New Culture Forum - So What You're Saying Is...

hello and welcome to so what you're saying is I'm Peter Whittle now we started this program in January since then I have interviewed about 25 people it's a very particular and very important time for us because we have just passed the 1 million views mark so I'd like to take this opportunity to say thank you very much so those people have watched hope you continue watching and also to those people who have subscribed to the channel and indeed to those of you who've sent donations because they are extremely important to us we really do appreciate it thank you very much because this is a landmark it's particularly important that we have an especially eminent distinguished guests I'm glad to say that today I'm joined by the philosopher Sir Roger Scruton Sir Roger has been a dogged defender and promoter of conservatism and conservative ideas over 50 years he's the author of 50 books on philosophy religion art politics sexuality and music and he's with me now thank you very very much for coming I think that some congratulations are in order because you've just been awarded the Polish order of merit of you know yes now does this relate to the work you did in Eastern Europe yes this was you just a week or so ago there was the 30th anniversary of the free first free elections that took place in Poland first free elections after the communist collapsing is in Europe and so there was a big celebration for this and they singled me out as someone who was symbolically important because I'd been involved but my involvement was not at all over two or well no number I spent my a lot of time in those days making contacts among the underground in Poland Czechoslovakia and Hungary and pushing people into relation with Western colleagues taking the materials giving them talks as well you know because they they were completely out of their depth when it came to uh trying to understand the geopolitical situation nobody had ever explained to them that there was such a thing that's conservatism or a liberal current of opinion within the socialism and all that so we had a very I under a lot of colleagues had a very good time going around to the places where people had got together to educate themselves and that's something I've always believed in it that civil society consists of those little platoons that Burke recommends to us and they they those platoons had all been abolished in Eastern Europe yet people were trying groping their way towards them again so it was very inspiring to you know to visit the places where they were and help people to set themselves on their feet it wasn't safe of course let's go say it must have been dangerous what it was but one was followed often and you know which I went on getting a visa to go in to Poland right to the end not to Czechoslovakia I was arrested there but but um you know as long as you were careful and prepared things properly we were we were always a step in advance of the secret police because it was a time when everything was changing you know we had computers they had only just begun to envisage a computer yeah we even had a man our underground context somebody who produced the first software for the Czech language so we had that before the secret police had so there was quite a you know a difference in in technological availability for us but it wasn't safe but for that very reason it was there was something inspiring because you knew that whoever you were talking to was taking a risk yes oh you're so talking to you was more important to him than the possibility of you know six months in in jail isn't that really while the like English academia now I have to say I have been distressed to see the parallel when I first went to Czechoslovakia in 1979 this was after the charter 77 movement which had tried briefly to establish relations with the West have been open kind all my colleagues in the university who had signed the Charter were either still in jail or anyway not allowed to teach they were doing menial jobs sweeping streets or stoking boilers and one of the most important procedures that had been used against them was the done at the annunciator letter they were their colleagues in their department would find a letter on their desk one morning issued by the secret police denouncing a particular colleague for having signed the Charter over having associated with people who did and accusing him of subversion of the Republic in collaboration with foreign powers and all this sort of thing and asking for a signature from the person on whose desk it was to add his name to the call for this person to be dismissed and that's what we're seeing in universities here now letters of denunciation formulated by totalitarian students who've got no conception of recent history don't read books but a full of a kind of undigested venom towards the world of culture into which they should be one longing to incorporate themselves but for some reason they can't do it when they see these with old-fashioned views you know who might not have the absolutely up-to-date vision of of whatever it is is the issue of the day transgenderism or whatever it might be and so he's right for denunciation and we've seen this with several cases recently and the university many of the universities just capitulate and say yeah well that's that's his fault I think you've referred to this recently versa it's possibly the kind of death isn't it well if it if it's not stopped it will it will be the death certainly of of humanities departments I think in the sciences it will still you know people will still go on but but science when as it were isolated from the rest of culture becomes a very dreary thing and people become alienated from it you know all the great scientists of our time if you look back at n Stein and you know and Freud and Piaget and all those people they