Sir Roger Scruton: How to Be a Conservative

the british man of letters edmund burke founded modern conservatism in the 18th century today a british man of letters is redefining conservative for the 21st with us today sir roger scrutin uncommon knowledge now [Music] welcome to uncommon knowledge i'm peter robinson born in lincolnshire during the second world war the philosopher roger scrutin represents one of britain's most significant conservative intellectuals in the words of one observer quote england's most accomplished conservative since edmund burke close quote knighted last year sir roger holds undergraduate and doctoral degrees from cambridge he is the author of more than 50 books you write faster than i can read including his most recent book on human nature and his classic work how to be a conservative sir roger scrutin welcome thank you from how to be a conservative it is not unusual to be a conservative but it is unusual to be an intellectual conservative in both britain and america some 70 percent of academics identify themselves as on the left while the surrounding culture is increasingly hostile to traditional values or to any claim that might be made for the high achievements of western civilization the press the bureaucracy the universities all hostile to conservatism why it's a very good question i think i i spent my life trying to answer it in fact my impression is that this hostility comes in part because people who self-identify as intellectuals and thinkers also want to identify themselves as in some way outside the community standing in judgment on it gifted with superior insight and intellect and therefore inevitably critical of whatever whatever it is that ordinary people do by way of surviving you know and so we have created an intellectual class which which by its nature does not identify with the way of life around it and and tries to gain another kind of identity through its critical stance and and and produces the paradox that within academic circles and within the press to be a liberal instead of a conservative is almost boringly conventional yes uh i i mean that's right there is a it is the convention is to be hostile to conventions right you begin i'm showing this book because i want everybody to get a good look at it it's a wonderful book you begin how to be a conservative with a marvelous essay on your own journey from left to right and you identify a couple of events in particular as crucial in that journey in the spring of 1968 you're in paris mass protests take place across france i quote how to be a conservative may of 1968 led me to understand what i value in the customs institutions and culture of europe paris explodes and young roger scrutin decides to become conservative not to join the students on the street why well gosh why i mean for a start the thing that most struck me about those students in the street was the sentiment sentimentality of their anger it was all about themselves it wasn't about anything objective here they were the spoiled middle class children baby boomers who'd never had any real difficulty to cope with shouting their heads off in the street burning the cars belonging to ordinary proletarians whom they pretended to be defending against some imaginary oppressive structures erected by the bourgeoisie the whole thing was a complete fiction based on the antiquated ideas of karl marx's ideas which were already redundant in the mid 19th century they were enacting out if you like a self-scripted drama in which the the central character was themselves again from how to be a conservative only someone raised in the anglosphere could believe as i believed in the aftermath of 1968 that the political alternative to revolutionary socialism is conservatism only someone raised in the anglosphere yeah yes i i think if you look around the world those political parties and political movements that identify themselves as conservative it's only in britain america australia uh possibly india that people would even use that word um because there is a tradition which we have inherited from edmund burke and the reaction to the con to the french revolution of recognizing that that um there is an alternative to revolutionary change and that is not changing and this extraordinary original idea only enters the heads of english-speaking people i don't know why but it's something to do with the english language it's sort of accommodation of of uh eccentricities the fact that we live a life based on compromise the common law which tells us that the ordinary person is in charge of the law not the people there who are pretending to impose it on him you know all those things which we've inherited for from hundreds of years actually of of discussion and debate they make it natural for us to to say you know let's not change the second large event in your own journey a visit to poland and czechoslovakia in 1979 awoke me to the fraud that had been committed in socialism's name and i felt an immediate obligation to do something about it 79 the pope visits poland you get the feeling that things are beginning to break up but it's still the the iceberg is still sitting on eastern europe yeah what happened in in czechoslovakia in poland what did you see what did how did how were you i was there in poland in the wake of the pope pilgrimage to his country um and there was a visible sense of that that we are we polls are together against this thing which controls us but people of course couldn't openly talk about it that uh uh and um but but the people i met talked to me about it and then when going to czech slovakia where of course the oppression was much heavier i got involved in talking to people who were actually trying to organize underground seminars at university underground well curriculum if you like for young people who have been excluded from the system um where there was a real consciousness that that um it was a life and death struggle either these societies are going to be finally killed off by communism or people who