Secular Scruton

After Roger Scruton died last year, I resolved to read back through some of his most important writing on culture, philosophy, and politics. Two things in particular—beyond the usual, and correct, comments on his erudition, intelligence, and lucid prose style—struck me in doing so. The first is his temperament, or rather his temper. At times Scruton is excruciatingly just in both his tone and his treatment of those with whom he disagrees. This restraint approaches a kind of intellectual chastity: one senses this deep disgust with what I can only call a prurience of the mind, a prurience he resents in thinkers he despises and repudiates in the nations and cultures he loves. This reticence is of a piece with the sort of conservatism he represents and recommends to others.

At the same time, Scruton can also give vent to his hatreds and engage in passionate, even bitter, polemic. Polemic is a venerable rhetorical and argumentative mode, so I don’t mean this observation as a critique per se. Often the ideas and writers he aims his words at very much deserve it. But polemic is not a stable vehicle for fine-grained analysis and charitable understanding, and in Scruton’s work one sees where the polemic has worn down the patience and generosity and sheer mental calm that characterizes so much of his other writing.

The second thing that struck me in reading back through Scruton—and this one surprised me—is how profoundly secular a thinker he is. I was surprised not because I thought Scruton an orthodox Christian but because, given his identity as a conservative and as a happy inheritor of Christian civilization, I anticipated an overall positive posture toward religious faith, practice, and thought. And to be sure, when Scruton is meditating on religious questions, he is eager to take seriously the claims of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim revelation as well as their traditions of reflection. But in his ordinary cultural and political writing, Scruton can be rather harsh toward both faith and theology. In fact, “theology” for him functions as an epithet with which to tarnish his enemies: twentieth-century leftist thinkers (like those in the Frankfurt School) embody an inscrutable and irrefutable “theology” by contrast to rational proposals subject to Enlightenment norms of disputation and argument. Elsewhere he heaps scorn on the concept of original sin, whether in its traditional form or in updated political mutations. Like a Rorty or a Scialabba or any other reputable philosopher from the last two centuries, he can refer offhandedly, presuming the reader’s nodding head, to how the great lights of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rendered faith in the supernatural moribund, or at least problematic, for reasonable and educated people. And he follows Kant et al in both rationalizing religion and reducing it to ethics, thereby explicitly making it a matter of private piety rather than public politics. At times there is—to this believer’s eyes—a vaguely sinister noble lie lingering on the edges of Scruton’s account of politics and religion: a Straussian (or Haidtian!) appreciation of religion for the masses while cordoning off its ostensibly inadjudicable and therefore strictly private implications from the rational public deliberations of the liberal nation-state. This streak of (Platonist? Hobbesian? Burkean? Oakeshottian?) toleration or even encouragement (by the few) of widespread false consciousness (in the many) is unbecoming, in my view, though it is native to a certain slice of secular or post-religious intellectual conservatism. Instead of keeping the kernel and tossing the shell, its adherents reverse the operation: keep the forms, they suggest, preserve the outward forms and traditions; but forget the faith at the center. Surely we have seen by now that that move does not work in actual practice. Form and content belong together. Remove one and the other withers and dies.

In any case, reading Scruton was a reminder of this crucial divide within the theory and among the philosophers of conservatism. Scruton has much to teach us on a range of matters, but for Christians, at least, his instruction comes with a certain proviso attached. Irreligiosity is usually associated with the left, but it is all too present on the right, too, only usually less openly hostile and thus more difficult to discern. Finding friends and forming alliances is harder than it seems.

Roger Scruton on the new divisions of class, centered on TV

"The growth of popular sports and entertainment in our time, and the creation of a popular culture based in TV, football and mechanized music, have to some extent enabled people to live without ... home-grown institutions. They have also effectively abolished the working class as a moral idea, provided everyone with a classless picture of human society, and in doing so produced a new kind of social stratification—one which reflects the 'division of leisure' rather than the 'division of labor.' Traditional societies divide into upper, middle and working class. In modern societies that division is overload by another, which also contains three classes. The new classes are, in ascending order, the morons, the yuppies and the stars. The first watch TV, the second make the programs, and the third appear on them. And because those who appear on the screen cultivate the manners of the people who are watching them, implying that they are only there by accident, and that tomorrow it may very well be the viewer's turn, all possibility of resentment is avoided. At the same time, the emotional and intellectual torpor induced by TV neutralizes the social mobility that would otherwise enable the morons to change their lot. So obvious is this, that it is dangerous to say it. Class distinctions have not disappeared from modern life; they have merely become unmentionable."

—Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism, 169. Originally written in 1980, the book was heavily revised for a 2002 re-publication, from which this excerpt comes. With the rise of both "reality TV" and so-called "Peak TV," this semi-Marxist, though conservative, analysis would be worth modifying and extending into the new situation in which we find ourselves, especially in the U.S. (since Scruton is British).

Scruton, Eagleton, Scialabba, et al—why don't they convert?

The question is a sincere one, and in no way facetious. Roger Scruton, Terry Eagleton, and George Scialabba represent an older generation of thinkers and writers who take religion, Christianity, and theology seriously, and moreover ridicule or at least roll their eyes at its cultured despisers (like the so-called New Atheists). And there are others like them.

Yet it is never entirely clear to me why they themselves are not Christians, or at least theists of one sort or another. In The Meaning of Conservatism Scruton refers vaguely to "those for whom the passing of God from the world is felt as a reality." In his review of Marilynne Robinson's The Givenness of Things, Scialabba remarks that, for neuroscientists, "the metaphysical sense" of the soul is a "blank," and asks further, "wouldn't it be a bit perverse of God to have made His existence seem so implausible from Laplace to Bohr?" (Surely an affirmative answer to this spare hypothetical depends wholly on a shared premise that already presumes against the claims of revelation?) My sense is that Eagleton is something of a principled agnostic perhaps, though I've by no means read either his work or the others' exhaustively. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Scruton, as a philosopher, has addressed this question head-on. And Scialabba belongs explicitly to a tradition of thought that believes "metaphysics" to have been descredited once and for all.

But why? I mean: What are the concrete reasons why these specific individuals reject the claims of either historic Christianity or classical theism or some other particular religious tradition? Is it theodicy? Is it "science" (but that seems unlikely)? Is it something about the Bible, the exposures of historical criticism perhaps? Is it something about belief in the spiritual or transcendent as such?

I'm genuinely interested. Nothing would be more conducive to mutual learning between believers and nonbelievers, or to theological reflection on the part of Christians, than understanding the actual reasons why such learned and influential thinkers reject the claims of faith, or at least hold them at arm's length.

I suppose the hunch I harbor—which I don't intend pejoratively, but which animates why I ask—is that there do not exist articulable robust moral or philosophical reasons "why not," but only something like Scruton's phrase above: they, and others like them, are "those for whom the passing of God from the world is felt as a reality." But is that enough? If so, why? Given the world's continued recourse to and reliance on faith, and a sufficient number of thoughtful, educated, and scholarly believers (not to mention theologians!) in the secularized West, it seems to me that an account of the "why not" is called for and would be richly productive.

But then, maybe all of them have done just this, and I speak from ignorance of their answers. If so, I readily welcome being put in my place.

Update: A kind reader on Twitter pointed me to this essay by Scialabba: "An Honest Believer," Agni (No. 26, 1988). It's lovely, and gives you a good deal of Scialabba's intellectual and existential wrestling with his loss of Catholic faith in his 20s. I confess I remain, and perhaps forever will be, perplexed by the ubiquitous, apparently self-evident reference to "modern/ity" as a coherent and self-evidently true and good thing to be/embrace; but that is neither here nor there at the moment.