The Contemporary Social Conservative - Roger Scruton at the LSE

The LSE holds a surprising number of open lectures that are free to the public - www.lse.ac.uk/events  It is currently one lecture into a five lecture series (and conference) on Secularism.  This week saw the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton give his view on 'morality and public space' where he drew a distinction between the emergence of the territorially-based Christian-Enlightenment concept of public space and the faith-based law of religious community, much to the disadvantage of the latter.  

What Scruton Teaches Us

Scruton is like the Curate's Egg, good and bad in places, and it becomes clear why this is so as he lectures.  He is the most articulate and (in my view) intelligent conservative philosopher of our time.  Anyone on the centre-left side of the political spectrum has to engage with his ideas on consensus and tradition, on the nation, on the rights of the mass to their illiberal conventions and on threats to liberalism from outside.  He is a standing challenge to elite liberal manipulation of the public agenda, to the pretensions of internationalism and to 'political correctness'.  A debate between him and Peter Singer on what 'rights' animals may hold would be high entertainment indeed.

Above all, although he almost threw the point away, the optimistic liberal has yet to come to terms with the social reality of the predator whose ever-presence is always lurking in the corner of the eye of the true conservative.  True socialists see the predator in terms of economic exploitation but even this very sound critique of capitalism misses out the problem of the minority of individuals whose activities are psycho- or socio-pathic and who can emerge to rule political movements, businesses and street gangs as much as to abuse children or vulnerable women. 

Some think that this can be dealt with through an assertion of State authority but the wise man knows that the only true restraint on the predator is the community that is vigilant about its leaders and of its own members in equal proportion  It is in this area, with his interest in custom and tradition and in the 'existential' (his phrase) values of the members of an organic community, that Scruton should challenge those of us on the liberal side of the values game.

What Scruton Misses ...

Unfortunately (although to his credit he does not hide this aspect of himself), he is also a public intellectual whose exposition elides into what can only be termed 'ideology'.  He is a partisan for causes.  His position on hunting and Europe (which I happen to agree with from a different reasoning) may have been philosophically cogent but it was presented as wisecracks that detracted from the rest of his presentation.  His reasonable point (well taken) was about New Labour's reassertion, in a one-sided way, of public morality in legislation. 

Instead of wisecracks, he should have been debating (I believe) the extent to which the political use of morality is instrumental.  He seems to have no clear theory of power, class or exploitation (even conservatives can consider these matters).  There appears to be no zone in which (on the basis of this lecture) conservative intellectuals can truly engage with their socialist opponents - both sides are engaged in an almost collusive conspiracy of silence about awkward truths in order not to open themselves up to too deep a scrutiny of their various refusals to recognise what humans are really like (the problem of the Left) or how power is actually managed (the problem of the Right).  The one cannot cope with 'original sin', the other with 'entrenched incompetencies'.

Scruton's account of public space in the West also omitted any reference to the deliberate construction of identity by those in authority ['national myth-making'], to the multiple identities currently emerging as social and political facts, to identity as technologically as well as geographically and faith-mediated or to identities of social resistance as formative in the initial creation both of public spaces and of conventional morality.  There are few people more socially conservative than political revolutionaries and po-faced social reformers.  'Reformers' have often twisted the libertarian moral climate of one era to impose a more restrictive one that Scruton appears to assume to be 'normal' or 'traditional' when it is merely the latest in sight.  It could be argued that his current conservative consensus in the community is the creation of do-gooding reformers from another age.

Above all, he seems not to contend with the probability that the de-moralisation of public space is partly a function of battles over time between different moral positions (whether as in a classic full-scale kulturkampf or as in the debate over the veils) taken by political, social and economic groups seeking other advantages than the moral.  In other words, with the use of the ethical high ground as a political tool.  He certainly seems to have no notion that 'struggle' can be creative in itself or of the importance of allowing 'moral interventions' to test the durability of the system and mobilise argument.  There is much more that could be said on this, but it requires a more sceptical reading of history than the one received in school.

The Problem of the Contemporary Conservative

Scruton is a social conservative with decidedly negative views about modern libertarian culture.  As a public intellectual, when he slips over the edge from clear exposition to position-taking, you also, as listener, have to realise that a learning experience must now be treated partially as an entertainment.  Although he has an admirable understanding of the complexity and confusion that makes up existence as it really is lived, he seems not to live in that confusion himself except as observer.  He is clearly not excited by the possibilities of transgression (say) or of shifting identity as a creative act - both normal and safe considerations to many educated persons in the generations below his. 

This is his business but it means that his conservatism is as much a product of who he is as what he thinks - as it is for all of us despite all our pretensions to objectivity.  He fails, and he is not alone in this amongst intellectuals, in understanding how society and politics shift and move in a way that makes the categories of traditional political philosophy and even ethics increasingly contingent, often mere tools themselves for political, factional or special interest advantage.  This statement would probably horrify him because shifting sands are not to be marked and managed but to be concreted over in moral philosophy.

For Scruton, (based on his ruminations on Turkey during questions) the strong mildly unjust state is still preferable to any democratic justice system that is faith-based (a reasonable if debatable position).  He prefers a sclerotic order over creative chaos, worries about the angst of the unchallenged ordinary person, and seeks (perhaps like Wyndham Lewis) to teach us all the 'art of being ruled' rather than to resist poor rule.  An important thinker but perhaps one of the last of his line, though with a late flowering as we work through the current short burst of existential authoritarian angst appearing within the Western bourgeoisie.  The thinking middle classes are currently in one of their periodic states of panic at the world - in this case about the world that their global free market has created - but this will subside.  Nevertheless, Scruton is (and is going to be) an important influence on the language in which that panic is expressed.

