Older people, with longer memories, realize something has changed in politics. A wave of angry populism is shaking things up in unexpected ways.
This has happened before, in previous generations. But now it feels new, because it is happening to us.
The poet T.S. Eliot wrote in his Four Quartets about how “a people without history” cannot be “redeemed from time.”
Do we ourselves have knowledge of history? Or will we be condemned to suffer the day’s events with passivity, unable to conceive of how we might be redeemed from the evils of the day?
Eliot wrote that “history is a pattern of timeless moments.” But it is hard to discern what is stable and reliable when political parties, unable to hold the attention of voters, shift violently.
The conventional definitions of left and right seem not to apply anymore. Disinformation campaigns use the latest technology to make everybody angry and cynical.
The result is that people revert to tribalistic thinking and cast their vote only on that basis. But politics as previously known is thereby destroyed, since reasoning together requires common deliberation and compromise.
Sir Roger Scruton (1944–2020) tried to describe how a moderate and sensible politics could operate, writing many books in an effort to redeem the time.
For him, this took the form of appreciating what conservative thought might contribute to sane and humane political solutions. He wrote The Meaning of Conservatism (1980) to figure out what things the right had gotten right.
In an effort to understand the left, he wrote Thinkers of the New Left (1985), which has recently been updated and republished as Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands (2015).
Although political concerns can be found throughout his many books on the arts and culture, he regularly wrote explicitly political books, offering unconventional reassessments.
Among these, we find England: An Elegy (2000); The West and the Rest (2002); The Need for Nations (2004); A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism (2006); How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism (2012); How to Be a Conservative (2014); Where We Are (2018); and Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition (2018).
Looking at what Scruton has to say about conservatism is enlightening. It presents a remarkable contrast with political movements today calling themselves “conservative” and their purportedly “conservative” policies.
The word “conservative” has been reduced to being little more than a tribalistic brand name or marketing slogan. There is nothing conservative about the destruction of institutions and the obliteration of the rule of law being enacted today by authoritarians who have co-opted the word and its attached voters.
This is why it is important to revisit what Scruton has to say about “the core belief of modern conservatism,” which he found best expressed in Edmund Burke: namely, that society has to be “a partnership between the living, the dead, and those yet to be born.”
Scruton is convinced “the most important thing that future generations can inherit from us is our culture.” In culture, human experience is summed up in patterns of timeless moments, which a community celebrates, incarnated in its local traditions.
To pass on this culture, we first have to inherit and appreciate it. But this is an arduous task that involves humility and sacrifice, when technology has made us lazier.
Scruton recognizes that the impulse to repudiate, to tear down and destroy, is an intoxicating way of life that has damaged contemporary politics. The urge to correct the injustices of the past by destroying what we have inherited, to clear the way for a bright new future, has now become dominant in political life.
“The future of mankind, for the socialist, is simple: pull down the existing order, and allow the future to emerge. But it will not emerge, as we know,” writes Scruton. He unsparingly criticizes the leftist orthodoxies of the day, finding them to be “lies and delusions, products of a sentimentality which has veiled the facts of human nature.”
In addition to the danger to culture posed by the radically progressive form of left-wing politics, Scruton can also help us to perceive the danger of reactionary right-wing political myths that would seek, in reaction to the left, to install another tyranny: not the one for summoning the brave new world of the future, but the one summoned by slogans about making things great again, in accordance with an imaginary past.
“The conservative response to modernity is to embrace it, but to embrace it critically, in full consciousness that human achievements are rare and precarious,” writes Scruton.
Whether radical political warfare is conducted by the left or by the right, “we have no God-given right to destroy our inheritance,” he cautions, “but must always patiently submit to the voice of order and set an example of orderly living.” For this task, we need not only to discern real news from fake news, but also the false myths of politics from the true myths of cultural inheritance.
Professors Chris Morrissey and Grant Havers of the Trinity Western University philosophy department will discuss the ideology of populism and how it differs from mainstream liberalism and conservatism at “Left and Right in the Age of Trump,” Trinity Western University, Northwest Auditorium, Tuesday, March 10, 6–8 p.m.