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Mr. Rogers' Crouton
83 Plays18 days ago
Helen introduces Sarah to the work of conservative philosopher, grifter and tobacco lobbyist Roger Scruton. Along the way the two learn about, among other things, the difference between values and orthodoxies, between ideologies and "just something normal people believe" and between male and female homosexuals.
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Transcript
Introduction: Roger Scruton's Philosophical Influence
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi all, Helen here. This week we look at the conservative philosopher and sometime tobacco lobbyist Roger Scruton. This episode felt like a real return to form for the podcast, as we discuss a man who seems to have spent his whole career churning out shallow and lazy bigotry, motivated largely by his own narcissism and sense of grievance.
00:00:20
Speaker
I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed recording it. There's really nothing real. There is no real. And that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. i don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live.
00:00:40
Speaker
Is Trump going to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader. Do it live! listen, you can write a calling name on your goddamn face and you'll stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
00:00:57
Speaker
some level of masochism.
Community Engagement and Promotions
00:01:01
Speaker
This is Helen. This is Sarah. Welcome to Odium Symposium, a podcast about the production of bigotry. Just want to remind you, you can join our Patreon at patreon.com slash odium symposium for $5 a month. We'll read your message on the show, you'll get early access to episodes, and we're going to continue to produce Conister-only episodes from time to time, although mostly you're just being nice to us.
00:01:23
Speaker
You can also find something new, Odium Symposium mugs and other merch at www.odiumsymposium.com. It's going to be designed by Quinny, who does our episode art.
00:01:35
Speaker
Links to all this in the description. Also, listeners are welcome to join our Discord. You can find a link for that in the description as well. Okay. i guess we'll just jump right into the episode topic.
Scruton's Intellectual Background and Influences
00:01:47
Speaker
What do you know about Roger Scruton? He's a conservative, what, philosopher or like political theorist? I don't know much more about him than that, i think. Yeah, so he's a philosopher, I would say, is is a fair description.
00:02:00
Speaker
When I first started a brainstorming episode topics, he's been on the list for a while. Obviously, we'll get into more details, but in a lot of ways, he's kind of a British version of William F. Buckley.
00:02:11
Speaker
So he's someone who provided sort of intellectual basis for conservatism. Okay. So that's just to give you like a very vague overview to hold on to as we dive into this. Okay. I'm expecting an incredibly annoying and fussy little crypto fascist. Yeah. So he was born in 1944. Vernon Scruton.
00:02:31
Speaker
roger vernon scruton Okay. He's technically Sir Roger Scruton. He was knighted in 2016. Sir Roger Scruton. Exactly. Dude, it's one of the most annoying, like, liberal affectations when you name a celebrity and they're like, oh, and don't you mean sir Ian or some shit like that? Shut the fuck up, man. I don't respect that stuff. Yeah, so he was knighted for services to philosophy, teaching, and public education in 2016. Okay, I believe Kathleen Stock is also. So, yeah, this doesn't have a lot of... it doesn't i don't put a lot of respect on that stuff. Yeah, so he got a scholarship at Cambridge, studied philosophy, and when he got to Cambridge, he said that he felt, quote, socially estranged, but spiritually at home.
00:03:22
Speaker
What does that mean? Yeah, so he didn't come from like a really well-off background. So it wasn't like, oh, he had, you know, he he he he wasn't Sir Roger Scruton because he grew up with a title and, you know, this this really wealthy family.
Conservative Philosophy and Aesthetic Writings
00:03:34
Speaker
So basically he was like a working class kid at Cambridge and so was definitely...
00:03:41
Speaker
ostracized on that basis, but he was enough of like a weird crypto fascist freak that he loved the concept of Cambridge. Okay. He loved the heritage. he loved the history. He loved the exclusion.
00:03:54
Speaker
So he was a philosopher, but mostly he was just a really prolific writer of popular philosophy books. um His focuses were aesthetics, political philosophy, and like what it means to be a conservative.
00:04:07
Speaker
This is a question I've heard you wrestle with before, actually. What does it mean to be a conservative? Yeah, like I think it's a genuine question. Yeah, I mean, we'll see what his answer is. It's not great. wad through his He wrote like over 50 books, so there was no way that I was going to be able to...
00:04:26
Speaker
read everything he wrote and distill it down into an episode. So i kind of needed to like find something that was going to be our main path through the episode. In 2014, he wrote a book called How to Be a Conservative. he He's done a couple of these throughout the years, like in the 80s or late 70s, rather, he wrote a book called like The Meaning of Conservatism. So he's always writing these kind of like manifesto-ish books. But this one felt like a good a good thing to focus on. So here's... Let's just take a look at the chapter titles. i'm gonna have you read these. And you'll get a sense of like what's ahead of us. Preface.
00:05:02
Speaker
My journey. Starting from home. The truth in nationalism. The truth in socialism. The truth in capitalism.
00:05:15
Speaker
The truth in liberalism. The truth in multiculturalism. The truth in environmentalism. The truth in internationalism.
00:05:27
Speaker
The truth in conservatism. Realms of value. Practical matters. A valediction forbidding mourning but admitting loss.
00:05:40
Speaker
Okay, so what vibe do you already get from this, these chapter titles? Well, I mean, first off, a super pretentious. Oh, extremely. Second, it seems like he's going to say something about how, like, you can draw truth from...
00:05:56
Speaker
all of these philosophies. yeah But like, you put the truth in conservatism last for a reason. yeah that's That's like our ultimate destination. We're going to be like, now socialism recognizes that actually we should try and make lots of people happy. But it does it through a destitution of the human spirit and a forbidding of freedom, which cannot be allowed. And then, you know, in conservatism, we're going to get sent the synthesis of all this.
00:06:29
Speaker
Exactly. i mean, it's almost like we just don't have to do the episode now, except there actually are a couple. There are a couple twists in here that I think are sort of interesting to take a look at.
00:06:41
Speaker
I was surprised by some of this book. None of it was surprising in the way of like making me have more respect for him and coming out of it than I went in. I had far less respect for him, which was already a zero when I started reading the book. so But I also thought this is a good one because he starts with a little bit of a biography. which I did have to supplement reading other sources because his own version of his biography is also highly biased. ah But we're just going to launch right in and you know my journey is is his life. So we'll we'll get a little bit of what his background is there.
00:07:15
Speaker
So okay, the preface is just like pretty bog standard are what you'd expect. Freedom is under threat, values are in decline, the modern world is destroying everything of value, and conservatism is the only rational response. So let's look at what conservatism is and learn why.
00:07:32
Speaker
Nothing really worth excerpting out of it. Here's how he opens my journey. It is not unusual to be a conservative, but it is unusual to be an intellectual conservative.
00:07:43
Speaker
In both Britain and America, some 70% of academics identify themselves as on the left, while the surrounding culture is increasingly hostile to traditional values or to any claim that might be made for the high achievements of Western civilization.
00:08:00
Speaker
Ordinary conservatives, and many, possibly most people fall into this category, are constantly told that their ideas and sentiments are reactionary, prejudiced, sexist, or racist.
00:08:16
Speaker
Just by being the thing they are, ah okay, does he happen to mean reactionary prejudice, sexist, and racist? I kind of suspect so. Yes. Just by being the thing they are, they offend against the new norms of inclusiveness and non-discrimination.
00:08:34
Speaker
Their honest attempts to live by their lights, raising families, enjoying communities, worshipping their gods, and adopting a settled and affirmative culture, these attempts are scorned and ridiculed by the guardian class.
00:08:53
Speaker
In intellectual circles, conservatives therefore move quietly and discreetly, catching each other's eyes across the room like the homosexuals in Proust,
00:09:04
Speaker
whom that great writer compared to Homer's gods, knowing only to each other as they move in disguise around the world of mortals. I did not see that passage coming.
00:09:15
Speaker
We, the supposed excluders, are therefore under pressure to hide what we are for fear of being excluded. I have resisted that pressure, and as a result, my life has been far more interesting than I ever intended it to be.
00:09:31
Speaker
Yeah, so there was a preface, but this is like the opening of the book, of like the book proper. And there's so much packed in here, right? Oh, yeah. There's so much here. First of all, this claim that like most people are conservatives, right? like Dubious at best.
Family Influence and English Identity
00:09:50
Speaker
But it needs to be married with this sense of... martyrdom and victimization. Absolutely. you know, oh, most people are conservatives, but the intellectuals are all, you know, crazy liberals or crazy socialists. And so...
00:10:05
Speaker
Notice that nowhere in here does the anti-intellectualism of conservatism as a movement, as a social tendency, like, come into play. Instead, intellectuals are just, like, hostile to conservatism through, i don't know, just pure snottiness or something. Whereas now, like, they're actually in power. And just as when they've been in power in the past, but even more severely now, the first thing they do is they fucking crack down on these leftist intellectuals, these pinko commie scum, these Jewish crypto communists. Yeah. Like... And then moving on from that, this thing about the homosexuals in Proust is so funny because he just, like, the reason Proust writes about homosexuals
00:10:54
Speaker
like having this kind of secrecy and catching each other's eyes across rooms is because- It's because guys like this. But also like, that's just how gay people are and like were because of this oppression. And so it's funny to be like gay people, like from the novels of Proust, when really you just mean gay people such as existing gay people. But if you had admitted that that was just like a real world phenomenon, it would challenge your sense of martyrdom because you're writing this at a time. I don't know. It's just, it's so crazy to be like, oh, gay people, like in the Proust novel. Like,
00:11:24
Speaker
so It tells you like the world he comes from and what he thinks of is real, right? Gay people aren't real, but the novels of Proust are real. Okay, but homosexuals exist in those in that world. It's very clear already from this that this is not actually a letter to centrists.
00:11:42
Speaker
No. This is for conservatives who are just like ah sick of the sense that they're being called out for their bigotry. Yeah. Then he talks about his upbringing.
00:11:53
Speaker
His father was a Marxist. Like, working class, involved in union politics, it seems. This guy's a failed mom, Donnie. Yeah. For politics, in Jack Scruton's eyes, what's the pursuit of class war by other means? Jack Scruton is his father.
00:12:11
Speaker
Thanks to the unions and the Labour Party, he believed the working class had begun to drive the upper classes into the corner from where they would be forced to deliver up their stolen assets.
00:12:22
Speaker
The major obstacle to this cherished outcome was the Conservative Party, which was an establishment of big business property developers and landed aristocrats who were hoping to sell the inheritance of the British people to the highest bidder and then move to the Bahamas.
00:12:37
Speaker
Jack regarded himself as locked in a lifelong struggle with this establishment, on behalf of the Anglo-Saxon peasantry whose birthright had been stolen a thousand years earlier by the Norman Knights.
00:12:50
Speaker
He believed in socialism not as an economic doctrine, but as a restoration to the common people of the land that was theirs. Okay, so Jack started off sounding, i don't know, pretty based.
00:13:04
Speaker
But then we're getting to like this proper English blood stuff. I'm not sure how much of this is like Roger Scruton needing to reconcile that his father was a communist with the fact that he needs his father to like be something else. Yeah, this version of his father that he that he's presenting as like having been motivated by loving England or this sort of traditional Englishness doesn't really hold up. So he doesn't say this in this book, but elsewhere in his biography, like in biographies of him, I found when Roger Scruton got into Cambridge and told his father this, his father stopped talking to him.
00:13:43
Speaker
Whoa. Yeah. Okay. So like everything else I could find indicated to me that like he actually was just a Chad Marxist and Roger Scruton needs him to be like not that because he has like severe daddy issues he still hasn't figured out.
00:13:58
Speaker
I mean, there's like a few different directions this could have gone in, but what you're saying is not that Roger Scruton himself actually thinks that Britain ought to belong to the Anglo-Saxon peasantry of a thousand years ago, and he's projecting this belief onto his father in order to reconcile it with his own beliefs.
00:14:17
Speaker
What you're saying is that actually he's accusing his father of this just to discredit him as a leftist, basically. Um, not quite. I actually think that he does kind of believe that and he wants to believe that his father was like noble in the way that he needed him to be as opposed to actually just a Marxist. He talks a bit more about his father that I think actually explains this in the in the next excerpt. Okay, okay. His father is blood and soil in order to give him some nobility.
00:14:45
Speaker
There was another side to my father's character, however, and this too greatly influenced me. Robert Conquest once announced three laws of politics, the first of which says that everyone is right-wing in the matters he knows about.
00:15:00
Speaker
right, well... yeah
00:15:04
Speaker
My father perfectly illustrated this law. He knew about the countryside, about local history, about the old ways of living, working, and building. He studied the villages around High Wycombe, where we lived, and the history and architecture of the town.
00:15:20
Speaker
And through knowing about these matters, he became, in respect of them, an ardent conservative. Here were good things that he wished to conserve. He urged others to join in his campaign to protect High Wycombe and its villages from destruction, threatened as they were by the unscrupulous tactics of developers and motorway fanatics.
00:15:39
Speaker
He founded the High Wycombe Society, gathered signatures for petitions, and gradually raised the consciousness of our town to the point where it made a serious and lasting effort to conserve itself.
00:15:51
Speaker
I shared his love of the countryside and of the old ways of building. I believed, as he did, that the modernist styles of architecture that were desecrating our town were also destroying its social fabric.
00:16:03
Speaker
And I saw, for the first time in my life, that it is always right to conserve things, when worse things are proposed in their place. That priori law of practical reason is also the truth in conservatism." So he's trying to say that like secretly his father was really a conservative and so even though he was like a committed marxist who organized his like neighbors against like Against the upper class like even though he did all these things and he stopped talking to roger when roger started going to cambridge like secretly He actually was a conservative. Yeah, you see my dad was actually a conservative because he wanted to conserve the ability of working-class people to survive the Depredations of the rich. Yeah, exactly and it's I mean this stuff about architecture
00:16:46
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not at all convinced that his father is like on the right side if his yeah positions are accurately described. But whatever, i also very clearly don't trust Richard Scruton's characterization here. Yeah, it's it's really funny. And um the architecture thing actually is like a huge bugbear for Scruton like his whole life. He's obsessed with like classical architecture and the the the dangers of modernist architecture and how it decays society. do you If this guy were a poster today, he would definitely have like a Greek statue avatar. Oh, absolutely. do you know what the Grenfell disaster was? That's when the um the public housing building that was shoddily constructed in order to save money went up in flames. Yeah, many people died.
