Roger Scruton - Liberalism and Loyalty, November 16, 2017

good evening and welcome I'm see you let me say immediately that the lecture we're going to hear tonight and the invitation that was offered to Suraj Scruton has created controversy in the in the community and I think it's important to frame this right out of the right from the beginning over the course of 40 years Roger Scruton has written expressed opinions on homosexuality on gay marriage on gay identity on European politics on British politics on Hungarian politics and in many of these arguments and points of view he's managed to offend members of our community and on Monday I met with some members of the community who wanted to express those feelings very strongly and did so and I committed to make it clear to the both to Roger as I've done already and to you that those views have registered not only with me right but right across the community but let me just make one simple thing clear Roger Scruton was not invited to cast aspersion or doubt or provoked the identities the subtle commitments and the moral values of this community this is a community of equals every member of it contributes to our mission we don't come from the same place we don't all believe the same things but we are deeply committed committed to equality of respect to affection affection because we work hard together whatever our origins whatever our beliefs whatever our orientations whatever our identities and that commitment to the moral unity of our community is and should be unshaken but I didn't because I take the responsibility for these invitations I didn't invite Roger Scruton to express disrespect or to provoke members of this community that's not what the purpose was let me tell you what the purpose was the purpose was that in a in a year long more than year-long a series on rethinking open society you're not doing your job as a community unless a project on rethinking open society invites and welcomes a conservative philosophical critique root and branch of the open society idea a conservative root and branch critique of what it is to believe in an open society and it was on that basis that I invited Sir Roger and let me tell you why Sir Roger because he has a PhD from Cambridge because he was a professor of aesthetics at Birkbeck College of the University of London for 20 years because he was a professor of philosophy at Boston University because he's published and fought and written about aesthetics moral philosophy and many other subjects for over 40 years and another feature of his biography that I think is relevant here because we are where we are is that he was among those British intellectuals of left right and center who went to Poland who went to Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 80s to defend the Czech underground and defend the Polish underground at a time of maximum pressure and stood with them against an intellectual and moral tyranny so that's who I invited and it seems to me he's highly qualified to speak about a conservative vision of open society and the subject of his lecture will be liberalism and loyalty and we will hear him and then as we do in every lecture we will have I hope 45 minutes of discussion and debate and take it from there Roger Scruton the floor is yours well thank you for that kind introduction I am I'm afraid it looks as though the protesting classes have taken the opportunity I won't be I'm afraid defending a radical conservative vision of the Open Society because so much of what is defended in the name of their open society I myself agree with the idea of the open society was introduced by the French philosopher aji Bergson in the 1930s with a view to contrasting two ways of creating social cohesion the magical and the rational magical thinking involves the submission to mystical forces that must be appeased and obeyed and societies founded on magic are closed to innovation and experiment since these threatened the dark powers that govern human destiny rational thinking by contrast involves exploring the world with a view to discovering the real laws that operate in it and exerting ourselves to find reasoned solutions rational thinking according to the Backson leads to an open society in which differences of opinion and lifestyle are accepted as contributions to the collective well-being now this distinction was taken up by Sir Karl Popper who writing in the wake of the Second World War saw totalitarianism whether the fascist or the communist variety as a return to magical ways of thinking and to a society based in fear and obedience rather than free rational choice for proper magical thinking had has persisted in new forms and the intellectuals those who live by their reasoning powers had been in part responsible for this for Papa the real enemies of the open society were those thinkers Plato Hegel and Marx in particular who had advocated submission to the collective rather than individual freedom as the goal of politics and who had failed to cede that without individual freedom reason has no purchase in human affairs and the worst of the gods that they had superstitiously imposed on us in order to perpetuate our submission was history itself whose rule The Hague aliens and Marxist proposes inexorable demanding the hecatombs of sacrificial victims offered during the course of the Second World War it surely clear that the issues to which popper referred are still much with us even if they've taken on a new form we are still besieged by the idea that history is a force to which we must submit and that attempts to resist it whether in the name of freedom or in the name of tradition will always be futile but the superstitious submission to history is now more commonly associated with those who call themselves liberal than with Marxists or nationalists in particular many who advocate the open society tell us that globalization is inevitable and that with it come new forms of transnational government new attitudes to borders migration and governance and new ideas of civil society the message coming down to us from many of those who propose themselves as our political leaders has been globalization is the future it is inevitable and we are in charge of it which is of course is a contradiction for if it is inevitable nobody can really be in charge but is it inevitable and is it as its advocates claim really compatible with the open society poppers open society conception