DD74 – The West and the Rest
He died in 2020, but Roger Scruton still comes across as a contemporary critic. Idiosyncratic? Certainly. Alarmingly extreme? Often. Determined to shock? Undoubtedly. He was a curious mixture of fiery arguments over those topics that concerned him, while also being willing to provoke, to push to extremes to challenge thinking. Robert George’s Opinion piece at the time captured much of what was engaging and infuriating about the man (in The uncomfortable Truths about Roger Scruton’s Conservatism, Opinion, The New York Times, The Stone, Jan. 29, 2020). Five years after his death, he still poses a real problem, when the answer to the question as to what he stood for requires us to stop lapsing into stereotypical thinking. He was a complex, irritating, deeply thoughtful and often aggravating man. I disagree with much he said, but I find it hard to ignore him.
Robert George suggests he was widely known as a ‘conservative philosopher’, possibly the most important Anglo-American conservative thinker of his generation. “It’s true that he was a conservative; it’s also true that he was a philosopher. Many of his philosophical views can truthfully be labelled “conservative.” But to honour the truth in full, it is necessary to explain, with respect to any particular view Roger held, the sense in which it was conservative. To do so will show the important ways in which Roger defied stereotypes.” For example “Like conservatives of all descriptions, Roger loathed and opposed Communism, which he regarded as a soul-destroying abomination (and not just as a failed promise of economic prosperity), and all forms of socialism. So he found little to like in the Labour Party of his native Britain, even in the Tony Blair era, or in the Democratic Party in the United States, even before its leftward lurch in the 21st century. Yet Roger was far from fully on board with the economic philosophy of the British Tories or the American Republicans.”
It is easy to concentrate on Roger Scruton the conservative, and ignore that he was a philosopher, writer, and social critic with a particular interest in aesthetics and political philosophy. Certainly his wide-ranging writing did often serve to ensure the promotion of conservative views. In 1982 he became founding editor The Salisbury Review, a journal championing conservatism. He claimed editing The Salisbury Review effectively ended his academic career in the United Kingdom, especially as it was critical of many key issues of the period – the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, egalitarianism, feminism, foreign aid, multiculturalism and modernism. He wasn’t shy, writing “It is necessary to establish a conservative dominance in intellectual life, not because this is the quickest or most certain way to political influence, but because in the long run, it is the only way to create a climate of opinion favourable to the conservative cause” (Martin Walker in The Guardian, 1/3/83).
Scruton wrote over 50 books on a wide range of topics, including architecture, art, philosophy, politics, religion, and several others, and was a regular contributor to the popular media. He explained that he had embraced conservatism after witnessing the May 1968 student protests in France (this was in a New Criterion article in 2003). He argued society is held together by authority and the rule of law, not by some kind of ideology such as the imagined rights of citizens. Obedience, he wrote, is “the prime virtue of political beings, the disposition that makes it possible to govern them, and without which societies crumble into ‘the dust and powder of individuality” (in Gentle Regrets, pages 40-41). As he saw it, real freedom does not stand in conflict with obedience but is its other side.
He opposed elevating the ‘nation’ above its people, which would threaten rather than facilitate citizenship and peace. ‘Conservatism and conservation’ are two aspects of a single policy, that of husbanding resources, including the social capital embodied in laws, customs and institutions, and the material capital contained in the environment. He argued further that the law should not be used as a weapon to advance special interests. People impatient for reform – for example in the areas of euthanasia or abortion – are reluctant to accept what may be “glaringly obvious to others – that the law exists precisely to impede their ambitions”, (see Arguments for Conservatism, pages 15, 34, 69).
Naturally, he wasn’t happy with the dictates of post-modernism, which he regarded as the claim that there are no grounds for truth, objectivity, and meaning, and that conflicts between views are therefore nothing more than contests of power. Scruton argued that, while the West is required to judge other cultures in their own terms, Western culture is adversely judged as ethnocentric and racist. He wrote: “The very reasoning which sets out to destroy the ideas of objective truth and absolute value imposes political correctness as absolutely binding, and cultural relativism as objectively true” (Ibid 105, 116).