00:17:31
Speaker
He basically said that it wouldn't have happened if the building weren't so ugly. Oh, what a fucking scum boy, man. Yeah, like, like, he he really had this, like, obsession with, like, and we'll see it, you know, later in his book, but this obsession with, like, beauty and the importance of, like, good architecture. Okay. oh this, also this thing about the three laws. So I looked up this guy Robert Conquest. Which is just like an incredible name. Absolutely amazing. Yeah. His other two laws, which are explained in a footnote, any organization not explicitly right-wing becomes left-wing in the end, and the simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
00:18:09
Speaker
So it's the kind of thing that are just like, they're just like bon mode. They're not like actual laws or political analysis. It's just like a thing that you would like repeat, like these like thought terminating cliches. I mean, well, what he's proposing there is that the deep state is responsible for society's ills. Yeah. In like, in this like fun little like, huh, the three laws of politics, right? It's just like...
00:18:28
Speaker
Okay, yeah whatever, man. Really encapsulating the conservative inability to take responsibility for failure right there. Yeah, so he's got another bit about his father that I'm not going to the whole excerpt, but he talks about how at the heart of his father's so socialism was like a really deep conservative instinct, right? More of the same thing.
00:18:47
Speaker
I can't get over that guy's name being Robert Conquest. I'm sorry. Yeah, it's really funny. He looks like a mole rat, too. So he talks about like, oh, his father was, you know, committed to class war. But really, it was because he loved England underneath it. And he loved the the the paintings of, you know, various English painters and the the home service and all these different things. And this guy has real daddy issues. Yeah.
00:19:11
Speaker
He fully bore out the picture of the English working class that had been painted by George Orwell in The Lion and the Unicorn. When the chips are down, Orwell argued, our workers do not defend their class, but their country. And he talks about, you know, Orwell talked about country and a gentle way of life and all these things. And they want nothing to do with a self-vaunting disloyalty that only intellectuals can afford.
00:19:30
Speaker
So Scruton loves Orwell. He's constantly talking about Orwell and quoting Orwell, right? It just comes up all the time. I'm aware that you are not a huge Orwell fan. Yeah.
00:19:42
Speaker
There's a very high chance that we do a future episode about George Orwell. He kind of sucked, but... he does He does kind of dine out a lot these days on the whole Spanish Civil War thing.
00:19:54
Speaker
Yeah. So, okay. He studies philosophy at Cambridge. He spends a couple years in Paris. He's in Paris in 1968, and this is where he gets like really radicalized against Marxists.
00:20:07
Speaker
We'll probably go into the details of 1968 more in a future episode where it's more relevant. But basically, there were some huge protests, largely led by students in 1968. And Scruton's version of events is that like, oh, these Marxists just wanted to burn everything down. And I understood that, like, you know, actually, this is a nihilistic philosophy of destruction.
00:20:31
Speaker
And that's when I became a conservative and and wanted to like save Western civilization. So this was like a real turning point for him. Then he gets back to England. finishes his PhD in philosophy in 1973 at Cambridge.
00:20:46
Speaker
He starts working at this college called Birkbeck College, largely catered to people who also had full-time jobs. So he taught mostly evening classes. And he has this little aside in there about like where you can really see that he's like, he's like, oh, i knew I was going to be a martyr from the beginning. Basically, he's like, I understood that I would soon need another career. So I started reading to prepare to enter the bar. oh my God. Yeah. So he starts studying law.
00:21:14
Speaker
Get over yourself, dude. I had already started nailing myself to the cross. Exactly. Reading for the bar and studying the English laws that was before the pollution injected by the European courts and before the constitutional changes haphazardly introduced by Tony Blair, I was granted a completely different vision of our society.
00:21:35
Speaker
Common law justice spoke to me of a community built from below, through the guarantee offered by the courts to all who came before them with clean hands. This vision stayed with me thereafter as a narrative of home.
00:21:50
Speaker
In the English law, there are valid statutes and leading cases that date from the 13th century, and progressive people would regard this as an absurdity. For me, it was proof that the English law is the property of the English people, not the weapon of their rulers.
00:22:08
Speaker
That thought is not one that you will find in the history books of Hobsbawm. Yeah, Hobsbawm was this English guy, socialist, basically, that he was railing on in the previous paragraphs. He was railing Hobsbawm?
00:22:23
Speaker
Railing about Hobsbawm. Like the homosexuals in Proust, I was railing Hobsbawm.
00:22:30
Speaker
So is this guy just like the Lindy man? Is that what's going on here? There's like a lot of Lindy man stuff.
Cultural Longevity and Controversies
00:22:36
Speaker
Okay, now you have to explain who the man Yeah, so the Lindy man is someone that I introduced Sarah to who we've been trying, like i desperately want to do an episode, but his books are all like self-published and like not available anywhere.
00:22:49
Speaker
if anyone has a copy... Of any of the Lindy man's books, please send them to me. But he's this guy who's obsessed with this, like this thing called the Lindy rule, which I forget where it originated, but it was this like just folk theory that originated named after this diner or this, this restaurant that like comedy managers would hang out in called Lindy's where they basically said, if you want to know how how much longer comedians career is going to last It probably, you know, everyone's probably in the middle of their career. So if somebody has done like 20 shows or been on Letterman 20 times, like they'll probably be on Letterman another 20 times.
00:23:27
Speaker
And if they've been on Letterman only once, like probably only once more. And it's basically this idea that things that have lasted have lasted for a reason. And so for things that aren't consumable, you can you can figure out how much longer they're going to last by looking at how long they've been around. The Lindy Man is just a dude who's like, used to be on Twitter. i guess he's still on Twitter.
00:23:45
Speaker
he's still on Twitter. Yeah. He just like posts about whether various things are Lindy or not. And he just like decides whether like something is like good or bad based on like, did the ancient Romans do it? And it's like, he's in a lot of ways just the same as every other like statue avatar guy. Yeah.
00:24:02
Speaker
But there's this like added like pseudo science layer to it. He's constantly writing like sub stack posts about like the Lindy effect and like yeah organizing things according to Lindy principles. And it's just like his entire understanding of the universe is like, is this Lindy or is this not Lindy? Yeah.
00:24:21
Speaker
I have been trying to get a copy of the book Women in the Lindy Effect, like, so hard. I made a fucking catfish account on X, okay? I just picked some, like, random stock photo model off of Amazon. I was, like, messaging him, like, oh I'm really interested in your book Women in the Lindy Effect, and he has not replied. Damn, that's too bad. Yeah, this is like a very similar thing. And there's a lot in Scruton's writing, which is basically just that. Like his whole thing is like, we want to conserve things. So things that have lasted for a while have lasted for a reason. And it's only stupid Marxists who want to burn things down. And if you were like a proper, you know, rational person, you'd want to preserve things of value.
00:25:00
Speaker
Other thing to point out here is this like little jab at the European court. So this came out in 2014. He was like very pro-Brexit. But I think even in 2014, this was like seen as like a long shot or like a fringe campaign. But there's all these points in this book where he does argue that like being in the European Union is a mistake.
00:25:18
Speaker
This is like a perpetual bugbear of conservatives, just this concept of like international law and international solidarity. And, you know, of course, it's because they're nationalists.
00:25:31
Speaker
But like they hate that shit. The Bush administration famously did everything it could to undermine the UN, which is kind of like... a farcical goal considering how weak the UN is anyway and was already. But anyway, they just hate this concept of accountability for people at the top of the hierarchy that they value most, which is the national hierarchy.
00:25:56
Speaker
Yeah, well, you know, it's it's funny because he's phrasing that that dislike of accountability for the people at the top of the hierarchy by saying that really it's about supporting people at the bottom, right? Like society should be bottom up. And that's what conservatism really is, is this like grassroots thing. ah And it's like totally incoherent. Yeah, I don't buy it for a second.
00:26:19
Speaker
Another funny part of this, like he's, you know, he starts talking about politics in the 70s and, and this sense that conservatism was really in decline, even before like the post-war consensus, cons conservatives were giving up.
00:26:29
Speaker
And he's got this quick little aside where he refers to the old guard of the Tory party. had joined in the scapegoating of Enoch Powell.
00:26:41
Speaker
Oh my god. The only one among them who had publicly dissented from the post-war consensus. Oh my god. Okay, so...
00:26:52
Speaker
To recap our Enoch Fowl episode, which the listener might enjoy going back to listen to you haven't already. He was like a super racist who believed himself to be a brave truth teller, but it was actually just kind of like a fall guy for other conservatives. It was his job to go out there and throw himself off the political cliff. ah in order to get the message of like racism and immigration restriction out into the public sphere where it could be discussed and where it could multiply and eventually like infect the entire political system. He was a sacrifice. He was a scapegoat from the start. That was his role. So I read this and I was like, okay, I gotta Google like what else has Roger Scruton said about Enoch Powell? And he was a huge Enoch Powell supporter. He like owned like a hunting jacket or something that belonged to Enoch Powell, which he like proudly wore like fox hunting
00:27:50
Speaker
jesus yes dude he has way more forbidden shit in his closet at home he's got a fucking sliding panel and it opens into a room with all kinds of leather shit there's this like long line of like weird conservative racists who are all like obsessed with each other Okay.
00:28:10
Speaker
He then talks about Thatcher's rise. He spends a bunch of time, like, in Czechoslovakia, like, helping out dissidents. Okay. And, like, fighting, like, communist authoritarianism.
00:28:20
Speaker
He, you know, I don't want to say, like, uncritical support of everything that happened in, like, the Soviet Union and, like, under Stalinism and that, like, everything in Czechoslovakia was chill.
00:28:35
Speaker
But later in his life, like soon before he died, he got a medal from Viktor Orban. So... That gives you like a sense of like the kinds of circles he was really running in.
00:28:46
Speaker
Yeah. But this thing where he like went to Czechoslovakia, this is really where he establishes a lot of his like conservative street cred. Like other conservatives love him and they're constantly bringing up like he fought the communist. He was a staunch anti-communist. So then he comes back to to England and he sees this like what he described as a growing socialist consensus. Which is like this, like the tiniest move towards like any kind of social justice or equality like in England, right? like And here's what he has to say about it.
00:29:15
Speaker
the conflicts in which i became involved over the ensuing years brought home to me just how low the level of public debate had sunk in britain on the left There seemed to be no response to the enormous changes introduced by mass immigration, except to describe everyone who attempted discuss the matter as a racist.
00:29:34
Speaker
This crime resembled the crime of being an emigre in revolutionary France or a bourgeois in Lenin's Russia. The accusation was proof of guilt. and yet nobody ever told us what the crime consisted in.
00:29:49
Speaker
i was reminded of Defoe's comment at the time of the Popery Act of 1698—shut the fuck up—that the streets of London are full of stout fellows prepared to fight to the death against popery without knowing whether it be a man or a horse.
00:30:06
Speaker
I was the more astonished to discover that this elementary intellectual defect— had entirely invaded the political science departments of our universities, and that the intellectual world was in a fever about the presence among us of, quote, a racist, end quote, whose conspiracy could never be discovered and whose nature could never be clearly defined.
00:30:30
Speaker
Being classed as a racist gave me a faint intimation of what it has been like in other times to belong to some despised and persecuted minority.
00:30:42
Speaker
I'm getting so mad. After a particularly frightening episode in which I was chased from a public lecture in the University of York and following liables by the BBC and the Observer, I decided to leave the academic world and live by my wits.
00:30:58
Speaker
Okay. so so much going on here. yeah ah Shall I try and just like take it linearly from the top? I mean, this is crazy.
00:31:11
Speaker
So, first off, he's doing the thing where he's like, oh, I'm being persecuted for my conservative beliefs. And it's like, what beliefs? And he's like, oh, you know the ones. Yeah. Yeah, literally doing that, right? Nobody can define them, but, you know, just normal beliefs that I have that aren't racist. They're definitely not racist.
00:31:39
Speaker
And then, like, he's like, oh, this gave me the slightest hint of what it must have been like to be a persecuted minority in another time when those existed.
00:31:51
Speaker
and he's talking about, like, England in the 80s. Like, he's talking...
00:31:58
Speaker
Andy's talking about Pappas since 1698. Yeah, like, but this is all happening in in England in the 80s, time of, I mean, quite a lot of racism, like, growing anti-immigrant racism.
00:32:10
Speaker
Also, a huge amount of, like, homophobia and... God, they're, like... This was an era in which there were actual persecuted minorities. Something he knows quite well, but he certainly doesn't want to acknowledge because he's a massive fucking racist. yeah Also, he's doing the Barry Weiss here.
00:32:31
Speaker
He's doing Barry Weiss. Yeah. He's like, I was canceled and it's time for me to go into the world and live by my wits. Despite the persecution, the institutions, the noble institutions I once belonged to have subjected me to. It's so sad. And all of you wealthy patrons out there should give me lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of money to write about this forever.
00:32:58
Speaker
Also, the fact that he just like... dances around and never makes clear what exactly he was canceled for, it's gonna be bad.
00:33:08
Speaker
Yeah. So... He can... I don't really know what he meant by, like, after this I decided to leave the academic world only by my wits. There were a bunch of different situations where people, like, protested him, because he was constantly saying...
00:33:20
Speaker
really outlandish shit. But he continued to, like, teach at Birkbeck College, like, through the Wait, so he didn't even quit the job he's pretending he got hounded out of? Exactly. Like, I think he sort of stepped, like, he took on fewer responsibilities at the university. He was kind of an adjunct teacher instead of a professor. my god, at least Barry Weiss actually quit. Yeah, exactly. The other funny thing is that around this time, later found out, so he...
00:33:49
Speaker
He was actually a full-on grifter in the sense that throughout the 90s, he was writing all these articles about how tobacco wasn't as bad as people were saying. And, like, basically, it's it's huge government overreach to ban tobacco.
