Roger Scruton
British philosopher.
Page 1 of 1
In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.
[Burke] emphasized that the new forms of politics, which hope to organize society around the rational pursuit of liberty, equality, fraternity, or their modernist equivalents, are actually forms of militant irrationality.
This "knowing what to do"... is a matter of having the right purpose, the purpose appropriate to the situation in hand... The one who "knows what to do" is the one on whom you can rely to make the best shot at success, whenever success is possible.
The first effect of modernism was to make high culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition.
In 1970s Britain, conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses.
A civilization is a social entity that manifests religious, political , legal, and customary uniformity over an extended period, and which confers on its members the benefits of socially accumulated knowledge.
[T]o teach virtue we must educate the emotions, and this means learning "what to feel" in the various circumstances that prompt them.
The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.
The core of common culture is religion. Tribes survive and flourish because they have gods, who fuse many wills into a single will, and demand and reward the sacrifices on which social life depends.
All of us need an identity which unites us with our neighbours, our countrymen, those people who are subject to the same rules and the same laws as us, those people with whom we might one day have to fight side by side to protect our inheritance, those people with whom we will suffer when attacked, those people whose destinies are in some way tied up with our own.
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative,' is asking you not to believe him. So don't.
Conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this lies the secret of its success.
The future of mankind, for the socialist, is simple: pull down the existing order and allow the future to emerge.
Faith exalts the human heart, by removing it from the market-place, making it sacred and unexchangeable. Under the jurisdiction of religion our deeper feelings are sacralized, so as to become raw material for the ethical life: the life lived in judgement.
Kant's position is extremely subtle — so subtle, indeed, that no commentator seems to agree with any other as to what it is.
The conservative response to modernity is to embrace it, but to embrace it critically, in full consciousness that human achievements are rare and precarious, that we have no God-given right to destroy our inheritance, but must always patiently submit to the voice of order, and set an example of orderly living.
Without the background of a remembered faith modernism loses its conviction: it becomes routinised. For a long time now it has been assumed that there can be no authentic creation in the sphere of high art which is not is some way a 'challenge' to the ordinary public. Art must give offence, stepping out of the future fully armed against the bourgeois taste for kitsch and cliché. But the result of this is that offence becomes a cliché.
In all the areas of life where people have sought and found consolation through forbidding their desires—sex in particular, and taste in general—the habit of judgment is now to be stamped out.
The ethical life... is maintained in being by a common culture, which also upholds the togetherness of society... Unlike the modern youth culture, a common culture sanctifies the adult state, to which it offers rites of passage.
Page 1 of 1