Owner of opinions that cause discomfort in the university environment of deep-rooted academic ideologies, Roger Scruton is the same one that causes reflection on knowledge and beauty, the political philosopher who will tell us that we are so concerned with intrinsic, specialized knowledge, that is, we study for exams, we memorize codes, summaries, maxims, we are experts in certain subjects, but incapable of writing a deep, coherent and innovative text in writing, for example, our society values the usefulness of knowledge so much that it has forgotten the importance of ideas, of critical thinking. Today language has become utilitarian, I write to save time, I write "you", "too"... this behavior reflects on us as a society and as people.
For example, when talking about beauty, Scruton leads us to reflect that we have lost the connection with beauty. It reinforces harmony in urban architecture, a major concern with urban zoning in times past. and how this has been lost in modern times, how we have been concerned with the usefulness of buildings and not with harmony with the space. It exemplifies great architecture, beautiful monuments, which are covered by gray mirrored boxes. The reflection of this has reflected on us as people, the loss of appreciation for beauty, contemplation, awareness of the harmony of things with nature, has led us to be and adopt useful behavior, our relationships begin to have this character, we seek in another the utility provided, the other cannot represent problems, we desire as long as it pleases us.
With this "taste" we decided to bring you a little more about Roger Scruton, especially an exciting text about civilization and sociopolitical relationships.
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As João Pereira Coutinho from Gazeta do Povo points out, Roger Scruton was not an original political philosopher. But he was a great connoisseur of philosophy, starting with conservative philosophy.
Scruton was more modest in his speeches on philosophical issues and, therefore, more influential among lay people: he applied old concepts of conservative grammar to the problems of postmodernity.
The biggest of all these problems was designated by the author as a “culture of repudiation”: revolutionary thought, which Scruton witnessed and fought in May 1968, in Paris, in which the entire moral and institutional tradition of a democratic society was repudiated, in search for a chimera in which men find themselves radically free. For Scruton, this promise ignores that real freedom, as opposed to fantasy freedom, requires everything that revolutionaries destroy (law, authority, moral tradition, etc.). The result of this repudiation, which had burlesque features in May 1968, acquired tragic contours in the great totalitarian movements of the 20th century.
Scruton's texts raised questions, sometimes uncomfortable for the academic doldrums. Unsurprisingly, the university always rejected him for his audacity. Her problem, not Scruton's
But the “culture of repudiation” does not only manifest itself in major rebellions. In the second half of the 20th century, there was a more subtle repudiation of what Scruton called “oikophobia”. It is, literally, a “fear of the house”, meaning home is the nation-state. For Scruton, the European Union seeks to supplant this reality by forcefully asserting that nationalism is a poisonous relic of history. Big mistake, warned the author. To begin with, blaming all the tragedies of modern Europe on nationalism would be like accusing love of fomenting domestic violence, said the philosopher.
Nationalism, understood here as pre-political loyalty that expresses a feeling of belonging to a language, culture, religion, historical memory, etc., is inerasable. Furthermore: having allowed the emergence of the nation-state, with a legal order that is assumed to be territorial (and not religious or tribal), this loyalty is a necessary condition for the existence of democracy. The democratic regime is a way of “managing discontent”. But this management is only possible when, despite differences, a people recognizes themselves as part of a common historical experience.
On the other hand, says Coutinho, the erosion of the national element will not only be a threat to democratic functioning and legitimacy. A society that is based on the repudiation of this “sense of belonging” cannot be surprised when this cultural and spiritual void is filled by other loyalties. The radicalization of Muslim communities in Europe can also be explained by the absence of a strong national identity. Deprived of this identity, younger people look for another identity in the radicalism of religion.
Drawing a parallel between young Muslims, who, through this implicit discourse that Muslim values do not conform to the modern concept of society and need another Nation-State to impose their perfect systems of rights and duties, as if an unwilling and uninvited guest who invades and takes over the sofa and the remote control, choosing which program everyone will watch. Is this globalizing and anti-nationalist discourse one of those responsible for this search by young Muslims for a need for cultural identity, this fervor offered by the coexistence discourses of religious extremists?
Well, this and much more we will discuss here in this video today, as we bring you the last speech of this controversial political philosopher, on September 19, 2019, at the 14th Annual Gala for Western Civilization, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute gave Sir Roger Scruton the Defender of Western Civilization award.
Sir Roger said these words upon receiving the award. He had recently been diagnosed with cancer, a disease that led to his death on January 12, 2020.
In a few words, Roger Scruton stated:
It is an honor to be awarded as Defender of Western Civilization in 2019 by the ISI, an organization with which I have long had a connection and whose work seems more important and necessary than ever, not only for young people, but also for those of us in the older generation , that we are trying to convey what we know.
Western Civilization has suffered many attacks for being Western. The word Western has taken on an abusive character by many people in today's world, especially by people who have no idea what it means historically, metaphysically and poetically. Our Western Civilization is not a specific little obsession of people who happen to live in a certain geographic region of the world. It is a constantly expanding heritage, always including new things. It is something that gives us knowledge of the human soul, that allows us to create not only wonderful economic systems and ways of living in our world, but also great works of art, religions, legal systems and government, all the other things. that make us recognize that we live in this world, as long as possible, in a successful way.