were highly cultivated people and for them the intellectual development could never have been confined to something like a laboratory it was a form of dialogue with with civilization as a whole and if that goes I mean it hasn't gone because I know some wonderfully cultivated scientists a day but if the humanities departments are taken out of universities that's a very great loss to science as well you mentioning Eastern Europe there you said I think recently that you know Eastern European countries Hungary Czech Republic are natural friends with more than maybe in the other with the impression one had traveling then of course I was traveling among dissidents and people had taken taken risks to stand up for something but the impression that was that there was a great admiration for the British experience and that we had to some extent established ourselves as a role model for a stable government in a changing world and our conservative party much admired finally for mrs. Thatcher's strength of character of course but it was really quite inspiring for me to be able to to associate myself with this country's resilience and harness against the whole Soviet expansion whether that exists now is another question but it was it did exist then in the late 1970s and I think had we worked harder than we have done those countries would have been natural allies in our long term conflict with the European Union yeah speaking of which to come right out today you mentioned there that the Conservative Party maybe was quite resilient than understand when you when you look at now we're recording this during the full throttle if you like of the leadership campaign to try and party when you look at that now what do you sort of take from from it when you look at the personalities involved and the issues and the way they're expressed I mean what does it what does it say about the general state of conservatism very good question you know I've always been worried about the general state of conservatives and vicars as an intellectual I think it ought to have proper philosophical foundations and I look for those foundations and I don't really see them very clearly in practical politics of course in the tradition and in in the history yes you have Burke and and Hegel and de Mestral all those people in the Romantic period and what followed in the 19th century all that is very inspiring but I don't think it has much impact on the Conservative Party I mean the Conservative Party has always been suspicious of intellectuals anyway on the perfectly good ground that intellectuals think and thinking is dangerous you you know you might come up with the wrong idea so the Conservative Party has always been very yes demurrer about it yeah but now I think it's that that lack of a proper thought through basis to their worldview is beginning to show because that's precisely what was needed in there Oh brexit thing a sense of of what and who and where we are as a nation in the in this confrontation with the global forces we can't avoid where do we put our flag so to speak and in what territory and how how do we respond to all the changes brought about by mass migration and of course especially migration from Eastern Europe anybody in his senses in Poland has his eye on coming here although I'm glad to say that the Polish economy is picking up and there's a big beginnings of a movement the other way but all these things we know are hugely hugely difficult and it's certainly a case where having some conception of what our country is and where its values and its future come from was necessary you mentioned that the battles seem to be largely economic and bits being very broadly broadly here but you mentioned there too about you know what we are who we are where we are you would define conservatism wouldn't you as being that is the essence of it in a way and and a love of that I'm wanting to preserve it yeah the first principle of politics were conservative in my view is that partes is concerned with belonging mmm-hmm we have a particular community which belongs in a place but also in a in a tradition in a political framework and with it and belongs in expectations and so all these are things which unite people in a first-person plural as a we and unites us to a place and we've always assumed that and if you don't assume that you have a real problem about how you deal with people who don't agree with you you know this is something was very clearly seen in the 20th century when the Communists and an ass is declared that that you know that there can be no opposition because you've now got the right solution but and then they looked around for what the opposition wherever it might be and of course it was then hidden it was then the enemy within and had to be destroyed but but in a democracy if you recognize that that we live among people who disagree with this but attached the same place and the same historical inheritance we can then all say you know let's agree to disagree but we still have this which is more important than what we believe this thing which is ours took which belongs to us and we belong to it that to me is what the Conservative Party has always emphasized in the past and one reason for its great electoral success and it's sort of suddenly has ceased to do so it's lost confidence partly because it's frightened of the left as soon as you start saying these sort of things that I've just said to you which I'm I feel quite harmless and also true how you get accused of these thought crimes that have suddenly become dominant you know because you're you're wanting to exclude people you're wanting to to attach yourself to a some kind of primitive you know supremacist vision of what your own community is you know when you say you're talking about the ages that there was a sense in which we could disagree or whatever but we we all had this I