting on display.
Christina: From her bed, her...
Sir Roger: Her disordered bed in which...
Christina: Frightening.
Sir Roger: Yes, in which all the mess of her
daily life is made into a spectacle and the
people will queue to see that spectacle.
This was a queue to see...used to queue to
look at crucifixions, but it doesn't follow
that the thing is beautiful.
And it doesn't follow that they'll go away
from this improved or in any way made to reflect
on their own condition and be reconciled to
it.
Christina: Now, you have said that if we...well,
you have defended beauty because you say it
is a way of finding ourselves, that it is...if
we lose it, we lose the meaning of life.
Sir Roger: Yes.
Yeah.
I mean, we don't do everything for the sake
of beauty.
That would be an esthete of the Oscar Wilde
type.
But...
Christina: Yes, impractical.
Sir Roger: Impractical, but also offensive
as well, because a large number of people
can't live their lives in that way.
But nonetheless, there is still, in all of
us, the desire to make things fit, to make
things harmonize.
You know, when you enter a house where you've
been invited to supper, your manners, your
language, your gestures are all expressed,
this is now to fit with these people.
You may not know them very well.
They would've laid the table so that it looks
inviting, etc.
That's something that human beings spontaneously
do and its part of making sense of life that
we do that.
Christina: And you see in the cities, in Washington,
and New York, people go to the parks where
as soon as they can get outdoors in some kind
of rustic setting, it's a longing in us for...
Sir Roger: Yes.
There is a longing for beauty and it isn't
just that we want to fit together with our
neighbors either.
There shines through these very primitive
and ordinary experiences of beauty, another
dimension of being.
And we don't necessarily notice it in our
day-to-day life or we certainly don't have
words for it, but just every now and then
we will stop and we'll recognize that we have
been granted a window onto the transcendental.
And in ordinary people's lives, those little
windows that open are absolutely vital, even
if they can't describe what it is that they
do.
Christina: Yes, and we wanna keep those...make
those available to our children, to one another.
And if you look at what's happened with modern
architecture which you...I don't remember
your exact words but something like it's,
you know, the greatest crime against beauty
has been carried out by the modern architects
who built the glass boxes.
Sir Roger: Yes.
Well, it's, yeah, a crime against the human
soul.
I want to say that building, and especially
the building of cities is one of the most
important enterprises that human beings engage
in because it's their way of marking out a
piece of the earth as their shared territory.
You know, when you build a city or something,
like Washington or something, all the Washingtonians
share.
So, it really matters how the buildings face
onto the street.
The typical modern building doesn't face onto
the street at all.
It doesn't have a face.
It's just a glass screen on a few steeled
girders, and it's erected to, usually on a
space that involves destroying all kinds of
agreeable habitats.
It's not built to last.
It'll be pulled down at huge environmental
cost in 20 years' time and replaced by an
equally hideous thing.
Meanwhile, the street, the fabric of the city,
the sense of the city as a home to all its
dwellers is mutilated and destroyed.
And I think this is...it's not the great works
of modern architecture that do this.
You know, it's the ordinary day-to-day business
architecture which is conceived purely a work
of engineering, but which is sweeping away
all the texture of the city as we used to
know it.
And I think this is having an impact on people's
lives.
The first impact it has is, of course, drive
people out to the city.
They don't live in the city anymore.
Christina: They don't wanna be there.
Sir Roger: Yeah.
They go, they retreat to the suburbs and into
their own private space, their own silence
instead of being out on the street mingling
with each other.
Christina: You lived in Boston for many years,
do you remember the Boston City Hall?
It was a brutalist.
It's still there.
Sir Roger: Absolutely horrible, yes.
Christina: A horrible building.
And if you look at the old city hall, it was
beautiful, Second Empire French design with,
you know, it had a mansard roof and very...I
look at this desecration.
First of all, it's terrible in every way.
It cuts the city in two in ways which make
it impossible.
And it has an open expense.
No one wants to go there.
It's all cement, no trees and then it's an
upside down, you know, concrete cake.
It's hideous inside and out and, you know,
people wanna tear it down but it's too expensive.
What were they thinking?
They built it in '68.
Sir Roger: Yes.
Well, we all know that the '60s was the time
when everything went wrong because it was
the time when the baby boom generation matured
or rather, they grew into immaturity.
And took possession of their inheritance and
their first, like a child, being given a precious
stove from the playbooks in the attic, start
pulling it apart, you know.
It was like that.
And that the architects at that time decided
they were going to pull their own inheritance
apart, and that was their way of making a
mark.
Christina: Well, is it stopped, don't you
think, for getting a little better?
Sir Roger: Yes.
What I was criticizing earlier was not the
work of the architects who pride themselves
on their work but of the ordinary...
Christina: Utilitarian.
Sir Roger: Yeah, ordinary architect's office
which is occupied by people who have never
been educated in architecture.
