The Roger Scruton Internet Bibliography
2010 Gifford Lectures
Roger Scruton on The Sacred and the Human
ISI Online Lectures
Roger Scruton on How to Change the World
Roger Scruton on Nonsense on Stilts
AEI Resident Scholar
Roger Scruton, The West and the Rest: Read excerpts HERE
Roger Scruton on "Why I became a conservative"
Roger Scruton on "Hiding
Behind the Screen":
"In its normal occurrence, the Facebook encounter is still an encounter
— however attenuated — between real people. But increasingly, the
screen is taking over — ceasing to be a medium of communication between
real people who exist elsewhere, and becoming the place where people finally
achieve reality, the only place where they relate in any coherent way to others."
(Roger Scruton, "Hiding Behind the Screen," The New Atlantis,
Number 28, Summer 2010, pp. 48-60)
The Defense of the West: How to Respond to the Islamist Challenge
Nature,
nurture and liberal values (Jan 25, 2012)
Biology determines our behaviour more than it suits many to acknowledge. But
people—and politics and morality—cannot be described just by neural
impulses
The
Space of Music (work in progress, January 2012)
Sounds become music as a result of organisation, and this organisation is something
that we perceive and whose absence we immediately notice, regardless of whether
we take pleasure in the result. This organisation is not just an aesthetic matter
– it is not simply a style. It is more like grammar, in being the precondition
of our response to the result as music. We must therefore acknowledge that tonal
music has something like a syntax – a rule-guided process linking each
episode to its neighbours, which we grasp in the act of hearing, and the absence
of which leads to a sense of discomfort or incongruity.
T.
S. Eliot as Conservative Mentor
T. S. Eliot was indisputably the greatest poet writing in English in the twentieth
century. Eliot attempted to shape a philosophy for our times that would be richer
and more true to the complexity of human needs than the free-market panaceas
that have so often dominated the thinking of conservatives in government. He
assigned a central place in his social thinking to high culture.
The
Importance of Culture
American Spectator (Sept 2011)
Unreal
estate
The endless economic crisis suggests that it is time for a return to a moral
understanding the economy, says a British philosopher.
The
Sacred and the Secular
PDF
Multiculturalism,
R.I.P.
Once we distinguish race and culture, the way is open to acknowledge that not
all cultures are equally admirable, and that not all cultures can exist comfortably
side-by-side. To deny this is to forgo the very possibility of moral judgment,
and therefore to deny the fundamental experience of community.
Roger Scruton on The Uses of Pessimism
"Effing
the Ineffable"
I too am tempted to eff the ineffable. Like my philosophical predecessors, I
want to describe that world beyond the window, even though I know that it cannot
be described but only revealed. I am not alone in thinking that world to be
real and important. But there are many who dismiss it as an unscientific fiction.
And people of this scientistic cast of mind are disagreeable to me. Their nerdish
conviction that facts alone can signify, and that the “transcendental”
and the eternal are nothing but words, mark them out as incomplete. There is
an aspect of the human condition that is denied to them. Moreover, this aspect
is of the first importance. Our loves and hopes in some way hinge on it.
"Hiding
Behind the Screen"
In its normal occurrence, the Facebook encounter is still an encounter
— however attenuated — between real people. But increasingly, the
screen is taking over — ceasing to be a medium of communication between
real people who exist elsewhere, and becoming the place where people finally
achieve reality, the only place where they relate in any coherent way to others.
"Memo
to Hawking"
Kant, who destroyed all the systems of metaphysics and dug a grave for theology,
was also a believer, who, as he put it, “attacked the claims of reason
in order to make room for those of faith.” It seems to me that he was
right.
"The
Idea of a University", The American Spectator (Sept 2010).
The great virtue of American society is that individual citizens have the scope,
the freedom, and the habits of association that enable them to pursue their
own objectives, regardless of the established institutions.
"Gratitude
and Grace", The American Spectator (April 2010).