think it's true to say that the things that was more intact then than now of course it was more intact and that's part of what we're going through is a recognition that that that the fabric that holds all that together has been torn but again I think there's a lesson to be learned from the East European experience if you ask yourself why was it that communism finally collapsed there wasn't any external force causing it to do so it collapsed largely because the poles woke up to their sense of national identity they started saying we are an entity other than the Communist Party and we're going to affirm that and thanks to the election of jean poor john paul ii you know to the papacy of course they had the added boost from their religious inheritance and you know we all need that and it shouldn't be demonized but the people that the left has had a real attempt at demonizing it so that we have the conservative party is afraid to confess to what it knows to be true yes you come from a quite humble background don't you really it wasn't it didn't have sort of future eminent conservative philosopher sort of printed all over it did it but was it a political family well my father was very political he was the Labour Party member and trade union member as well along to the National Union of tree of Teachers and he was a local secretary of his branch and he took it very seriously and he was a bit of a class warrior him product of the of the Manchester slums who remained through all his life loyal to that deprived background and wanting on the best of grounds for the situation of people in the industrial working class to be improved they need they should have their share of the beauty of this countryside for instance and the wealth that it produced and it was a very noble approach to things very much that of the labour party which was not about taking over the entire economy and turning it in a collectivist direction although unfortunately after the war you know the clause three stuff came in and and it did move in that direction but but he wasn't a collectivist of that kind but he did want things to be distributed more fairly yes and and he had a visceral dislike of the upper-class and how did that manifest herself anybody appeared on the radio is speaking with what was then the correct BBC accent people talked correctly he was he would bang his fists on the table and anyway not that was not pleasant and I at the time his anger against the upper class really inspired me to investigate them you know I thought well gosh these people they say they really sound interesting and they look what did was there a particular point at which or what did a gradual thing that you formulate is your conservatism or your your worldview was there but did something happen or did it just gradually emerge well everybody's in a state of flux and I'm no different for everybody else but but there was the crucial moment of 1968 in Paris where where I was at the time I was at left University and been teaching in the college university area and Paul and I was there in May in Paris border flap my friend and saw was going on and I was outraged by it the the the smashing of things by these incredibly well-heeled students in their mouths uniforms you know it occurred to me what an earth do they think they're going to put in the place of this wonderful city of Paris of France of the culture and history of France where is it where are they going to get it from and there was no answer to that and of course I started reading all the destructive literature that that had influenced them in particular Foucault and how to say and so on and that really turned me against the sort of Marxist orthodoxy that was beginning to take over the student world in the in the late 60s and then I went back to Cambridge to do research and you know there I met you know robust people who who hadn't gone down the Marxist line and I thought well in that case one doesn't have to and I started thinking things through I really got interested in you know in the question what is the alternative what does it apply to the society in which we are now and where are its intellectual roots so I became you know sort of known in the academic world as someone prepared to defend conservatism well that 1968 when our 2019 so that fifty-one years yes you've been defending conservatism between the whole time you have often you know powder lonely far as to say what and you've had lots of obstinacy what keeps you going in the face of that as a man your right to ask that question because I have gone through moments of depression but I've always had the hope that there are others who thinking likewise and I've always had the good fortune to meet them and and for the most part the hostility has been the kind that you can deal with as as long as you are you have another circle of your own so I'm I was very lonely at certain times and but my involvement in Eastern Europe cheered me up in the end because I recognized then that all those things I disliked in the academic Marxism that was emerging around me had actually been put into practice and had shown how not how inefficient they were but how evil they were you know entering that world where everyone was in a state of fear nobody trusted anyone there was a sense of the omnipresent eye observing you without knowing whose eye was all that was very creepy and and I got into my soul to be quite honest and I thought we even if I'm hated for what I write I've got to write in such a ways to show how destructive of the human norm that is of a human personality and I still think that I still long them both the great book which will pin it down and it should never happen again but of course I got to know the literature and there's nobody who's read me wash is kept captive mind or massagin it's and of course can can have any doubts about it but unfortunately