All this takes us to Roger Scruton’s 2002 book, The West and the Rest. In a Carnegie Council review, (1/10/03), John Becker began by citing the final four sentences of the book: “The enemy is of two kinds: the tyrant dictator, and the religious fanatic whom the tyrant protects. To act against the first is feasible, if we are prepared to play by the tyrant’s rules. But to act against the second requires a credible alternative to the absolutes with which he conjures. It requires us not merely to believe in something, but to study how to put our beliefs into practice. Scruton contrasts the basic structure of Western political life with the Holy Law of Islam. Islam then becomes his paradigm for ‘the rest.’ It is a nicely written book, seductive in its clarity, suspect in some of its conclusions.” (p. 161).
The development of early Christianity within the context of Roman Law, says Scruton, lays down a pattern of church-state separation for the West: Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s. “Religion, in the West, is not completely separate from the state; it may teach that there are moral limits to what a state can do, but religion does not dominate all. The business of religion and the business of the state remain essentially distinct. The fruit of this separation is that strangers to one another live together peacefully under the secular rule of law. Though family, tribal custom, and religion persist on the deepest levels, it is possible for a secular state to create its own deep and powerful appeal. That is an appeal to loyalty, loyalty to a place, a territory, a common home. … The government is a government of laws, not a government of men, nor of a totalizing religion. Citizens are first and foremost members of a society of strangers, committed to the defense of their common territory and to the maintenance of the law that applies there. Citizenship therefore depends on pre-political loyalties of a territorial kind–loyalties rooted in a sense of the common home and of the transgenerational society that resides there”. (p. 60).
But we live in a globalizing world and one wonders if we aren’t on the way to some kind of world citizenship, a sense of the entire globe as our home, a larger home, but still a home within an “all-embracing legal order.” Scruton thinks not. The alternatives to the nation-state, he argues, are bad: “tribes, creed communities, or customary communities united by an imperial power.” Such political structures are “hostile, on the whole, to democratic politics. Nationhood is the best that we can offer by way of a pre-political loyalty that delivers territorial jurisdiction and individual citizenship as its natural political expressions.”(p. 61)
Becker sees some plausibility in this argument. Western Europe has welcomed many asylum seekers who, enjoying the rights and privileges of citizens, respond to the incitement of their religious leaders with violence against the very countries that have taken them in. Religion is apparently the problem: “People who see all law, all social identity, and all loyalty as issuing from a religious source cannot really form part of this [Western] political culture, and they will not recognize either the obligation to the state or the love of country on which it is founded.” (p. 63) But is this true? Isn’t it rather true that the number of immigrants and asylum seekers who respond to these calls for violence is small. A vast majority of Muslims seem to have made their peace with the secular states in which they live. Unfortunately, we hear little from that majority. Scruton’s understanding of Islam is the understanding we are all acquiring of radical Islam. Those Muslims who have made their peace with the modern secular state seem stricken with silence. How good it would be to hear from them.
Becker continues “What makes me suspicious of Scruton is his use of the word natural. Is it in the nature of human beings that the largest unit to which they may pledge their loyalty is the nation? My suspicions were verified as Scruton went on to express his reservations about immigration, the multicultural society, the loss of the traditional division of labour between men and women. These, he says, tend to break down the pre-political loyalty on which every social contract is founded. He may be right, but is it necessarily so? Is it natural? And does that end the discussion. The global outreach of Western political culture has forced a confrontation, between two visions of society that are profoundly contradictory. What to one is good, freedom, to the other is vacuous, corrupt. And those who love freedom find the cultural dominance of religion intolerable, even infuriating. The question that comes to mind is this: Just how deep and how broad is this contradiction in the lives we all live? How many of us manage to shape our lives around convictions so irreducible? It’s a real question and a practical one. Perhaps even an urgent one. Scruton doesn’t really address it, it seems to me.”
Becker ends by admitting he likes Scruton’s seductive clarity. “Reading him reminds me of reading Plato. One of my undergraduate philosophy professors used to say that the way you make a philosopher is to fill him full of Plato and then beat it out of him. Scruton makes you think, even though there’s a lot that needs sorting once you’ve done it.”