00:34:04
Speaker
And then it was revealed that the entire time... He was being secretly paid by tobacco companies. He was being paid by Japan Tobacco International. and it got leaked. It got found out because an email leaked in which he emailed them asking them for more money. Because he was like, I'm still more like, you know, I'm providing like, I'm still cheaper than like a PR firm. And like, I'm providing value to you.
00:34:31
Speaker
And people were like, dude, you like... This is a huge scandal and he was like, no, the real scandal is that you guys are reading my private emails. like
00:34:44
Speaker
But he's just like a total fraud and a grifter. Like, yeah. Dude, that's so funny. That's so funny. Okay, so that's the end of my wonder why intellectuals can't stand guys like this. Yeah.
00:34:57
Speaker
Did you ever find out what the libels by the BBC and The Observer were? I mean, i think just that he was called ah a racist and a homophobe. Okay, gotcha. So, okay.
00:35:10
Speaker
So that's my journey. So then we get into starting from home. Oh my god, that was just chapter one. That was just chapter one. Holy shit. I think that's the one with the most excerpts from it, because the rest of these, it's it's pretty repetitive.
00:35:24
Speaker
This book is like... 500 pages long in my like e-reader copy and I read all of it and it was not worth it. It was so bad. Helen, why do we keep doing episodes about these terrible 300 to 500 page books?
00:35:38
Speaker
What are we thinking? So... I guess that's not true. Sometimes we watch movies. Sometimes we watch three hour long movies. Like The Dark Knight Returns. God. What a terrible movie.
00:35:51
Speaker
Okay, so Starting From Home is really like a defense of like Burkean conservatism and like, and like nationalism, essentially. here is really against the French Revolution, like even for the same reasons Burke was, right? So we got this again. I'm used to this. Yeah.
00:36:12
Speaker
So here's here's a fun little excerpt. We are not built on the model of homo economicus, the rational chooser who acts always to maximize his own utility at whatever cost to the rest of us.
00:36:25
Speaker
We are subject to motives that we do not necessarily understand and which can be displayed in terms of utilities and preference ordering and preference orderings only by misrepresenting them.
00:36:38
Speaker
These motives make war on our circumstantial desires. Some of them, the fear of the dark, the revulsion toward incest, the impulse to cling to the mother,
00:36:50
Speaker
are adaptations that lie deeper than reason. Others, guilt, shame, the love of beauty, the sense of justice, arise from reason itself and reflect the web of interpersonal relations and understandings through which we situate ourselves as free subjects in a community of others like ourselves.
00:37:12
Speaker
That's so many words to say virtually nothing. yeah At both levels, the instinctive and the personal, the capacity for sacrifice arises, in the one case as a blind attachment, and the other case as a sense of responsibility to others and to the moral way of life The error of reducing political order to the operations of the market parallels the error of revolutionary socialism and reducing politics to a plan.
00:37:45
Speaker
In his reflections on the French Revolution, Edmund Burke argued against the geometrical politics, as he called it, of the French revolutionaries, a politics that proposed a rational goal and a collective procedure for achieving it and which mobilized the whole of society behind the resulting program.
00:38:05
Speaker
Burke saw society as an association of the dead, the living and the unborn. Its binding principle is not contract, but something more akin to love.
00:38:16
Speaker
I think a couple notable things here. As you say, he's very verbose. I've tried to keep some of the other excerpts shorter, but I did want to just get a sense of, like, he's just... He loves his own, like, eloquence.
00:38:28
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah. He's very, like... He's definitely substituting big words for actual thoughts. Yeah. He's, uh... Like, he's literally doing the Bill Maher thing, right? Like, this is exactly... yeah
00:38:45
Speaker
And then a criticism he's gotten repeatedly from, i think, you know, people who make valid criticisms of him are, he doesn't seem to understand like differences between things he disagrees with. He has this, like, very, like, either you are correct and conservative like me, or you are, you know, in error. And, like, all versions of being in error are, like, sort of fundamentally the same, right? This analogy he's drawing between, like, rational... This sort of homo economicus, this idea of, like, human beings as rational economic agents, and revolutionary socialism... It just makes no sense. Like...
00:39:28
Speaker
He's just trying to tar them both with the same brush as technocratic. Yeah. That's what he's going for there. But if you take at face value what he's saying with this idea of like geometric politics, he literally just means like engaging in discourse at all is a trap.
00:39:43
Speaker
like You just can't have conversations about things if you're actually like engaging in argument. Yeah. A politics that proposed a rational goal and a collective procedure for achieving it and which mobilized the whole of society behind the resulting program.
00:39:58
Speaker
Oh, the whore. Yeah, like that could be bad. It could be good, right? Depends what the goal is. Depends what the plan is, right? You have to get into specifics. You can't just say like everyone who has any kind of plan is wrong. it just doesn't make any sense because he also has a plan. He also has a a thing he thinks society is for.
00:40:18
Speaker
he just thinks that it's more natural. He just thinks that it's the correct one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. He's for nature. He's for the land. He's for the people who have inherited this place. Yeah.
00:40:32
Speaker
And therefore he's against the elites. Yeah. That's all that's going on with this guy, I feel like. is he is fully embedded in and committed to the interests of elite society, and he is trying so hard to portray himself as on the common man's side, as against el elitism, while advancing their interests and attacking the concept of common goals. It's a parody of conservatism. Yeah. It really is. Yeah.
00:41:02
Speaker
But he just like fully believes it, right? Yeah. And here again, he goes on a whole thing about like the importance of, you know, when society is organized from above, either by top-down government or revolutionary dictatorship or bureaucracy, right? Accountability disappears and top-down government breeds irresponsible individuals, right? So he's really trying to frame this as like, he's for the common man. He's for bottom-up government. And that means conservatism, right? Mm-hmm.
00:41:28
Speaker
Okay. So that's starting from home. Then we got the truth in nationalism. So fundamentally, he just thinks we need a national identity to hold society together. This is... This is why he loved Enoch Powell, right? Like, if you if you did listen to our Enoch Powell episode, you'll know what I'm talking about. If not, like, Enoch Powell was all about, like, being English is about English cultural and English cultural inheritance.
00:41:59
Speaker
And we need to be able to say, like... These white people who live around me are English and all these other people who are coming in and flooding our country are not English. it It has to be okay to say that we have to be able to defend our culture. That's right. We have to be able to defend our white neighbors. We have to be able to defend the white race and continue perpetually. I'm sorry, I'm going on at length. yeah I really should have just boiled it down to 14 words. Yeah. So, okay, so he talks about how, you know, the land is important, territory is important, but then he has, this was a really telling moment in the book that kind of made me realize something that's really going on here.
00:42:36
Speaker
Of almost equal importance are the history and customs through which that territory has been settled. There are rituals and customs that occur here and which bind neighbors together in a shared sense of home.
00:42:49
Speaker
These rituals and customs may include religious services, but these are by no means essential, and are open to reinterpretation when it is necessary to include some neighbor who does not share our faith.
00:43:02
Speaker
Increasingly, therefore, the stories and customs of the homeland are secular. The stories may not be literally true. They may include large areas of myth, like the stories that the French tell about Jean d'Arc, about the Bastille, and about the Revolution. or the stories that the Scots tell about Robert the Bruce and about the Jacobite rebellions.
00:43:24
Speaker
These stories are the product of shared loyalty and not the producer of them. The loyalty does not come about because the stories are believed, the stories are believed because the loyalty needs them.
00:43:37
Speaker
And the stories change to accommodate the changing first person plural of the people. They are, as Plato put it, noble lies, literal falsehoods, expressing emotional truths.
00:43:51
Speaker
A rational being will see through them, but nevertheless respect them, as he respects religious convictions that he does not share, and the heroes of other nations. So, he's basically admitting that, like, he doesn't really care about the truth.
00:44:07
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Myths, or you might say lies that serve the cause of national coherence are fine. Yeah. and if you happen to see through them, if you happen to be like, wait,
00:44:24
Speaker
I think this Roger guy is just lying to me. Like, yeah just roll with it. It's fine. Yeah. Don't be such a bitch about it. And so, you know, I had originally planned to excerpt a bunch of, like, specific historical claims he makes that are not true, but I think it's actually an error, even.
00:44:40
Speaker
Like, he's doing the thing that Star Trek talks about. Like... You know, never believe that the anti-Semite, like, believes the, like, ridiculousness of his own statements. Like, he's saying, like, yeah, of course I don't believe the ridiculousness of my own statements. Like, you think I'm obliged to take these words seriously? Yeah, exactly.
00:44:56
Speaker
So, he then has, like, a whole, he like, jacks himself off for a long time about how, like, even more important than the importance in the majority is the person who disagrees with the majority, and, like, the political dissident is the ultimate hero culturally, which also doesn't make sense. Oh god. with the whole earlier thing about coherent like national coherence. like It's totally... It makes no sense.
00:45:19
Speaker
Okay. Now we're going really start getting into some... I've been cancelled, by the way. I've been cancelled. I just wanted to let you know I'm actually heroic. I'm so fucking brave for this. Yeah. So, at this point, he's hinted at it a little bit earlier in the book, and I just didn't clip it, but we really start to get some of the other dimensions of Odium that this book is going to have.
00:45:41
Speaker
Oh, so just to context here, he's talking about like the law as coming from this national identity, this sense that you're going to obey the law because you are a member of the nation and why that's important.
00:45:54
Speaker
Okay. There is another and deeper reason for adhering to the nation as the source of legal obligation.
Critique on National and Religious Laws
00:46:03
Speaker
Only when the law derives from national sovereignty, can it adapt to the changing conditions of the people.
00:46:10
Speaker
We see this clearly in the futile attempt of modern Islamic states to live by the Sharia. The original schools of Islamic jurisprudence, which arose in the wake of the Prophet's reign in Medina, permitted jurists to adapt the revealed law to the changing needs of society by a process of reflection known as, i apologize for mispronouncing this, Ijtihad, or effort.
00:46:36
Speaker
But this seems to have been brought to an end during the 8th century of our era, when it was maintained by the then-dominant theological school that all important matters had been settled, and that the gate of Ijtahad is closed.
00:46:50
Speaker
This seemed to be the only way to conserve the authority of God's absolute and eternal decrees in the face of human deviousness and backsliding. Hence today, when the clerics take over, law is referred back to precepts designed for the government of a long-since-vanished community.
00:47:08
Speaker
Jurists have great difficulty in adapting such a law to the life of modern people. To put the point in a nutshell, secular law adapts, religious law endures.
00:47:20
Speaker
Moreover, precisely because the Sharia has not adapted, nobody really knows what it says. Does it tell us to stone adulterers to death? Some say yes, some say no.
00:47:33
Speaker
and Does it tell us that investing money at interest is in every case forbidden? Some say yes, some say no. When God makes the laws, the laws become as mysterious as God is.
00:47:44
Speaker
When we make the laws and make them for our purposes, we can be certain what they mean. The only question then is, who are we? And in modern conditions, the nation is the answer to that question.
00:47:58
Speaker
An answer without which we are all, let's see. oh this is such bullshit. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of layers of bullshit. So first off, i I absolutely cannot comment on what he's saying about like the history of Islamic jurisprudence and like how true that is.
00:48:17
Speaker
i don't believe it, but like, I don't have enough information to straight up contradict. Yeah, I mean, I think the only important thing really to say there is that this vision of like the Islamic world, as he wants to think about it as like being trapped in the 8th century or 9th century, as opposed to religious fundamentalism of being a product of modernity and all these other material forces is just, again, a lie that is like being used to strengthen Islam.
00:48:44
Speaker
his vision of national coherence, and it's just not connected to history, so it doesn't really matter. Yeah, like, i mean, he told us that he was going to feel free to lie about it, and that, like, if you happen to see through it, that would be fine. So, like, what's the point of, like, fact-checking him here, really?
00:49:00
Speaker
But also, like... Wasn't he talking earlier about how such a beautiful and important thing about the laws, how it comes from the common experience of people from the fucking 1300s in England? Like that was his whole thing. yeah So this is one of these classic like every accusation is a confession things.
00:49:20
Speaker
He, this is actually how he thinks culture, not only the law, but culture in general should work, right? His whole thing is like new things are bad, right? Modernist architecture is bad, right? He was talking about society as a pact between the living and the long since dead. Yeah. And now he's like, oh yeah, the problem with Islam is that you get laws that are developed for a long since vanished community. Yeah, and he's talking about like, oh, you know, we secular law knows how to adapt and all these things. It's just He doesn't want secular law to adapt. Yeah God Okay, so that's The truth in nationalism, which is just that we should be nationalists
00:50:07
Speaker
The truth in socialism I only have one excerpt from it because he just rails against socialists for a long time. Okay. The, the like, little crumb that he says is basically what you said, which is, like, we should try to make people's lives better. Right? But then he's like, but the socialists are totally wrong about how to do that.
00:50:25
Speaker
And... Yeah, he's key again, he engages in some pretty bad history. The Russian October Revolution did not target Kerensky's government only.
00:50:36
Speaker
It targeted the successful, those who had made a go of things so as to stand out among their contemporaries. In every field, in every institution, those at the top were identified, expropriated, murdered, or sent into exile, with Lenin personally overseeing the removal of those whom he judged to be the best.
00:50:57
Speaker
this according to the zero-sum fallacy was the way to improve the condition of the remainder stalin's targeting of the kulaks the property-owning peasants exemplified the same cast of mind as did hitler's targeting of the jews whose privileges and property had in nazi eyes been purchased at the cost of the german working class The explosion of anti-bourgeois sentiment in post-war France, leading to works like Sartre's Saint-Genae and Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex, followed the same logic and was incorporated into the philosophy of the soy-antuitards. Yeah, so again, like everyone he doesn't like is the same. There's no space between Jean-Paul Sartre, Stalin, and Hitler, right? It's just it's it's a totally like confused version of history, right Going after people who are doing class war and trying to...
