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- Herausgeber: Notting Hill Editions
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
A collection of provacative essays by the late philosopher and political thinker Roger Scruton. Each 'confession' reveals aspects of the author's thinking that his critics would probably have advised him to keep to himself. Scruton sought to answer the most pressing problems of our age: what can we do to protect Western values against Islamic extremism? Why is the Nation State worth preserving? How should we achieve a timely death against the advances of modern medicine? As Douglas Murray writes in his introduction, Scruton was an outsider, yet he showed his readers 'not just what they should reject, but what they should nurture and love.' This selection offers consolation and guidance to a new generation of readers.
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About the Publisher
Notting Hill Editions is an independent British publisher. The company was founded by Tom Kremer (1930–2017), champion of innovation and the man responsible for popularising the Rubik’s Cube.
After a successful business career in toy invention Tom decided, at the age of eighty, to fulfil his passion for literature. In a fast-moving digital world Tom’s aim was to revive the art of the essay, and to create exceptionally beautiful books that would be lingered over and cherished.
Hailed as ‘the shape of things to come’, the family-run press brings to print the most surprising thinkers of past and present. In an era of information-overload, these collectible pocket-size books distil ideas that linger in the mind.
iii
CONFESSIONS OF A HERETIC
Roger Scruton
–
Introduced by Douglas Murray
Contents
viiDouglas Murray
– Introduction –
‘Heretic’ might seem like a strong word to describe Roger Scruton. And yet its use in the title of this beautiful volume is correct and the author was right to suggest it. For though there are eras in which the heretics are of the left, during the era in which Roger Scruton lived and worked it was conservative thought that was at odds with the dogmas of the day.
Of course there are a number of oddities about this. Not least is the time frame in which Scruton first came to prominence. He made his name in the 1980s with The Meaning of Conservatism (1980) and his weekly column in The Times. Students of what must now be regarded as history will note that Conservatives were not absent from power during this period. Yet during this time conservative ideas remained anomalous if not altogether absent. It is true that conservatives argued and won the economic and geo-political struggles of their day. But aside from these areas, conservative ideas were deemed abhorrent precisely because they were assumed to prevail in government. Nowhere did this happen more than in the university system in which Scruton should have been able to make his career but from which he was effectively cast out for his offending views. viii
Yet it was not solely the dominance of the ideological left in his day that made Scruton a heretic. For most of his life Scruton was also on the outside on his own political side. As a founding member of the Conservative Philosophy Group, and editor of The Salisbury Review, he valiantly attempted to make their ideas relevant to the Conservative party. But Conservatives did not appear to have a need of conservative thinkers as surely as left-wing governments had the need for ideological thinkers of their own ilk. In a further layer of complexity, Scruton did not think that Conservatives were wholly wrong to be suspicious of conservative thought. Indeed the necessity of a suspicion of political philosophy as a whole might be said to be one of the deep but unavoidable contradictions that Scruton had to manage throughout his career.
Having found himself outside of the institutions, Scruton ended up going it all but alone in his professional life. Over the course of four decades he managed an often precarious living outside of the institutions. He wrote books, essays and newspaper pieces. He edited magazines and other volumes. In the long run his accretion of intellectual endeavours brought him admirers. But in the short term what they brought most were highly motivated ideological brickbats. Another person might have been embittered by the embattlement and resulting solitude. But as the years went on and Scruton wrote what he needed to write, the range as well as depth of his achievements ixbecame increasingly obvious and marked him out even to many of his one-time opponents.
After all, while other people might have been able to write one of his books, who else could have written them all? Who could have written volumes not just on music but also on architecture, politics and aesthetics? Who could have bothered themselves with the day-to-day fluctuations of a nation’s affairs necessary to master a newspaper column while also writing studies on Kant and Spinoza?
Only Scruton could have done all of these things and more. And that is one reason why it was noticeable during the last period of his life – and perhaps even more since his death in 2020 – that he had become so invaluable to a new generation of readers both in Britain and abroad. There are a number of reasons for this, all of which are suggested by the present volume.
The first is that Scruton always went a layer beneath the level at which his contemporaries played. While many people in recent years have written about nationalism and self-determination, few if any have chosen to approach the subject from the very elemental question of the need for belonging. This Scruton does in ‘The Need for Nations’ among other places, for he knew that while the desire to struggle and fight for things is very strong – especially in the young – the need to reconcile yourself with things, to find a sense of belonging and home in the nation as in the world, is a very deep yearning also. Better than anyone else, xScruton described how this yearning could find reasonable and respectable form.
