Kevin recommends (which is, of course, not the same thing as endorsing) an interesting essay by Roger Scruton about how a smart guy thought his way into a classically conservative standpoint. AKMA does an excellent job assessing and undermining it. AKMA’s main point strikes me as brilliantly right: Scruton poses “a binary choice between banal libertinism and sensible, prudent conservatism” as if shallow liberalism were the only variety on the shelves. And yet there’s a further irony here.

The issue for Scruton seems to come down to whether we humans can escape our traditions and culture. If not, says Scruton , then we must embrace who we are instead of thinking — as liberals do — that we can re-invent ourselves. He writes:

Burke brought home to me that our most necessary beliefs may be both unjustified and unjustifiable from our own perspective, and that the attempt to justify them will lead merely to their loss. Replacing them with the abstract rational systems of the philosophers, we may think ourselves more rational and better equipped for life in the modern world. But in fact we are less well equipped, and our new beliefs are far less justified, for the very reason that they are justified by ourselves.

It is certainly the Enlightenment prejudice to believe that “abstract rational systems” should replace older prejudices, but that is not the only liberal alternative. For example: “Moral progress is a matter of wider and wider sympathy,” writes Richard Rorty (in Philosophy and Social Hope); sympathy is not an abstract rational system. Further, the very person Scruton goes out of his way to malign rather nastily — Foucault — is in fact one our subtlest thinkers about the way prejudice (pre-judgment, not racial bias, of course) simultaneously enables judgment and undermines it. Rather than saying we are all open to radical self-reinvention — something no one except Sartre and motivational speakers espouse — Foucault provided exactly the sort of nuanced analysis that would help Scruton move past the simplification of naive liberalism vs. coldly-brilliant conservativism.

But, Scruton begins the article by saying that it was conservativism’s bold statements that attracted him. So we shouldn’t be surprised that his embrace of conservativism is in fact a rejection of nuance. The irony is that Scruton is so smart and subtle in his support of this position.

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