• Log In

The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

A Philosophy Podcast and Philosophy Blog

Subscribe on Android Spotify Google Podcasts audible patreon
  • Home
  • Podcast
    • PEL Network Episodes
    • Publicly Available PEL Episodes
    • Paywalled and Ad-Free Episodes
    • PEL Episodes by Topic
    • Nightcap
    • Philosophy vs. Improv
    • Pretty Much Pop
    • Nakedly Examined Music
    • (sub)Text
    • Phi Fic Podcast
    • Combat & Classics
    • Constellary Tales
  • Blog
  • About
    • PEL FAQ
    • Meet PEL
    • About Pretty Much Pop
    • Philosophy vs. Improv
    • Nakedly Examined Music
    • Meet Phi Fic
    • Listener Feedback
    • Links
  • Join
    • Become a Citizen
    • Join Our Mailing List
    • Log In
  • Donate
  • Store
    • Episodes
    • Swag
    • Everything Else
    • Cart
    • Checkout
    • My Account
  • Contact
  • Mailing List

Roger Scruton on Religion and Politics

July 7, 2011 by Mark Linsenmayer 5 Comments

The recent interest here in Roger Scruton (who I'd really only known due to his Kant scholarship)

...He rejects the western assumption that while freedom makes us vulnerable to terrorist attack, it ultimately gives us the strength to triumph. “You can’t build civilisation on freedom alone, it’s just a welcome by-product. If you just have freedom it degenerates into mob rule, which abolishes freedom. Freedom has to be within the framework of institutions that demand obedience. There has to be a culture, therefore, that encourages obedience.”

Liberals argue that successful societies don’t need rigid Christian rule books: it is up to capitalists, artists et al to make of a country what they will. But Scruton contends that our institutions, built on Christianity, are collapsing because they now have no guiding principles.

Though he's advocating religion, he's against fundamentalism:

“It’s dangerous to say this these days, but religion requires the erosion of the original sentiment by the friction of society,” he says. The problem with Islam is nobody dares check its religious fervour unlike, say, the Church of England, that has so brilliantly educated us to understand that God doesn’t really exist. “Once you get the fundamentalist, who thinks only the Koran is the authority, you have problems. And all Islam is fundamentalist.”

So much like Hitchens, Scruton is reacting to 9/11 and to "my religion is right" militancy, and he even claims that "any religious text is a bundle of contradictions," but instead of wanting to do away with the whole business, he lays the blame on our having "lost touch with Christian roots, which have been usurped by our worship of celebrity" which led "the West to 'propagate its achievements and temptations around the world, seducing people away from pious ways, offering a merely materialist substitute."

Overall the article is rather rambling and merely lets out a provocative quote to rouse the reader then moves on to something else before it can be explained, so I left this with no real sense of what Scruton's philosophy is about, i.e. what makes it philosophical as opposed to that held by many a political hack. The exception is what appears to be his ambivalence towards religious influence in politics: religion is instrumental for keeping people in line but perhaps needs to be tempered by a power struggle with other social elements. In other words, institutions are vital, but distributed power keeps any one institution from messing things up.

-Mark Linsenmayer

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Filed Under: Web Detritus Tagged With: philosophy blog, political philosophy, Roger Scruton

Comments

  1. Daniel Horne says

    July 7, 2011 at 12:37 pm

    Hi Mark,

    I’m more troubled by Scruton’s antipathy toward Islam than Hitchens’. Hitchens’ argument is internally consistent: All religion is all bad all the time. Scruton instead claims that Christianity is more compatible with western democracy than is Islam. That seems to me, to put it politely, unsupported by any fair historical review. To pick one of a hundred examples, it was not so long ago that American Protestants were hostile to American Catholics, precisely on the question of whether Catholicism was inherently anti-democratic:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Poperob.jpg

    Anyway, if it will help determine whether Scruton’s arguments are any better founded than, say, Pat Buchanan’s, this interview may be enlightening:

    http://youtu.be/jWmUXjPXNP4

    Reply
    • Mark Linsenmayer says

      July 7, 2011 at 1:43 pm

      Yeah, actually Harris might be a better example than Hitchens: a blanket condemnation of Islam in particular out of the fear of terrorism. The fact that this has been mistaken as having anything to do with “philosophy” bewilders me.

      Reply
      • Daniel Horne says

        July 7, 2011 at 2:10 pm

        Sure, although to Hitchens’ “credit” (for consistency, at any rate), he was dissing Islam before it was cool:
        http://youtu.be/plaDcrlUkb0

        Reply
  2. Tom McDonald says

    July 8, 2011 at 1:53 pm

    Daniel: I’m perplexed when you say of Scruton’s claim that “Christianity is more compatible with western democracy than is Islam” that his claim is “unsupported by any fair historical review”. It seems to me rather that your judgment here of what constitutes a “fair historical view” can only derive from the orthodox Enlightenment stance (or put less politely, ideological dogma, in my view) that Western modernity was the discovery of naturalistic principals purer and deeper than the distorting and polluting influence of historical Christianity. In contrast to this standard 18th-century doctrine fallen back on again and again by those who believe science is a cure-all, it seems rather that any sober assessment of Western history from a humanities perspective could not fail to see Western humanism and individualism and democracy arising from the (Christian) Protestant reformation.