is a recent manifestation of a far older idea namely that of liberal individualism as this took shape during the Enlightenment followers of John Locke saw legitimacy as arising from the sovereignty of the individual free individuals confer legitimacy on government through their consent to it and the consent is registered in a contract the result is a reasonable and reasoning form of government since it draws on individual rational choice for its legitimacy in such an arrangement individual freedom is both the foundation and the goal of politics and the resulting society is open in the sense that nobody is in a position to impose opinions or standards of conduct that the people cannot be persuaded to accept there will be dissenters of course but an open society shows itself by nothing so much as by its attitude to dissenters whose voice is allowed in the political process and whose freedom to express dissenting opinions is protected by the state this idea underlies Papa's vision and it is an idea of perennial appeal however it is open to an objection made vividly by Hegel the objection is this freely choosing individuals able to sign up to contracts and accept responsibility for their agreements do not exist in the state of nature popper himself acknowledges that magical ways of thinking submission to dark forces and the desire to appease them define the original position from which we humans must free ourselves we become free individuals by a process of emancipation and this process is a social process are dependent on our interactions with others and on the mutual accountability that shapes each of us as are freely choosing being the free individual is the product of a specific kind of social order and the constraints necessary to perpetuate that order are therefore necessary to our freedom if openness means freedom then freedom cannot be extended so far as to unsettle the social order that produces it but then the advocate of freedom must be an advocate of that kind of social order and this means thinking in terms of something other than openness we need to know what kind of constraints are required by a free society and as I see it that defines the agenda of conservatism from its foundation in the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes through Burke Smith and Hegel to its frail and beleaguered advocates today one of whom you see on the platform before you the emphasis on the individual and individual liberty is an immovable part of the Enlightenment legacy and has been continuously aligned with the view that human beings live under a single moral law that comprehends every variety of community individual freedoms and universal values are two sides of a coin such as the position advocated by Kant in his theory of the categorical imperative morality according to Kant stems from our shared nature as rational agents each of whom is governed by the same collection of imperatives humanity and free rational agency are ultimately the same idea and to be human is to live under the sanction of the moral law which tells us to will the maxim of our actions as universal laws and to treat humanity always as an end in itself and never as a means only the moral law according to Kant follows immediately from the fact that we are free in the sense of being guided by our own reason independently of any threats or rewards that might be waived in front of us this condition which he described as the autonomy of the will can be overridden by tyrants but never destroyed even if we are constrained to do what the moral law forbids we will inevitably know that we are doing wrong and seeks to avoid our guilt a regime that maintains itself in being by threats therefore violates what for Kant was the basic condition of legitimate order which is that rational beings consulting their reason alone would consent to it there are many complexities and subtleties involved in spelling out that position but it has lost none of its appeal and is the best argument ever produced for the human rights idea the idea that there are universal rights which serve as a shield behind which we can all exercise the sovereignty over our lives that reason itself requires of us and in doing so Express and act out our consent to the political regime under which we live rights are equal and universal and other way in which the sovereignty of the individual is fitted into the same slot as it were as the sovereignty of the state few doubt therefore the importance of this idea and all that it is inspired by way of constitutional building it is the foundation stone of the liberal order and for poppers for many others the way to release reason into the community and to produce a society open to innovation and experiment however we should not neglect the difficulties associated with the human rights idea of which to in particular stand out as especially relevant to the times in which we live first what exactly are our rights how our rights distinguished from mere interests and desires and what prevents people from claiming as a right what they just happen to want regardless of the effect on the common good secondly what are our duties and to whom or to what are our duties owed the American Declaration of Independence told us that all human beings are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights including life liberty in the pursuit of happiness that relatively innocuous summary leaves open as many questions as it answers and when Eleanor Roosevelt set out to draft to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights the list began to grow in ways that the American founders might very well have questioned human rights which began life as basic freedoms soon began to include elaborate claims to health work security family life and so on which are available only if someone is prepared to provide them that which was conceived as a limitation to the power of the state soon became a way of increasing that power to the point where the state as guardian and provider occupies more and more of the space once allocated to the free acts of individuals we have seen this process of rights inflation everywhere in the post-war world a much of it issues either from declarations such as that of the United Nations or from the courts established to adjudicate our rights under this or that treaty the expansion of Rights goes hand with a contraction in duties the Universalist vision of the Enlightenment