Roger interestingly questions and answers, what is Civilization?
Let's leave aside the idea of Western Civilization. After all, it depends on how you see the world, West or East. Instead, let's look at the idea of civilization. What is that? It is a form of connection between people, not just a way through which people understand their languages, customs, behaviors, but also the way they connect with each other, eye to eye, face to face, in the everyday life they experience. share.
It is something that has a common dimension in the workplace and in the community, in our daily lives. But it is also something on which high culture, works of art, literature, music, architecture and so on have been built. They are ways of changing the world so that we feel more comfortable in it.
I think this is the hallmark of Western Civilization, which is a comprehensive civilization that is always creating new ways of feeling at home, ways of relating to each other, which generates peace and mutual interests as the main ties between neighbors .
This is a central point in Roger's ideas, and that is why he is called Conservative, he reinforces the importance of the cultural models on which we build the foundations of our community, mainly expressed by art, music, literature, architecture, social rites, for example. , as society begins to fall apart, be more selfish and maladjusted when the cultural movement becomes the movement of repudiation, the destruction of what is classic or cultural structures, replacing a philosophy of relativism and revolution with the anarchism of values and society, an inconsistency between a safe and harmonious society, built through the absence of norms, the hegemony of libertinism, the opposition as if parents were representatives of a supposed oppression, instead of seeking in their example and experience, ways of improving yourself and maintain family traditions.
Modern society is liquid, based on a relationship seen as a victim of the system. People start to place all their frustration in the name of a common enemy: the laws, the meritocratic system, the parents, the church, the security forces, the employer, the entrepreneur, the competition... that is, my inefficiency and lack of application in my skills are not my fault, but in the social construct as a whole that pushes me down. This thought starts to dominate the discourses and shape the structure of young people's thinking, as a consequence I have a society that instead of improving their education systems, they create ways of circumventing competence to justify access, and increasingly, this expansion is being desired and expanded, to the point that it is no longer based on ability and/or knowledge to occupy jobs, but rather on personal characteristics such as skin color, social class, gender, sexual orientation, regionality... creating a social incoherence, in which it discourages competition for space and increases the feeling of social victimization, to the point that anyone who disagrees with me automatically becomes ignorant and selfish.
Roger continues:
Now, I myself have obviously gotten into a lot of trouble for defending Western Civilization. A strange mark of our time seems to be the fact that the more you are willing to defend it, the more you are considered a narrow-minded fanatic. But the people who make this accusation are narrow-minded. They are the ones who don't see how big and comprehensive our civilization was and is.
We were created, for example, based on the Hebrew Bible, an ancient document that perpetuates the civilization of the pre-classical Middle East. It gives us a sense of how people lived in tribal communities that roamed the desert and so on.
We learned and studied the great Roman and Greek epics, which taught us different languages – dead languages, but languages that portrayed the world in a different light from the world created by our contemporary languages.
We were raised based on the literature of the Middle Ages, much of it influenced by Arabic literature, of course. In fact, we've all fallen asleep listening to stories taken from the 1001 Nights.
The more you analyze, the more you realize how comprehensive and universal the heritage of our civilization is. And that's something we tend to forget these days. It is not a restricted legacy. It is something that is really open to all types of innovations, that accepts the totality of the human being as its theme.
That's how I see it. I always liked being a humanities teacher because I know what the humanities are about. They deal with the human being and how diverse and broad being is in the world we live in today.
Whatever we do, we must react against the accusation that our civilization is somehow narrow, dogmatic, intolerant and exclusionary. It is not at all.
Compared to what, after all, did we receive this accusation? Compared to the Chinese? Are we narrow, intolerant and exclusionary when we set aside the great Confucian tradition? No way. I was raised, like many others, with an interest in Chinese civilization. We read the Book of Odes in Ezra Pound's translation. We all fell in love with Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, one of the greatest uses of Chinese poetry in the entire history of music, and certainly greater than anything I have heard in Chinese music. And look! Therein lies the prejudiced statement.
But let us recognize that this is not prejudice at all. The fact that a composer like Mahler could direct his Viennese feelings towards those poems of solitude that led him to compose such beautiful music shows a tolerant and generous aspect of our culture. Leaving us, at the end of the last movement, with that incredible chorus that, as Benjamin Britten wrote, remains imprinted in the air.
Why are we forced now to take a defensive position when anyone who knows a little about the subject knows that what we call Western Civilization is just another name for civilization and for all the achievements that young people need to know about and, if possible, purchase. The problem, it seems, is the invasion of academia and the intellectual world by activist groups that don't take the trouble to understand what they are positioning themselves against and that, even so, define their position in terms of political agendas. These political agendas are all about belonging to a group of salvationists: we are saved because we believe in the right things and we look everywhere for venomous beings that try to prevent us from taking possession of our rightful inheritance.