The Death of 'Auctoritas'

However, one thing has gone that will never come back and on which Scruton's conservatism depends - the belief in an apparently competent elite.  That lie has been exposed.  It needs more than the man on the white horse or the exhortation of 'leaders' to be restored as a truth.  'Auctoritas' as Augustus Caesar would have understood it is no longer viable in a highly developed technological society.  It can only return with economic breakdown and as a reaction to true anarchy. 

In this way, one suspects that hardline communists and High Tories with their penchant for pessimism almost hope for the crisis that will either bring the brave new dawn or a return to traditional values.  Lurking at the corner of society are the Reds and the Blacks (though I hasten to add that Scruton's own liberal democratic values cannot be questioned).  But, until that day when auctoritas becomes necessary for the many instead of desired by the few, these people who rule us will actually have to buckle down and learn how to meet the needs of a nation as people and not a nation as state.  Mr. Blair and Mr. Sarkozy's interest in 'values' and 'gloire' is the long drawn-out swan song of Western imperial aspirations - and the West, far from decaying, will be stronger for their passing.

Scruton's social conservatism may have a part to play in that process because his wisest uncovering is that of the fact of existential angst in populations under pressure from modernisation.  So far liberal elites have managed to drive through modernisation faster than resistance can grow.  Much to Scruton's chagrin, I suspect that the libertarian agenda has reached such critical mass in the West that it is unbeatable in the long term and that resistance will take the form of community self-organisation, often on faith-based lines, well within the liberal public space.  Muslims, for example, will become voters within European liberal democracy and not proponents of a separate but equal Sharia law.  Eventually, the new technologies will reach the limit of innovation and new social patterns will emerge that may have conservative characteristics but not on lines recognisable to the High Tory.

Foreign Policy Implications

Where existential angst is most politically interesting is where modernisation is moving too fast for the elites to manage it - where the economies are still mid-twentieth century in structure or where feudal elites are trying to hold on to power in a service-led world.  The former are going to manage modernisation through 'guided' democracy as in Iran, China and Russia while the jury is out on the survivability of the latter.   Is social conservatism (the existential yearning of the masses for what they know) or public space the more important value?  This is a question that is going to be played out across the world in the coming decades.  It is the real question - not the 'clash of civilisations'.  It is bad news for liberal internationalists.

Scruton is a social conservative who empathises with the masses but who comes down firmly in favour of the Western model of public space.  This works in the West - after all faith-based groups can infuence matters in the US and UK without imposing their standards on private life - but in the developing world, whether in relation to homosexuals in Africa or Russia or women's rights in the Islamic World, matters are not so simple.  Democracy in these worlds will mean that the liberal element in the elite will be overwhelmed by demands for protection of cultural identity.  The choice (for the Western liberal) is supporting liberal dictators or colonels or accepting such concepts as Islamic Democracy or Chavezism as legitimate. 

In the end, Scruton chooses Ataturk over the Islamic Democrats - his conservative instincts place the organic State and the rule of law far above the resolution of the existential angst of the Muslims.  He is consistent - although a social conservative, he does not resent that the conservative moral position has been placed to one side as irrelevant by the liberal implications of the concept of public space in the West but only that the ‘other side' has begun to use public morality arguments to whittle away the very concept that was used to advance their cause to hegemony.  This strikes him as just plain unfair - and I agree!

But, though he is right that liberalism is going too far in its claims in the UK and that the preservation of public space is prior to moral claims in the West (partly because it advances liberalism), he is wrong (in my opinion) about the situations in other countries.  He cannot have it both ways - both respect for national organic conceptions of public space that emerge through struggle to protect the citizen and support for top-down elite public spaces trying to emulate the West against the tide of popular resentment of modernization.  Top-down management and organic cultural development are in tension and can only be resolved through democratic and, in extremis, street struggle.  Liberalism that privileges the role of vanguard elites is interpreted in the outside world not (as we would like to see it) as a universalist desire for good but as an imperialist attempt to hold on to territory informally whether as market or as cultural hinterland.

An Alternative Stance

I would argue that a more tolerant attitude in the West to third world socialisms, to Islamic democratic models and to various nationalisms would have caused different problems but would not have left us with the current danger of a growing insurgency against us and our ‘allies' - nor seen certain states harden their position as ‘rogues'.  Just as Stalin could seize power on the credible determination that the West was a threat, so extremism in the third world thrives on the so-called war on terror.  The West would do better to strengthen democracy and public space in its own zone of direct influence, give economic advantage to similar democrats as they emerge in the third world and place radical democracy ahead of liberalism (for at least a period) as an emerging world value. 

Of course, this will mean a plethora of socialisms, populisms and Islamisms but, over time, unthreatened, internal demands, the natural emergence of reformers within these countries (unhampered by an association with Western interference), open debate and pragmatic concerns to ensure trade and economic development will combine to liberalise these countries.  It will move them towards a tolerable version of public space.  It  will take longer but it will be more certain.  It will still mean suffering for many in a minority situation and relative disadvantage for women in some parts of the world, but less deaths and poverty and a more realistic hope that the next generation of women and minorities overseas will have a much more secure hold on their lives, freedoms and property than they have ever had in the past.