Roger Scruton’s Anti-Intellectualism

Australian Essays
by Roger Scruton
Connor Court and the Institute of Public Affairs, 2014, 98 pages, $19.95

Not all great intellects, of course, are intellectuals. The “intellectual” as we understand him today—the public intellectual—is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the Bad Old Days, as Prince Philip calls them, we had men of letters, who possessed such penetrating minds that they were able to earn their bread reflecting on the more abstract aspects of society, politics and culture. One couldn’t earn that exalted title merely by scaling the ivory tower: in the English-speaking world, the exalted Doctor of Letters was (and occasionally still is) awarded on an honorary basis, to acknowledge the accomplishments of the elite thinkers of a generation. Their life’s purpose was to stand above the tide of fad and fashion: whatever transpired in our tumultuous Western societies, they ensured the survival of high culture and high-mindedness.

But, in the wake of the French Revolution, the men of letters began their slow decline. It was no longer enough that men of extraordinary genius devoted themselves to the formidable task of guarding the cultural and philosophical heritage of our civilisation. They were to enlist themselves in the service of radical politics, fortifying the ivory tower and turning their pens against our heritage. Their new charge was to give intellectual justification for the cultural vandalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Naturally, men of letters became irrelevant. No one was looking to recruit “the sweet laughing eagle thoughts that grow / Where wings have memory of wings”. The men of letters were the memory-banks of Western civilisation; what the radicals demanded was forgetfulness. Post-revolutionary society needed their big formidable brains to help engineer a new civilisation, not to preserve the old one. If they (the Brains) glanced to the past at all, it was through a veil of dream-distortion, as though recalling a recurring boyhood nightmare. These architects of the new order were called intellectuals, and they’ve been plaguing us ever since. Culminating in the career of Russell Kirk, the man of letters is today nearly extinct.

Roger Scruton is one great intellect that refuses to fit the mould of the plat du jour intellectual, and one of his most recent publications, Australian Essays, contains some of his most incisive criticism of soi-disant intellectuals to date.

The first essay, “Where Did We Go Wrong?” is addressed to all of us who share the inheritance of Western culture, law, philosophy and religion. The idea itself is radical: we’re not used to great intellects condescending to address us at all; when they do (as with Chomsky), it’s only to reprimand us for not paying greater heed to the edicts of the intelligentsia.

Naturally enough, what follows is a criticism of the insular ivory tower, with its “gymnastic display of nonsense, and the peculiar self-referential syntax”. (“Ingrown toenail syndrome”, as Scruton calls it.) He argues that the alienation of Western man from high culture, and the ensuing loss of a meaningful common identity, has left us with a yawning divide between the academy and the marketplace. There’s no longer any such “society” to be initiated into, no community to satisfy our need for belonging. The bonds that once united us—worship, music, literature and the like—are relegated to the so-called private sphere. Those enterprises that make life, not only meaningful, but bearable, have been privatised. We call them matters of “personal taste”.

So the academy has created its own rites of passage, based in convoluted jargon that’s totally inaccessible to the uninitiated. As in the gnostic religions of antiquity, sacred knowledge is guarded jealously by the privileged few deemed worthy to receive it. “Nonsense,” Scruton opines, “when uttered with due solemnity, as the rites of a mystery cult, has a natural capacity to reproduce itself.” By piously imbibing and regurgitating certain spells and incantations, the intellectual is promised a place in the postmodern Valhalla of footnotes and Facebook quotes.

The second essay, “Freedom and Its Discontents”, is ostensibly a reflection on the pervasiveness of Soviet power structures in post-Soviet Eastern Europe. In fact, it seems more of a pretence for Scruton to offer one of his sharp, though ever constructive, criticisms of the mainstream centre-Right. He issues an urgent warning to political leaders in the West, particularly those of a “free market and capitalist persuasion”, who act as though “economics is the base of social order, and law, morality and religion no more than a superstructure”. This, he rightly notes, is a sort of right-wing variation on materialism: “the most damaging part of Marxism”.