00:51:59
Speaker
actually redistribute wealth is the same thing as scapegoating jews and committing genocide i don't know just yeah there's just nothing there i'm fascinated by this invocation of quote the zero-sum fallacy Because like it's such an important thing to conservatism actually to convince you that Society is zero-sum and that actually you need to be the oppressor in order to avoid being the oppressed Yeah, so that's an interesting thing again. I think part of his project of saying he's really on the common man side he Actually turns that around entirely and says that the whole problem with socialism is that zero-sum
00:52:44
Speaker
That's fascinating. Yeah, that could not be further from the truth. Right. I mean, there is like this sense of like, oh, you know, the socialists want to redistribute everything, but they don't realize that like, instead of trying to redistribute everything, you can just let everyone be successful. And it's not zero sum.
00:53:02
Speaker
Like, I've heard this argument before. I think it's stupid, but it's... Yeah, the rising tide lifts all boats. Exactly. So then we get to the truth in capitalism. I've got a little bit more here because as you can imagine, he's gotten more to say about capitalism and he basically supports it.
00:53:20
Speaker
When is he getting to the truth in cigarettes? When is that happening? That already happened. but he already He's already been cancelled for that, so he can't go back to that well. The term capitalism entered European languages through the writings of the French utopian philosopher Saint-Simon.
00:53:37
Speaker
It was picked up by Marx to know the... by Marx to denote the institutionalized private ownership of the means of production. Marx contrasted capitalism with other economic systems, notably with slavery, feudalism, and socialism, and predicted that just as capitalism had overthrown feudalism in a violent revolution, so would capitalism be overthrown by socialism.
00:54:04
Speaker
In due course, socialism would wither away to leave the full communism that lies at the end of history. The theory is unbelievable, its predictions false, and its legacy appalling. Nevertheless, its terms changed the language of political debate in the 19th century, and we are now stuck with them.
00:54:26
Speaker
The word capitalism is still used to describe any economy based on private property and free exchange. and the term socialism is still used to denote the various attempts to limit, control, or replace some aspect of capitalism so understood.
00:54:41
Speaker
In all its appearances, therefore, capitalism, like socialism, is a matter of degree. It is important to be aware of terms that have been inherited from dead theories.
00:54:51
Speaker
Oh, he hates dead theories. Unless they come from thirteen hundred s Englanders. Yeah. They may have an aura of authority, but they also distort our perceptions and weigh down our consciousness with new speak of the kind so brilliantly satirized by George Orwell in 1984.
00:55:10
Speaker
Orwell's point in writing that book was to show that the dehumanizing jargon of Marxism produces also a dehumanized world in which people become abstractions and truth is merely an instrument in the hands of power.
00:55:24
Speaker
And the point should never be forgotten by conservatives who need to escape from the 19th century theories that sought to make their position not just obsolete, but also in some way inexpressible.
00:55:36
Speaker
We need to look at the world afresh. Using the natural language of human relations. Oh, God forbid that language be deployed at the behest of the powerful. Oh, Japanese cigarette company, would you please send me a little more money? I'm cheaper than a PR firm. Yeah, but also, okay, there's a bunch of things going on here, right? He needs to deny that capitalism exists.
00:56:01
Speaker
Why? Because he supports capitalism. But fundamental to his whole thing is that ideology is bad. i see. So capitalism has to be an ideology which is free of ideology. Exactly. It has to be completely unmarked. It has to be a default that you're not even allowed to perceive. Yeah, so we need to look at the world afresh using the natural language of human relations is like, all we're going to do all of capitalism, but...
00:56:30
Speaker
I'm going to pretend that there's no ideology. We need to do newspeak to get rid of the idea of capitalism. Yeah. It should just be what is. Exactly.
00:56:41
Speaker
he does have some critiques, as we saw earlier, of this free market kind of neoliberalism. So he does want to make some critiques of the free market. he He does talk about how like oh Marx and Marxist theory were like totally disproved by the Austrian economists von Mies and Hayek.
00:57:02
Speaker
He talked about the price mechanism. There's definitely some future episode subjects in which we'll get into like Hayek and von Mies.
00:57:14
Speaker
I'm like also in the middle of some books about those guys right now. And these guys are like really influential for a lot of conservatives today. Like cryptocurrency guys love this kind of thing, right Because they were obsessed with this idea that like, oh, in a free market, price is actually the carrier of like this distributed information that really, right? There's like this like epistemological claim being made and it's all just like totally garbage.
00:57:40
Speaker
but Scruton kind of loves that stuff and says, you know, if you don't take it too far and say that like people are entirely like economically self-interested like there's a lot of truth to what what these guys were saying so Okay okay So what is his objection?
00:57:57
Speaker
It is at this point, however, that conservatives may wish to enter a note of caution. Although Hayek may be right in believing that the free market and traditional morality are both forms of spontaneous order and both to be justified epistemically, it does not follow that the two will not conflict.
00:58:15
Speaker
Socialists are not alone in pointing to the corrosive effects of markets on the forms of human settlement, or in emphasizing the distinction between things with a value and things with a price.
00:58:26
Speaker
Indeed, many of the traditions to which conservatives are most attached can be understood from the point of view of Hayek's evolutionary rationality as devices for rescuing human life from the market.
00:58:39
Speaker
Traditional sexual morality, for example, which insists on the sanctity of the human person, the sacramental character of marriage, and the sinfulness of sex outside the vow of love, is, seen from a Hayekian perspective, a way of taking sex off the market, of refusing it the status of a commodity and ring-fencing it against exchange.
00:59:03
Speaker
This practice has an evident social function. It's so evident that we don't even need to mention it But it is a function that can be fulfilled only if people see sex as a realm of intrinsic values and sexual prohibitions as absolute commands.
00:59:20
Speaker
In all societies, religion, which emerges spontaneously, is connected to such ideas of non-negotiable order. To put the matter succinctly, that is sacred, which does not have a price.
00:59:35
Speaker
And a concern for the priceless and the non-exchangeable is exactly what defines the conservative view of society, as I described it in chapter two.
00:59:46
Speaker
So the problem with free market capitalism is that it's not homophobic enough. Oh, oh, that's where we're going. Yeah, like that's basically what he's saying here, right? Like, oh, if if i if everything is a free market and if everyone is like rational economic decider, how do we uphold traditional sexual morality?
01:00:04
Speaker
It's so funny because he's like almost quoting part of the Communist Manifesto here. Yeah. He's talking about like how capitalism takes these like things with an aura of mystery and of sacredness and just like devalues them and destroys them. Except like the communists are mostly like, okay, I mean like that's not necessarily bad. Like you're destroying the relationship between like a serf and his master and that's like pretty cool but you're replacing it with other forms of oppression and that's really bad and he's like okay no no no no no no the forms of oppression those are the things we need to protect yeah
01:00:50
Speaker
Those are the things we need to keep around. But yeah, there is this like way in which these these perspectives overlap. But he just like yeah he wants to he wants to save the values of like homophobia and serf and serfdom.
01:01:03
Speaker
We get to the truth in liberalism. Liberalism, the truth in liberalism is basically individual freedom is important, but he's against liberalism. He basically goes on a whole thing. Again, lots of which I even agree with just coming out from exactly the opposite side, which is that like the social contract model of society is kind of incoherent.
01:01:21
Speaker
Like, yeah, i would say that that's actually true. to a large extent. Okay. Like, whatever. But the wrap-up of the chapter is kind of interesting. Or interesting for us to look at, not actually good.
01:01:34
Speaker
Christ's parable of the Good Samaritan imposes a huge moral burden on us all. But to transfer this moral burden to the state, To say that it is for the state to transform that moral duty into a right of the recipient and a right moreover against the state, and therefore against society as a whole, is to take a large step away from the original liberal idea of a state founded on the sovereignty of the individual, Oh, what happened to classical liberalism? oh god, I'm so sick of hearing that shit.
01:02:06
Speaker
It is to move towards the new idea of a society ordered by an overarching morality, which may have little or nothing to do with the way people live. Judges in human rights courts therefore play with an abstract calculus of legal privileges, while passing the cost of their judgments to others with whom they have no connection.
01:02:28
Speaker
and nobody knows whether that cost can really be borne it is this fact that is giving rise in britain to a growing discontent with human rights and especially with the decisions of the foreign court tasked with inventing and imposing them At the same time, instead of limiting the power of the state, alleged human rights have begun to enhance that power, and to bring the state into all our disputes, on the side of the favored party.
01:02:56
Speaker
Rights, which for the liberal are the sine qua non peaceful politics, become thereby a declaration of war on the majority culture. the majority culture, of course, being all these conservatives. Yeah. Who quietly agree with him. Yeah. The silent majority. That's right. So speak.
01:03:17
Speaker
He... Yeah, just... It's also really funny because suddenly this, like, heroism of the dissident is gone, right? Like, anything which goes against the majority culture is, like, an offense.
01:03:29
Speaker
There's... Yeah, he just like really is obsessed with this idea that like human like the concept of human rights has gone too far and things like the right to healthcare or like the right to Marriage equality or the right to all these different things are actually impositions on the rest of us as opposed to like can't legislate morality guys Yeah, there's this like he he goes through a whole thing about like the difference between like negative and positive rights and like the nature of the obligations entailed by rights and like a lot of it is just like quite boring but mean, this is just like This is so incoherent. like I know perfectly well that a guy like this is totally in favor of legislative morality.
01:04:09
Speaker
repeatedly he will see like the laws that are legislating morality is like not laws so he's against marriage equality right he thinks it's good to have a law which says gay people cannot get married but that's not a law that's just not expend not extending the state construction of marriage to gay people right but that's just like total sophistry to make a distinction between those two things and be like one of those is positive one of those is negative And by the way, i didn't... Total bullshit. It's not in this book and I didn't clip it here, but he did actually say like in this, and in an article around the time when gay marriage was legalized in the UK that gay people shouldn't be allowed to get married because like gay people can't have children and marriage is about like reproducing society and gay people aren't invested in society, right? So like, ah hey yeah, he's all for legislating morality. He just doesn't think that that's what it is.
01:05:03
Speaker
I'm also fascinated by he he goes on this like long blather about oh the original liberal idea of a state, blah blah blah blah, blah, blah, blah. And then he's like, now all of this is giving rise in Britain to discontent with human rights. No, it isn't.
01:05:22
Speaker
well And I'm not saying that like discontent with human rights isn't rising, but it's definitely not coming from this sort of like abstract blather that he's talking about. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's important that like...
01:05:39
Speaker
We are recording this at a time when the UK is seriously talking about withdrawing from the European Commission on Human Rights over like not being able to immiserate transgender people enough.
01:05:51
Speaker
Right. It's like very concrete desires to oppress that are like motivating this contempt for human rights. He is part of this conservative project.
01:06:02
Speaker
God. Okay. Are you ready to hear about the truth of multiculturalism? I think I know what it is. i think I know what it is. And the reality is that not having multiculturalism is actually essential for maintaining the coherence of a national identity, for binding people into their communities, and for keeping the original idea of a nation and its traditions alive. Yeah.
01:06:29
Speaker
Like, literally, yes. <unk>s got a little more to say. So he does want to say that, like, other cultures have something of value, right? So here we go. Well, that's big of them. The Enlightenment vision of human nature was based on the idea that human beings everywhere enjoy the same reasoning powers, and that these powers lead of their own accord toward a common morality and a common repertoire of passions.
01:06:54
Speaker
Works of art from the European Enlightenment took as their subject matter other cultures, other countries, and other climes. so as expressly to profile the shared humanity of the different peoples of the world.
01:07:07
Speaker
Examples like Montesquieu's Letters' Parsens, Lessing's Nathan Der Weiss, Mozart's Die Amphurung, A De Samreo, Macpherson's Ossian poems, Goss' Westerl-Kikur-Diwan,
01:07:22
Speaker
And a thousand lesser creations remind us of the immense curiosity that grew in European and American society towards the varieties of human experience and community. Oh God, that was so tedious and Krauthammer-esque for him to just like rattle off this list of works of like capital G great capital A arts. Yeah.
01:07:44
Speaker
And it is thanks to the work of Western anthropologists in the 19th century that we know so much about the way human beings are before technology, science, and the knowledge of modern life impinge upon them.
01:07:57
Speaker
The long-term effect of this has been to open Western societies to immigration and to impart an ideal of citizenship that, it is hoped, will enable people of disparate origins and backgrounds to live together Recognizing that the real source of their obligations lies not in that which divides them, race and religion in particular, but in that which unites them.
01:08:19
Speaker
Territory, good government, the day-to-day routines of neighborliness, the institutions of civil society, and the workings of the law. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
01:08:33
Speaker
And that is what we must expect. And if it is to work, it will be thanks to the effort on both sides to integrate the new arrivals into the surrounding way of life so that the common culture of citizenship adapts to include them.
01:08:48
Speaker
The effort on both sides. You know, if you take the contrapositive, it seems to suggest that one side must have failed if things aren't going so great. And I wonder which side he's going to pick. Yeah.
01:09:03
Speaker
It's also just like, right, it's it's incredible to list all these, like, Western cultural products as your evidence that the West values any other cultural products, right? Like, he's like, look, we understand that, you know, the people from the East, right?
01:09:21
Speaker
Uh-huh. The people from the Orient, like, have cultural knowledge to teach us. And we haven't, you know, we can see that in Goethe's Vestus Ligate Ivan. That's right.
01:09:35
Speaker
I mean, even the French can make art. Like, we recognize that. We're quite open-minded. and It's like yeah, you're really not painting the like the utopian multiculturalism that you are pretending to here My god, this reminds me of rationalists saying things like oh, we have all kinds of people at our conferences we have like philosophers mathematicians physicists computer scientists like just all the same type of people over and over. Yeah.
01:10:06
Speaker
And then, yeah, and then immediately to, like, say, and this is what's led to, like, immigration, and, you know, it's fine for, you know, Orientalist tropes to enter into our media, but we don't want the people, right? It's just such a, like...
01:10:20
Speaker
horrible horrid view of the world. Look as long as they stay on their side of the ocean they can send us all the anime they want. So then he starts talking about multiculturalism and postmodernism kind of in the same breath, right? This is where he really gets into like the ultimate cultural relativism of the Marxist University blah blah. Oh god.