are going to try and keep them alive in the catacombs and it was my first vision of a catacomb culture which as it were reenacted what the earlier early christians had to go through in the roman empire now you you also say you felt an immediate obligation to do something about it and as a here correct me but as i understand your well your training your formal training is as a philosopher yeah and in your lifetime philosophy has gone off in all kinds of directions in this country in particular and headed off in in the direction of formal logic yes i take it that you decided that you intended to to contin to do the work you intended to work in the tradition of aristotle philosophy as it bears on ordinary political life is that correct well yes i've always thought that philosophy has ordinary life as its subject matter that's what it's about but it is also a reflection on ordinary life and its meaning but when it came to working in eastern europe my main thought was that that what young people there especially needed was not not merely philosophy but but a whole range of knowledge which had been excluded from the official curriculum for instance knowledge of history um not knowledge of literature knowledge of the way in which those things connect how how music and art and literature feed into a vision of of your society and of course knowledge of the religious traditions of their countries now all those things had been excluded by the communist party from from the national sense of identity but it didn't it didn't alter my view that they'd also been excluded from our societies too by the universities themselves you know um most young people today leave a university having studied history but not actually knowing very much about it they will know about the periods of revolutionary struggle and other things that have appealed to their professors as as part of their own self-glorification but they won't know the sort of things that are as it were interred within the spirit of the people your visit to poland in czechoslovakia took place again in 1979. mrs thatcher becomes prime minister in the same year your views of mrs thatcher a little more complicated i think that an american conservative would expect to read picking up a book entitled how to be a conservative on the one hand and again i'm quoting in the midst of our discouragement margaret thatcher appeared as though by a miracle and that surely i uh that surely is the way it felt to many people on the other hand and again i'm quoting roger scrutin quote i never swallowed in its entirety the free-market rhetoric of the thatcherites close quote so explain that there's this miraculous being but there's a lot of hogwash involved well she came into into our lives as a representative of our country at a time when the country looked particularly enfeebled by um by the trade unions by the whole labour party attempt to rope the rope society into a communal prison run by the state all that was wonderful we felt you know whew we don't actually have to go along with all that crap we can we can do our own thing and we can revert to our natural conditions as rebellious eccentric englishmen but um she felt that she had to embellish it with a complete doctrine which she borrowed from the institute of economic affairs you know about the the need for a marketizer market solutions to every social problem now i'm all in favor of market solutions where they apply but not every social problem does have a a market solution and there are there is a need for the maintenance of traditions in in education and in culture and in the law which are not traditions of free enterprise but much more conditions of some kind of collective renunciation you know people the pronunciation of the state i know renunciation of one's own uh individuality you know that's what her culture is partly so and i think she wasn't sensitive to all that part aspect of things and you have to remember that we inherited at the time when she became prominent we inherited a uh a society and an economy that had been radically changed by the second world war and by the socialist governments that came into being because of the second world war you know people people wanted a government based on planning because they had felt that the war with the war showed the need for planning if it hadn't been for planning we wouldn't have survived it and we almost didn't survive it because people weren't ready for it etc well actually let me pursue that point if i may because needless to say here we sit in washington in the second month of the trump administration so i'm going to i'm going to haul you from margaret thatcher to donald trump even if you come screaming so again how to be a conservative pressed for arguments i'm quoting you mrs thatcher leaned too readily on market economics and ignored the deeper roots of conservatism in the theory and practice of civil society you've just said this but i want to put empty it up again family civil association the christian religion and the common law were all integrated into her ideal of freedom of the law the pity was that she had no philosophy with which to articulate that idea she felt it she knew it yeah but she'd not thought it through and in a way that permitted her to articulate it all right here's mrs thatcher now if i may go a step backward and i am doing something very dangerous because my knowledge of this history is tenuous and yours will be deep winston churchill had the capacity to articulate this deeper conservatism throughout the war he's talking about love of native land he uses the phrase he actually uses the phrase which would today have the man thrown in jail he uses the phrase christian civilization and yet in the 1945 election in the face of the socialists because he lacked a vocabulary to talk about free markets he was naked before hatley and this socialist impulse and so what i'm getting at is it almost of course i want to come to american the american situation in a moment but it almost seems to me as though