Within the culture of ingratitude pockets of thankfulness can grow. Everyone
who has suffered some major calamity, be it illness, loss, or some sudden reversal
of fortune, feels, on pulling through, a great surge of gratitude. And gratitude
comes in two forms. First, you are grateful for pulling through -- you are still
alive, still functioning, still able to love. Secondly, you are grateful for
the experience itself. Here again the religious person would be disposed to
speak of the workings of Grace. You can be grateful for something bad: grateful
for the affliction that awoke you to the truth about yourself, that enabled
you to confront it, to overcome it, to understand. You are grateful to have
learned that life is a gift, and that to receive it fully you must give in turn.
"Soul
Music", The American (February 27, 2010).
Plato was right to think that when we move in time to music we are educating
our characters. For we are learning an aspect of our embodiment, as free beings.
"Music and
Morality", The American Spectator (February 11, 2010).
Changes in musical culture may go hand in hand with changes in the laws, since
laws so often reflect pressures from culture.
"The
High Cost of Ignoring Beauty", The American (December 19,
2009).
Architecture clearly illustrates the social, environmental, economic, and aesthetic
costs of ignoring beauty. We are being torn out of ourselves by the loud gestures
of people who want to seize our attention but give nothing in return.
"The Flame
That Was Snuffed Out by Freedom", The Times (November 7, 2009).
The EU has facilitated the transition away from communism. It has filled the
legal vacuum--indeed, filled it to bursting. It has offered easy routes to cross-border
trade and incoming investment. It has led to an exchange of expertise and--in
Poland's case--to a mass escape of the working population. But those countries
today bear no resemblance to the liberated nations that were dreamt of in the
catacombs. For when the stones were lifted, and the air of freedom blew across
the underground altars, the flame that had been kept alive on them was instantly
blown out.
"TV Will Never
Poison My Children's Minds", The Times (October 13, 2009).
When children are distracted by a flickering screen from the earliest age and
never encouraged to explore the real world, they will not develop the capacity
to communicate with other humans, or to cope with the stresses of real encounters.
They will take the short way out, which is not the way of communication but
of aggression.
"Beauty and
Desecration", City Journal (July 27, 2009).
At any time between 1750 and 1930, if you had asked an educated person to describe
the goal of poetry, art, or music, "beauty" would have been the answer.
And if you had asked what the point of that was, you would have learned that
beauty is a value, as important in its way as truth and goodness, and indeed
hardly distinguishable from them.
The
Sacred and the Human
Girard’s genealogy casts an anthropological light on the Christian ethic
and on the meaning of the Eucharist; but it is not just an anthropological theory.
Girard himself treats it as a piece of theology. For him the theory is a kind
of proof of the Christian religion and of the divinity of Jesus. And in a striking
article in the Stanford Italian Review (1986) 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 in Parsifal, and one along which even
Nietzsche reluctantly strayed, under the influence of Wagner’s masterpiece.
A
Wall That Won?t Come Down
It is true that a suspicion of Communism remains, and that young people from
Eastern Europe have internalized, to a great extent, the experiences of deprivation
and fear that their parents still recount to them. Hence they are more open
to conservative ideas than their Western contemporaries; they have a vestigial
sense of the seriousness of politics and the real cost of putting fanatics and
nihilists in charge. They at least have learned this lesson; many of my colleagues
have not. From Horkheimer and Adorno to Foucault, Deleuze, and Badiou, fanatics
and nihilists continue to dominate the university curriculum, and there prevails
in our universities today the same suspicion of power, property, hierarchy,
and liberty that was in the ascendant twenty years ago, when my colleagues called
an emergency meeting in order to keep the official illusions in place.
All
the Evidence for God: An Inquiry
Also on the morning of Friday, December 11, the Anglo-American philosopher Roger
Scruton elaborated the fourth of the "transcendentals" of classical
philosophy, that of beauty, also as a way of access to God.
"In creating beauty, the artist gives glory to God's creation," he
said. This is how it has been over the entire span of human history, even where
– as in the abysses of the twentieth century – suffering and desolation
reign.