we are entering a period of illiteracy in which people don't read those I mean one of the most recent you know hostages you face or while the difficulties you faced was when they put an end to your position when you you had been appointed by the Conservative government to be head of the beautiful building Housing Committee oh that's not right and because of a an interview which seems to have been a new low in outrageous Distortion you were asked to leave whatever what was that like well that was very disturbing because I thought whatever the attacks on me the Conservative Party surely is my place of refuge and they must see that I'm standing up for the things that they ought to be standing up for now is pleased that they appointed me to this commission unusual yes it was a difficult Commission to inter advocate for the beauty in a world that's dominated by utilitarian architecture you know that's tough and it required a lot of work and not good diplomacy but the interesting thing is that when as you say I gave an interview at my publishers request I didn't ask for it to the to the New Statesman I thought it was going to be about my philosophy and so on and they sent this journalist of obviously of animated by a very strong hostility to actively madly who who essentially fabricated the interview from my discourse yes and they're taking bits out of context adjusting other bits and all the usual stuff but addressing it in effect to the social media mob asking them inviting them to join in in the character assassination and the effect of it of course was the whole press came in on this because he looked like a jolly good story and the Conservative Party joined in he said I wasn't even asked to explain I learned I was on a train a time I learnt I've been dismissed peremptorily by the Minister concerned and that was it and it was so you know it was typical of this panic that the Conservatives feel at the witch-hunting that goes on on the Left they don't want to be the next one if someone is if someone is being scapegoated you must pick up your own stone and throw it at him otherwise you'll be the next one it's exactly the same as that I've talked about that with letters of June and yes exactly yes I remember with one particular of the Tory MP I think there were about three two MPs and won't name him but one of them who went for you and it seemed to me actually what it really showed her also with the level of Philistine ISM yeah actually because I got the impression I mean this was greater suspected I I got the impression he didn't quite know who you even want I'm not I'm taking a particularly Johnny Mercer you know I'm talking about intellectualism so somehow this was a bad thing you know no I think but I had the great good fortune that Douglas Murray I saw stepped in and relentlessly interrogated the New Statesman about it until it big until finally somebody managed to get hold of the tape of the interview send it to me anonymously and we recognized that I hadn't said any of these things or what if there were phrases that were that were phrases I'd use I'd used them in a completely different context and I think now I think there will be an apology about it from the from the paper I know the editor was mortified by the whole thing and that's good um before we leave this particular topic I suppose that you know this is the important part in what we call our cultural wars I guess it was an important in in in instance office I suppose that you could say there would be a would have been a some sort of victory in the culture wars if they had said actually we were wrong please who would like you to take it back if they did that would you have taken it back I think if it had come at the right time I would in order to help them over their embarrassment we're gonna be I would wanted it back because the reason why I got these attacks happened already is that the architectural establishment is deeply hostile to my being in that position because they know they know that I will say the things that they don't want to hear and they don't want the public to hear namely that the kind of templates used in cities and in our country Saturday by that the average modern architect are deeply repugnant to the ordinary person and that's why ordinary people fight planning battles and prevent us from building and the architectural schools need to wake up to this and we need to arm the public against them and I was going to say that so they will always stop me saying that yes and they'll use any weapon because there's a this is a huge vested interest with a great deal of money behind it yes and a great deal of political connection especially with the Tory Party and so will you you were surprised in some ways maybe by your appointment as anyone else absolutely I thought that I thought the Conservative Party had was now must be going through a crisis because it was insane enough to appoint someone who believed what it ought to be believing you know on the whole the Conservative Party has survived by aiming to be still in place at the next election and doing whatever is necessary to be there you you're talking about it was called building beautiful you talked a lot about beauty written about beauty there's a book on beauty and you did the TV program on beauty which I loved I'm watching it it's quite viewing I think but the upshot of what you saying that it seems to me is that we are either afraid of beauty now or we have sort of banished the whole idea of beauty so before I asked you I just asked what would you call beauty in architectural or art I think what I would say is the most important aspect of beauty is that we are at home with it right and that's even when it shocks us or challenges us you know some just go back to the you know the great challenging works of art like Picasso's you know early middle period stuff or Stravinsky