there's a kind of ideological teeter-totter conservatives in britain either get to talk about free markets or they get to talk churchill macmillan eden to the extent that he talked about anything heath later on or they get to try to talk about cultural conservatism somehow the two don't seem to go together is there some reason for that or is it mere happens that's a very um insightful observation i think since edmund burke we've had this this tension between the adoption of the of the free market as the instrument of economic uh organization the into the primary way in which a society should create and exchange goods and the the sense that some things should be withheld from the market and that those things are just as important um but much more difficult to defend and and of course burke was talking about those things that should be withheld from the market love family and so on we've all societies have recognized from the beginning of history that a market in sexual relations is the end of all social coherence um but it's been it's always very hard to say why but and that's just one example and you know all the things that matter to us as soon as we recognize how much they matter we want to withdraw them from the whole business of exchange and proliferation and as it were hug them to ourselves and that is it's that aspect of humanity which is so difficult to to articulate but as you rightly say churchill did articulate it and it's it because it's so much easier when it's under threat um of course all right we're creeping up to trump but first one more large question about britain brexit last june the united kingdom held a referendum on whether to remain in or to leave the european union and overturning the predictions of virtually every pole and virtually ever every pundit i myself as i'm sure i was on the telephone to friends in la very i thought well-informed friends and the most pro-brexit prediction i got on the day of the voting was it'll be very touch and go we'll have to see everybody expected almost everybody expected to fail and it carried 52 to 48 percent close but at the same time unambiguous sir roger scrutin speaking on the bbc soon afterwards quote the experts failed to see that the british people are profoundly democratic and do not accept to be governed by bureaucrats who are not accountable for their mistakes close quote now one hears it said over and over and over again that it was xenophobia the brexit was a reaction against immigration and roger scrutin says it was a blow for democracy explain well it could be both but i think what has been the the feelings of opposition to the european union um of much um longer standing than the recent feelings about the mass immigration from europe and they have been about democratic accountability the thought being that you know more than half i think in nearly two-thirds of the laws rubber-stamped by our parliament originate in brussels in the minds of bureaucrats who have no knowledge of or interest in the peculiar social conditions of britain which are very peculiar because we haven't been interfered with in this way before so and people have resented that and rightly because after all what is democracy it is the if it's not the ability of a people to decide for themselves about the laws that operate in the country that is theirs you know and that that reference to the country our country is absolutely fundamental to the democratic idea um it is true of course that that that british people also reacted strongly to the mass immigration at the rate of something like three hundred thousand three hundred thousand a year of people from the former communist countries you know they were brought into the european union without any mandate for any popular mandate from the existing members they were people living in a country in countries ruined by communism suddenly given the opportunity to settle in places which were not so ruined england and in particular britain in general has the advantage that its infrastructure was not destroyed in the war right it speaks the international language you know the freedom to settle there and to enjoy what the british people had uh defended at great cost themselves uh it was suddenly offered to these people inevitably they all transferred to britain and it's not xenophobia to to recognize that your life if you're an ordinary person that your life has been changed when suddenly people better qualified than you competing for your job where your child is going to a school where english is the second language where your right to social housing has been conferred on people who never paid anything to obtain it etc right so one more question about brexit you've spoken about the peculiar customs of britain you've spoken about the distinctiveness of the anglosphere so is it your position is it your position simply that britain ought to have left the european union or is it your position that the european union in it is bad for everyone i mean one can see the germans with war guilt it would be lovely if they could dissolve themselves in a new sense of international identity spain wanting to rejoin europe after the years of being cut off on different you could create a kind of psychological case for every continent the italians would far rather have their money supply run by good steady germans than by their fellow italians and so on and so forth so the european union let the continent have it it's just that it's improper for us to be in let us be out or the european union is a nasty piece of work in and of itself well i i would say well i did say this prior to the vote that um that what is needed is not simply for us to withdraw from the treaty what is needed is a new treaty one that we could accept and that everybody else could accept too and my view is that treaties are dead hands they weigh upon you um maybe beneficially if they're restraining you from doing something that would otherwise be destructive as peace treaties do but they might actually prevent you from