And yet "the worship of ugliness and desecration is asserting itself today
in an age of unprecedented prosperity. [...] Desecration is a sort of defense
against the sacred, an attempt to destroy its claims. Our lives will be judged
before sacred things; and in order to escape that judgment, we destroy the thing
that seems to accuse us. And since beauty reminds us of the sacred – and
is even a special form of it – beauty must also be desecrated."
The "positive way" of beauty is, nonetheless, embedded in the heart
of man. "Why then do so many artists today refuse to walk this path? Perhaps
because they know that it leads to God."
Sextants
and Sexting
The power of gadgets to enter and possess the human soul is brought out by the
new vice of sexting
Scruton
comments on virtual suicide
Viewing the world from behind a screen, the internet addict can relish every
kind of narcissistic, sadistic and hateful feeling without cost.
Can
virtual life take over from real life?
Are computers making us lose friends and alienate people, asks the writer Roger
Scruton
"If you study the opinions that prevail in modern academies,
you will discover that they are of two kinds: those that emerge from the constant
questioning of traditional values, and those that emerge from the attempt to
prevent any questioning of the liberal alternatives. All of the following beliefs
are effectively forbidden on the normal American campus: (1) The belief in the
superiority of Western culture; (2) The belief that there might be morally relevant
distinctions between sexes, cultures, and religions; (3) The belief in good
taste, whether in literature, music, art, friendship, or behavior; and (4) The
belief in traditional sexual mores. You can entertain those beliefs, but it
is dangerous to confess to them, still more dangerous to defend them, lest you
be held guilty of "hate speech"—in other words, of judging some
group of human beings adversely. Yet the hostility to these beliefs is not founded
on reason and is never subjected to rational justification. The postmodern university
has not defeated reason but replaced it with a new kind of faith—a faith
without authority and without transcendence, a faith all the more tenacious
in that it does not recognize itself as such."
-- Roger Scruton, "Whatever
Happened to Reason?"
The
New Humanism
Like so many modern ideologies, the new humanism seeks to define itself through
what it is against rather than what it is for. It is for nothing, or at any
rate for nothing in particular. Ever since the Enlightenment there has been
a tendency to adopt this negative approach to the human condition, rather than
to live out the exacting demands of the Enlightenment morality, which tells
us to take responsibility for ourselves and to cease our snivelling. Having
shaken off their shackles and discovered that they have not obtained contentment,
human beings have a lamentable tendency to believe that they are victims of
some alien force, be it aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, capitalism, the priesthood,
or simply the belief in God. And the feeling arises that they need only destroy
this alien force, and happiness will be served up on a plate, in a garden of
pleasures. That, in my view, is why the Enlightenment, which promised the reign
of freedom and justice, issued in an unending series of wars.
How
society has lost its voice
Music is going the way of meals, drinks and sex, all of which are ceasing to
be occasions for bonding and becoming sources of solitary addiction instead.
Humanity is being divided in two by its own inventions. On the one side are
the IT-savvy nerds, who do not relate to each other directly, but have mastered
all the ways of achieving satisfaction from digital substitutes. On the other
side are the savages, as Aldous Huxley might have called them, who sit down
to meals with their families, and who drink and sing madrigals with their friends
like Samuel Pepys. And the two classes are increasingly estranged from each
other, since the moments in which they might have united, as people unite through
singing, no longer exist.
What
makes the West strong?
This culture of repudiation has transmitted itself, through the media and the
schools, across the spiritual terrain of Western civilization, leaving behind
it a sense of emptiness and defeat, a sense that nothing is left to believe
in or endorse, save only the freedom to believe. And a belief in the freedom
to believe is neither a belief nor a freedom. It encourages hesitation in the
place of conviction and timidity in the place of choice. It is hardly surprising
that so many Muslims in our cities today regard the civilization surrounding
them as doomed, even if it is a civilization that has granted them something
that they may be unable to find where their own religion triumphs, which is
a free, tolerant, and secular rule of law. For they were brought up in a world
of certainties; around them, they encounter only doubts.
