What Scruton’s parents would have said
Roger Scruton has a hilariously funny piece in The American Spectator in which he starts from the familiar conceit of comparing a Good Past with a Fallen Present, doing it by way of his parents and their sensible modest patriotic postwar humanism. It looks suspicious from the outset, given the obvious harmony between the views Scruton attributes to his parents and his own (notwithstanding the basic difference in religious belief). It looks suspicious from the outset, and it looks more suspicious as it goes on, and then there comes a moment when suspension of disbelief falls apart altogether amid snorts of laughter.
The British Humanist Association is currently running a campaign against religious faith. It has bought advertising space on our city buses, which now patrol the streets declaring that “There probably is no God; so stop worrying and enjoy life.” My parents would have been appalled at such a declaration. From a true premise, they would have said, it derives a false and pernicious conclusion.
Oh yeah? Would they? Would they really? Both of them? In chorus, would it have been? Both schooled in philosophy, were they? Both given to talking about premise and conclusion? Really? Pardon me if I decline to believe a word of it! Pardon me if I laugh raucously and conclude that Scruton is all too obviously simply inserting his own reaction into the mouths of his parents. Pardon me if I laugh at him for not noticing that he had extended his own rather lame conceit far past the point at which it could be believed. What else would they have said? From a true premise, it derives a false and pernicious conclusion, and what are these MP3 players everyone keeps talking about, and what does ‘google’ mean, and whatever happened to Lyons Corner House?
I wouldn’t mock, except that there is such an annoying tone of bullying nostalgia mixed with whining superiority throughout the piece that mockery seems only appropriate. My parents would have said this, my parents would have thought that. So what? Your parents didn’t have creeping-Jesus politicians to deal with, your parents didn’t have jihadists skipping around the landscape, your parents didn’t have ‘honour’ killings and forced marriages in every newspaper. Your parents didn’t even have Roger Scruton telling them what’s what, not in the way we do. They could afford to be less assertive about their non-theism. It doesn’t follow that we can too.
Humanists of the old school were not believers. The ability to question, to doubt, to live in perpetual uncertainty, they thought, is one of the noble endowments of the human intellect. But they respected religion and studied it for the moral and spiritual truths that could outlive the God who once promoted them.
Really? All of them? I don’t know; maybe they did. I’m not a humanist, and I don’t really know what ‘humanists of the old school’ did or didn’t respect; that’s because I don’t really know what the word ‘humanist’ means or what different people mean when they use it. Maybe it’s true that all humanists of the old school respected religion and studied it for moral truths; if so that might help to explain why I’m not a humanist. I don’t think religion is particularly good at ‘moral truths’; I think religion generally blocks or distorts clear thinking about morality.
Scruton would doubtless say that his parents would have disagreed with me.
‘Your parents didn’t have creeping-Jesus politicians to deal with, your parents didn’t have jihadists skipping around the landscape, your parents didn’t have ‘honour’ killings and forced marriages in every newspaper.’
Well said, OB. The tone of a lot of the comments on the article seemed to say the same thing – let us be Christians and we’ll let you be Humanists. But this seemed to miss the point that there are lots of Christians (and Muslims etc., and especially in the US) who don’t want ‘live and let live’, and do want to promote the idea of atheists as amoral and dangerous, and keep rights from them. If people would actually read what Dawkins etc. have to say (I think AC Grayling’s thoughtful short essays are a good place to start) they would see that they do have positive things to say about ethics and morality, and when they are seen in the media to being aggressive and attacking religion, it is more often than not a defense of free-thinking against those religious people who would have their beliefs unfairly privileged over others.
A couple of the comments say such obviously ridiculous things it just reinforced the need of humanists/atheists to speak out against such illogical thought processes:
‘Humanists are not second class citizens. But they naturally take “second place” in a nation that is self-defined as “One nation UNDER GOD.” Our currency says “In GOD we trust.” ‘
But this is only a recent addition is it not, not an absolute, written-in-the-Bible law? And the Founding Fathers, whom this commenter quotes later, had this little idea of freedom FROM religion, no?
‘If I wasn’t a Christian, I think I wouldn’t care about humanity because I don’t see the point of morality – with no deity to offend, what’s the point?’
That’s a genuine quote – how someone can come out with something like that in all seriousness and not see how vile it is, how lacking in any real compassion or ethical substance, is beyond me.
The comments beneath the article are even worse. At least Scruton knows how phrase his claims so that they don’t sound as stupid as they are.