Another reason why people gravitated towards Scruton despite – or because – of his heresy was that he took seriously some things which the age had lightly skipped over. For instance he was the most notable figure of any political stripe to take seriously the importance of the built environment. Given that this environment is the only one most people can live in it seems strange that the question of beautiful – or at least not actively ugly – housing should have been so ignored. To the extent that they thought about it at all, most Conservatives seemed to think that this was yet another thing that the market would work out. As our Conservative and Labour-run cities have shown, this hope was wholly misguided. But by focussing his own gaze on the question Scruton ended up provoking even a Conservative government into addressing the question of the places where we live.
And then there was the positive aspect of his vision. Many thinkers and polemicists of the right have been able to deconstruct portions of the left-wing orthodoxies of their day. But it was Scruton’s gift to go a stage beyond that. Naturally a part of what he did with his time was criticism. But an equal amount of his time at least was spent doing what so few people do – which was after the deconstruction to go on to construct again, and to rekindle. To put this in practical terms, Scruton showed his readers not just what they xishould reject, but what they should nurture and love. His writing on music – as here on Strauss’s ‘Metamorphosen’ – is just one gateway into this aspect of his thought.
For he clearly felt that what propelled him might propel his readers also. In one of the most moving essays in this volume (‘Effing the Ineffable’) he describes how anybody with an open mind and heart will throughout their life encounter ‘moments that are saturated with meaning, but whose meaning cannot be put into words. These moments are precious to us. When they occur it is as though, on the winding ill-lit stairway of our life, we suddenly come across a window, through which we catch sight of another and brighter world – a world to which we belong but which we cannot enter.’
Another philosopher might have ignored this aspect of our lives, deeming it either insurmountable or irrelevant to philosophical or other inquiry. Scruton rightly recognised that to do this is to leave unexamined one of the great clues we have to tell us about ourselves and our relationship with the world around us.
Scruton perhaps had a special need to find what these consoling, hopeful signs left for us actually mean. As anybody who knew him can attest, the sense of feeling embattled was very deep in Roger. Throughout his career, right up to the end, he suffered quite extraordinary assaults from people who thought they understood him, but who had barely bothered to xiiscratch his surface: people who had hardly read a word of his books behaved as though they had complete oversight of the whole. Any observer could see that they did not, yet still their scratching affected Roger at some very deep level, constantly fuelling a fear that he was at odds with the world and unacceptable to people who ought to have accepted him. The Knighthood he was awarded in 2016 put some of his feeling of estrangement to rest for a time. But the turbulence was always there.
One of the essays in this volume – ‘Dying in Time’ – has of course taken on an added layer of significance since its author’s death. And it is typical of Scruton that he should have been tempted to struggle with the last of the great questions long before he had to. Just one of the thoughts that occurs from reading it is the extent to which Scruton managed here as elsewhere to live up to his own exacting standards and principles. ‘The value of life’ he writes ‘does not consist in its length but in its depth.’ While the length of his own life is over, its depths remain here as in other volumes: ready for new generations of readers to discover and find deep fulfilment in.
– Preface –
This collection of essays arises from a decade of engagement with the public culture of Britain and America. Some have been published in print or on-line; some are appearing here for the first time. I describe them as confessions, since they reveal aspects of my thinking which, if I am to believe the critics, ought to have been kept to myself. I have weeded out material of an academic kind, and have tried to include only those essays that touch on matters of concern to all intelligent people, in the volatile times in which we live.
Scrutopia, Christmas 2015
1
– Faking It –
‘To thine own self be true,’ says Shakespeare’s Polonius, ‘and thou canst be false to no man.’ Live in truth, urged Václav Havel. ‘Let the lie come into the world,’ wrote Solzhenitsyn, ‘but not through me.’ How seriously should we take these pronouncements, and how do we obey them?
There are two kinds of untruth: lying and faking. The person who is lying says what he does not believe. The person who is faking says what he believes, though only for the time being and for the purpose in hand.
Anyone can lie. It suffices to say something with the intention to deceive. Faking, however, is an achievement. To fake things you have to take people in, yourself included. The liar can pretend to be shocked when his lies are exposed: but his pretence is part of the lie. The fake really is shocked when he is exposed, since he had created around himself a community of trust, of which he himself was a member.