and the Stravinsky ballets especially the Rite of Spring or even some of the striking architecture of people like leatherby and so at the turn of the century that they're you know whatever we think about it we stand back after a while we think yes I can bring this into my life yeah and it is part of me and it's inviting me - nope to be part of it yeah and I patterned it part of me and that invitation is I think is central to our sense of beauty and in ordinary life you know we don't we're not easy it's most most of us we don't go around the world looking for the the sublime experience that you can get from and the Shakespeare sonnets or Tristan is older or whatever we go around the world wanting to find the places where we could be places which don't repel us which don't say go away which on the country opens some kind of inner door and I think that's what everyday beauty is like and we all were all able to produce it when we have given a room of our own and a bit of furniture we start arranging it so that it is like that so we belong and dip the lungs and I think that is what the instinct for beauty is and why it's absolutely necessary for us and more necessary today than it's ever been before precisely because it's so rare and also because the surrounding world is dominated by a utilitarian culture everything is conceived in functional terms as a means to an end certainly we see that in architecture and it's all straightforward simple engineering devices proved to perform a particular function but which don't have any ability to put the surrounding people at ease with them but you made the point our shadows were absent point in the program where you said that buildings that are have been built purely because they are useful as it was in the way that art is not necessarily useful end up being useless they end up being empty they end up graffiti school door over there and no one wants to be near them exactly I think that that's where the first lesson that you learn when you begin to study the philosophy of beauty is that there is a utility in the useless and that you have we that's what we most need to cultivate in our own lives as well we don't become lovable objects by being useful although we do should lend our help to others and so on but we we should we become loveable through enjoying the world and radiating our appreciation of it and that is something that we look for in beauty in buildings to and you know I always take Paris as an example partly because it is so obviously you know a wonderful thing but also because it's always under threat mmm you know a poor not for Dom was going to have some ghastly he killed were designed by Norman Foster stuff on it I imagine in the end but you know that there you see all around you that this sense that things are there because because they are what people wanted to put yeah yeah just like you know arranged room and the doors open into agreeable spaces the windows open onto the street promptly and you are there as though among friends even though those friends are made of stone the there is a century if you look at the art world in particular or architecture there's a sort of sense in which the belief is is that truth is ugly you know Agnes is more truth years this is the sort of thing you get told a lot you know if you yes that was the idea being that that you become truthful and by as it were repudiating things showing that that showing the world as it is and the world as it is is a horrible world but that's what the artist should be doing yeah not finding something to love but finding something to just push in your face and say this is part of you too now sometimes that that can have a important role in art obviously we all know that the Rite of Spring is about something extremely ugly mmm the sacrifice sacrificial death of it of a girl in the grip of the most appalling primitive superstitions but it is one of the most beautiful things ever composed it's to say it redeems that death it isn't about saying that this the world is just as horrible as this it's saying that no even in these horrible things there is a Redemption and here is the music that shows you that so I think that the true artist who may he may mess around with these nasty things but it's in order to to show that they are not intrinsically nasty that they that they contain the seeds of a real humanity and you know a real artist will go to the edge of what is intolerable and still bring you back some people like dr. Johnson thought that that Shakespeare went to the edge in Kings King Lear and fell over it and so he rewrote the aims to bring us back and you know there's some truth in yes but I think we must recognize that the whole idea of tragedy is about the way in which art can redeem the human condition by by looking the most awful things in the face sometimes when you look at the situation now in the art world for example you you can kind of loot opened but then something happens and the example I've read recently to the Portrait Gallery's Portrait Award and it was full of people some of the work was extraordinarily talented beautiful craftsmanship and you thought somehow these people must have slipped the net well they have because remember the awful thing about works of visual art is you can own them and then the Saatchi types come in and bid for them and then they're told by the critics you must bid for this because it's really hideous and that would be a prized possession so that we're constantly beating up ugliness and those old-fashioned portrait painters you know who exhibited the Academy summers exhibition and so on they are pushed into the corner it's you know sort of you know a sweet but there but it's it's just bland yes and doesn't challenge doesn't doesn't get to the the mystery of the human condition on all the things that those are all things now my view is that actually