The general consensus seems to be something like “why do these atheists have to persecute us by demanding to have the same rights we enjoy. They are so agressive!”
As for the article itself, I thought it was quite interesting that Scruton criticised the bus campaign for seeming to promote hedonism, and held this up as a typical example of the deficiencies of so-called new humanism. I seem to remember Dawkin’s saying something similar about the hedonistic tone on the slogan – does that mean he’s one of these old humanists Scruton was eulogising?
Scruton signed the petition defending so-called Christian colleges, which discriminate against gays. What would his humanist parents have thought about that?
Don’t forget, this is the guy who goes all funny inside about blood sports! He actually said this about ‘hunting’ (that is, chasing on horseback after dogs chasing a fox)!
The last sentence is particularly memorable, I thought! He’s even written a book: On Hunting: A Polemic, so he’s very earnest about it. You can find the interview here here. He’s very nostalgic, is our Roger!
Yeh, I read only a few of the comments under the article; one doesn’t expect much from comments at the American Spectator, I think.
Hunting…dear Scruters said something very absurd about hunting just recently, in a piece about something else. I’m pretty sure I did a post on the piece here…but I can’t now remember anything more about it. I wonder what it was (that Roggie said)…
Oh and what his parents would have said about the Christian colleges – he covered that by talking about their views on family a lot, and perhaps also with the nonsense about hedonism. His parents ‘would have’ disapproved of anti-family hedonistic homosekshals, of course. According to him.
On the other hand I see Stephen Law and Peter Cave commented, so I take it back about the comments.
OB: “I’m not a humanist, and I don’t really know what ‘humanists of the old school’ did or didn’t respect; that’s because I don’t really know what the word ‘humanist’ means or what different people mean when they use it. Maybe it’s true that all humanists of the old school respected religion and studied it for moral truths; if so that might help to explain why I’m not a humanist. I don’t think religion is particularly good at ‘moral truths’; I think religion generally blocks or distorts clear thinking about morality.”
After googling ‘humanism’ out of curiosity, I find that the broad claim of humanism is that it includes all thought and morality based on reason and excludes that based on authority and religion. With certain reservations for which there is no space here, I would endorse that.
I did find the following from Robert G Ingersoll (1833-1899):
“When I became convinced that the universe is natural, that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell. The dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts and bars and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world, not even in infinite space. I was free–free to think, to express my thoughts–free to live my own ideal, free to live for myself and those I loved, free to use all my faculties, all my senses, free to spread imagination’s wings, free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope, free to judge and determine for myself . . . I was free! I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously faced all worlds.”
Not bad. It reminds me of the words of Frederick Douglass, speaking about his escape from slavery (quoted without attribution on the Schiller site):
“Though dazzled with the wonders which met me on every hand, my thoughts could not be much withdrawn from my strange situation. From that moment, the dreams of my youth and the hopes of my manhood were completely fulfilled. The bonds that held me to Old Master were broken. No man will now hold the right to call me his slave or assert mastery over me. I was in the rough and tumble of an outdoor world, to take my chance with the rest of its busy number.
“I have often been asked how I felt when first I found myself on free soil. There is scarcely anything in my experience about which I could not give a more satisfactory answer. A new world had opened up for me. If life is more than breath, and the quick round of blood, I lived more in that one day, than in any year of my slave life. It was a time of joyous excitement, which words can but tamely describe.”
http://www.jcn.com/humanism.html
http://www.schillerinstitute.org/educ/hist/douglass.html
Ermm… strictly speaking, aren’t “spiritual truths” an oxymoron?
Or at the very least, the sort of “truths” which cannot be proven to be..er..true?
And as for the comments under the article, well, I’m afraid they were pretty typical of the American “religious conservative” viewpoint (and quality of argument)…which, given that it was the Spectator – which would like to claim to have some sort of reputation to uphold – I found rather disappointing.
Well yes, that’s why I said the rather scornful bit about ‘that might help to explain why I’m not a humanist.’
The latest comments I saw were pointing out how tragic and screwed up I am because I’m skeptical of Scruton’s ability to know what people ‘would have’ said about anything. It’s a very simple and basic epistemological point, taken to be a symptom of twisted weirdness. Faith is not good for the intellect!
OB,
oh, I knew you knew :-)
just surprised that Mr. Scruton doesn’t appear to.
And yeah, I read those comments…and no, going by the evidence, it sure ain’t.