They wouldn't know, for instance, how to draw
the shadow on a Corinthian capital in the
middle of the day or how a campanile looks
or the shadow of a campanile on a sloping
roof.
Those are the things that architects have
to study and know before they could qualify,
right up to the Second World War.
But thanks to propaganda of people like Le
Corbusier and Gropius, that curriculum was
swept away and all they study now is engineering
and isometric drawings, you know, just ground
plans repeated 20 times over.
Christina: Could we build beautiful cities
without bankrupting ourselves and beautiful
towns?
Sir Roger: Of course, we could.
And it is, in the long term a building like
this in which we are conducting this interview
is much more economical than those 20-story
glass boxes because it can change its use.
People will keep it because it's...
Christina: Because they like it.
Sir Roger: Yeah, because it's beautiful.
I wanna ask you about the universities and
some of your work.
Your recent book is called, "Fools, Frauds,
and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left."
The Guardian calls it a brilliant and patient demolition.
Which fools and frauds and firebrands do you
have in mind?
Sir Roger: Well, there's an awful lot of them
as you well know.
But for example, not all of them are frauds
actually, let's face it but among the frauds
Deleuze, Lacan, Badiou, Žižek.
Christina: Foucault.
Sir Roger: I don't call him a fraud Christina: No, no he's not a fraud.
Sir Roger: I think he's a serious thinker.
Christina: He's quite brilliant.
Sir Roger: Yeah.
I have a...
Christina: Althusser but...
Sir Roger: Althusser.
I have a soft spot for Sartre and Foucault.
Christina: I do too.
Sir Roger: And Sartre is a genius in fact.
But then there are the mere fools who just
go on iterating senseless jargon
Which, if you reproduce it, people think you must
be brilliant that you've seen into the real
meaning of that because I don't see the real
meaning of it.
Christina: Well, someone once said, a philosopher
I greatly admired and you too, John Stuart
Miller said, "Mill wrote so clearly, he could
be found out."
Sir Roger: Yes.That's a very good point.
Well, I consider it a great virtue, clarity. And you go to these post-modernists and it is a secret language. So, it is a kind of initiation and I think students have, maybe their first .
sort of genuine feeling as though they've had some kind of genuine intellectual experience and they form a little group of...
Yes. And that there is something, what you're talking about, part of the pathology of the human condition, that mumbo jumbo
at a certain point gives people the sense of being lifted out of the ordinary mundane life into a realm of illumination, you know.
Of greater importance.
Sir Roger: Yes. Exactly
And sometimes, it can be like that, you know. Religious initiations in the old world
The mysteries of, you know, the Greek religion
were like that.
And the mumbo jumbo was there to give people a sense of a superior authority.
And the less it could be understood, the more
effective it was.
Christina: So, there was this obscurantism
but at least, in that case, it led to a mystical
experience or something.
I don't know, this seems to lead to the current
state in our universities which is a lot of
moral relativism.
Students reading history to debunk and to
take it apart, to feel superior to our predecessors.
And then works of art that you're taught to
look at them with a hermeneutic of suspicion,
that's the phrase.
Sir Roger: Yeah, that's right.
Well, I do see this as an enormous problem
in education.
One aspect of it is that the student tends
to be given, especially the students come
to study literature and he or she really wants
to read Keats and Shelley and, you know, the
modern classic stories and folklore and so
on.
And instead, it's given these impenetrable
tomes, Deleuze, for instance, is huge.
Whatever.
All the books are 700 pages long and unintelligible.
And after a while, there seems to...he's not
gonna be examined on Shelley and Keats.
He's gonna be examined on this.
So eventually, spends his three years filling
his mind with this impenetrable jargon, just
learning how to reproduce it.
And losing all love of literature along the
way, because how can you love this stuff?
Christina: Yes, and it was last year, last
spring, students at Yale protested that there
was a course, the Major English Poets, pre-1800
to the 1900.
And they focused on Chaucer, Shakespeare,
Milton, Spenser, Donne, Pope, Wordsworth.
The petition accused them of excluding women,
people of color, people from the LGBQT community.
Now, there are many courses at Yale that have
poets that would, you know, meet you know,
female poets and poets of color and so forth.
But they were unhappy about this course, and
this course is legendary at Yale.
It's been taught since the 1920s.
And one young woman described herself as being
sort of traumatized by her English major at
Yale and particularly, this course.
And just the idea that they would take a poet,
they would take Shakespeare and Milton and
Spenser and Donne and put them all in the
same category as, you know, dead white men.
Sir Roger: Yes.
I mean, yeah.
I mean, this is something new.
This desire of students to police the curriculum
that they've come to learn.
You know, when we went to university as you
will remember, we went in due humility thinking,
"My God, look, there's masses of knowledge
which I need to acquire and there are people
there are gonna teach me.
It's not for me to set the curriculum.
It's for them to set the curriculum."