If repudiation of its past and its identity is all that Western civilization
can offer, it cannot survive: it will give way to whatever future civilization
can offer hope and consolation to the young and fulfill their deep-rooted human
need for social membership. Citizenship, as I have described it, does not fulfill
that need: and that is why so many Muslims reject it, seeking instead that consoling
“brotherhood” (ikhwan) that has so often been the goal of Islamic
revivals. But citizenship is an achievement that we cannot forgo if the modern
world is to survive: we have built our prosperity on it, our peace and our stability,
and—even if it does not provide happiness—it defines us. We cannot
renounce it without ceasing to be.
What is needed is not to reject citizenship as the foundation of social order
but to provide it with a heart. And in seeking that heart, we should turn away
from the apologetic multiculturalism that has had such a ruinous effect on Western
self-confidence and return to the gifts that we have received from our Judeo-Christian
tradition.
Can
virtual life take over from real life?
When I relate to you through the screen there is a marked shift in emphasis.
Now I have my finger on the button. At any moment I can turn you off. You are
free in your own space, but you are not really free in mine, since you are dependent
on my decision to keep you there. I retain ultimate control, and am not risking
myself in the friendship as I risk myself when I meet you face to face. Of course
I may stay glued to the screen. Nevertheless, it is a screen that I am glued
to, not the person behind it.
The
Return of Religion
Not so long ago, God was in residence. You could open a door and discover him,
and join with those who sang and prayed in his presence. Now he, like us, has
no fixed abode. But from this experience a new kind of religious consciousness
is being born: a turning of the inner eye towards the transcendental and a constant
invocation of ‘we know not what’.
Distrust of organised religion therefore goes hand in hand with a mourning for
the loss of it. We are distressed by the evangelical atheists, who are stamping
on the coffin in which they imagine God’s corpse to lie and telling us
to bury it quickly before it begins to smell. These characters have a violent
and untidy air: it is very obvious that something is missing from their lives,
something which would bring order and completeness in the place of random disgust.
Cities
for Living
The city, as we have inherited it from the ancient Greeks, is both an institution
and a way of life, one coterminous with the civilization of Europe. The confluence
of strangers in a single place and under a single law, there to live peacefully
side by side, joined by social networks, economic cooperation, and friendly
competition through sports and festivals, is among the most remarkable achievements
of our species, responsible for most of the great cultural, political, and religious
innovations of our civilization. Nothing is more precious in the Western heritage,
therefore, than the cities of Europe, recording the triumph of civilized humanity
not only in their orderly streets, majestic facades, and public monuments, but
also in their smallest architectural details and the intricate play of light
on their cornices and apertures.
Conservatives
Are Conservationists
Environmentalism has all the hallmarks of a left-wing cause: a class of victims
(future generations), an enlightened vanguard who fights for them (the eco-warriors),
powerful philistines who exploit them (the capitalists), and endless opportunities
to express resentment against the successful, the wealthy, and the West. The
style too is leftist: the environmentalist is young, disheveled, socially disreputable,
his mind focused on higher things; the opponent is dull, middle aged, smartly
dressed, and usually American. The cause is designed to recruit the intellectuals,
with facts and theories carelessly bandied about, and activism encouraged. Environmentalism
is something you join, and for many young people it has the quasi-redemptive
and identity-bestowing character of the twentieth-century revolutions. It has
its military wing, in Greenpeace and other activist organisations, and also
its intense committees, its odium theologicum and its campaigning journals.
Environmentalists who step out of line like Bjørn Lomborg are denounced
at the important meetings, and thereafter demonized as heretics. In short, it
has the appearance of those secular religions, like socialism, communism, and
anarchism, which turned the world upside down during the twentieth century.
Hence conservatives are instinctively opposed to it, and begin to look around
for facts and theories of their own, in order to fortify their conviction that
global warming, loss of biodiversity, rising sea levels, widespread pollution,
or whatever, are simply left-wing myths, comparable to the “crisis of
capitalism” prophesied by the nineteenth-century socialists. However,
the cause of the environment is not, in itself, a left-wing cause at all.
