Our lost legacy
Stephen Logan
AN INTELLIGENT PERSON'S GUIDE TO MODERN CULTURE by Roger Scruton Duckworth, £14.95, pp. 152 Roger Scruton's career as a philoso- pher has prepared him for being a sage. We read him now less to learn what others have thought than to find out what he himself thinks. I for one can cheerfully condone a few minor misquotations and am even heartened by his frank reluctance to verify every reference. Scruton has been careful enough about such things in the past; but his last book clearly heralded a change. He maintains a deep reverence for traditional forms of learning, yet cares less about scholarly punctilio than about telling the truth.
On Hunting was widely discussed as a contribution to the debate over animal rights versus rural tradition. This exquisite- ly written book seemed to me, however, of far greater interest as a spiritual autobiog- raphy. That Scruton had found in hunting a kind of spiritual fulfilment, akin to that afforded by religious observance and the appreciation of high art, struck me as more edifying than any mere marshalling of argument. The book was less dialectics than apologetics, less a disquisition than an exemplum. In it, Scruton apologises for resorting to an occasional footnote, as if avoiding them were proof of integrity. And he interweaves with the discussion of hunt- ing an account of the arduous, ten-year process by which he coaxed himself out of academe. Evidently, ceasing to be an academic felt like a liberation. His new book explains both what the liberation was from, and what Scruton hopes it may lead into.
Though part of a series, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture transcends routine exposition while exemplifying all the expository virtues. It is lucid, forthright, orderly and succinct, luminously intelligent and piercingly impas- sioned. Within a series of 12 brief chapters, Scruton defines the three main senses of `culture' (common, popular and high) and charts the process by which the old cultural traditions of the West have dwindled to the point of collapse. Disrupted during the Enlightenment, shored up by the Roman- tics, lamented by the Modernists and trav- estied by the postmodernist avant-garde, these traditions are vital to the preserva- tion of our humanity. With philosophical learning and psychological shrewdness, Scruton discourses eloquently on our need to mourn, and thereby recover, the legacy we have all but lost.
The book contains many profound insights and enabling distinctions. These local felicities, as well as the general thesis, remind me of C. S. Lewis, whom Scruton never cites. The affinity is the result not of direct influence, but of participation in the moral and metaphysical traditions which both want to conserve. Like Lewis, Scruton insists that the anthropologist, being out- side the culture he purports to explain, lacks the understanding that only belonging can give. Like Lewis too, he explains, in the best modern rejoinder to deconstructive theory I have read, that 'where nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved'. And like Lewis he recognises that the self- proclaimed subversiveness which would undermine established virtues and aesthet- ic proprieties often springs from hatred. Yet the power of the academic consensus against these arguments is so strong as to have entailed the occlusion of Lewis's The Abolition of Man (1943) ostensibly on the grounds that, being by a Christian, it must be wrong.
Here, though, we come close to the root of Scruton's recoil from academe. For it was, he recognises, the decline of religion that ushered in the enervating rationalism of the Enlightenment: 'when religion dies . . . the common culture evaporates like a mist beneath the sun of reason'. Yet religion is not just one more 'discredited ideology', but the focus and sanction of our deepest spiritual yearnings. Scruton justly observes that even where it is not explicitly Christian, the world-view of most canonical English writers is thoroughly permeated by Christian doctrine. Since this is no longer true of their readers there will be a clash, causing either pain, misreading or the defensive hatred which masks both. We cannot, in simple justice, ignore the facts that most of the writers , whom tradition would have us respect believed in God, the moral law, objective reality, and in reason as a means to discovering elements of the truth about them all.
Three minor reservations. First, Scruton is imaginatively impelled towards a faith which his intellect cannot endorse. His own argument repudiates the claim that old Western cultural traditions can be pre- served without religion. Second, there are traces of the intellectualism, over-reliance on ratiocination, which, I sense, he has left academe in order to get free of. And third, he seems unwilling to perceive that high art is often — as in the cases of Homer, Shakespeare and Dickens — popular art which has become difficult. You do not have to be a crack-brained theorist in order to believe that it will not in the future seem irresponsible to compare Lennon and McCartney's songs with Schubert's.
You cannot produce respect for cultural tradition by argument alone. Yet the grow- ing dissatisfaction with our present state may be the ashes from which a reinvigorat- ed common culture may slowly arise. Scru- ton's magtisterial and necessary book is a sign that the process has begun.
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