01:10:40
Speaker
Nietzsche is a favorite since he made the point explicitly.
Postmodern Critiques and Conservative Views
01:10:44
Speaker
There are no truths he wrote, only interpretations. Either what Nietzsche said is true, in which case it is not true since there are no truths, or it is false.
01:10:56
Speaker
But it is only from the standpoint of the enlightenment that this response seems like a refutation. The new curriculum is in the business of marginalizing refutation, just as it marginalizes truth.
01:11:10
Speaker
This explains the appeal of those recent thinkers, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty, who owe their intellectual eminence not to their arguments, but to their role in giving authority to the rejection of authority, and to their absolute commitment to the impossibility of absolute commitments.
01:11:30
Speaker
In each of them you find the view that truth, objectivity, value, or meaning are chimerical, and that all we can have and all we need to have is the warm security of our own opinion.
01:11:43
Speaker
Hence, it is in vain to argue against the new authorities. No argument, however rational, can counter the massive will-to-believe that captures their normal readers.
01:11:54
Speaker
After all, a rational argument assumes precisely what they put in question, namely the possibility of rational argument. Each of them owes his reputation to a kind of religious faith, faith in the relativity of all opinions, including this one. For this is the faith on which a new form of membership is founded.
01:12:15
Speaker
A first person plural of denial. Oh god. It's just all the same shit over and over, man. Yeah. So i was given the opportunity here by him actually mentioning Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Richard Roury to go on a big tangent. right, your thing. But I'm just not going to because this doesn't matter. He's not engaging with it on any like serious level. The one thing that I think is worth pointing out here is all these guys were huge nerds about culture and actually valuing sort of our cultural inheritance.
01:12:51
Speaker
Just not in the totally like... fascist way that he insists upon right like he's saying that like derrida wants to destroy authority and meaning and value but actually you know i've i've talked a bunch on this podcast before and i think most of it's actually been cut but i just don't need to get to go into another rant about like Derrida was actually hugely concerned with like preserving value. But one of the things that makes Derrida very hard to read is that he constantly cites like the entire Western canon. like You read Derrida and he's constantly referencing like Aristotle and Rousseau, but write just like every philosopher who's ever written, and you get the sense that like he has read everything.
01:13:29
Speaker
And so it's really hard to, if you actually like read that and and confront it, like Square that with this notion of somebody who like doesn't give a shit about any authority and just wants to destroy all value like that's just not true It's just that like he's not jacking himself off about it the way that roger scruden is Mm-hmm and to that point there have been like almost no citations in this book up to now that continues to be the case roger scruden as like a philosopher He just like never cites anyone like none of these arguments are backed up. There's no citations and
01:14:02
Speaker
this This whole, you know, for all that he wants to say about rational argument and presenting a rational argument, right, it's it's convenient in his view that, like, there's no point in making a rational argument because he actually never bothers to.
01:14:15
Speaker
Yeah, it's... You know what's happening is... His readership has this image of like a bomb throwing anarchist who doesn't give a fuck about anything and just wants to burn the whole town down. And what he wants to communicate is that all the people who are like, hey, maybe you should think about shit for a half second are just an intellectual version of that guy. Yeah.
01:14:39
Speaker
So you don't have to take him seriously. Helen here. I am about to reference a conversation that was hosted by the British organization Intelligence Squared between Roger Scruton and the Marxist literary theorist and philosopher Terry Eagleton.
01:14:58
Speaker
I had explained this conversation already, I brought it up and introduced it earlier in the recording to Sarah, but that part of the conversation got very digressive and ultimately didn't really contribute to the episode very much, so it was cut.
01:15:12
Speaker
so one of the big conflicts that he and terry eagleton have on this on this conversation that i mentioned earlier and he talks at at length about this elsewhere is he thinks that marxists suck also because they're constantly trying to historicize everything they're trying to destroy values by putting them in historical context to understand where they came from and it's such a weird claim because it's like One of those doesn't necessarily entail the other, right? And Eagleton's entire response is just repeatedly say like, no, historicizing something doesn't mean destroying it, right? It just means like understanding where it came from. And somebody actually asks like an audience question to Scruton is like, okay, you're against this like materialist discourse of like the origin of values. Like what's the right, like what's the right wing response? Is there a conservative theory of value that would like tell you where values come from?
01:16:04
Speaker
And his he basically has no answer. His answer is like, well, it wouldn't be the kind of like historicizing Marxism. It would be, you know, basically just saying, oh, these things are values because they're good. There's like a wisdom in value. But there's no there's no ability to ever explain what the thing is that is conveyed by the value, right? like Well, I would simply pick the correct values. Yeah, exactly.
01:16:24
Speaker
Like everyone else believes in orthodoxies. I believe in values, right? And it's like... ah It's just touch such an empty, nihilistic view of the world, right? Because you can't actually have a conversation. What is the point of talking about anything?
01:16:40
Speaker
Which is, i mean, there's projection right there. That's exactly what he's accusing Michel Foucault at all of doing. So, okay, the next one is the truth in environmentalism. I didn't clip any of this.
01:16:53
Speaker
Basically, the truth in environmentalism is we should protect the environment. He has already talked about the problems with capitalism earlier, being that it tends to externalize costs, that if you can push your costs out to other people, you can avoid paying them, and that this is bad because it destroys things, and we're destroying the environment in this way.
01:17:10
Speaker
But he barely gets that out before he then starts talking about how, like, the screeching progressives are so annoying and they're alienating everyone. It's just, yeah.
01:17:21
Speaker
Then we get to the truth in internationalism. This is where he really, like, his pro-Brexit agenda really becomes clear. here He wants to say, like, you know, top-down government is bad, right? He said this before. And so, like, an internationalist government, like the European Union, is, like, even more top-down than a nationalist one. So it's, like, even worse, right?
01:17:43
Speaker
He makes a really starting claim at one point that I think is worth getting into, so... One instance of this deserves mention, since it is a major contribution to the loss of security in Europe.
01:17:56
Speaker
The Geneva Convention on Refugees and Asylum was ratified in 1951, when there were no refugees uncatered for in Europe, and very few applicants for asylum, a fact which meant that there was no cost involved in ratifying the convention.
01:18:11
Speaker
This has bound the legislators of the nation-states ever since, despite radically changed circumstances. The convention enables dictators to export their opponents without earning the bad name that comes from killing them.
01:18:26
Speaker
The entire cost of the convention is therefore borne by the law-abiding states. An uneasy silence has so far prevailed concerning this, one of the most important issues facing modern Europe.
01:18:39
Speaker
Many of those claiming asylum bring with them the Islamist frenzies of the countries from which they have escaped. Some claim the benefits of citizenship even sue for them as human rights, while acknowledging no duty to the state in return.
01:18:56
Speaker
There are now British citizens engaged in a jihad against the British people, for whom the accusation of treason is as incomprehensible as the suggestion that there is treason on the moon.
01:19:08
Speaker
Should we not deal with this problem by consulting the national interest rather than surrendering to a treaty signed before most of us were born? i okay, I'm getting sick of like calling out this hypocrisy of like, this treaty was signed before most of us were born. Like, can we really treat it as valid? And this whole like, laws are good because they're fucking Lindy shit. Well, the thing is that he doesn't like the treaty. where he He likes the old laws that come from English common law because those are like under the purview of the people. That's bottom up. But a treaty is top down. He actually basically does address this, right? Oh my god. The thing though that I find shocking is this completely ahistorical account of the treaty on refugees and asylum in 1951. Right, talk about that. Which was after World War two
01:20:03
Speaker
There were many Jewish refugees who were turned away from other countries in Europe as well as from the US. There was famously a ship full of Jewish refugees that was turned back from the US to Germany and most of the people on that ship died in the death camps.
01:20:24
Speaker
This idea that, like oh, it was this easy thing to agree to that didn't have any cost, and not that it was like the result of realizing the horrible atrocities that were committed. Then to add this idea that, oh, you can you can export your opponents without earning the bad name that comes from killing them.
01:20:42
Speaker
And that, like, you should have to pay the cost of killing your political opponents as opposed to making other nations pay the cost of rehousing them. Like, it's such a disgusting and dehumanizing way of thinking about just, like, all of these issues. It also, like, his discussion of the Geneva Convention here, I can't quite call it, like, Holocaust denial.
01:21:05
Speaker
But, like... He's certainly avoiding the question of like Britain's treatment of Jewish refugees during World War II, and he's covering that up by wrapping it in a layer of Islamophobia. I think it's a fun moment to talk about how in a bunch of the descriptions of his life in his like pastoral English home. He liked to listen to a lot of like classical music and opera. He was a big Wagner fan.
01:21:33
Speaker
interesting. Like he was like specifically a huge fan of Wagner. He does talk about like the ring cycle in this book as like a cultural product that was like, you know, an important inheritance of the West. Was he a big fan of Wagner's essays say? He doesn't say. Just like he doesn't specifically say, right, that he liked the Rivers of Bloodspeed from Enoch Powell, but he lets you know that he was a big Enoch Powell fan, right? Okay.
01:22:02
Speaker
if so if There is like no dog whistle left unblown in this book. Oh my Also, i gotta say, European countries are responsible for quite a lot of the destabilization of the Middle East and of places that, you know, refugees come to Europe from.
01:22:22
Speaker
And I think there actually is like an element of truth in the claim that like, Part of what makes Europeans so pissed about this is it does in fact make them pay some of the costs associated with the instability that they've introduced to countries. And by costs, maybe I should rephrase that. Do you know what I mean? No, I think i know you mean, but like the, it is in their view.
01:22:47
Speaker
a cost to have these immigrants, right? Like, I do think that, like, while I completely disagree with this framing, like, it is the framing that is happening in their mind, which is, like, producing this resentment. I've been reading a bit, and I'm trying to think about how to work it into a future episode, but specifically about this, like, very ahistoric vision of specifically, and I talked a little bit about it earlier, but, like, this, you know, Islamist fundamentalism that is you know, because these places haven't moved forward into the modern age as opposed to being like very specifically a product of European imperialism. Well, we have to understand that the fall of Constantinople is a tragedy which we are all still experiencing hundreds of years later. Exactly, exactly.
01:23:31
Speaker
Okay, here's how he ends this chapter. The cosmopolitan outlook of Marxism-Leninism justified the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe for 40 years.
01:23:41
Speaker
The anti-national vision of the Islamists incurred... What are we doing here? What? The anti-national vision of the Islamists encourages aspiring mujahideen to join those who are trying to impose Islamic government around the world, regardless of whether the local people consent to it.
01:24:01
Speaker
By contrast, powers that enter war in order to defend national territory need have only one intention, which is to withdraw from the conflict when the battle is won, as the Americans and their allies are currently trying to withdraw from Afghanistan.
01:24:16
Speaker
Such
Challenges in Conservative Thought
01:24:17
Speaker
powers are in a position to recognize that the age of empire is over, and that conflict will cease only when nations, obedient to the will of their people, agree to the terms on which they can coexist.
01:24:29
Speaker
That is the direction in which conservatives wish the world to go, and one major obstacle is the internationalist desire to dissolve all borders and to govern the world from nowhere.
01:24:40
Speaker
Like, look, we went into Afghanistan, we fixed the problems, right? and the But there's all these rootless cosmopolitans who are floating around, whether it's the Judeo-Bolsheviks...
01:24:53
Speaker
or bit right like I feel like I just turned a corner and I got hit with intellectual paintballs from like five different directions. Like cosmopolitan outlook of Marxism-Leninism, encouraging occupation of Eastern Europe. By the way, we're talking about the Mujahideen now and also the invasion of Afghanistan. I read 500 pages of this book, Sarah.
01:25:17
Speaker
but but
01:25:22
Speaker
i
01:25:24
Speaker
I'm kind of at a loss for words. Yeah, there's kind of nothing to say is there. It's just like... No, you really can't tie an idea together from sentence to sentence. I'm shocked. You can't. so This is a conservative intellectual. This is one of their leading lights.
01:25:42
Speaker
We're like 21 episodes into this podcast and I'm so i'm just like shocked. The bare bones of the idea to to head off anyone who's like, okay, you're you're just clipping this this excerpt. The argument he is trying to make, which I think is like a very shallow and bad one, is that the nation is an important concept. We shouldn't have, right, he's he's already talked at length about how we shouldn't have like free market neoliberalism and, like, the social contract, but we do need to have, like, national identity and cultural values. And then the extent to which, like, internationalism, like, can and should exist, it's that, like, nations can function as individuals and enter into treaties, but those should be much looser associations and that there shouldn't be there should be international order. There shouldn't international law. Yeah, there shouldn't be a sense of international law. It should be,
01:26:39
Speaker
like a recognition of like non-aggression, right? And like we should be able to like enter into... right he He's like, the social contract can exist at the international letter, but then it really has to be a social contract where nations can pull out at any time that they want to Mm-hmm. And- But then again- need more living space, they need more living space, Exactly. We just have to acknowledge the reality of that. Exactly. And he can't really identify the difference between Marxism and, like, religious fundamentalism.
01:27:12
Speaker
And he thinks that, like, the war in Afghanistan is almost over, right? This was written in 2014. There was another, what seven years of war in Afghanistan after this?
01:27:26
Speaker
Okay. Well, I'm sure he suffered terrible reputational consequences for being so overtly wrong. he He continued to suffer reputational consequences, and then there would be this, like, reset, and be like, oh, he's mellowed out now. And then, this was in 2014. Oh my god. He had already suffered, like, waves and waves and waves of, like, people were protesting him, right? And then it would be like, oh, but he's, you know, he's matured, right? And then he would, like, publish some other odious piece of shit, right? Like, I kept thinking about this after the Anita Bryant episode, just like the excitement with which liberal media outlets greet the opportunity to like rehabilitate some piece of shit at the slightest excuse.
01:28:07
Speaker
Them being like, oh, Anita Bryant's changed. You can tell because here's her views on gay people now. And then she said like the exact same shit as before. like Yeah, it's really bad. So, okay.
01:28:22
Speaker
Now we get to the truth in conservatism. I clipped more of this because it's just really odious. Like, and this is really... okay I'm excited. i think this might be the longest excerpt that I have for us. If people are free to associate, then they can form long-standing institutions outside the control of the state.