Art,
Beauty, and Judgment
It is impossible to live as though there are no aesthetic values, while living
a real life among real human beings. Manners, clothes, speech, and gestures—all
require careful attention to the way things look. In every sphere of human life,
from laying a table to giving a funeral speech, aesthetic choices are both necessary
and noticed. Without them we cannot solve the vast problem of coordination that
arises when a myriad private individuals crowd into a single public space. Hence,
in the democratic culture, aesthetic judgment begins to be experienced as an
affliction. It imposes an unsustainable burden, something that we must live
up to, a world of ideals and aspirations that is in sharp conflict with the
tawdriness and imperfection of our own improvised lives. It is perched like
an owl on our shoulders, while we try to hide our pet rodents in our clothes.
The temptation is to turn on it and shoo it away.
The
sacred and the human
It is Girard's theory, it seems to me, that most urgently needs to be debated,
now that atheist triumphalism is sweeping all nuances away. For it helps us
understand questions that even atheists must confront, and that their dogmatic
certainties otherwise obscure: what is religion; what draws people to it; and
how is it tamed?
A
Righter Shade of Green
While the Left pursues environmentalism to advance its global agenda, Roger
Scruton advocates the conservative solution that conservation is best entrusted
to local stewardship.
The
glory of the West is that life is an open book
Although it was probably no part of Said’s intention, the combined effect
of his attack on western “orientalism”, Foucault’s attack
on bourgeois “discourse”, Derrida’s “deconstruction”
and the general crushing of the old curriculum under a weight of inquisitorial
“theory” has led to an orthodoxy of nihilism in the western academy.
The effects of this nihilism are widespread, as in the addictive drumbeats and
soundbites that form the background of popular culture.
The
Decline of Laughter
The ability of the self-appointed censors to discern ideological sins and heresies
has been vastly enhanced by their daily exercises in resentment. Such accusers
know how to discern racist, sexist, and homophobic thought-crimes in the most
innocent-seeming small talk. And they know no forgiveness, since they are cut
off, like all humorless people, from the process of self-knowledge. The desire
to accuse, which brings with it a reputation for virtue without the cost of
acquiring it, takes over from the normal flow of human forgiveness, creating
a wooden personality familiar to all who have had to deal with the lobbies that
now control public opinion in America. What should be our response to this?
Better
off without religion?
The rituals of religion are shared; and those who participate in them are drawn
into another kind of relationship with their neighbours than those that prevail
in the world of 'getting and spending'. People hunger for this kind of membership,
and the power of religion resides in its ability to provide it.
Stealing
from Churches
My years as a voyeur of holiness brought me into contact with true believers,
and taught me that faith transfigures everything it touches, and raises the
world to God.
Who Is
Noam Chomsky?
Someone who should have stuck to syntax. WSJ (Sept 26, 2006)
The
great hole of history
The problem revealed by 9/11, far from resolved five years on, is of a radical
Islamism driven by "transferable grievance"
Should
he have spoken? Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood'
The New Criterion, Volume 25, September 2006, page 22
'Islamofascism':
Beware of a religion without irony
Wall Street Journal (August 20, 2006)
"Old Profession, New Toleration", National Review (June 19, 2006)
"Sacrilege and Sacrament" in The Meaning of Marriage: Family, State, Market, and Morals
PDF file: Scruton on Fukuyama [PDF file: Fukuyama's new afterword to The End of History]
Roger Scruton on Immigration, Multiculturalism and the Need to Defend the Nation State
In the Footsteps of Moll Flanders, Banished to Rappahannock
"Thoroughly Modern Mill", Wall Street Journal (May 19, 2006)
"The Dangers of Internationalism", The Intercollegiate Review (Volume 40, Number 2; Fall/Winter 2005)
"The Political Problem of Islam", Intercollegiate Review: A Journal of Scholarship and Opinion (Fall 2002)
"How to be a Non-Liberal, Anti-Socialist Conservative", Intercollegiate Review: A Journal of Scholarship and Opinion (Spring 1993)
"Armchair moralising", New Statesman (22 Jan 2001): Scruton demolishes Peter Singer
Read Roger Scruton, wine columnist at the New Statesman
I Drink, Therefore I Am: A Philosopher's Guide to Wine
(Scruton also blogs irregularly at RogerScruton.com and at Right Reason)
Roger Scruton at Azure
Noteworthy Publications:
Immanuel Kant and the Iraq war
The Joy of Conservatism: Interview in the New Pantagruel
An Interview with Roger Scruton (Part I)
Wagner:
moralist or monster?