taking the measures needed to cope with the new situations and no treaties don't adapt and the more signatories to them there are the less likely it is that they ever will adapt uh and that is the problem we were living under a treaty uh signed 60 60 or conceived 70 years ago by people long since dead in a situation that has vanished uh why should we be governed by it um because it is it's unusual for a treaty in that it sets up a system of government and so you have a system of government which is essentially non-adaptable my view is get rid of it get it and everybody come together again uh seeing if they can get another kind of treaty which answers to all their separate national interests um you know the polls take the polls they they thought it was great to join the the treaty because at last they would have a system of law which which would replace the complete nonsense of communist legality they had access to proper infrastructure and markets and so on what they did not realize is that they would also lose all their youth so that poland is in the state of demographic collapse everyone goes off to london so yeah so clearly um you know each country has a different problem likewise the greeks thought you know great the single currency as you say we can transfer all our debts to those reliable germans and then suddenly they realize but of course we can no longer govern our economy as we used to by periodic devaluation and the result is a total collapse in youth employment this country trump from the british referendum on brexit to the election of donald trump sir roger scrutin in a talk on the bbc the week after the american election quote in america as in britain the indigenous working class has been put out of mind even overtly disparaged by the media and the political class all attempts to give voice to their anxieties over immigration over the impact on their lives of globalization and the spread of liberal conceptions of sex marriage in the family have been dismissed or silenced close quote first question how can it be that when franklin roosevelt seven decades ago in establishing modern conservatism i beg your pardon modern liberalism the democratic of which the democratic party is the great champion he placed the working class at the very center of that coalition how can it be that these decades later that same party that same liberalism has turned its back on the indigenous working class how did it happen yes well it's happened everywhere i think again it's one of those deep mysteries but i think there are two important factors that contributed this one is that the um the change in the economy which has transferred an awful lot of economic activity to service activities um to thing activities that could be conducted through the internet or through um or through companies based outside the jurisdiction all that it means that the old traditional working class it no longer has that cohesion that it had before and it's no longer an identifiable social mass in the way that it was in roosevelt's day that's one very important thing the other important thing is that the the liberal um establishment has ceased to represent the interests of that class anyway it represents the interests of people who are saying that they represent the interests of that class it's a self-serving ideology of people who want to appear virtuous without the cost of it and people in the media the the administration and so on who love the image of themselves as defenders of the people but recognize that when in the proximity of the people they feel nothing except repugnance you're making a moral point pride vanity it all happened through pride and vanity and sloth and inattention on the part of very comfortable people well there is that i said that's only one factor all right there are also lots of good people who are liberals who really do worry about these things but i'm just talking about these new social factors which we have to recognize you you mentioned these factors that are legitimate concerns anxieties over immigration now again one will hear over and over again uh the american anxiety over immigration is xenophobia it's just it's just immoral to to to think you can draw a line at the border and keep out the people in the south of the border have immortal souls just as those well of course the liberal would doubt that but they're worth they have as much value as all right then the other big one here is is it just economically the more immigration the more the economy grows and then a kind of counter argument but still it's the argument against the the concern for immigration um immigration has slowed as mexican as the mexican middle class has risen and partly because our economy is slow net immigration from mexico is almost zero and net immigration from everywhere else in the world is a million people a year and in a population of 330 million you can live with that so there are all these arguments why should anyone be anxious over immigration and yet you would argue i think i take you to argue that it is actually a legitimate concern in this country well yes i mean again there are many factors but illegal immigration has been a great concern to people there are 10 million illegal immigrants possibly in this country um and i think ordinary people say look if some if the first thing that somebody does when coming into the country is to commit a crime uh should he really be allowed to stay you know i think it is a very strong argument um of course legal immigration which has the consent of congress and therefore the consent and indirectly of the people is not something that that people are complaining about in this not in the same tone of voice in any way but then again you have to recognize that what is being asked of the people is to offer hospitality to those who are not currently part of their home you can offer hospitality to others if you have a secure home from which to offer it but if that home has become insecure um as it has in large parts of of europe because of