I was thinking of adding a comment to the bottom, but after reading through all the “you’re going to be crushed by Sharia, you atheist Eurotrash wimps” stuff, I felt it pretty pointless, and that I needed a shower… :-)
Hasn’t “humanist” come to be a polite euphemism for “atheist” or “non-believer'” After all, Scruton wouldn’t say: “my parents were atheists”. It would be uncomfortable for him. People who are atheists generally call themselves “humanists”, when they wish to avoid confrontation with religious believers. A humanist is an atheist in the closet.
Except that people in the closet are usually there out of fear. Whereas Scruton’s parents were not afraid; rather, they were “reluctant to deprive other human beings of a moral prop that they seemed to need.” For, as we all know, the knowledge that some people think differently must always constitute that kind of a threat. Therefore, decent people will always engage in one-way-street consideration, somehow understanding instinctively that it is always their own views, and never someone else’s, that could upset the apple-cart.
Scruton is trying to make it seem as if bad taste is the thing that is really wrong with the atheists of today and that if you don’t understand how serious that is, you’re probably guilty of it as well.
I never call myself a humanist…which I guess means I never want to avoid confrontation with religious believers. Except actually sometimes I do, but I still call myself an atheist. There are limits, after all – as Stewart points out.
“Therefore, decent people will always engage in one-way-street consideration, somehow understanding instinctively that it is always their own views, and never someone else’s, that could upset the apple-cart.”
Isn’t that precisely the problem with Scruton’s “old humanism”? Christians whinge about how offensive they find everything and so they receive all sorts of special privileges because atheists are too polite to make a fuss.
Well, Scruton considers a point of view that accepts unsubstantiated claims about gods as a neutral one. The atheists about whom he complains are trying to shift the Overton Window of what is acceptable and Scruton is one of those trying not to let it budge, or even nudge it back a bit to where it was in the Bad Old Days,
The word “atheist” is more subversive than the word “humanist”. I would never call myself a “humanist”, but there are humanist groups, composed of atheists who want to be accepted in a society in which people socialize through sharing common beliefs, generally religious beliefs. In the same way, reactionary religious believers like Scruton use the word “humanist” to avoid the more subversive and confrontational connotations of the word “atheist”. There may be situations, for example, applying for certain jobs, in which describing oneself as a humanist is wiser than describing oneself as an atheist. When I fear using the word “atheist”, I use the term “non-believer”.
I use “atheist” if I’m in a situation that does not make it easy to explain that an anti-theist is one opposed to theism rather than a theist-hater. Of course, I don’t live in the States…
Back in the day, all of 200 years ago, they called us ‘freethinkers’. Which is a dam’ fine label, when you come to think on it…
“Ermm… strictly speaking, aren’t “spiritual truths” an oxymoron?”
A tiny bit ot, but can I make a plea fopr avoiding ‘oxymoron’ whan what we mean is ‘contradiction in tertms’? It’s a small thing, but it makes bme sad to see ‘oxymoron’ go the way of ‘disinterested’.
I am pretty sure that Scrutes is Anglican. I don’t share his religious views, but I usually fined him interesting and persuasive, up to the point where he makes the leap into faith. The thing is with Scruton, that at his best, he gets the heart of the matter in really clear prose even if his conclusions and prescriptions are screwy.
John,
sorry, but I disagree over “oxymoron”.
Oxymoron – [my understanding] a figure of speech (intentional or otherwise) where two contradictory or opposing terms are conjoined, yes? Or as dictionary.com puts it:
“a figure of speech by which a locution produces an incongruous, seemingly self-contradictory effect, as in “cruel kindness” or “to make haste slowly.””
Maybe we don’t agree with the exact nature of the word “spiritual”, but I reckon there’s a strong argument it’s antithetical to “truth”. Or even Scruton’s “truths” (because he wants to apply a different standard of proof, etc to theological wittering, perhaps?).
Thus I felt “oxymoron” was fair and appropriate.
Apologies if I strayed too far from the original, mid-C17th application…
:-))
Hmm. I looked it up too – and concluded that I’ve been misusing it all this time too. I think it’s the figure of speech bit that counts – it’s a figure of speech so it’s deliberate, chosen for effect – not just an inadvertent contradiction in terms. I think that’s what John meant, and it seems to be a fair cop.
blush
It works like hyperbole, I suppose. I’m always having to say that I’m using hyperbole, I’m not just exaggerating – when people tell me I’ve exaggerated something. Yes I know, I say kindly, that was hyperbole. The exaggeration was deliberate. So with oxymoron. Scrute pretty clearly didn’t consider himself to be using a figure of speech. (He was in fact using an empty banality as well as a contradiction in terms – but those aren’t figures of speech.)