conceives duties as owed indifferently to all mankind we have a general duty to do good the beneficiaries of which are not bound to us by specific obligations but are simply equal petitioners for a benefit that cannot in fact be distributed to them all no particular person comes before us as the irreplaceable object of our concern all are equal and none has an overriding claim in such circumstances and can be easily forgiven if I neglect them all being unable to fulfill a duty that will in any case make little difference to the net sum of human happiness if you look at recent literature on ethics stemming from such thinkers as Peter Singer and the lake late Derek Parfit you'll get a fairly clear idea of what this enlightenment morality means futile calculations of cost and benefit from which all real human feeling and all lively sense of obligation and moral ties have been removed giving to Oxfam is about about all the moral life amounts to it should be said that cants own position by no means tends in that direction for Kant the fundamental moral concept was not right but duty the free being is bound by the moral law which imposes the duty to treat humanity always as an end in itself and never as a means only in other words to respect the individual if there are universal rights this is simply a consequence of the fact that there are universal duties notably the duty to respect each other as sovereign individuals to tell the truth and to keep our promises in such a view there is a balance between rights and duties and a clear conception of our specific moral ties or at least we can see a path towards those things but without the underlying metaphysics is difficult to see how the Enlightenment vision of the moral life will lead to anything other than enhanced claims for me accompanied by reduced duties to you that imbalance can be observed in a radical misconception that seems at the heart of much liberal politics in our day the view adopted by many advocates of the open society is that enlightenment universalism once adopted will replace all other social ties providing a sufficient basis once adopted for providing a sufficient basis on which individuals can live together in mutual respect moreover this replacement ought to occur since Universalist values are ultimately incompatible with those historical loyalties and rooted attachments that cause people to discriminate between those who are entitled to the benefits of society and those who are not enlightenment universalism requires us to live in an open and borderless Cosmopolis from which all forms of traditional obedience whether tribal nationalist or religious are marginalized or banished this misconception results from identifying what is in fact a rare achievement as the default position of humanity that the idea is that human beings will be motivated by the force of the human rights idea and recognize individual sovereignty in a state of nature that I do it seems to me involves a fallacy a fallacy that we saw at work in the recent so-called Arab Spring where the belief at least among the Western powers seemed to be that if you remove the tyrant then democracy and right and human rights immediately emerged as the consensus and the sole dominant motive but in fact the default position of human beings is precisely not enlightenment individualism even if it lies in all rational beings to see in some sense the validity of it the default position is fear and indeed justified fear fear of the most dangerous animal in existence namely the human being hence when the tyrant is removed people flee towards the next offer of security which may very well be the army since the army after all is what is the thing that exists to provide security and I think we must recognize therefore the long history of conflict and compromise made it possible for these Enlightenment ideas to become the guiding motives in human communities and these motives have not in every place become established and to understand this I think we must recognize that the primary needs of human beings for trust and a sense of belonging trust grows in small units like the family where people experience each each other from day to day and adopt each other's well-being as their own but in family based communities people have to distinguish their own family from other and rival families which means trusting other families less under pressure such communities break down along family lines as we've seen in the Middle East and as we saw of course in Shakespeare's famous representation of the vendetta between the Montague and a Capulet families in general kinship loyalties are more suited to sustain closed than open societies and it is one reason why the tribal forms of society have been so often contrasted with the Enlightenment request more importantly trust in an open society must include strangers only then will it provide the foundation for a sense of belonging that guarantees all the deals and arrangements whereby free beings live it is an assumption of our way of being that trust extends indefinitely outwards to include all those on whom we directly or indirectly depend for our well-being but trust cannot be commanded any more than affection can be commanded trust me is not a command but a promise a trust extends extending to strangers is what enables people referring to their neighbors countrymen and fellow citizens to say we and mean it to mean it as an expression of obligation and not just of fate most of us in Western democracies are living under a government of which we don't approve and I think that's especially true of people in this room we accept to be ruled by laws and decisions may by politicians with whom we disagree and whom we often deeply dislike how is that possible why don't democracies regularly collapse as people refuse to be governed by those they never voted for clearly a modern democracy must be held together by something stronger than party politics there has to be a first-person plural a pre political loyalty which causes neighbors who voted in opposite opposing ways to treat each other as fellow citizens for whom the government is not mine or yours but ours whether or not we approve of it this first-person plural varies in strength from fierce attachment in wartime - casual acceptance on a Monday morning at work but at some level it must be assumed if we are to accept a shared form of government a country stability is enhanced