    Reply
    • Daniel Horne says

      July 8, 2011 at 3:08 pm

      Hi Tom,

      Reading your comment, I’m not sure exactly where our disagreement lies. I certainly don’t think democracy spread through Europe via “discovery” of cultural, scientific, or philosophical principles.

      By “fair historical review,” I mean that history provides several dozen examples of Christian cultures being just as hostile toward democracy as Islam, and of non-Christian cultures adopting democratic norms. And I make no claim to being sober while assessing Western history! Also, by “fair historical review,” I mean “any historical review that I endorse,” so let’s be clear on our terms!

      Anyway, there’s nothing inherent in Christianity qua religion to make it more accepting of democracy than Islam qua religion. Much of what we think of as democratic institutions (secret balloting, a republican Senate, trial by jury) arose in pagan Greece, Rome, and Scandinavia. Modern Japan adopted democracy while rejecting Christianity. As did Islamic Turkey. Conversely, many parts of the Christian world abandoned democratic principles while continuing to embrace Christianity as a dominant social norm. (See, e.g., most of 20th C. Spain and Latin America, including the Philippines.)

      I agree there was a resurgence of democratic principles through certain parts of Europe (not the Catholic ones) spread at about the same as the Protestant reformation (though wouldn’t a more traditional account trace it back to the Magna Carta?)

      But you get into a chicken-and-egg problem as to which caused what, or even if one caused the other. Both Protestantism and rising European democratic norms (for the landed class, anyway) could be described as historical byproducts of rising economic prosperity — isn’t that a standard Marxist account? Marxist or not, I lean more to the idea that societal institutions and economic conditions better account for the rise (and fall) of democracy than do cultural norms. I think the religious/cultural norms follow the economics, they don’t lead.

      The cash difference between my approach and Scruton’s (as I understand it) is that I won’t write off whole cultures (or sub-cultures) as being opposed to democracy due to the religious colors they claim.

      Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

PEL Live Show 2023

Brothers K Live Show

Citizenship has its Benefits

Become a PEL Citizen
Become a PEL Citizen, and get access to all paywalled episodes, early and ad-free, including exclusive Part 2's for episodes starting September 2020; our after-show Nightcap, where the guys respond to listener email and chat more causally; a community of fellow learners, and more.

Rate and Review

Nightcap

Listen to Nightcap
On Nightcap, listen to the guys respond to listener email and chat more casually about their lives, the making of the show, current events and politics, and anything else that happens to come up.

Subscribe to Email Updates

Select list(s):

Check your inbox or spam folder to confirm your subscription.

Support PEL

Buy stuff through Amazon and send a few shekels our way at no extra cost to you.

Tweets by PartiallyExLife

Recent Comments

  • Seth Paskin on PEL Eulogies Nightcap Late March 2023
  • John Heath on PEL Eulogies Nightcap Late March 2023
  • Randy Strader on Ep. 309: Wittgenstein On Certainty (Part Two)
  • Wes Alwan on PEL Nightcap February 2023
  • Kunal on Why Don’t We Like Idealism?

About The Partially Examined Life

The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don’t have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we’re talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion

Become a PEL Citizen!

As a PEL Citizen, you’ll have access to a private social community of philosophers, thinkers, and other partial examiners where you can join or initiate discussion groups dedicated to particular readings, participate in lively forums, arrange online meet-ups for impromptu seminars, and more. PEL Citizens also have free access to podcast transcripts, guided readings, episode guides, PEL music, and other citizen-exclusive material. Click here to join.

Blog Post Categories

  • (sub)Text
  • Aftershow
  • Announcements
  • Audiobook
  • Book Excerpts
  • Citizen Content
  • Citizen Document
  • Citizen News
  • Close Reading
  • Combat and Classics
  • Constellary Tales
  • Exclude from Newsletter
  • Featured Ad-Free
  • Featured Article
  • General Announcements
  • Interview
  • Letter to the Editor
  • Misc. Philosophical Musings
  • Nakedly Examined Music Podcast
  • Nakedly Self-Examined Music
  • NEM Bonus
  • Not School Recording
  • Not School Report
  • Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts
  • PEL Music
  • PEL Nightcap
  • PEL's Notes
  • Personal Philosophies
  • Phi Fic Podcast
  • Philosophy vs. Improv
  • Podcast Episode (Citizen)
  • Podcast Episodes
  • Pretty Much Pop
  • Reviewage
  • Song Self-Exam
  • Supporter Exclusive
  • Things to Watch
  • Vintage Episode (Citizen)
  • Web Detritus

Follow:

Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | Apple Podcasts

Copyright © 2009 - 2023 · The Partially Examined Life, LLC. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy · Terms of Use · Copyright Policy

Copyright © 2023 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in