01:28:42
Speaker
These institutions might confer advantages on their members, in the form of knowledge, skills, networks of trust and goodwill, they will contribute to the stratification of society by offering those advantages selectively.
01:28:57
Speaker
For it is a law of association that to include is to exclude, and exclusion can hurt. Indeed, in no area does the tension between liberty and equality reveal itself more vividly than in this one.
01:29:13
Speaker
Free association leads naturally to discrimination, and the advocacy of non-discrimination leads naturally to top-down control.
01:29:24
Speaker
How do we choose the acceptable middle ground, and on whom do we confer the right to forbid us? The libertarians tell us that no one has a right to exercise this kind of control, and that it will always get into the wrong hands.
01:29:38
Speaker
The hands of those who most want to hurt us in directions that we at least want to go. There is a truth in that, but it is not the whole truth.
01:29:48
Speaker
For we know that our liberties are diminished if our fellow citizens are excluded from exercising them. The privileges of social membership should not be withheld from people purely on grounds such as race or class that are irrelevant to their exercise.
01:30:05
Speaker
For this reason, most of us now accept that where discrimination brings with it an unacceptable penalty, as in contracts of employment and admission to schools and colleges, it is part of true civil liberty to prohibit the divisive forms of it.
01:30:23
Speaker
Okay, we're not done with the excerpt. We're not done with the excerpt. I'm gonna press on, but like... Oh boy. Yeah, so he's like, yeah, like, okay, I understand that... Right, some of this is, like, good. Like, yeah, our liberties are diminished if our fellow citizens can't exercise them, right? We shouldn't discriminate against people for irrelevant things like race and class. Yeah, and if we want to prevent that, then, you know, like, we're gonna have to accept a little bit of, like, top-down control, at least... Yeah, so how do we find the middle ground? make that happen. So you're ready to hear about the middle I do want to push back against his use of the word natural when he talks about discrimination, of course. There's some quibbles here, but mostly I'm dreading where this is about to go.
01:31:11
Speaker
The question remains of the extent to which associations should be subject to this kind of control. The American civil rights movement ended racial segregation in America, and decent people applaud the result.
01:31:24
Speaker
But the same people might be less happy to learn that the Catholic Church in Europe can no longer run adoption agencies for children in its care, since the Church's attitude to homosexual couples violates the non-discrimination clauses in European law.
01:31:39
Speaker
they may worry that similar clauses are beginning to impact on the activities of the Boy Scouts and church-based youth organizations in both Europe and America. Should we simply accept this as the price of real equality, or should we rather uphold the freedom to associate as we will and as our conscience requires of us?
01:32:02
Speaker
Oh, should we should we simply accept this, or should we boldly assert our right to bully gay children? Yeah. Or like bully gay parents who want to adopt children. Yeah. Like god The problem is illustrated by the history of all male clubs in America.
01:32:21
Speaker
Men stand in need of the male bonding that enables them to make deals. What? Yeah. To compete peacefully and to form networks of enterprise and risk taking that fill their lives with purpose while defusing the instinct to fight. Oh my God. He's doing fucking Evo psych. Yeah.
01:32:40
Speaker
Hence, they form clubs where they meet during the evenings over drinks and food and exchange whatever ripe or rowdy gossip takes the edge off their mutual competitiveness.
01:32:51
Speaker
What harm in that? a great harm, say the feminists, for the club becomes an arena of privilege, a place where deals are made and careers advanced, and the deals and careers are on offer only to members, and therefore only to men.
01:33:08
Speaker
Hence, the male club is an instrument of unfair discrimination of a sexist kind. Only if women are admitted to the club can its existence be reconciled with the demands of social justice.
01:33:20
Speaker
As a result of this argument, all male clubs have been made illegal in America, a fairly radical assault on free association and the name of an egalitarian principle.
01:33:35
Speaker
Helen, can I just ask you right now, aren't all male clubs illegal in America? i don't think so. i didn't think so. i was like, wait, wait. she and like Can I just like burst in here and be like, that's not true. That's not true. Because like what if it is? So it seems somewhat complicated. there's Essentially, there's some restrictions on the ability to not allow women into clubs if it's judged that like this is a sort of professional organization.
01:34:04
Speaker
But basically the the argument that he is trying to gloss here, which I think he's doing like a very bad faith gloss of, is that it was recognized that a lot of exclusion of women was happening by for men getting together and making professional male-only societies.
01:34:23
Speaker
Yeah, in other words, his description of the harm caused by these things from feminists is just like true. Yeah. It's just like accurate. And he's like, well, hang on.
01:34:37
Speaker
But we want to exclude the women. like It's important for us for evolutionary reasons, actually, because it curbs our aggression and it facilitates male bonding, which is like really important because otherwise we'll fight each other.
01:34:55
Speaker
yeah like you can't have an all-male golf club so you're just gonna like fucking punch each other in the face in the parking lot is that what's is that what he's claiming is going to happen oh i can't do this on the pod but here's a picture of rogers gruden like he is not getting into a fight god like to imagine this guy like oh i gotta i gotta have my looks like a licked ice cream cone He's got to have his all-male club so he doesn't... His natural male aggression doesn't doesn't leak out and like... hard
01:35:32
Speaker
Dude, he looks like he's leaking, but it's not leaking aggression. completely
Conservatism vs. Modern Social Values
01:35:37
Speaker
wild characterization here right but it's okay so what's whats the story he's telling he's saying look when people want to get together they're going to exclude because when you have a club it's excluding the non-members of that club so what's the conservative reply to this so he says you know you might think like oh discrimination you know if you can show that it's unjust right like there's a question of justice here you figure whether the discrimination is unjust And then you, you know, you you dismantle discrimination in those cases.
01:36:07
Speaker
And he actually doesn't go with that answer. He says that's not quite the right answer. Very libertarian, right? And he doesn't really want to be libertarian. He wants to be conservative. So he doesn't really like this libertarian answer. So he says, okay, so what is the point of this association? What is the point of society? Well, the point of society is to...
01:36:23
Speaker
is to be like a kind of conversation. oh And he talks about like Hayek again and the conversational model of society. Oh my God. And so here's how he wraps this up. If we are to propose conversation as our model of political order, therefore, we need to answer the questions.
01:36:40
Speaker
Conversation in what circumstances? Between whom? And of what kind? and Okay. I mean, he's saying, like, you might have noticed that this conversational model of society is incoherent and stupid, so, like, yeah maybe we need to, like, refine it into something usable. Okay. Okay.
01:36:59
Speaker
Conversations arise in human society even in the most instrumentalized of our interests and activities, and Aristotle helps us to see how the truth in conservatism morphs into another all-absorbing falsehood.
01:37:13
Speaker
Conservatives are right to emphasize free association as the root of civil society. But when free association becomes a shibboleth, when all forms of community are regarded as equally worthwhile, provided only that the participants consent to them, oh my god, then we lose sight of the distinction between associations in which people make no demands of each other and associations in which moral discipline grows between the participants and informs and transforms their lives.
01:37:43
Speaker
Okay, okay, gotcha. Conversations in church count. Others don't. Exactly. The truth in conservatism depends on our recognition that free association is to be valued only if it is also a source of value. In other words, only if it is ordered towards fulfillment rather than mere utility or recreation. In the libertarian free-for-all, what is worst in human nature enjoys an equal chance with what is best.
01:38:12
Speaker
and discipline is repudiated as a meddlesome intrusion. Conservatism is the attempt to affirm that discipline and to build, in the space of free association, a lasting realm of value." Okay, so his objection to libertarianism is that it's too principled.
01:38:29
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, so his objection to libertarianism is like, it's too hard to do homophobia again, right? It's too hard to, like, be a racist. Which is, like, also funny, because libertarians that I've known have had no problem, you know, also being homophobic and racist. But, yeah, he's... Yeah, there's no conflict between that and pedophilia, so...
01:38:54
Speaker
This is such nonsense. It's making me mad. We want to create a lasting realm of value. Okay. I mean, he knows exactly which values yeah are good already. And he's just like, we need to recognize as worthy and important of protection, those forms of conversation in which the values i like are affirmed. And then all the others can get like flushed down the shooter. Yeah, I mean, he already has said that, like, you know, real historical facts don't matter. And the thing that matters is telling the right kinds of lies that are going to give social cohesion. and So in that context, conversation can't be about argument because argument cares about facts again, right? Conversation is about affirming the correct values. So the next chapter is called Realms of Value. Oh, my God. so By the way, let me also point out that he's acting like some sort of like value is being built here. Like it's being created. But like he doesn't like that either. yeah It's conservatism. The whole idea is to conserve what already exists. like You're not generating new concepts of value and introducing them to society and sinking them into them. like
01:40:07
Speaker
He hates that shit. Yeah, so this whole section on realms of value... like He knows what values he likes. It's just like another another chapter of him jacking off about what the good values are and and like the source of value, right? And you might think that like, okay, he's been doing a lot of like trashing other ideologies, right? And so now he's going have a positive project. But really like, no, like there is no like substance here. So here's here's what he has to say about the church.
01:40:35
Speaker
It seems to me, therefore, that religious freedom is itself a legacy of the religion that has enjoyed precedence in the Western world, the faith for which the stranger and the brother have an equal claim.
01:40:47
Speaker
When that faith declines, as it has been declining during our time, there remains only the shell of the political order that grew from it. Many people hunger for the spiritual life, which that shell protected.
01:41:01
Speaker
Christianity provided that life. Islam cannot, in its present form, provide it, since it presses against the shell of secular law and threatens always to replace it with another law entirely, a law that seeks brotherhood and shared submission rather than neighborhood and mutual freedom.
01:41:22
Speaker
Such a law is directed against the otherness of others, rather than setting out to protect it. Christians are under an obligation to bear witness to their faith, but this does not mean inflicting their faith on other people or forcibly requiring them to adopt it.
01:41:38
Speaker
As the founder of the Christian faith showed, you bear witness not through triumphing over your rivals, but through submitting to their judgment. The Christian faith, as it understands itself today, does not demand that we silence its critics, or even that we forbid them to practice their faith. Yeah, just total bullshit. Yeah, complete nonsense.
01:42:01
Speaker
I mean, okay, first off, what is this metaphor of the shell? There remains only the shell of the political order that grew from Christianity. Islam presses against the shell of secular law. So I don't know. Everything has like its little shell or whatever. and various things are pressing into like this shell or that shell. I don't really know what he's going for there. It seems totally incoherent.
01:42:25
Speaker
But also like...
01:42:29
Speaker
Conservatives love to do this thing. That's like, I've analyzed Islam down to its constituent particles. And let me tell you what it needs is a reformation. Like they don't understand shit about Islam. They don't want to understand shit about Islam. yeah All they want to do is be like, this is like pre-modern in some sense. This is like barbaric in some sense. yeah And I don't think it's really compatible with our more enlightened, more forward ways where, you know, we've already done the work.
01:43:01
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, it's pretty, it's pretty crazy. and it's also pretty like ungrounded from reality to say Christianity doesn't require you to force your beliefs on others. Like, okay, like maybe your particular text of whatever you found, like the part where Jesus said, like, don't do that shit. Right. But like, sure. Like, sure. Some, some denominations, I think even that is being too broad.
01:43:25
Speaker
Some like groups of Christians like do not feel that need, do not see it as an issue and like don't like press the religion on other people. Okay fine, but like when we look at Christianity as it is actually like expressed and practiced in many countries today, like it very clearly does motivate this stuff and you can say that it doesn't, it doesn't matter that like it does motivate this stuff because the principle of the thing is like is not oppressive is not outreaching but like the same person who makes that kind of argument is then going to point to like the authoritarian circumstances that prevail in many islamic countries and be like oh see this proves exactly my point that like islam is like backwards and bullshit yeah
01:44:13
Speaker
Yeah, so that's what he had to say about religion. Here's what he has to say about the family, another realm of value. I don't know, man. I think secularism is good. I think it's good for laws to be secular. That's my opinion. Yeah, but his point is that secularism is actually an outgrowth of Christianity, right? Which doesn't make any sense. That drives insane. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. Ugh! Family law grew from the desire to protect a specific form of domestic life, based on the lifelong union of one man and one woman.
01:44:49
Speaker
But once the state became involved in tying the bonds between people, it also, in response to radical reformers, played an equal, if not greater, part in undoing them.
01:45:00
Speaker
Our laws against incest, bigamy, and child marriage reflect the belief that marriage, as defined by the state, is to be judged in terms of another and higher standard.
01:45:12
Speaker
But when marriage is rewritten as a contract between the partners, in which future generations have no voice, those laws lose their underlying rationale. Hence, by a series of almost unnoticed changes, allowing ever easier divorce and ever more blatant neglect of children, I assume that means not sending them to Sunday school or something, the state has overseen the gradual undoing of the marriage vow.
01:45:40
Speaker
to the point at which the advocacy of homosexual marriage seems not merely a logical consequence of all that has preceded it, but a manifest offer of equal treatment to a previously marginalized minority.
01:45:54
Speaker
Yeah, cause it is. Yeah. Western society has evolved in the matter of homosexual relations, accepting that way of life and the right of the state to endorse it through civil partnerships.
01:46:09
Speaker
But the bond between husband and wife, like that between parent and child, has a moral nature that is not to be summarized in a free agreement. Conservatives especially resonate to the old rite of passage and wonder what business it is of the state finally to set it aside with no clear mandate for doing so.
01:46:29
Speaker
And some are troubled by the shallow reasoning that has dominated the political discussions surrounding this move. Oh, how dare you talk about shallow reasoning, you stupid piece of shit.
01:46:40
Speaker
as though the idea of equality were enough to settle every question concerning the long-term destiny of human society. But if we ask ourselves, How is it that the advocacy of gay marriage has become an orthodoxy to which so many of our political leaders subscribe, we must surely acknowledge that intimidation has some part to play in the matter?
01:47:03
Speaker
oh my god, express the slightest hesitation on this score and someone will accuse you of quote, homophobia. while others will organize to ensure that even if nothing else is known about your views, this at least will be notorious.
