Reading the State of Britain with Roger Scruton

Apr 20, 2018 by

by Theodore Dalrymple, Law & Liberty:

Sir Roger Scruton is a man of such intellect and polymathic erudition that he is always worth attending to whatever he chooses to write. He is also a man of courage. With one or two others (but very few) he kept alive a tradition of intelligent conservatism in an era when to be conservative was thought by intellectuals and academics to be a manifestation of malevolent stupidity at best, and outright mental incapacity at worst. He suffered disdain, abuse and mockery for his steadfastness, and it took many years for him to receive the recognition that he deserved.

In Where We Are, Scruton tackles the subject of Britain’s projected exit from the European Union, thank goodness not from the point of view of its economic effects, splendid or disastrous, or from that of the details of the negotiations, complex and mind-numbing, but from that, loosely-speaking, of political philosophy.

[…]  Britain has not yet achieved the levels of German prideful breast-beating, but it is fast catching up. Scruton is right to stress the importance of historiography in determining the political attitudes of the population. One way of explaining the difference between the way the generations voted in the recent referendum on Brexit is that the younger generation has been brought up on post-colonial guilt and absence of any pride in national achievement other than that which was oppositional. For them, the nation state (in this case the British) brought nothing but oppression, misery and exploitation into the world, and therefore the dissolution of its power in a multinational union can be nothing but good. Even the Scottish, or the Scottish nationalists, manage to represent themselves as victims of the British Empire, analogously to the Austrians who represent themselves as victim of Nazism, when in fact they were disproportionate enthusiasts for it. Historiography thus becomes a historical force in itself, more easily for evil than for good; and a case might be made that it has disarmed the west in advance from the challenges it faces. If you are not aware of freedom as a rare achievement, you will not do much to defend it: a lacuna of which freedom’s enemies are acutely aware.

Read here

 

Related Posts

Tags

Share This