Since when does a figure of speech have to be intentional? Bathos, for example, often happens unintentionally, and is no less a figure of speech for all that. Many people use metaphors every day without conscious intent: “Jackass!” “Asshole!!” “Sunuvabitch!!!”
Now, in such an exchange, there may be all the classic components of ethos, logos and pathos, but I doubt the disputants are aware of the tradition in which they are following.
OB,
Interestingly (to really mis-use a word), I *did* look up about 7 different definitions *before* I used “oxymoron” in the first place.
As per Dave’s comment, several of ’em raised the question of intent, and stated quite clearly that it could be unintentional on the part of the original author.
By calling it “oxymoron”, I wanted to make a stronger,specific criticism of the phrase, that went beyond “contradiction in terms”…Scruton *should* have been thinking harder about what he was writing. Especially since he’s supposed to be so dead clever and all…
Wow, it’s so much fun being a thrawn bugger over something so petty…
:-))
Since when did city buses ‘patrol our streets’ ?! More like skulk around avoiding passengers like a does of pubic lice.
He’s clearly only read about them. The lice that is.
Oh, I can go on using it then! Hurrah!
Ain’t it the truth about the buses. I’ve never seen the like of UK bus drivers for slamming the doors in the face of a passenger (to wit, me). Around here if a driver sees a passenger running for the bus, she waits; in the UK he hastens to drive off.
Scruton’s atheist buses have to “patrol.” How else do you expect him to make clear that atheism is militant? Usually, when I read about anyone or anything patrolling, he, she or it is armed and prepared to eliminate opposition. Most definitions of patrol seem to include specific military references. If the purpose of patrols is to respond to expected threats with physical force, how could Scruton avoid using the word to describe unarmed buses carrying civilians that bear a mild assertion about the non-existence of the supernatural and encourage the enjoyment of one’s life? A good thing Scruton wasn’t a film critic back in the 30s; he would have lambasted Shirley Temple for goose-stepping with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson.
Well…you’d look hot in a burka, Stewart! Sharia’s on its way! Eurotrash! LOL!
So there.
I was flying for a bus last night and the bus driver clearly saw me (as I came near it) putting my hand out trying desperately to catch his attention. He still insisted on speeding off without me on board. I cried, O God, you are certainly not on that bus. Because, if you were, well, you would have made the driver halt the bus.
This Morning there was a woman having a great chat with the bus driver as he was going through a very busy thoroughfare of the city. He was in deep conversation with her and constantly made eye contact while she, in turn, made hand gestures which showed the deep intensity of their bus tete-a-tete. Nobody on the bus gave a God darn hoot – or if they did said nothing.
Some bus men definitely do not have their St Christopher statue magnets displayed in their driver seats. Because, if they did, there would not be all this perpetual palaver going on in buses. Am I right?
The thing about burkas is that anyone wearing one looks like only one thing: a burka.
You’d look hot in a burka Stewart! Sharia gonna getcha! LOL!
(This makes no sense if you haven’t read the comments on Scruter’s post.)
Ah, I see now. Thank you for having… raised… the level of the discourse.
Morons! Europe! Burka! Sharia! LOL
:- b
I like this def’n of Humanist:
“a person having a strong interest in or concern for human welfare, values, and dignity.”
I do object to classifying myself as an “Atheist” – to me that’s all about what I’m against, rather than what I’m for.
Actually this is quite common, for conservatives to whine about how the old style secular humanists were so much better than the new-fangled breed.
Also it’s not really true that humanists looked to religion for moral truths. Humanists have always looked to all philosophies, religious or not, in search of moral truths, but have always been *against* giving religion a privileged place in that search.
Starmonkey, that definition of humanist is quite good and once you accept it you realize that most modern people are humanists. Even religious people who wouldn’t call themselves humanists now try to justify their religions in humanist terms (and fail, but they try). This is often true even of the most conservative religious people.
Well, that’s what I suspected about humanists and religion and moral truths, but I carefully expressed my suspicion with more caution than Scruton expressed his many certainties. Really, for a respected philosopher, he’s remarkably dogmatic and incautious. That piece is just filled with assertions of things that he can’t possibly know.
Well, Scruton’s the sort of hierarchy-loving, authoritarian, anti-feminist conservative who would love Pope Ratzi, so…logic really isn’t his strong suit.
I suspect he’s respected because he occasionally says intelligent things about art and music, and because he’s an arch-conservative who can spell and write a straight sentence. Those are rare.