Understand the philosopher's criticism of the growing political, academic, media and internet discourses in a shallow type of argument, as if based on 150 characters, people no longer want to look for the bases, the originals and the construction of thought, they dream of a solution that they think is the right one and they form militancy around their ideas, they transform their life motivations into building a pseudo social debate in which social activism becomes a kind of salvationism, the new social religion in which everyone who disagrees with me , will burn in the fires of hell, or rather, "cancellation".
Roger continues:
And all new causes are chosen based on this. They are causes of people who want to feel that the current order of things excludes them and that they are therefore justified in destroying that order in order to take a place at the top of it. Once at the top, they will rearrange things in order to purify all old and corrupting influences seen as a problem.
I think this invasion of political activism into universities and the humanities and all channels of civilization is one of the greatest disasters of our time.
But that didn't have to happen. We don't have to listen to what these people say. We are not obliged to get involved in public trials, in denunciations, in all the ways in which people are hunted and excluded from the community. These activists are only successful because we participate in these activities. We don't have to participate. It's possible to take a step back and even laugh at some of the things that are being said.
If you stop and think about all the furor over transgender activism, much of it is pure confusion, and confusion that people want to be rescued from. Much of anger is a cry for help. Stay calm and say: there are other opinions than yours. You may have a good argument, but it's not the only argument. Let's calm down and discuss this. Let's look at this in the context of civilization as a whole and where it is headed.
Doing this should be enough to eliminate much of the tension that afflicts us.
Roger asserts, that we are in a time for courage.
And I feel that now is the time, through institutions like the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, to bring courage and conviction back to the young people who know that there is something wrong with this anti-tradition activist witch hunt. The time has come, it seems to me, for people like me and the older generation of teachers to give courage to young people, to say: look, you have a civilization and a heritage that helps you understand these things. Giving in to this type of exclusionary activism, which ignores entire portions of human knowledge, is not good. It's not giving you the things you really need in the world you're going to live in.
What you need is dialogue, and that's what our civilization is about. Trying to understand the human condition in all its complexity. And when people try to radicalize and politicize the academic curriculum and what is taught and thought in universities, you do not need to participate in that. You might even laugh at them. In fact, it is still allowed to laugh at people in our country and civilization. After all, comedy is one of the great gifts of civilization. And it's up to you, I guess, to use it.
So my final message is that we should not despair about Western Civilization. We just have to be careful to recognize that we are not talking about a small, narrow-minded thing called the West. We are talking about an open, generous and creative thing called Civilization.
Maybe you coldly disagree with Roger, maybe I even have some reservations about him, but one thing is certain. We build an argument that is the result of Trotsky, the communist idea of internationality and universalization of the communist revolution. Faced with the horrors of the Second World War and the resentment over this period of genocide and young casualties in the conflicts led to an attraction on the part of European youth mainly to Trotsky's ideas, a new ideological war against the feeling of nationalization. The values that previously underpinned fascist states were indiscriminately thrown into the trash can and a wave of repudiation of national sentiment began to give way to activism and salvationism.
And at this point we can highlight the new wave disseminated as the key to humanity's salvation, globalization, greatly taken advantage of by large corporations and entrepreneurs, who tear down the State's borders to have free access to their interests anywhere in the world, without having to create links with local society. The State begins to live in a struggle with no prospect of victory against these forces, which are gradually convincing people to overturn social security in favor of large multinationals and an increasingly hungry market.
These conceptions have been merging and creating misshapen, incomprehensible and hypocritical speeches. And we see shallow ideological battles preaching a better future, an overlap of culture. China has been very efficient in this aspect, today it owns a large part of the internet in the sense that its social media companies like Tik Tok are responsible for dictating world culture, its algorithm provides what is most interesting for geopolitical interests, you is increasingly distracted by frivolities, NPCs, dances, memes... while in China children and teenagers are trained with a different algorithm, designed to demonstrate respect for values, obedience, competition for the job market, conception of family, values chosen as desirable by the Chinese government, which makes its nation more competitive in the future.
Imagine the power that Tik Tok, just one example, has in its hands, your habits, your desires, your personal data, your tastes, your predispositions, concerns, medical history, fear... imagine someone who knows everything you do in four walls, knows you better than yourself. This is the power of the algorithm, it thinks it can put a little voice in your head to reinforce it more and more. The more you watch, the more everything seems to make sense.
There is a lot of interest in victimizing the Western world and demonizing the West, just as the West did decades ago. We can say that the coin turned and showed another side. The United States fell behind technologically at the turn of this decade at the turn of 2010, and is being destroyed from the inside out by the greatest North American invention, the internet.
The issue is not exactly the ideological and imperialist war between China and the USA, but rather the side effects of this. This militant and activist salvationism carelessness that we witness day after day, in which not even itsown memberscome to a haltrdo aboutyour ideas, evenbecause a lot ofdo not countis a stadequate rupture, anstrução metaphphysics of thought. This colonists' warzationintellectual, the legacywill be victimistic and inflamed people, eachincreasingly frustrated and weakemotionally, intolerantesfor the lack of capeace about the interpstraightening andconstruction crethics ofthought.
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