Do try to keep up, dear boy
Roger Scruton, with an eyebrow (if not two, or six) lifted in amused skepticism, reads Anthony Grayling. Oh these funny little people who prefer mental freedom to the other thing – how droll they are, but in the end how tarsome.
While treating us to some agreeable ventures in the history of ideas, he recycles the Victorian notion that the West has progressed from oppressive superstition to enlightened liberty.
Dear me, does he really, how very old hat. (But then if we think progress from this to that is a silly idea, why does it matter that it’s old hat? Well because my dear you know ‘Victorian’ – they never got any sex, so it always pays to throw them in by way of eyebrow-raising.) How could anyone think that we had progressed from oppressive superstition to enlightened liberty? Because there used to be laws requiring church attendance? Because atheism got the death penalty? Because of the Inquisition? Because of witchcraft trials? Pffff – nonsense. Simply because we’ve left all that behind, is no reason to think we’ve gained any enlightened liberty. It’s Victorian to think we have. Prudish, sentimental, and above all girly.
Grayling’s scholarly account…makes up for his one-dimensional view of Western history, in which the Good forces of liberty, secularism, democracy, equality and enlightenment are locked in “struggle” (how I hate that word!) with the Bad forces of religion, authority, hierarchy, inequality and darkness. Grayling is surely right to believe that people aspire to freedom and light; but he cannot see, from his ivory tower, that they also need obedience and shadows.
Oh do they. Obedience to what, exactly, on whose terms, for what reasons, in pursuit of what ends, according to what criteria? He doesn’t say. He doesn’t even say why people need obedience. Check out Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the joy of escaping obedience, and then ask yourself what on earth Scruton has in mind.
Grayling sees all liberal ideas as summed up in a single moral imperative, which is the defence of “human rights”. His hostility to Christianity causes him to ignore the church’s defence of natural law, from which the idea of human rights derives. The rights defended in secular terms by John Locke were spelled out more thoroughly by Thomas Aquinas, who is given only fleeting credit. For Grayling, the political influence of the medieval church is symbolised not by Aquinas but by the Grand Inquisitor, Torquemada. Why not say, rather, that, while Torquemada disgraced the Dominican Order, Aquinas redeemed it? Aquinas stands to Torquemada roughly as Condorcet stands to Robespierre.
Allow me to quote a comment by Ronald Lindsay, Director of Research and Legal Affairs of the Washington D.C. Center for Inquiry.
For its shameless intellectual dishonesty, this assertion must rank among Scruton’s 10 best distortions. Leaving aside the point that, with the possible exception of Jacques Derrida, Aquinas is the most overrated “philosopher” in the West (and Derrida had better hair), Aquinas expressly endorsed what Torquemada carried out. In the Summa Theologica, Tommy argues that it is imperative that heretics be killed as quickly as they are convicted. ST II-II, Q. 11.
Condorcet, of course, opposed Robespierre. Aquinas would have applauded Torquemada.
That’s probably why not say that while Torquemada disgraced the Dominican Order, Aquinas redeemed it: because he didn’t.
Grayling concludes his book with an extended warning against the way in which the hard-won liberties of the subject are being eroded in Britain and America. He makes a strong point with good-natured grace. But…The right to hunt – on which the way of life of my neighbourhood depends – was recently taken away by a dictatorial House of Commons.
The right to hunt. The right to preserve foxes so that they can be hunted under the pretext that they prey on chickens – that right. Nothing Victorian there – that’s pure Regency. Butch, dressy, exhibitionist, and expensive. Darling Prinny, how we do miss him.
Since “light” here is a metaphor for clear thinking and accurate knowledge, do the “shadows” that people supposedly need in contrast consist of muddled thinking and falsehoods and superstitions?
Do people really “need” stupidity and ignorance? If we do, isn’t this a pathology that ought not to be pandered to?
Well, more charitably, he could mean imagination, fantasy, story-telling – but then he should say so instead of making a sinister obscurantist quip.