01:47:19
Speaker
Only someone with nothing to lose can venture to discuss the issue with the measure of circumspection that it invites. And politicians do not figure among the class of people with nothing to lose.
01:47:31
Speaker
Yet conservatives will recognize that the ordinary conscience will not find itself entirely at ease with change that overthrows social norms on which people have depended throughout recorded history.
01:47:43
Speaker
In this, as in so many things, people of conservative temperament look around for the person who will speak for them, and find only an embarrassed silence. Strident minorities, strident, acting on the growing disposition to censor their opponents, ensure that the deeper the question, the more likely it is to be settled by shallow arguments. Helen. Yeah. Helen. brave and dissenting unorthodox truth tellers are being hunted by the gay mafia in today's society. That's what's happening.
01:48:19
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I wish, honestly. Oh my god Someone should have put this guy down like a fucking dog. He... but Again, I mean, the use of orthodoxy to mean, like, value with which I disagree is like, so annoying. Helen, has it ever occurred to you that in some ways wokeness is much like a religion?
01:48:46
Speaker
he was just talking about the importance of, like, specifically, like, values that originate from the church, right? And now he's using orthodoxy as a slur.
01:48:57
Speaker
Well, religion I do like is good. And religion I don't like is bad. its also quite straightforward. Look, religion I don't like presses against the shell of the law of secularism, which is left by Christianity, which also creates the shell Even though, okay, I don't know. Yeah, it just doesn't make any sense. So then he's got another realm of value is work. He talks about the importance of fulfilling work and the de-skilling of society because the university is full of, quote, junk degrees. my god. Like media studies.
01:49:32
Speaker
oh my god And that we need to like bring back like liberal arts. like He actually doesn't like... vocational actually it's not quite true he's like sort of sorry he he does criticize elsewhere like business school things like this that are like so you know specifically like you're going to school to like specifically learn something to make money but he you know he's like oh like the liberal arts we need to bring back like the tradition of like liberal arts universities and get rid of all these like new things like media studies and then sort of under his breath you know Gender studies, African-American studies, right? Like all these things are just like, those are the junk degrees, right? Uh-huh.
01:50:08
Speaker
He wants to bring back old school anthropology. Yeah. Which we know he's a big fan of. He's been reading all the great classics in that David Starr Jordan.
01:50:22
Speaker
And then he's got a bunch to say about art as well. That's another realm of value. No. Oh my god. i think I know which art he likes. I think it's classical art. I think it's art which is informed by Western heritage, which is informed by Greco-Roman values, and art which is representational and not corrupted by postmodern influences. Okay, what are the corrupted pieces of art? what If you could name one of his like examples of bad art, what would you guess? Oh my god, he's a Jew.
01:50:53
Speaker
um No, actually, I'm gonna i'm gonna guess it's Pablo Picasso. So far as the critics and the wider culture were concerned, the pursuit of beauty was increasingly pushed to the margins of the artistic enterprise.
01:51:07
Speaker
Qualities like disruptiveness and immorality that previously signified aesthetic failure became marks of success. While the pursuit of beauty was regarded as a retreat from the real task of artistic creation, which is to challenge orthodoxy and to break free from conventional constraints.
01:51:25
Speaker
This process has been so normalized as to become a critical orthodoxy, prompting Arthur Danto in his Paul Karras lectures to argue that beauty is both deceptive as a goal and in some way antipathetic to the mission of modern art.
01:51:40
Speaker
Art has acquired another status and another social role. Indeed, it might seem that wherever ever beauty lies in wait for us, there arises a desire to preempt its appeal to smother it with scenes of destruction.
01:51:53
Speaker
Hence the many works of contemporary art which rely on shocks administered to our failing faith in human nature. such as The Crucifix Pickled in Urine by Antonio Serra.
01:52:04
Speaker
Oh, you know what? i I should have guessed about something like that, because that's exactly the sort of thing that Krauthammer would have gotten mad about. yeah Hence the scenes of cannibalism, dismemberment, and meaningless pain with which contemporary cinema abounds, with directors like Quentin Tarantino?
01:52:22
Speaker
That's the target of his ire? Quentin Tarantino? Yeah, like out Piss Christ and Quentin Tarantino. Oh my god. Having little else in their emotional repertoire. Hence the invasion of pop music by words and rhythms that speak of unremitting violence, often rejecting melody, harmony, and every other device that may make a bridge to the old world of song.
01:52:44
Speaker
and hence the music video which has become an art form in itself devoted to concentrating into the time span of a pop song some startling new account of moral chaos okay i mean there's a lot of old man yelling a cloud here yeah but like i also can't help but notice that like his description of the invasion of pop music by words and rhythms that speak of unremitting violence could be interpreted to have a racial subtext. Yeah, like there's quite a lot that, I mean, it's so repetitive. So there was so much that I cut because I was like, we already established this, right? But there's quite a lot of that. There's a point where he talks about, you know, the beauty of classical architecture and how important it is compared to the, you know, the ugly, you know, exurbs of Detroit, right? Like there's like quite a lot in here. Um,
01:53:38
Speaker
Which again is actually not really a way of valuing art, right? Like he doesn't actually think you should like engage with a work of art or like be transformed by it. And like, even as I was prepping this episode, like I was listening to some Beethoven string quartets. I don't know, like I have, like, I can appreciate a lot of the classical art he talks about, but he doesn't really care about classical art or beauty, right? He just wants to rail against...
01:54:05
Speaker
like, new things and creating anything new, right? It's just... awesome And it'll all somehow, like, match. Kind of rationary in the purest sense. Yeah, it it it will carry values and protect us, right? Like, this is this is the guy who says that the the reason Grenfell burned down is because the building was ugly, right? He doesn't actually think of beauty as, like, something real that, like, I don't know, like, that we engage with as people and we create new artworks, right? He he thinks that it's this, like, magical ritual you perform where you, like, you build enough...
01:54:35
Speaker
You know, you build enough arches or whatever and then suddenly, you know, you're living the good life or whatever. Like, it's just, it's so stupid. so the last two chapters are practical matters and valediction for bidding mourning but admitting loss.
01:54:49
Speaker
I didn't clip any of those. There's nothing new. Basically, he just continues to say, like, you know, conservatives want to conserve values. Values are important. But values are just like anything he likes. Anything he doesn't like is an orthodoxy. we've We've gone over this to death.
01:55:02
Speaker
There's more about how he actually has a ah quote in here about how you know conservatives understand that underneath the quote fragile crust of society isn't the idol of Rousseau. Oh my god, there's another layering concept here. We've had shells, we have crusts now. but He says that underneath the fragile crust of society isn't the idol of Rousseau, but the violent world of the hunter-gatherer.
01:55:26
Speaker
see, okay. he's coming out as a Hobbesian. Yeah, values are protecting us from this kind of threat of barbarism. Right. And, yeah, like, again, like, completely ahistorical, like, not, you know, real anthropology at all. Like, it's this just-so story. But as we know, like, he thinks that that's the whole purpose of culture is to be, like, a collection of just-so stories we tell ourselves. Okay. Mm-hmm.
01:55:50
Speaker
A series of convenient little fictions and you can see through of them or not, it doesn't matter. The real point is that they're hegemonic enough that we can draw collective strength from them.
Brexit, Ideology, and Controversial Novels
01:56:00
Speaker
So the problem with this book is upon finishing 500 pages of it, I realized I don't really know if it's meant to be read. i think it's actually just meant to be gotten mad about or like, yeah, like I don't know that like this really matters at all.
01:56:15
Speaker
He was just like a guy who said shit and he continued to say shit for his entire career. Well, who's paying him Well, he doesn't need to like like... The thing is that these books will, like, get enough of a readership, get enough of a circulation, because they'll cause a stir that, like, various publishers... Like, he gets book deals relatively easily. He, like, does seem to actually have some political influence in the sense that in the 80s, he starts ah a magazine called the the Salisbury Review. it never gets a huge circulation, but it's acknowledged as, like...
01:56:47
Speaker
Similar to, um, what's the William F. Buckley one, the National Review, like, it's acknowledged as, like, a source of conservative ideas. In 2019, he did an interview with the New Statesman.
01:57:01
Speaker
Okay. That got him, like, canceled again. Again? Yeah. Oh my god. And it got him so canceled... How many nails can you fit in one set of wrists? Neil Ferguson actually wrote an article, like, sticking up for him and being like, we have to band together. Woke has gone too far. oh my god. Yeah. That's a real low point. Yeah. Being defended by Neil Ferguson. yeah so i clipped some good parts from the interview um they ask him like do you think brexit was a good idea like now that brexit has like gone to shit right this is 2019 so like it was pretty much accepted disaster do you think it's a good idea they talk about that for bit they talk about the problem of like the irish border right he has this kind of incoherent answer about like the importance to the northern irish and also to the republic of ireland of like the national identity of ireland um and then he gets this great this really great passage
01:57:52
Speaker
When the troubles occurred, Southern Ireland still was that strange entity described in Ulysses, which I'm rereading. A deeply Catholic country in which divorce was impossible and abortion and all that hadn't moved with the modern world.
01:58:07
Speaker
Oh man, he probably came so many times thinking about that. It wasn't the country which now has a tea sock, who is a Hindu immigrant and a homosexual, you know, who has brought about all these extraordinary changes.
01:58:20
Speaker
I'm not saying that those changes are necessarily right, but Ireland has jumped forward into the modern world in a way which I'm sure many of the Irish people themselves regret. But nevertheless, it's not that romantic thing that was so yearned for by the IRA.
01:58:34
Speaker
So could it be that this old conflict is now dwindling and disappearing? I don't know. Wow, really thoughtful, man. Yeah. Yeah.
01:58:46
Speaker
Like, oh, you know, the Irish, like, they have a they have an Hindu immigrant gay tea sock now. Uh-huh. Yeah, I'm not saying those changes were right. Can you believe it? Those guys have a faggot in charge. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, he's... Anyway, maybe things are different now. I don't know. I love this, like, I'm not saying those changes are necessarily right. When you know what he means is, those changes are necessarily wrong. Right. like Also being like, by the way, I'm re-realing Ulysses.
01:59:15
Speaker
Not to brag. Okay, and then I liked this part. Interviewer. Are there any of the individual policies that you think have merit? Renationalization of public utilities or a higher tax for top earners?
01:59:29
Speaker
What's your view on those? Scruton. I do think, well, obviously as a railway user, I get tempted by the idea of renationalizing the railways, partly because they seem to run quite well in places where they're nationalized.
01:59:44
Speaker
He does then go on to say like, oh, but there's a lot of strike power and it grinds the country of France to a halt, right? So he does hedge a little bit, but I just included this to be like... I thought everyone was right-wing in the things they know about, bitch. Like, you're saying that it's because you're a rail user that you support nationalization? What a fucking idiot. Okay.
02:00:03
Speaker
Okay, he gets asked about, like, homosexuality, and he's like, well, you know, I don't think homo... I'm not a homophobe. Like, I don't think han homosexuality... I've said repeatedly that it's not a perversion, in fact. I've repeatedly said it's not a perversion, right? Oh, how thoughtful. You know, it's different. And I just talked about how homosexuals are different, and people get all mad, right?
02:00:22
Speaker
you know what i'm really glad to have him as an ally yeah and then he talks about how transgenderism is confusing children oh nice you know oh if you if you you know if if if a boy says he's a girl and you give him hormones and insist on and give him a new body like when he regrets it can you give him the old body back no you can't so we should be a little careful about these things. Like, it's just so stupid. Oh my god. So obviously he was just, like, staring down the scope at homosexuals and he was like, okay, it's time to move these sites about a half inch to the left.
02:00:53
Speaker
At one point, Margaret Thatcher, like, so there's this famous quote from Margaret Thatcher where she said to the conservatives, like, the other side have got a philosophy they can test their policies against and we have to have the same.
02:01:04
Speaker
And he's frequently even been mentioned along with this as like providing that policy. Right. And there's been groups that he he started ah a member of like a think tank and this Salisbury review and these other groups that were meant to like provide that policy. So they ask him, like, do you still agree with that? And his answer is literally no, because conservatism is not about ideology. It's about love. He's he comes right out and says, like, no, like because we don't have an ideology. Right. We just like it's about loving value. Right. The other guys have ideologies. We don't have an ideology.
02:01:33
Speaker
he He talks about, he's asked and and talks about Islamophobia as a quote propaganda word that Islamophobia doesn't exist. And it's just like something people say so you to to shut you up from talking about like the dangerous immigrants who are flooding our countries.
02:01:49
Speaker
He's asked, what's your view of Viktor Orban? In which he is like, you know, it's complicated. Like, you know, he's got some good points about the Muslims. like It's complicated because it's unpopular to say that you like him. Yeah, exactly.
02:02:02
Speaker
So, okay. He died in 2020. He was memorialized by basically just like fringe lunatics of the right wing. He, so I talked about Rod Dreher already. So for people who don't know, Rod Dreher...
02:02:18
Speaker
is like a Twitter poster and has a sub stack. And he wrote a book called The Benedict Option, which is basically about how like conservative Catholics need to like retreat from society and like live in the woods and like rebuild.
02:02:31
Speaker
Catholic nationalism in these like homesteading kind of arrangements. He's very much an extremist and a fascist. He wrote this for the American conservative. He wrote like a sort of in memoriam piece.
02:02:49
Speaker
And here's how he opens it. Very, very sad to get the news that Sir Roger Scruton has died of cancer. Details yet to come, but I want to ask your prayers for him and for those who loved him.
02:03:04
Speaker
This past summer, my friend Laura and i visited him at his farmhouse in Wiltshire. I interviewed him for my forthcoming book about what the experience of resisting Soviet bloc communism has to teach us about resisting the soft totalitarianism emerging today.