immigration then what what are you asking of people you're asking them essentially to deteritorialize themselves to detach themselves for the from the place that is theirs you know without giving them any alternative the spread another of the concerns that you mentioned i'm quoting you again the spread of liberal conceptions of sex marriage and the family and this is a legitimate concern here's the difficulty about that one all the figures divorce rate illegitimacy rates and so forth all these are at least as high among what depends on how you would define the indigenous working class and so forth but the argument could be made that the indigenous class has no right to be the indigenous working class again i'm using your phrase the indigenous working class has no right to be upset about these liberal conceptions of sex and marriage in the family because they're the ones who've embraced them to which rogers sir roger scrutin replies well um i i would reply that just that the we all of us fall away from the standards that are required in this area that is undoubtedly the case because this is the the biggest area of temptation but it is also the biggest area in which examples are needed and in which a culture of resistance is needed that culture of resistance was absolutely vital to the protection of the working class family and and especially of children you know who need a father at home and have lost that protection and it is undeniable that it's liberal propaganda which has made it almost impossible to say those things and it's not possible to say the things uh that are needed in this area unless your child's murray and don't care about what's said about you anyway or survivor's group well yeah that makes two of you yeah exactly uh the point is it's an area in which the truth has been made unsavable by the the liberal censorship all right and along comes donald trump and whereas mrs thatcher made not exclusively but made largely economic arguments donald trump is making different kinds of arguments you make america great again does roger scrutin approve of the 45th chief executive of the united states well that's a direct question which is not strictly relevant to my vision of the world but rewrite the question how do you want to grapple with donald trump um well i'd rather not but of course his defects of character are so manifest that one can as it were recognize the the the um recognize that he's put you in a new position you know you've got he is the legitimate president of the united states and uh he won the election on the basis of things which were rightly said some things were rightly said um and also on the basis of other things which you could criticize which perhaps should not have been so did he have the virtue to go back to the point you were just making did he have the virtue at points during the camp many points during the campaign of saying the unsayable yes one of the reasons why he was elected is exactly that and this is one thing that i said in my bbc talk that you referred to earlier that that people have been living under a regime of liberal censorship which makes it very hard to say things without being accused of faults like racism xenophobia you yourself mentioned this uh which nobody wants to be accused of but which are very easy to these are accusations which are very easy to make because there's no criterion on the basis of which to make them other than the the feelings involved so if i may maybe this is the way to ask you to address donald trump a man who's resistant to grapple with him trump and his critics and as i read it and i have a couple of quotations here for you criticisms of donald trump you'll recognize partly of course because you followed the american scene very closely but partly because they echo or have echoes in britain here's john mccain speaking very recently senator john mccain speaking very recently at the munich security conference in oblique but not that oblique criticism of the president what would the founders of this security conference say if they saw our world today they would be alarmed by an increasing turn away from universal values and toward old ties of blood and race and sectarianism close quote donald trump and also sir roger scrutin champion the native land the the indigenous the the the the the organic culture and here you you that can be called you're you want to turn us back to blood and soil blood and race and certainly so that's the kind of language which i i reject uh my my view is that that that the country is a vital part of our identity i don't mean by that blood and soil in the nazi sense i mean this land the place where our jurisdiction operates and this is a crucial thing about the national idea it's an a defense of territorial jurisdiction against religious or quasi-religious jurisdictions like the universal doctrine of human rights or the sharia to take another competitor we live and we are fortunate to live in countries where the law is defined by the land over which it operates and within that land of course there is a sense of belonging on which the law draws for the democratic process this isn't there's nothing blood and soil about this it's to do with neighborhood we have we are settled among neighbors we want to get along with them we don't want to force them to agree with us about everything nor do we require them to be at the same race whatever that means but we do require them to share our commitment to the place where we are because this is where we're building a home and other people might want to come into that home and we we should be entitled to invite them provided they agree to abide by the rules um all this is perfectly reasonable in my view and it's only because the left have dominated the language in which these things are discussed that my reasonable position can be made to look like that unreasonable position which you were just um attributing one more one more criticism of trump and this is his now famous executive order imposing a temporary travel ban