The New Criterion, February 2005
Know
Your Place
The Spectator, 27 Nov 2004
The United States, the United Nations, and the Future of the Nation-State
Friends, Muslims, countrymen, lend us your ears
American Conservatism in the New Century
Godless
Conservatism
Wall Street Journal, Friday, April 5, 1996, p. 8.
National Review articles:
The Moral Birds and Bees: Sex and marriage, properly understood
On Loyalty: The uses and abuses of a complicated virtue
The sex files - American attitudes toward sex are confused
A philosophy of pleasure - A Guide to Pleasure
ROGER SCRUTON is a conservative, but not the true-blue kind:
he's too green for that. His turquoise Toryism, keen on rural
traditions and against money-grubbing modernity, chimes with many people's love
for the countryside as a source of cultural, aesthetic and spiritual solace.
BOOK
REVIEW: The English countryside (Economist, 27 May 2004)
Roger Scruton, The
Need for Nations (Civitas, 2004).
The nation state provides us with the surest model for peace, prosperity, and
the defence of human rights. In spite of this, the idea of the nation state
is under attack, derided as a cause of conflict, and destined to be replaced
by more 'enlightened' forms of jurisdiction. This is in spite of the fact that
all recent attempts to transcend the nation state into some kind of transnational
political order have ended up either as totalitarian dictatorships like the
former Soviet Union or as unaccountable bureaucracies like the European Union.
Bibliography:
Essays in City Journal:
Roger Scruton, "Becoming a Family," City Journal (Spring 2001 | Vol. 11, No. 2)
Roger Scruton, "What Is Acceptable Risk?" City Journal (Winter 2001 | Vol. 11, No. 1)
Roger Scruton, "Bring Back Stigma," City Journal (Autumn 2000 | Vol. 10, No. 4)
Roger Scruton, "Animal Rights," City Journal (Summer 2000 | Vol. 10, No. 3)
Roger Scruton, "After Modernism," City Journal (Spring 2000 | Vol. 10, No. 2)
Roger Scruton, "Real Men Have Manners," City Journal (Winter 2000 | Vol. 10, No. 1)
Roger Scruton, "Modern Manhood," City Journal (Autumn 1999 | Vol. 9, No. 4)
Roger Scruton, "Sleeping Cities," City Journal (Summer 1999 | Vol. 9, No. 3)
Roger Scruton, "Whatever Happened to Reason?," City Journal (Spring 1999 | Vol. 9, No. 2)
Roger Scruton, "Kitsch and the Modern Predicament," City Journal (Winter 1999 | Vol. 9, No. 1)
Roger Scruton, "Youth Culture's Lament," City Journal (Autumn 1998 | Vol. 8, No. 4)
Roger Scruton, "Communitarian Dreams," City Journal (Autumn 1996 | Vol. 6, No. 4)
Roger Scruton, "Why Lampposts and Phone Booths Matter," City Journal (Summer 1996 | Vol. 6, No. 3)
Roger Scruton, "Decencies for Skeptics," City Journal (Spring 1996 | Vol. 6, No. 2)
Misc. Articles by Roger Scruton:
Roger Scruton, "On the Mend," The Financial Times
Roger Scruton, "The Beauty of the Beasts," The Times, July 6, 1996
Roger Scruton, "A philosophy of pleasure," National Review, April 18, 1994 v46 n7 pS1(2)
Roger Scruton, "Kiss
Me, Cate," Vol. 45, National Review, 11-01-1993, pp 61
Review of Only Words, by Catharine A. MacKinnon (Harvard, 152 pp., $14.95)
Roger Scruton, "Picasso: Creator and Destroyer," National Review, Dec 9, 1988 v40 n24 p46(3)
Roger Scruton, "Robert Nozick, anarcho-capitalist"
Roger Scruton, "Fox Hunting: The Modern Case"
Oxford Union Debate on Hunting: Scruton speaks (Real Audio)
Salon Interview with Roger Scruton by Ray Sawhill
Book review by Lee Trepanier of Roger Scruton's Understanding Music
Book review by John von Heyking of Roger Scruton's I Drink Therefore I am
Book Introductions:
Leisure: the
Basis of Culture
by Josef Pieper.