by economic growth but it depends far more upon the sense that we belong together and that we will stand by each other during the real emergencies and short it relies on the legacy of social trust - which I've been referring this trust depends on customs and institutions that foster collective decisions in response to the problems of the day it is the cynic well known of enduring peace and also the greatest asset of any people that possesses it as the British have possessed it throughout the enormous changes that gave rise to the modern world whether the Hungarians possess it after after the disasters disasters of Nazi and Soviet occupation and all that has happened in the wake of the Treaty of Trianon is a real question and I'm sure it's a question for many people in this room of course not one that I can possibly deal with there is a great difference between societies in which trust depends on personal acquaintances and family ties and one in which trust exists between people who are strangers to each other moreover people acquire trust in different ways urban elites build trust through career moves joint projects and cooperation across borders like the aristocracy of old they often form networks without reference to national boundaries they do not on the all depend on a particular place a particular faith or a particular routine for their sense of membership and in the immediate circumstances of modern life they can adapt to globalization without too much difficulty this University is a proof of this however even in modern conditions this urban elite depends upon others who do not belong to it the farmers manufacturers factory workers builders clothiers mechanics nurses carers cleaners cooks policemen and soldiers for whom attachment to a place in its customs is implicit in all that they do in a question that touches on identity these people will very likely feel differently from the urban elite on whom they depend in turn for government and these two kinds of people will be pulled in different directions when asked to define lift define the real ground of their political allegiance and this is clearly beginning to cause radical problems all across Europe as the question of identity moves to the center of the political stage liberal individualism grants each of us a great benefit sovereignty over our lives and a Shield of rights in the face of all who are tyrannize over us but it also imposes on us a very great burden which is a which is life among others who enjoy the same benefit and who may very well use their freedoms to our disadvantage and liberal individualism precisely because it expands freedom and opportunities amplifies society bringing in more and more people who do not personally know each other and who want to sign up to the ongoing deal how and why should we trust them that is the question to which liberal individualism itself offers no answer in a religious community people are bound together by a shared faith and by the traditions and customs which express the faith and are in some way authorized by it the history of modern Europe is the history of our emancipation from that kind of community not that we have turned away from religion that although many people have but that we have privatized it removed it from the foundations of our shared but on public life and brought it into the house very much as Jews have always done in communities founded on religious obedience as in Calvin's Geneva the fear and hatred of the heretic will in any emergency destabilize people's loyalties Calvinist Geneva resembled Muhammad's Medina in making no real distinction between secular and religious authority and it is still the case today that Muslim communities have a conflicted attitude to any attempt to govern them by a purely secular law something which is making matters difficult for us in Britain whatever we think about the Enlightenment a glance back at 17th century Europe prior to the Peace of Westphalia and at the Islamic world today must surely lead to the opinion that we need another kind of first-person plural than that provided by religion and down the centuries people have always been aware of this it is why religious communities tend to morph into dynasties or military dictatorships as religion loses its grip as in the Middle East today these are the real defaults positions and vestiges of them remain in the background even in democratic political orders too as in America we're seeing emerging behind the mask of constitutional monarchy McCart constitutional government a kind of dynasty dynastic monarchy in the big families of the east coast this brings me to the first person plural that is most interesting to us the political form the We the People in whose name the American Constitution was issued in other words people bound together by political obligations in a place that they share any attempt to advocate an open society must begin it seems to me from this conception of political order for it is the cynic one known of the openness that is being advocated just briefly to summarize what this political first person plural involves first of all it involves that that a sense of belonging that derives from an inclusive political process in other words one in which we all participate in one way or another and which therefore legislates by consensus building negotiation and compromise democracy is one form of this but of course not the only form is perhaps its most recent form but and nevertheless there are alternatives there are also in our political orders rules which determine who is and who is not a member of the first person plural this is crucial anyone who seeks the benefit must also assume the cost and that means a criterion for distinguishing the authentic member of the community from the intruder what is the cost membership of a community of trust and that means acquiring those attributes that enable trust in actual conditions conditions this means establishing proof of a pre political loyalty signs of belonging such as the willingness to work to put down roots to learn a language to look after one's to care for one's neighbors and language locality and the networks that come with them are all parts of this as is obedience to a shared rule of law and we're all used to this process through which the concept of the neighbor has come to replace that of the faithful it's our kind of communities our communities of neighbors we're a neighborhood