But on second thought, ‘shadows’ would be odd if he meant imagination and fantasy. He probably means ‘mystery’ – in which case he is indeed pandering, and the hell with him.
Funny – I always thought that Aquinas provided the justification for the Inquisition. Human rights, anyone?
(Yes, I know I’m being anachronistic. Saint Tom was probably progressive for his time. But still, putting him forward as a staunch advocate of rights?)
Oh, I see that you already pointed out his connection with the Inquisition. But I would also suggest that the whole Christian notion of natural rights is rather fishy. Unless the concept of rights is put on a secular basis, it will always be too limited.
The image that leapt to my mind when he said that his neighbourhood depended on hunting was of a pub going quiet as someone not wearing hunting pinks came through the door…
If his neighborhood “depended on hunting” does that mean he is some kind of aborigine or hottentot, part of a “primitive” hunting and gathering tribe?
Yes! Yes! Poor Roger S will starve if he can’t go out and bag a rabbit for dinner every day; he has no other resources at all; there is no Waitrose or Tesco within a thousand miles, and even if there were he doesn’t have the money to shop there or the automobile to carry the provender home withal. And it’s the same for all his neighbours.
Speaking (off topic totally) of Tesco-they are opening a store in my city in California-called “Fresh and Easy.” All kinds of sadly juvenile thoughts come to mind. :)
Now, it’s all very well to rail against Scrudup — Oh! I do apologise — a mere Tyop — I mean scrutin, but can anyone direct me to a favourable review of Anthony Grayling’s book?
Oh come on, at least he writes well and gives you coherent statements that you can argue with. With a lot of writers you spend most of the time trying to figure out what the argument is.
Having said that, it is clear that Roger Scruton is not a conservative, he is an elitist. the conservativism is there to keep the proles in order and provide a stable society within which he and other members of his elite can do what they like.
To paraphrase his concluding sentence :- his approach is the airy declaration of concrete political goals, combined with a contempt for real people.
This is a conservative elitist condemning a liberal elitist.
Here’s a favourable review, Elliott – was in News awhile ago…
http://www.theage.com.au/news/book-reviews/towards-the-light/2007/08/28/1188067098786.html
And, of course, only a certain type of Victorian thought the West was progressing from superstition to enlightened liberty. Quite a few of them thought that such “progress” was tenuous, at best (superstition was always in the process of reemerging where you least expected it…), and many of them would have been astonished (and/or horrified) to be associated with anything that substituted secularism for “religion, authority, hierarchy,” etc.
“…with the possible exception of Jacques Derrida, Aquinas is the most overrated ‘philosopher’ in the West.”
Sorry, but that’s just embarrassing.
I think Roger Scruton has accidentally become Evelyn Waugh.
I think Scruton is making a point though his advocacy for fox hunting is quite, what can I say, baffling.He seems to be arguing for a kind of life to lead, and institutions lending stability to the ‘good life’in so far as they set examples. The excessive focus on ‘rights’ seems to be taking away from this positive aspect.Inspite of all the evils the Church committed, it provided an aesthetic for people to look up to, thus providing a kind of backbone which the liberal institutions of today fail to provide, a stable framework in which people can actually cultivate the virtues of being and becoming and all the symbols and poetry which we cherish even today. Th West might have gained liberty, and one might say it is better to err on the side of liberty, but I’m not quite sure that it was really all that oppressive before, although one(and that includes Scruton) wouldn’t deny the contribution of those who have framed modern ‘rights. The absolutine unidimensional notion that the West has progressed from oppressive superstition to enlightened liberty is quite false, because in the pursuit of liberty, the moderns seem to have forgotten what to live for.
And we all at one point or the other love to sing ‘nothings gonna change my world’. Some things have to be preserved, and you need money and a stable, not-worried-about-money hierarchy to preserve them. Otherwise it all becomes a muddle.