from seven countries in the middle east where there has been terrorism seven muslim-majority countries as the press put it in reporting on this and one of the sources of immediate criticism was the united states conference of catholic bishops here's their statement quote part of their statement the bond between christians and muslims is founded on the unbreakable strength of charity and justice welcoming the stranger is the very form of christianity itself the actions of our government must remind people of basic humanity close quote well there you get you've heard this before there you get the notion that drawing lines at the border is from the catholics it's unchristian from others it's immoral who are you who was donald trump who is sir roger scrutin who was prime minister may to say we have the right to keep people out well i mean you have a house which you share with your wife and children or assuming you have had them um and uh you do recognize a right to keep out of that house people whom you've not invited in don't you i do and having invited people in who start smashing things up you recognize a right to exclude them i do yeah and that just multiplied that by a few hundred thousand and you'll recognize that people taken as a whole have that right that is part another part of of democracy that we live in a place we have the right to exclude from that place those whom we think are not going to fit into it or to whom we don't want to extend a welcome um this is if we didn't have that right we wouldn't feel secure in occupying the place that we claim as ours this is a it's a simple part of human nature and although i i think trump should never have mentioned the the muslim idea in this that because that goes against the whole american tradition that that religion is not what it's about but but settlement you know nevertheless um he he wasn't exceeding the natural powers of a president in saying what he said uh if he'd left out that reference to religion and um you know he did make various promises to people a bit prior to the election which he's obviously under some obligation to follow through anyway last question sir roger if i feel this way to some extent actually i feel this way to a great extent i'll just ask this question on my own behalf i was about to hide behind say there will be people who listening to this feel i won't do that i'll say i feel it myself wonderfully compelling everything you say hugely attractive but here's where i and and it causes my fills fills the heart with hope there's a way forward but then comes the thought oh but it's nostalgic it's the shire it's tolkien for goodness sake even england isn't green and pleasant in quite the same way anymore and we've got in britain itself this massive for all one can see permanent state apparatus and in this country as president trump is about to find out as republicans who now hold both houses of congress and can barely pull themselves together to figure out how to deal with obamacare are finding out there is such a thing as the permanent state and we live in a modern world and for seven decades at least seven decades in both your country and throughout the anglosphere let's let's i'll grant you the anglosphere the state has expanded and expanded and expanded and i love the world that you described with the same yearning love that i would which i love tolkien but they belong on the bookshelf together it's not a practical agenda right tell me why i'm wrong and please tell me why i'm wrong well uh you're not entirely wrong the expansion of the state to absorb more and more of civil society has happened everywhere more outside the anglosphere than inside the anglosphere let's face it you still have private education available here if you want it one can afford it you still have all the little little platoons as back called them if you have a problem you can get together with your neighbors to um to solve it uh you can you know you you probably belong to all sorts of clubs and and and discussion groups and so on no all that free association which made the uh english-speaking countries what they are still exists it's just that there's a a tax on it roughly speaking half of what you ever you earn which goes to maintain uh a a sort of shadow community of parasites who whose only justification is that they pretend to be governing us uh you have to you know you we're we belong in an organism which goes which is accompanied by a cancerous version of itself that's the way it is all you can do is is every now and then diminish it if you know cut off this or that bit of it but it will always be there but at the same time focusing on the other thing is not nostalgia although nostalgia is an underrated um aspect of the human condition remember the the founding work of literature of our civilization describes odysseus's decision to give up immortality and life with the goddess in order to travel across dangerous seas to his home you know it set the model for what we are what all our literature since has been about and all our art and why turn away from that that is we are in this world as dispossessed and alienated and we do have that longing for a home and we try to build it and that's all i'm advocating is that we should go on doing this it'll always be a different home but um but you know it isn't anyway nostalgia to say that this is where our values lie rather than in that other thing that great expanding state machine all right that was penultimate question here's the last question brexit has happened britain has a new government there hasn't been an election it's still the tories but you have a new prime minister and we have a new president are you hopeful i am i've never in my life been hopeful i take the view that pessimism is the wise position to adopt because you're always agreeably surprised all right sir roger scrutin author of more than 50 books including the superb how to be a conservative thank you thank you for the hoover institution and uncommon knowledge i'm peter robinson you