Christina: Yeah, did you...what the students
will say, I don't see myself reflected in
the curriculum.
You know, it doesn't validate my identity.
I don't...
Sir Roger: Yeah, well that's the point of
it.
Christina: Isn't that the purpose of education
is to introduce you to a larger world and
take you out of yourself?
Sir Roger: I know, at a certain point, if
people go on reacting in that way, the correct
response is to say, "Yeah, that's true.
You wouldn't see yourself in this, but since
you are so satisfied with yourself, there's
no need for you to come to university anyway.
So why don't you...here is the front door,
out you go."
I wanna ask you about some sort of contemporary debates on the campus. About freedom of speech, freedom of expression
or meaning of freedom altogether, but let's talk about freedom of speech. There's an understandable desire on the part of
campus administrators to preserve stability. And I'm quite sympathetic with that. I do wish people would be polite and civil. It would be shocking to me as a teacher if students were saying hideous things to one another in my class, I would tell 'em to stop.
But as soon as they start issuing speech codes or and then enlarging the meaning of hate speech or offense to include
simply irritating someone or saying something they don't agree with, then we begin to have a, you know, almost a ministry of truth and thought in what can be said and what can't be done. Is there some way to resolve this?
There is a great distinction
that we should bear in mind between giving
offense and taking offense.
A lot of education, these days, is about the
art of taking offense, gender studies is all
about this.
How to take offense at things which are meant
kindly and innocently, but by reading into
them some illegitimate denigration of women
or...
Christina: Yes, and motives no longer matter.
Perhaps someone can have good motives they
can, you know, a man can want to open a door
for you to be helpful, he thought, but that's
benevolent sexism.
Sir Roger: All that, yes, all that is a way
of raising the temperature of ordinary relations
between people to the point where they don't dare to engage in them.
This is what I worry is that it's going to undermine friendship. When the best way to overcome prejudice is that everyone has them and you meet someone from somewhere,
you know nothing about them. You will have stereotypes. What breaks them down is becoming friends and in speaking, you know, casually and not being monitored, not being afraid, not having to tread on.
And that's all absolutely true. And I think older people, people of our generation especially have a duty to point all these out to young people to say,
"Look, there are some opinions which we really dislike, you know. I hate the whole Marxist way of looking at society, and I think that it has been responsible for some terrible things that have happened that a lot of crimes
have their roots in that way of seeing everything in terms of class conflict. But I don't want to stop people from studying Marx or for even from describing their experience in this way. I want them to do it and to engage with them in argument.
You know what I find interesting is that I don't dislike my ideological opponents. I disagree with them. I think they're wrong, but I think they're misguided. And sometimes I'm reading things and I realize that they hate me.
Sir Roger: I think that this is a difficulty that I've had as well. That I think they're mistaken but they think that I'm evil because I disagree with them. They have a world view which is moralized through and through
You've got to have certain beliefs or at least you've got to say certain things otherwise, you're outside the fold of the redeemed humanity. And I think that lies behind a lot of these campus attacks on free speech, you know.
That the people who are saying the things that they don't like to hear can only be saying them because they're evil and wanting to stir up human beings into some terrible conflict.
Christina: They want to attribute the worst possible motive and they do see you as a kind of evil that should be silenced spotted out and then and that's why there's suddenly this urge to disinvite people from campus.
They take someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and someone I admire so much, and they speak poorly of her and accuse her of all sorts of things.
I wanted to end by asking you a more general question about freedom and I heard you quote recently Matthew Arnold who said that, "Freedom is a very good horse to ride but to ride somewhere." Well, I think I know what he meant by that but what does it mean to you?
Well, freedom is, for me, a sine qua non. Without freedom, I don't have the ability to shape my own life, nor the ability to help others shape theirs. So, I must have basic freedoms if I am to live a fulfilled life as a human being.
But I must also have a sense of what that fulfilled life is or would be. What should I be aiming at? At what point, can I look on myself and say, "What you are, it's good to be?" You know that is what human happiness consists in. It doesn't consist in pleasure and appetite and, you know,
having all the good things, etc. It consists in looking on yourself and saying, "That thing is a good thing to be and I've done it." And it's hard because every now and then, we do have that sense.
But then if we are truly worthwhile people, we will quickly think, "No, there are things still to be improved."
So, I think that all that Matthew Arnold meant was that just to emphasizing freedom, doesn't distinguish a good society from an anarchic one.
Anarchy leads in Hobbes's famous words to, "Life it is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." And we want the opposite of all those things.
Christina: We want the opposite. And because this is the American Enterprise Institute and we are very pro free enterprise. You are a reluctant capitalist. Explain what you mean and it's connected with our freedom because we are free to be happy consumers but that's a temptation away from a good...
Sir Roger: Well, yeah, thinking for inviting
me.
Christina: Delightful.
Sir Roger: Yeah, it's great to be back.