It’s a pity that popularizing philosophers seem incapable of retaining their critical faculties when they write for a broader audience. To my mind, Grayling and Scruton are both second-rate thinkers at best who have managed to convince people otherwise only by writing down to them. Though I have found Scruton irritating for his half-argued defenses of what he calls conservatism, I do have to agree with him that Grayling’s historical narrative is more ideology than reality. It’s a pity that Benson doesn’t just admit that and go on to defend the substance of what Grayling says. Instead, she gives us a rant that could be put to good use in introductory logic courses, illustrating informal fallacies.
To Scruton’s charge that Grayling oversimplifies history with his black-and-white narrative of good liberalism and evil religion, Benson mocks the argument for a while and finally goes on to tell us that Aquinas supported burning heretics. Since Aquinas supported such nonsense, clearly religion is pure evil, liberalism pure good, and history pure progress. Add to this an appeal to authority for the view that Aquinas is over-rated, and we just about have the ‘argument,’ if we can call it that.
To be frank, dismissing Aquinas on these grounds is like dismissing all of Kant’s metaphysical and epistemological views because he was wrong about non-Euclidean geometries. It is historically false to say that Aquinas supplied ‘the’ justification for ‘the’ Inquisition — there were plenty of justifications on offer, and Aquinas’ particular contribution played no role in his lifetime. It is worth noting that Aquinas’ position on heretics is mistaken even on his own assumptions and that he was probably led to defend it for political reasons rather than for purely philosophical ones. Finally, it just doesn’t make sense to say that because a philosopher gets one moral position wrong he must be wrong about all the rest. If that were so, then Aristotle would have to be wrong about everything because he defended slavery and thought women were rationally inferior to men; Nietzsche would have to be wrong about everything simply because he believed that oppressive political circumstances had overwhelmingly positive effects; Mill would have to be wrong about everything because no unsophisticated form of hedonism could possibly be correct. And so on.
Aquinas is indeed ‘over-rated,’ but for a special reason. For some time, Aquinas has been more or less the official philosopher of the Roman Catholic Church. He has been held by thinkers even in the 20th century to have been right about more or less everything, lacking a few refinements. No other philosopher has had the honor of having so many people consider him basically correct about everything for so long. He is over-rated not because his philosophy turns out to be pretty bad, but because so many people have held it in too high a regard. Anyone who reads, say, Robert Pasnau’s work on Aquinas or the chapters in Terence Irwin’s new book on the history of ethics should not come away thinking that the man was anything less than one of the best moral philosophers in the western tradition. Neither Pasnau nor Irwin are religious, so they have no ulterior motives in finding Aquinas extremely philosophically interesting.
Grayling makes matters much worse by being so committed to a language of ‘rights.’ There’s no question that Scruton is just right that the language of rights and the whole rights-based approach to political morality comes out of the Christian natural law tradition. It comes, however, more from the secularization of that tradition than from the tradition itself. For those of us who don’t have any ideological axes to grind, there is no problem with acknowledging that religious traditions can develop true moral views and that secular western thought owes a lot to its Christian past. Even those who seriously doubt whether rights-based thought is coherent and defensible, let alone ideal — and there are good reasons to doubt it, whether or not there are good reasons to accept that view — can recognize that many of the fundamental moral views that we aren’t going to be giving up very soon were not an important part of Western thought before Christianity. I say this somewhat grudgingly, as a person who thinks that ancient Greek ethics is vastly superior to much modern moral philosophy: the post-Christian moral world is richer than the pre-Christian, particularly when it comes to seeing other people as valuable in their own right. If you’re inclined to doubt me on this score, you might read the historical narrative of Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self.
In short, Ms. Benson: get real, grow up, and start thinking.
It is interesting that so many come to the defence of Mr Grayling, when it is clear that the arguments are completely above them.
What is more perplexing is that Mr Grayling allows such unmoderated drivel on his website.
Actually, come to think of it, he probably finds the arguments convincing.
Why are people commenting on this years later? This post is from two years ago.