In all ages people have lied in order to escape the consequences of their actions, and the first step in moral education is to teach children not to tell fibs. But faking is a cultural phenomenon, more prominent in some periods than in others. There is very little faking 2in the society described by Homer, for example, or in that described by Chaucer. By the time of Shakespeare, however, poets and playwrights are beginning to take a strong interest in this new human type.
In Shakespeare’s King Lear the wicked sisters Goneril and Regan belong to a world of fake emotion, persuading themselves and their father that they feel the deepest love, when in fact they are entirely heartless. But they don’t really know themselves to be heartless: if they did, they could not behave so brazenly. The tragedy of King Lear begins when the real people – Kent, Cordelia, Edgar, Gloucester – are driven out by the fakes.
The fake is a person who has rebuilt himself, with a view to occupying another social position than the one that would be natural to him. Such is Molière’s Tartuffe, the religious imposter who takes control of a household through a display of scheming piety, and who gave his name to the vice that his creator was perhaps the first to pinpoint with total accuracy. Like Shakespeare, Molière perceived that faking goes to the very heart of the person engaged in it. Tartuffe is not simply a hypocrite, who pretends to ideals that he does not believe in. He is a fabricated person, who believes in his own ideals since he is just as illusory as they are.
Tartuffe’s faking was a matter of sanctimonious religion. With the decline of religion during the 19th century there came about a new kind of faking. The romantic poets and painters turned their backs 3on religion and sought salvation through art. They believed in the genius of the artist, endowed with a special capacity to transcend the human condition in creative ways, breaking all the rules in order to achieve a new order of experience. Art became an avenue to the transcendental, the gateway to a higher kind of knowledge.
Originality therefore became the test that distinguishes true from fake art. It is hard to say in general terms what originality consists in, but we have examples enough: Titian, Beethoven, Goethe, Baudelaire. But those examples teach us that originality is hard: it cannot be snatched from the air, even if there are those natural prodigies like Rimbaud and Mozart who seem to do just that. Originality requires learning, hard work, the mastery of a medium and – most of all – the refined sensibility and openness to experience that have suffering and solitude as their normal cost.
To gain the status of an original artist is therefore not easy. But in a society where art is revered as the highest cultural achievement, the rewards are enormous. Hence there is a motive to fake it. Artists and critics get together in order to take themselves in, the artists posing as the originators of astonishing breakthroughs, the critics posing as the penetrating judges of the true avant-garde.
In this way Duchamp’s famous urinal became a kind of paradigm for modern artists. This is how it is done, the critics said. Take an idea, put it on display, 4call it art and brazen it out. The trick was repeated with Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes, and then later with the pickled sharks and cows of Damien Hirst. In each case the critics have gathered like clucking hens around the new and inscrutable egg, and the fake is projected to the public with all the apparatus required for its acceptance as the real thing. So powerful is the impetus towards the collective fake that it is now rare to be a finalist for the Turner Prize without producing some object or event that shows itself to be art only because nobody would conceivably think it to be so until the critics have said that it is.
Original gestures of the kind introduced by Duchamp cannot really be repeated – like jokes they can be made only once. Hence the cult of originality very quickly leads to repetition. The habit of faking becomes so deeply engrained that no judgement is certain, except the judgement that this before us is the ‘real thing’ and not a fake at all, which in turn is a fake judgement. All that we know, in the end, is that anything is art, because nothing is.
It is worth asking ourselves why the cult of fake originality has such a powerful appeal to our cultural institutions, so that no museum or art gallery, and no publicly funded concert hall, can really afford not to take it seriously. The early modernists – Stravinsky and Schoenberg in music, Eliot and Pound in poetry, Matisse in painting and Loos in architecture – were united in the belief that popular taste had become 5corrupted, that sentimentality, banality and kitsch had invaded the various spheres of art and eclipsed their messages. Tonal harmonies had been corrupted by popular music, figurative painting had been trumped by photography; rhyme and meter had become the stuff of Christmas cards, and the stories had been too often told. Everything out there, in the world of naive and unthinking people, was kitsch.
Modernism was the attempt to rescue the sincere, the truthful, the arduously achieved, from the plague of fake emotion. No one can doubt that the early modernists succeeded in this enterprise, endowing us with works of art that keep the human spirit alive in the new circumstances of modernity, and which establish continuity with the great traditions of our culture. But modernism gave way to routines of fakery: the arduous task of maintaining the tradition proved less attractive than the cheap ways of rejecting it. Instead of Picasso’s lifelong study, to present the modern woman’s face in a modern idiom, you could just do what Duchamp did, and paint a moustache on the Mona Lisa.