stretches over the horizon to embrace people who and we do not know and this is ratified in our jurisdictions which are all territorial jurisdictions the law of Hungary applies here in Hungary the law of England applies in England and so on now how trust grows from this kind of contiguity and interaction is of course a deep and difficult question but we must in all cases recognize the difference between order that grows from below and that which is imposed from above this difference is widely recognized in the amendment in the many attempts to distinguish civil society and state state control kills free association on the whole but state protection is necessary if the free associations are to be protected and to endure to put it simply the political form of fast person plural requires a pre political sense of community of our mutual dependence as neighbors subject to the shared rule of law from this kind of mutual dependence the modern conception of participatory sixth citizenship has emerged but who is included in the deal this is the question of our time and of course globalization has made it increasingly urgent and perhaps increasingly difficult to answer people have wanted the benefit of the open society without the trouble implied by asking that question can we really have an open society without national sovereignty and borders securing a territorial jurisdiction the European Union says yes mr. Orban says no and there are lot of positions in between before returning to that theme however we need to be a bit clearer about what openness actually consists in there are in fact two rather different conceptions both of the nature of the open society and of its value one is epistemological and the other is political poppers conception of the open society is as I say if histological only in conditions of open discussion and the free exchange of opinion are going to popper this human inquiry reliably tend towards knowledge in such conditions as he puts it our hypotheses die in our stead the inspiration for popper is the Scientific Revolution and the contrast between rational inquiry and mere superstition rather than that between the political philosophy of liberalism and the conservative hierarchies free inquiry could be compatible with quite a lot of restrictions on individual freedom in other areas but it's the popper it's the free inquiry that really matters the epistemological benefits of individual freedom have been further emphasized by other Central European figures notably Michael Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek for whom free association is necessary for the production of social knowledge knowledge what to do and what to feel in company and there is the famous argument about markets due to Mises and Hayek which tells us that only in a regime of free exchange do prices convey the economic information that we need to make fully rational decisions information about others wants and needs and again a free market can exist without other personal liberties that defenders of the open society might think to be necessary to their ideal for example there can be a market without freedom of opinion as in China today by contrast there is the true liberal position which values freedom not as a means to knowledge or the replacement of superstition by rational inquiry but which values freedom for its own sake this was was the position of John Stuart Mill in on Liberty and which raises the question of pre political order in a radical way is there no limit to the extension of our freedoms or our other bids for freedom which undermine and the social conditions so are the other bids for freedom such as to undermine the social conditions which make freedoms possible this question is at the root of the conservative a response to liberalism and I will end with a brief summary of what I think is involved in this first social trust is not created overnight and is not brought into being by a mere contract deals and contracts presuppose trust and do not of themselves produce it a social trust comes to us as an objective fact something that we inherit with our social membership tis therefore intimately bound up with customs traditions and institutions that enable us to rely on social continuity the reduce a background way of doing things how far can we put these institutions and traditions at risk by expanding our freedoms that is a question that mill already had and he argued that we can expand freedoms so long as we do not harm others by doing so but this idea has proved irremediably vague am i harmed by the spectacle of another's licentiousness and no trust requires a definition of the others to whom it is owed this definition is one of the things that social customs and political institutions provide they are the guarantees of membership belonging is not simply a matter of acquiring rights that will be protected by the community it means acquiring duties towards the community including the duty to play one's part in maintaining it in being it involves signaling oneself as an object of trust this I think underlies the national idea as it has come down to us language and neighborhood are all important most of all is the spirit of cooperation with those whom we encounter day to day for the most part conservatives have found no difficulty in accepting the epistemological version of the open society indeed popper and Hayek are regularly situated in the pantheon of conservative intellectuals but they have always expressed doubts about the libertarian interpretation which seeks to expand freedoms indefinitely without being too careful about the loyalty and trust that all freedoms ultimately presuppose however liberals also I think have had doubts about the about the libertarian interpretation both liberals and conservatives are united in accepting the epistemological argument for the market which is a special case of the general principle that social interaction requires a background of tube knowledge tradition - is like prices in a market a set of signals that enable you to act with a proper sense of how others on whom you depend will receive what you do and that is the conservative aspect of classical liberalism to accept that argument but liberals argue that markets must be controlled in the interests of community economic freedoms do not merely benefit those who exercise them they also create new social conditions that change the position from which our choices