New Introduction by Roger Scruton. 1998
New Translation by Gerald Malsbary.
St. Augustine's Press
Edmund
Burke: A Genius Reconsidered
by Russell Kirk.
Introduction (PDF)
by Roger Scruton.
Published Letters:
Roger Scruton in The New York Review of Books
Roger Scruton on Christopher Hitchens on Isaiah Berlin in The London Review of Books
Review: Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner?s Tristan and Isolde
Roger
Scruton on Plato's "noble lie":
"Truth, Plato believed, is the business of philosophy, but it is rhetoric,
not philosophy, that moves the crowd. So how can we protect people from fatal
errors, such as those that tempted Athens into conflict with Sparta, or those
which, much later, led the Germans, mesmerized by Hitler, into an equally suicidal
war? Plato did not believe that philosophers would be listened to: Their words
would sound strange and ambiguous, and their eyes would be turned from present
and time-bound emergencies towards the stratosphere of eternal truths. Nevertheless
among the rhetorical devices of politicians, it is still possible to distinguish
the noble lies from their ignoble negations. The noble lie is the untruth that
conveys a truth, the myth that maps reality. It is thus that Plato justified
the stories of the gods and their origins which inspire people to live as though
nearer to the source of things, and to discover in themselves the virtues that
exist only when we find our way to believing in them.
...
"The problem with Plato’s theory of the noble lie is that noble lies
have to be believed by the one who utters them. Otherwise people will see through
the deception and withdraw their support. And a lie that is believed is not
really a lie.
...
"Plato’s theory of the noble lie was a first shot at describing the
role of myth in human thinking. Myths are not falsehoods, nor are they scientific
theories: They are attempts to capture difficult truths in symbols. Myths also
arm us against realities that are otherwise too fateful or disturbing to bear
contemplation."
Roger
Scruton on education and social hierarchy:
"Education is possible only if we persuade children that there are things
worth knowing that they don’t already know. This may make them feel bad
about themselves, but feeling bad now is the price of feeling good later. The
culture of self-esteem has the opposite effect: by making children feel good
now, it makes them feel bad later — so bad indeed that they blame everybody
else for their failure, and join the growing queue of resentful litigants. Education
involves transmitting knowledge and skills, not illusions, and a practice devoted
to persuading children that they are fine just as they are does not deserve
the name of education. The acquisition of knowledge requires both aptitude and
work, a truth so obvious that only decades of egalitarian propaganda could have
induced so many people to deny it.
...
"Now there are hierarchies only if there are people at the bottom of them.
The advocates of self-esteem are so exercised by this fact that they try to
invert the social spectrum, to represent the bottom as the top and the top as
the bottom. Slovenly speech is praised as socially authentic, and ignorance
as ‘difference’. All forms of knowledge that require aptitude or
work, or which aspire to a higher culture than that of the street, are dismissed
as ‘elitist’ and driven to the edge of the curriculum.
...
"It follows that a society can be hierarchically ordered without being
oppressive. For every station has its duties, the performance of which is both
an end in itself and a passport to social affection. And through education,
ambition and hard work you can change your station, to arrive at the place that
matches your achievements and which, through performing its duties, you possess
as your own."
This Web page of Internet resources on Roger Scruton used to be maintained by Christopher S. Morrissey
But now a much more up-to-date bibliography of his writings is available here: The Roger Scruton Bibliography