02:03:19
Speaker
Sir Roger was strongly supportive of this book, telling me it was urgently important. I feel so humbled by his friendship and encouragement. you couldn't even get like a full paragraph into your like memoriam of the guy before you're plugging your own book like it's it's all grifters all these guys like they claim to love each other but like it's all about like oh he loved my book by the way my book that's getting published later this year That reminds me of when like, when Trump was asked about Charlie Kirk, this was like the day after his death or something. It was like, oh yeah, that sucks. We're building a ballroom over there. It's great. yeah
02:04:00
Speaker
So there's like a longer piece right after this, because he quotes Roger Scruton at length and he quotes this interview he did with him and he talks about how it was important to fight the communists and now woke is rising or he calls it still political correctness is rising. It's much like communism and right, blah, blah, all the stuff you could imagine we've already talked about, but I just, I just loved that.
02:04:19
Speaker
Okay, so i want to close out. I've got basically a game and then some dessert for us and then we're done. So I want to play a game of two truths and a lie. Okay. I'm going to give you three statements about Roger Scruton, one of which is a lie. Okay. He wrote a book that got him sued by the Pet Shop Boys.
02:04:41
Speaker
He got pulled over by a cop and gave him a facsimile copy of the Magna Carta as his driver's license. And he wrote a novel about a girl who gets groomed by a gang of immigrants, but whose teacher figures it out because of clues in her essay about Shakespeare's The Tempest.
02:05:02
Speaker
Oh my god. This is impossible. Yeah. These are all true. You're tricking me. One of them is actually a lie? Okay, then gonna go with the Magna Carta. Okay, so he wrote a book about music in which he said like basically electronic music is like not even music and like the Pet Shop Boys are so bad that they like basically cannot be really said to write their own music.
02:05:26
Speaker
They sued, they won in court, the book got pulped.
02:05:32
Speaker
Okay, rare W for UK libel laws. Here is... it is the Magna Carta thing. That was a lie. Here's from, okay, another right-wing woman who... See, it's too libertarian, the Magnificat. Well, and so here we go. So one of the other people who wrote like a sort of in memoriam after he died is this woman, Christina Hoff Summers, famous anti-feminist.
02:05:59
Speaker
She's published a bunch about how like the feminists are the real anti-women and like supporting traditional feminists, all these different things. But here is a clip. During Roger's visits, we would go to concerts and lectures in my car.
02:06:14
Speaker
One evening he volunteered to drive. We were pulled over for the victimless crime of my expired license plate. The officer asked for his driver's license. Alan, fuck you Roger reached deep into his book bag, extracted a huge faded manuscript, and carefully unfolded it for the officer to review.
02:06:35
Speaker
It looked like the Magna Carta. The officer was stunned. You told me one of them was a lie Sir, this is not a recognized license in the District of Columbia.
02:06:46
Speaker
Oh no, Roger politely replied. My village council assured me this was valid throughout the world. He threatened to arrest Roger on the spot, but Roger kept pointing to sections in his document that supported his case.
02:06:59
Speaker
The officer let us go in exasperation. Roger ever after held to his pastoral British license on US highways. A living testament to the Anglo-American rule of law.
02:07:10
Speaker
Okay, so it's unclear to me. Like, she says it looked like the Magna Carta. i It is just like some parchment. As far as I could tell, there was never a practice of, like, British village councils issuing these pastoral licenses on big pieces of parchment. Like, that's not a thing. And so I'm calling this one a lie because that didn't happen.
02:07:30
Speaker
like Yeah, no. Like, the story did not happen, right? Yeah, no, you're right. like, incredible that she's, like, telling this story. Like, I don't know what the actual story was, but, like, this didn't happen. So this is the lie.
02:07:41
Speaker
yeah okay. But it's not my lie. it's not your lie. all right. Excellent work, Helen. And then, of course, he did write the novel. It's called... Helen, this is so stupid. This is so stupid.
02:07:55
Speaker
Like... Does Christina Hoffs-Sommer's just like talk to Sov-Sitz or something? Does she talk to Sovereign Citizens? I was pulled over for the victim's crime. Expired by Suspense.
02:08:08
Speaker
And I cited the Magna Carta and the officer was like, Sir, you have won the internet today. And everybody clapped. And then... Yeah, the book, the book, of the novel he wrote, he wrote a couple of novels, but the novel that I was referencing is called The Disappeared. Okay. Okay. And yeah, it's about like a gang of immigrants that like grooms a young English girl, but then her teacher helps like save her because she writes some essay about the Tempest that contains clues.
02:08:39
Speaker
Oh my god. The magazine was praised by Bindle. Oh my god. Who described it as both timely and brave.
02:08:50
Speaker
oh my god. Yeah. Notorious racist turf. Yeah. Beautiful. Yeah. Okay. All right.
02:09:01
Speaker
So the dessert. In 1986, he wrote a book called On Sexual Desire. No, of course. like course I almost brought this up at yeah multiple points during this. I could have done the whole episode just about this book because it's so wild, but that felt like shooting fish in a barrel. Like, of course this, like, British conservative boomer has, like, weird stuff to say about sex. So I didn't want to make the whole episode about it, but I did pick out two particularly fun passages to share.
02:09:34
Speaker
So he's got a whole chapter on perversion. course. course he's a fucking pervert. Of course he's a fucking pervert. One of the sections about on perversion is the section on homosexuality.
02:09:45
Speaker
Now, he is clear to say in the section that he that homosexuality isn't necessarily a perversion. It just happens to be in the perversion section. Yeah, because he's he's talking about all these things that other people might consider perversions, and he wants to evaluate each one and whether it's actually a perversion. Okay. There is, like, an overarching, like, philosophical project in the book. It's, like, pretty incoherent. It's, like, this very shallow, like, pretend reading of Hegel that he does. It's not really worth getting into.
02:10:15
Speaker
But here's what he has to say about the difference between male and female homosexuals. Oh, yeah.
02:10:24
Speaker
At the same time, it should be recognized that male and female homosexuality are significantly different, just as male and female desire are different. The need for a lasting partnership takes precedence in women's sentiments over the immediacy of sexual excitement, or rather, sexual excitement tends to be inseparable from the feeling of dependence,
02:10:46
Speaker
while the male impulse towards new encounters may lead to promiscuity on a remarkable scale the the f flitting nature of greek pederasty is beautifully conveyed by the poems included in strato's musa pyrillus and in particular by those of meleger who laments that his eyes Boy-hunting hounds repeatedly betray his soul into the trap of Aphrodite.
02:11:13
Speaker
In his incomparable description of the sexual encounter between M. de Charlus and Juppian, Proust shows the dramatic reality of a desire which knows no inner constraint, while being subject to an immense outward interdiction.
02:11:29
Speaker
The two partners recognize each other's need immediately, observe only those proprieties that are necessary to conceal their mutual desire, accomplish their union, and separate, all the while entertaining towards each other an outlook of indifference, contempt, or at best, in Jupien's case, curiosity.
02:11:49
Speaker
The possibility of such an encounter is, I believe, enhanced by the sense that no barrier divides one from the sex of the other, that his desire is already intimately known and as ready for fulfillment as one's own.
02:12:01
Speaker
This, combined with the natural predatoryness of the male, Interesting. Yeah. Constitutes the danger inherent in male homosexuality and is one of the major reasons for its traditional interdiction.
02:12:16
Speaker
It also partly explains the Greek attitude to male homosexuality. As the amphorae illustrate, the phallic component is uppermost in the appeal of the aeromenos, a fact which is greatly relished by Sir Kenneth Dover in his trivializing book on the subject.
02:12:33
Speaker
And in one poem, Maligar delights in the vision of five boys ministering to a single, throbbing penis. The case of female homosexuality is remarkably different, at least insofar as it has been sensitively recorded.
02:12:47
Speaker
There is not the same emphasis on the sexual organs and on the moment of sexual excitement. Instead, there is an extremely poignant, often helpless sense of being at another's mercy.
02:13:00
Speaker
The lesbian knows that she desires someone who will not typically make those advances that are characteristic of a man, even if she wants to. Nor can she make these advances herself without compromising the gender identity which, she wishes to believe, is integral to her own attractiveness.
02:13:16
Speaker
She can only wait, and wish, and pray to the gods with the troubled fervor captured by Sappho in her hymn to Aphrodite. Poicholothron Athenat Aphrodite
02:13:33
Speaker
like this I'm a little amazed by his background in the subject for someone who seems to No, nothing. But also his background is entirely like literature again. Yeah, that's exactly. There's like never... And yet he seems to have read like quite a lot of literature on the topic. Yeah. And yet like he clearly has never actually spoken to a homosexual. Yeah. At least with knowledge.
02:13:59
Speaker
Yeah. It's pretty wild. Okay. This is from the section. is from the section on masturbation. Thus, when masturbation intrudes into the sexual act, it has precisely that freezing character which churns us from
Critique of Scruton's Views on Sexuality
02:14:15
Speaker
perversion.
02:14:16
Speaker
Consider the woman who plays with her clitoris during the act of coition. Such a person affronts her lover with the obscene display of her body. What? Wait, what? Yeah. And in perceiving her thus, the lover perceives his own irrelevance.
02:14:31
Speaker
Oh, you child! She becomes disgusting to him, and his desire may be extinguished. The woman's desire is satisfied at the expense of her lovers, and no real union can be achieved between them.
02:14:44
Speaker
The incipient obscenity of masturbation threatens the intentionality of desire, and brings us constantly to the verge of perversion. Yeah. This fucking loser. Yeah.
02:14:57
Speaker
Are you kidding? Oh my god.
02:15:02
Speaker
I'm just imagining his nasty cotton candy ass like just floating over a woman. And she reaches down to give herself like the tiniest bit of satisfaction as this like incompetent toad who works what little magic he has. And then he's like, you gross, what are you doing?
02:15:22
Speaker
ah lo that's for verse like He's going to be the brave truth teller to speak out against the perversion of clitoral stimulation. Like, what a loser.
02:15:33
Speaker
What fucking loser. Yeah, so I could have done the whole episode on that book, but like, don't know. It's just, there's nothing there. so Let's do f FAG ratings!
02:15:46
Speaker
Oh my god. Okay. On this show, we use the world's most advanced system for the measurement of bigotry. We rate each of our subjects on a three-part scale, with a number from 1 to 5 for each. In exceptional cases, we might go up to a 6 or down to a 0.
02:16:00
Speaker
First, how ferocious are they? Second, how arrogant are they? Third, how gullible are they? For Ferocity, I think he probably rates kind of low just because he's so fucking vague all the time. Yeah, I think... I don't want to rate him too low because I think that, like... It is kind of that, like, he just knows what the limits are of like...
02:16:22
Speaker
what to say out loud to ride that line of like guy who was out there but will continue to be employed so like he makes sure to talk about how much he loves enoch powell how much he loves wagner right the importance of like traditional values like i think i think he could be at a
Reflection on Legacy and Contradictions
02:16:38
Speaker
three okay i can see a three that seems all right arrogance has got to be quite high Like, he's reaching Ayn Rand levels of, like, everything I believe is a natural value and everything anyone else believes is orthodoxy or ideology.
02:16:54
Speaker
oh man. Like, to arrive at Cambridge and be like, I was socially ostracized and spiritually at home. Like, everyone could immediately see. Yeah. yeah Like, yeah he understands Cambridge to be like,
02:17:09
Speaker
A place with which his glory is in accordance. Yeah. Is part of how I read that. Okay. I... I could see giving him a four. yeah I kind of agree with that He's like not... Yeah, there's still room to go up for sure. iing Rand was a six. I don't really agree that he's approaching Ayn Rand. Yeah, I think he's just like on the same scale where he's like getting up there. But I would agree four.
02:17:37
Speaker
Okay. Gullibility requires a little explanation. Each of our subjects has a role in the production of bigotry. A higher gullibility score means they are inhabiting that role without any awareness of doing so, while a low score means they're hyper-aware of their role.
02:17:51
Speaker
Okay, so I guess we should say, like, what is his role? I think... This guy is the one who most purely so far inhabits a role that I kind of had in mind when I started the podcast, which is there's a way you can conceive of a bunch of production of bigotry as the creation of a commodity.
02:18:10
Speaker
And it doesn't really matter what the quality is, it doesn't matter what the what the details of it are, it just matters that you get a sufficient quantity of the stuff because it needs to go out onto the market so that people can absorb it and use it to their own ideological ends.
02:18:29
Speaker
It's like paper clips. You know, you're not going to the store and being like, oh, I need premium paperclips. Somebody just has to be out there stamping the fucking paperclips. And I think that is exactly what this guy does. He's a paperclip maker.
02:18:43
Speaker
And I think he is incredibly aware of that fact. You know, that's the thing where, like, I think there is a part of him that really does believe... that he is engaged in a project to actually like defend something real called conservatism.
02:19:01
Speaker
Like I don't quite know if he really conceives of how empty his entire life was. I don't know that he really cares. Maybe.
02:19:12
Speaker
i think I'm gonna give him a three. You're gonna give him 3. Okay. I'm gonna give him a 1, but I was honestly tempted to give him a 0. Okay. So, we've both given him the combined FA score of 7, which is, like, quite bad.
02:19:29
Speaker
But yeah, that's Roger Scruton. Any closing thoughts? Terrible experience. What a goddamn toad. Yeah. And to all the women who slept with him, I'm so sorry.
02:19:42
Speaker
god At least it was probably over soon because you, like, made the wrong motion with your hands or some shit and you got pissy and ran out. Yeah, of God. All right. Ugh, disgust me. What is this beastio thing you're doing? Sir Roger Scruton won't stand for that.
02:20:00
Speaker
Right after the part on masturbation, he's got a section about chastity and how, like, people think of, like, chastity as a perversion, but really chastity is, like, the true, like, good light. Like, he's, like... He's... Yeah, he...
02:20:14
Speaker
He had some issues, so, um... Well, he's probably going to be the last conservative we examine who has some sort of, like, sexual hang-ups. Yeah, but, I mean, very few of them write an entire book about it like that, so, I don't know.
02:20:29
Speaker
Anyway, goodbye. Alright, bye guys.
02:20:34
Speaker
There's really nothing real. There is no real. And that's that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. i don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live.
02:20:49
Speaker
Is Trump going to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader. Do it live! listen, you can write a loving name. Let's get... Let's stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
02:21:06
Speaker
some level of masochism.