are exercised and this change of position can be a huge social cost to many the sweeping away of old forms of economic life and with it the customs and joys associated with them can be as much lamented as praised and the Communist Manifesto begins with praise of the bourgeois order which is also a heartfelt lamentation more importantly choices might be enhanced for some people and diminished for others for the unskilled the workers in long-established industries that have a kind of local religious meaning and often it seems that the massive gambling of those at the top is simply using those at the bottom as tools and this is part of the complaint against globalization of course all this means and has for long been taken to mean that a free economy must also be a regulated economy and that it should be regulated in the common interest but what does the common interest amount to surely all those who are bound together in the first person plural on which their mutual trust depends form part of this common interest in which case the ideal of the open society depends on endorsing and maintaining conditions that openness alone will not generate rules and regulations and have the maintenance of a given community as their aim and there are more liberal doubts about the open society to a more recent kind the first amendment to the American the United States Constitution was a move towards creating an open society granting freedom of religion or forbidding the state from imposing a religion of its own and also forbidding any interference in free speech and free assembly but how far we have come from those requirements is surely clear to everyone does freedom of religion extend to the freedom to teach religion to the young to where religious symbols to run an adoption agency it upholds a traditional Christian view of marriage and which on these grounds accepts no applications from gay couples all those are now controversial and in particular they are rejected by many people who consider themselves to be defenders of the open society idea freedom of religion they will argue should not go that far likewise with free speech the growing view that free speech does not extend so far as to protect what is increasingly known as hate speech a term which is itself hostage to the one who chooses to define it but this view has more of a following among those who would call themselves liberal than among citizens who live by the rule of neighborliness to put it simply we we have witnessed a closing down of choices in those areas such as religion and speech where new interests are competing for space already occupied by old customs and institutions finally some conservative doubts about to the open society idea for conservative the important question is how far can we create new options extending individual sovereignty into areas previously ring ring fenced against choice without jeopardizing the shared first-person plural the interesting case here of course is that of marriage the likely conservative instinct is to say that marriage belongs to the whole practice of social reproduction to interfere with a long-standing conception of it is to jeopardize the way in which social capital is passed from one generation to the next and maybe a conservative will find reasons for endorsing the old view of marriage as a sacrament in other words the concept of the sacred steps as it were to protect us from utilitarian reasoning about this institution which is too precious to be treated in that way but how do we deal then with the demand for gay marriage is this a genuine addition to our freedoms or simply the undermining of an institution which viewpoint should we adopt and I think this is a question lies before all of us at the moment and it is one which about which the arguments are extremely difficult to disentangle like we likewise with the growing questions of gender and gender identity to what extent is my being a man a condition that I have chosen or at least chosen to maintain and all this matter to be opened to choice and the choice is protected by the law is it a genuine freedom to opens women open women's bathrooms to those who claim to be women but who present themselves physically as men and so on we all know that these have become extremely vociferous issues in the media of today and have entered politics too and there's a real conflict between those who advocate freedom and those who wish on the contrary to say that something else is at stake than freedom some kind of institutional or even natural order which is jeopardized by introducing choice into these areas so in conclusion I was asked to address what the question of the conservative view of the open society and as those examples show I think every increase in freedom is likely to have a cost attached to it and maybe the cost will itself be a loss of freedom you weren't seen in the long run that's one of the things which I think conservatives might say the liberal enlightenment vision sees individual freedom as a good in itself and requires all attempts to curtail our freedom and as an unjustified until proven otherwise but free individuals arise only in the context of a first-person plural which contains it which creates a condition of mutual trust otherwise we risk returning to a state of nature this trust be sufficient to maintain peaceful relations between us and guarantee the passing on of our social capital otherwise freedom will simply be the freedom to lose our freedom it must also be an open trust one that does not depend on surrender to an authority or a custom that closes down those freedoms that are precious to us such as freedom of association and freedom of opinion hence it must help us to move away from the religious and tribal forms of society towards the condition of citizenship and I believe that that the this means replacing belief and kinship by neighborhood and secular law as the paradigm forms of Association and that I think is the real achievement of Europe to create the nation as the object of loyalty and the secular state as its expression thank you [Applause]

Channel: Central European University

Views: 52,440

Keywords: Roger Scruton, Rethinking Open Society, CEU, Central European University, Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, The New Atlantis, Ethics and Public Policy Center

Id: sn6kB9qC-oI

Length: 46min 26sec (2786 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 21 2017