The essence of conservatism, he suggests, isn’t reducible to laissez faire economics. Rather, Scruton holds up the traditionalist qua freedom-fighter he encountered among the Hungarian underground: “young people who understood the value of books and learning, who respected their national history and culture, and who were anxious to protect their environment from destruction”. The conservative movement hasn’t rearmed itself, so to speak, for the culture war just yet; but pockets of resistance are forming.

As the humanities are further devoted to the perpetuation of soixant-huitard gobbledygook, with any semblance of a canon or tradition rapidly dissolving in a bath of corrosive deconstructionism, students are already gathering to keep the classics—Shakespeare and Milton, Elgar and Debussy, Plato and Hume—from being lost to living memory. There’s a growing sense, in defiance of our intellectual elite, that these humane pursuits are valuable in themselves, and merit preservation despite (or, perhaps, thanks to) their irrelevance to the pet projects of academia, from stripping metaphysics from religious thought to “desegregating” gender-specific bathrooms. They offer us the sense of true meaning, of authentic belonging, which has given way to the sorry state of the modern university.

We shouldn’t think that Scruton is by any means an anti-capitalist. Rather, he echoes John Ruskin, who he elsewhere calls “the greatest conservative thinker of the Victorian age”. As Ruskin said of the merchant and manufacturer: “It is no more his function to get profit for himself … than it is a clergyman’s function to get his stipend.” Ruskin counted the merchant among five indispensible professions of a civilised nation. The merchant’s vocation is to provide for civilisation, as well as—or, when duty calls, at the expense of—himself.

Thence follows no pathetic socialist dogma; only that the merchant and manufacturer aren’t exempt from their responsibilities to the commonwealth. Their trade isn’t an end unto itself. And while the state could no more enforce such an ethic on them than it could vet physicians for their kind-heartedness or lawyers for their sense of righteousness, conservatives, as defenders of the free market, have every right and reason to hold them to this standard. When we become preoccupied with material provision, we lose sight of what it is we’re being provided for: family and friendship, art, music, nature and the like. Just as a man obsessed with his health can fret himself into illness, so too we risk becoming so obsessed with our livelihood that we stop living, and merely survive. For the time being, Scruton is the voice of one crying in the wilderness, but the survival of conservatism—indeed, of civilisation—depends on our heeding his cries.

One aspect of life long neglected that we can, with a bit of gumption, reclaim for ourselves, is our sense of being: of belonging somewhere in the world. Architecture, one of Scruton’s areas of expertise, is the art of habitation. In the traditional understanding of architecture, we don’t impose ourselves on the earth, flaunting our dominance over nature. Instead, we bring our dwellings into harmony with the natural world, complementing the beauty of creation with our own created things. The various buildings and, indeed, the landscapes from which they arise, seem to be “enjoying each other’s company”.

The sixth essay in the collection, “How to Change the World?” contains some of Scruton’s clearest prose and insights on the subject. He condemns our modern utilitarian architects for imposing the Marxist theory of alienation on us: where the supposed estrangement of the proletarian never manifested in revolution as Marx anticipated, architects have gone about making everyone feel as though they don’t belong in our great cities any more. It’s the “architecture of nowhere”, as Scruton calls it: “It lies there by the road, as though some giant had dropped it as he strode across the landscape.” He gives voice to the secret wish that arises in the heart of everyone confronted by the brutality of our major settlements: “to re-attach ourselves to the community, to the place and to the form of life that is ours”.

From what I can tell, there are only two previously published pieces in Australian Essays: “The Return of Religion” is taken from his introductory Gifford lecture, The Face of God, and “Eat Your Friends” from A Political Philosophy. But the best essays are certainly the original ones, and no Scrutoneer’s collection can do without this little volume. It’s also perhaps the best sampler of Scruton’s thought, interests and style available, an ideal starting point for those wishing to acquaint themselves with the greatest living conservative, but who are intimidated by the sheer volume of his output. And for his Australian devotees, we can take special pleasure in knowing that it’s his gift to us.

Michael Warren Davis is an editorial assistant at Quadrant