The interesting fact, however, is that the habit of faking it has arisen from the fear of fakes. Modernist art was a reaction against fake emotion, and the comforting clichés of popular culture. The intention was to sweep away the pseudo-art that cushions us with sentimental lies and to put reality, the reality of modern life, with which real art alone can come to terms, in the place of it. Hence for a long time now it has 6been assumed that there can be no authentic creation in the sphere of high art which is not in some way a ‘challenge’ to the complacencies of our public culture. Art must give offence, stepping out of the future fully armed against the bourgeois taste for the conforming and the comfortable, which are simply other names for kitsch and cliché. But the result of this is that offence becomes a cliché. If the public has become so immune to shock that only a dead shark in formaldehyde will awaken a brief spasm of outrage, then the artist must produce a dead shark in formaldehyde – this, at least, is an authentic gesture.
There therefore grew around the modernists a class of critics and impresarios, who offered to explain just why it is not a waste of your time to stare at a pile of bricks, to sit quietly through ten minutes of excruciating noise, or to study a crucifix pickled in urine. The experts began to promote the incomprehensible and the outrageous as a matter of course, lest the public should regard its services as redundant. To convince themselves that they are true progressives, who ride in the vanguard of history, the new impresarios surround themselves with others of their kind, promoting them to all committees that are relevant to their status, and expecting to be promoted in their turn. Thus arose the modernist establishment – the self-contained circle of critics who form the backbone of our official and semi-official cultural institutions and who trade in ‘originality’, ‘transgression’ and ‘breaking new paths’. 7Those are the routine terms issued by the Arts Council bureaucrats and the museum establishment, whenever they want to spend public money on something that they would never dream of having in their living room. But these terms are clichés, as are the things they are used to praise. Hence the flight from cliché ends in cliché, and the attempt to be genuine ends in fake.
In the attacks on the old ways of doing things, one word in particular came into currency. That word was ‘kitsch’. Once introduced the word stuck. Whatever you do, it mustn’t be kitsch. This became the first precept of the modernist artist in every medium. In a famous essay published in 1939, the American critic Clement Greenberg told his readers that there are only two possibilities available to the artist now. Either you belong to the avant-garde, challenging the old ways of figurative painting; or you produce kitsch. And the fear of kitsch is one reason for the compulsory offensiveness of so much art produced today. It doesn’t matter that your work is obscene, shocking, disturbing – as long as it isn’t kitsch.
Nobody quite knows where the word ‘kitsch’ came from, though it was current in Germany and Austria at the end of the 19th century. Nobody knows quite how to define the word either. But we all recognise kitsch when we come across it. The Barbie doll; Walt Disney’s Bambi; Santa Claus in the supermarket; Bing Crosby singing ‘White Christmas’; pictures of poodles with ribbons in their hair. At Christmas we are 8surrounded by kitsch – worn out clichés, which have lost their innocence without achieving wisdom. Children who believe in Santa Claus invest real emotions in a fiction. We who have ceased to believe have only fake emotions to offer. But the faking is pleasant; it feels good to pretend; and when we all join in it is almost as though we were not pretending at all.
The Czech novelist Milan Kundera made a famous observation. ‘Kitsch,’ he wrote, ‘causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: how nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!’ Kitsch, in other words, is not about the thing observed but about the observer. It does not invite you to feel moved by the doll you are dressing so tenderly, but by yourself dressing the doll. All sentimentality is like this: it redirects emotion from the object to the subject, so as to create a fantasy of emotion without the real cost of feeling it. The kitsch object encourages you to think ‘look at me feeling this; how nice I am and how lovable’. That is why Oscar Wilde, referring to one of Dickens’s most sickly death-scenes, said that ‘a man must have a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell’.
And that, briefly, is why the modernists had such a horror of kitsch. Art, they believed, had, during the course of the 19th century, lost the ability to distinguish precise and real emotion from its vague and self-satisfied substitute. In figurative painting, in tonal 9music, in the cliché-ridden poems of heroic love and mythic glory, we find the same disease – the artist is not exploring the human heart but creating a puffed-up substitute, and then putting it on sale.
