Scruton

A small snippet from Roger Scruton’s latest interview—that should have some resonance with readers here. A bit on the abstract side, though:

MG: Shifting gears, an important theme in your book is that the notion of a social contract, “a recent and now seemingly irrepressible political idea,” cannot ground political life as we experience it. Can you say a little about the contrasting idea of the “transcendent bonds” that you say give rise to our social obligations?

Scruton: My point was simply to emphasize that the most important obligations governing our lives as social and political beings—including those to family, country and state—are non-contractual and precede the capacity for rational choice. By referring to them as “transcendent” I meant to emphasize that they transcend any capacity to rationalise them in contractual or negotiable terms. They have an absolute and immovable character that we must acknowledge if we are to understand our social and political condition. The refusal of people on the left to make this acknowledgement stems from their inability to accept external authority in any form, and from their deep down belief that all power is usurpation, unless wielded by themselves.

MG: Does your emphasis on authority give any substance to the claim, so often found on the lips of liberals, that conservatism is repressive and dictatorial?

Scruton: To describe an obligation as transcendent in my sense is not to endow it with some kind of oppressive force. On the contrary, it is to recognize the spontaneous disposition of people to acknowledge obligations that they never contracted. There are other words that might be used in this context: gratitude, piety, obedience—all of them virtues, and all of them naturally offered to the thing we love.

What I try to make clear in my writings is that, while the left-liberal view of politics is founded in antagonism towards existing things and resentment at power in the hands of others, conservatism is founded in the love of existing things, imperfections included, and a willing acceptance of authority, provided it is not blatantly illegitimate. Hence there is nothing oppressive in the conservative attitude to authority.

It is part of the blindness of the left-wing worldview that it cannot perceive authority but only power. People who think of conservatism as oppressive and dictatorial have some deviant example in mind, such as fascism, or Tsarist autocracy. I would offer in the place of such examples the ordinary life of European and American communities as described by 19th century novelists. In those communities all kinds of people had authority—teachers, pastors, judges, heads of local societies, and so on. But only some of them had power, and almost none of them were either able or willing to oppress their fellows.

http://rightreason.ektopos.com/archives/2005/11/the_joy_of_cons.html

Posted by jonjayray on Wednesday, November 30, 2005 at 02:01 PM in Political Philosophy
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Comments:

Posted by John S Bolton on November 30, 2005, 05:51 PM | #

The left is opposed only to that authority which limits frredom for aggression. An authority which unleashes freedom for aggression, however, is one to which they will gladly give obedience, piety and gratitude. They will give it their worship, surround it with their own mystic feelings, the more occult the better, and call it the transcendent. The left will say all have agreed, and have natural obligation toward, that which looses freedom for aggression against the fat selfish bougeoisie, will they not? If the above be true, Scruton would seem to have rather missed the essence of the difference between right and left. There have been socialists of throne and altar. Some would say the essence of the matter is that there can no utter essence of anything; but does not that reduce to a contradiction-in-terms?

Posted by Guessedworker on November 30, 2005, 07:08 PM | #

Here, anyway, Roger Scruton offers no critique of right liberalism. Yet it is by no means free from “antagonism towards existing things and resentment at power in the hands of others”. In the same terms - or almost the same terms - with which critiques the left he could critique the right.

Ultimately, liberalism in the round is anti-Conservative. That is as true of Hayek as it is of Trotsky.

Furthermore, Scruton rather predictably lapses into talk of obligation, authority, transcendence and so on when, in respect of family and country (he forgot race - wonder why?) the pull is ethnic genetic interest. As for obligation to the state, that is dependent on the utility of said state as a vehicle for ethnic genetic interest. Throughout the West that question is increasingly moot.

Posted by John S Bolton on November 30, 2005, 07:46 PM | #

Governments which wage war on their people’s EGI’s are not likely to last; loyalty cannot be retained then. The left can’t be defined as hostility to EGI’s; that would make it a terminal affair, when it is really more enduring than that. Scruton calls czarist Russia deviant; but we can look at the left and right in relative terms. The left is that party which wants more freedom for aggresion, the right is that which wants more freedom from aggression. Suppose that a movie were made called ‘cossacks and students’ in which leftist college students have used aggression to riot against and occupy a campus. The students are set upon by cossacks in violent manner. Isn’t it claer that the right sympathy will be against, and the left sympathy will be for the students, and where the premiss is that the students are the aggressors against the property under dispute? Won’t it be this way regardless of any other consideration?

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