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 1,165,997

Rating: 4.8523583 out of 5

Keywords: Trump, Brexit, Thatcher, Churchill, immigration, conservatism, Sir Roger Scruton, political philosophy

Id: 1eD9RDTl6tM

Length: 44min 46sec (2686 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 19 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Lev_the_Wanderer_VI]

More like r/badphilosophy

[u/WouldBSomething]

"There is an alternative to revolutionary change, and that is not changing. This extraordinary and original idea only enters the heads of English-speaking people. I don't know why, but it's something to do with the English language - its accommodation of eccentricities."

Why BL? 1. There is zero evidence that a people's mother tongue determines their political outlook 2. The idea that English is more "eccentric" than other languages is incredibly fanciful. How does he know? Is he familiar with the eccentricities of all other languages? And anyway, how does one measure eccentricity in one language against another? You can't.

Scruton's thesis is a self-serving Romantic myth (he is assuming a strong version of Sapir-Whorfism without any evidence to support this.) Scruton is sneakily implying that Anglophone peoples are linguistically and politically exceptional because they invented Conservatism (apparently).

[u/[deleted]]

It's this sketch again

[u/frisky_husky]

Scruton is one of those people that I just cannot fathom taking seriously. Everything I've had to read of feels like he just picked the conclusion he wanted and strung together the minimum amount of anecdotal evidence required to provide the appearance of support.

[u/as_an_american]

Aside from the poor linguistics. In the first minute of listening he equates conservatism with “common people” ruling, which completely ignores the fact that conservatism has historically been elite. Furthermore, he makes the baseless claim that the English are keen on things staying the same while others aren’t, which again is completely baseless, without a touch of evidence.

[u/AimHere]

I see the use of the present tense a lot in the comments and the title.

I figure you guys don't know, but Scruton died in January this year, so it might be better to switch to past tense when talking about what he thought.

[u/[deleted]]

This guy is such an embarrassment to philosophy.

[u/irontide]

The fact that I can feel solidarity with my colleagues in linguistics about what a fuckwit this guy is may very well be the only good that Scruton did for public philosophy in his lifetime.

Don't feel bad laughing at him, he was a paid shill for the tobacco industry well into the 80s.

[u/dokkodo_bubby]

Ah yes, philosophy