it does often get to the mystery of the human condition more effectively than say Andy Warhol actually see you're looking at indeed I have got that there yes you know who in my view was a totally trivial character who happened to make a splash yes and this splash sold now in the case of music you know where you can't actually own the result there's a countervailing force that says you know since I can't possess this the only way I can appreciate it is by listening to it and then of course critical judgment comes in and gradually after a few horrible things clamoring in your ears you come around to recognize that in music there has to be beauty too and we have emerging composers like James McMillan and David Matthews and so on who are writing the sort of music that people actually want to listen to and I think that there's the Atelier movement in in representational painting which is trying to do the same it's just that the art schools are full of people who are not capable of actually teaching the techniques of representational painting they can teach you to make a splash and put your ego on display and therefore they invent all kinds of curricula which are about putting your ego on display even if you have no real ego that would fit the bill it is all really about me unfortunately that's our celebrity culture yeah that's one of it we didn't talk about this when talking about politics but that is one of the problems with politics that because of the celebrity culture because you have to be fotage and it can appear on TV and everything the me concept begins to dominate politics too and I think we are lucky that that it hasn't really dominated this current attempt to find a leader of the Conservative Party which is good but you know I think they beyond to a hiding to nothing as well I think you mentioned there about how the maybe the art world repudiated its traditional forms whatever may be a bit of a conky segue here but I'm going back to 1968 and when you were in part and I remember that the French they tend to be much more open about talking about cultural issues and I remember I think it was Sarkozy he was talking about we have got to the the 68 generation must not keep apologizing it must not keep repudiating our greatness or you've called this the culture of repudiation I believe I which is where we essentially appear to want to disown and indeed hate everything about ourselves do you think in the 50 years that you've been rioting and and everything that you've been doing that did it it's the situation there is better now or or worse because it seems to me that we are in one of the peaks of sort of repudiation yes and no I think when I first began publishing there's a conscious conservative back the meaning of conservatism published at 1969 or something the it was the case that all I got was incredible attacks and then later I wrote thinkers of a new left which was more that's the end of my academic career people just wouldn't just thought that was completely on the margin of everything and in attacking people like Foucault and us at all that but um no I can't let the emails all the time and yeah thanking we could work for my writing in saying that this is inspiring I think we we should all get together and do something about this so I think that there is certainly a kind of moment of awakening awakening against the woke do you think that is happening I think it is happening among serious people and not only middle-aged people lots of young people write to me about things like that my little film on Beauty which you referred to you know that's had I don't know had a million reviews before the BBC took it down in outrage you can still see it on Vimeo yes exactly with Portuguese for subtitles that sound about a million views and it and that I get a lot of stuff from young people about that saying thank you so you've helped me you've helped me get away from the cult of ugliness and okay that's only my personal narrative but I I think we mustn't lose faith in human nature or must but at the same time recognize that civilizations decline that we can lose things and never get them back as our ancestors did you know in the Dark Ages but there were those self-sacrificing monks who kept the lamp burning and it did come back I suppose in an almost more prosaic level I wasn't thinking here are the sort of 68 is who who I would say on the whole are in charge to show you know they're the seniors now and the general drift of society regardless of the government appears left would always there's got to come a point where you know all of these people who were placed in all of these positions for you briefly for a moment which was most unusual but how do we change that how did what is the plan for changing that one should never forget that one's greatest friend in this life is death and you know they're all go and you have to prepare out what their successor and they're all there are also moments of the repudiation of the repudiation and I think we've seen this to a great extent in France a recovery of the sense of the French cultural identity you don't find in France the adulation of Foucault and David and and Lacan all that you find in American universities they most French intellectuals will say yeah that had its day but you know it was pretty narcissistic wasn't it so and there's always something new do you know that's really giving me some hope about reading thank you very much thank you so much for joining us actually sort of thank you for that time and for that very very optimistic ending thank you very very much for watching so what you're saying is and I hope to see you next time thank you very much

Channel: Roger Scruton Official

Views: 51,839

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Id: 7b2JHLXU4zE

Length: 45min 27sec (2727 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 02 2019