In another contemporary review, Bill Muehlenberg (Culture Watch, 21 September 2005) addresses the book’s subtitle, ‘Globalization and the Terrorist Threat’, and he observes how Scruton explores a number of related themes. His major thesis is how modern Western democracies differ from other types of societies in general, and the Islamic world in particular. His historical and philosophical investigations provide a framework in which to judge both the September 11 attacks, and the ongoing threat of Islamic terrorism.
He begins by noting that social bonding can take place by means of either religion or politics. In the pluralistic West, social cohesion is mainly found in the form of the social contract, whereas in the Islamic world, religion alone provides that basis. Roman law and the Christian religion helped provide the basis for the social contract, as well as bring about the Western conception of the demarcation of the religious and political spheres. He argues Islamic societies on the other hand know of no separation of religious and secular authorities, with religion the sole basis of the state. Just as the Communist party was a law onto itself, so “Islam aims to control the state without being a subject of the state”. As a result, there are no political or social mediating structures between Allah and His will (Islam) and the submissive Muslim (Islamic citizen). The freedoms of a democracy, including the freedom to oppose the state, to vote for alternative parties, and to freely express dissenting opinions are thus not to be found in Islamic states. In theocracies, such dissent is just not possible. And given that Islam means submission, the good Muslim is an obedient Muslim.
Both secular Western societies and Muslim societies have notions of membership. Membership in the West is made up of the voluntary, the tribal, the linguistic and the political. Muslim membership is credal, based only on the religious. The political process of the West allows for the separation of society from the state, while there is no such distinction in Islamic jurisdictions. Thus the political is the religious, whereas the genius of Western democracies is to separate the political from the rest of social and personal life.
Democratic citizenship helps to limit state power and deter totalitarian temptations. However as the onslaught of radical individualism and secularism sweep the West, former loyalties and the sense of social membership are quickly giving way. As the concept of citizenship disappears, social membership is strained and the basis of democracies is undermined. In the light of such social and political fragmentation, the religious membership of Islamic societies stands in sharp contrast. However Islamic unity is based on force and power, not consent. Religious toleration, taken for granted in the West, is a foreign concept in Islamic societies. Islamic law applies to every aspect of life and leads to the denial of the political. All is religious, and mediating structures are unheard of.
While Christianity teaches us to give to Caesar what is his, in Islamic thinking nothing is Caesar’s, everything is Allah’s. All is religious because all is Allah’s. Thus Islamic membership is all-embracing and all-demanding. But Western membership, or citizenship is unravelling, making Western democracies vulnerable and lacking in direction. Thus the inability of Western nations to unite against the real dangers of terrorism. Thus the mistaken notions of moral equivalence, where ruthless Muslim dictatorships are seen as no better or no worse than Western leadership. Thus the real possibility of the continued demise of the West coupled with a resurgent rise of Islam.
Thus Scruton’s book is not only a warning about the anti-democratic makeup of Islamic societies, but a wake-up call to the West to re-explore its roots and re-establish its moral and cultural foundations. Without a revived West the prospects for the war against Islamic terrorism look bleak. But this volume helps to remind us that the stakes are high and some things are worth fighting for. Hopefully this book will serve as a much-needed call to action by the West. If not, we have much to fear from the future.
Robert George argues conservative can support moderate reforms but their fundamental goal is to conserve. Roger Scruton was an ardent, but old-fashioned and therefore moderate, conservationist Left-wing philosophers, heirs to 1789, believe that philosophy’s point is to chart how the world should be remade. Some conservative philosophers have sought to explain that the social world is as it is because it had to be that way and cannot be changed. Roger saw things more flexibly. He believed that philosophy can help us see the value of good, if imperfect, things, our communities and institutions, that have grown up organically, and that it can show us why we should fight to preserve them and how we can make our own contribution to their development, even by way of moderate reforms.
Let’s face it, The West and the Rest makes me uncomfortable. At one level I can ignore Scruton’s analysis by reflecting on conversations I have had with a variety of Muslims over the years. They come across as people not unlike me: often rational, sometimes passionate, and willing to listen and argue. However, Roger Scruton would argue I am missing the point: this isn’t about that famous ‘man in the street’, but the holders of power, the decision makers. They often lay claim to the views Scruton depicts. Yes, perhaps, they are different.
