Scruton



The recent death of Roger Scruton has brought forth a number of reviews of his ideas and praise for his determined defence of them.

As the article below points out, his ideas coincide well with Trump's campaigns.  Patriotism is once more respectable and Scruton could well be described as the prophet of patriotism.  He is certainly a British patriot and I think he defends that well.

He is spot-on here:

"The Left is united by hatred, but we are united by love: love of our country, love of institutions, love of the law, love of family, and so on... what makes us conservatives is the desire to protect those things, and we're up against people who want to destroy them."

But I think he is dead wrong here:

"Left-wing people find it very hard to get on with right-wing people because they believe that they are evil. Whereas I have no problem getting on with left-wing people because I simply believe that they are mistaken."

That may show what a nice guy Scruton was but it reverses reality.  Leftist beliefs are not mistaken.  They are beliefs tenaciously clung on to because of their destructive potential.  Leftists really are evil and we have a big struggle to defend ourselves and our way of life from their dictatorial impulses

I also think that there is much in Scruton's view of conservatism that is rather idiosyncratic.  To me he is more a reactionary, not a conservative. He summarizes his view here.  There is much that he says about conservative psychology which is correct and insightful (such as: "British conservatism has always been suspicious of ideas" and "conservatism is less a philosophy than a temperament") but he claims to say what conservatism is without once mentioning the major policy preference which springs from that psychology -- the desire for individual liberty.  

And is there ANY American -- conservative or not -- who would agree that "the future is the past"?  That is  Scruton's summary of  a core conservative outlook.  By that criterion there are no (or very few) conservatives in America, I would think.  I prefer an infinitely more influential conservative's view of what is important in conservatism,   Ronald Reagan's :  "If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism....  The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom"

There is a good article here by Janet Albrechtsen which contrasts Scruton's thought with Leftist thought.  Scroll down to the heading "Hate is all that the Left have"

I have written more extensively on Scruton here


Sir Roger Scruton Is Dead, but His Ideas Live On

“Conservatism,” wrote Sir Roger Scruton, “is not a matter of defending global capitalism at all costs, or securing the privileges of the few against the many… Its underlying motive is not greed or the lust for power but simply attachment to a way of life.”

The great English philosopher, taken by cancer at the age of 75, was certainly no Chamber of Commerce conservative. For him, conservatism was not defined by the clash of competing economic systems, but by far simpler and more important matters; the preservation of truth, beauty, tradition, heritage, place, and identity.

His definition of patriotism, too, involved concepts you’re unlikely to hear at a Koch-funded lecture:

“When we wish to summon the ‘we’ of identity we refer to our country. We refer simply to this spot of earth, which belongs to us because we belong to it, have loved it, lived in it, defended it and established peace and prosperity within its borders.”

Scruton’s ideas, marginalized for many decades, have bubbled back to the top of the mainstream conservative movement. Under the leadership of nationalist and populist firebrands like President Donald Trump, Matteo Salvini of Italy, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, and Viktor Orban of Hungary (which recently awarded Scruton the Order of Merit), all manner of Scrutonite ideas have returned to the frontline of politics.

Take the concept of Oikophobes and Oikophiles, which Scruton often talked about. Oikophobia — from the Greek word “Oikos”, meaning “home” — refers to an aversion to one’s home; to its people, its traditions, and its culture.

As Scruton described it in a 2006 speech in Brussels, the Oikophobe opposes and ultimately seeks to supplant his own nation with rootless, bureaucratic political entities:

The oikophobe repudiates national loyalties and defines his goals and ideals against the nation, promoting transnational institutions over national governments, accepting and endorsing laws that are imposed from on high by the EU or the UN, and defining his political vision in terms of cosmopolitan values that have been purified of all reference to the particular attachments of a real historical community.

Is there any doubt that the division between Oikophobes and Oikophiles — or, one might say, globalists and nationalists —  is now the primary political divide in the west? Has it not sidelined the old, 20th-century battle between capitalism and socialism, which defined the left-right divide in that era? To be sure, the Kochs and the Chamber of Commerce and the D.C. think tanks are still deeply entrenched in the conservative establishment, but the momentum of the movement is no longer behind them.

This is not to say that Scruton was in any way soft on socialism. Far from it: in the 1980s, he played a leading role in the underground academic networks behind the Iron Curtain that helped bring about the collapse of Soviet communism. Socialism and communism, after all, are Oikophobe ideologies — throughout the 20th century they laid waste to national loyalties, to traditional architecture, to Christianity and other religions. Their fanatical adherents sought to supplant the authority of the masses with the authority of politburos whose loyalty lay not with their nation or people, but with a transnational ideology.

What set Scruton apart from mass-produced “conservative intellectuals” of the think-tank circuit, however, was his recognition that western neoliberalism was perfectly capable of producing its own kind of Oikophobia.

Even as eastern and Central European nationalism flowered amid the ruins of communism, western politicians — including so-called “conservatives” — pushed for mass immigration and deeper ties to artificial constructs like the E.U., which Scruton firmly opposed. Domestically, opponents of the agenda were demonized as cranks, conspiracy theorists, or racists. (Scruton himself recently fell prey to this well-oiled witchhunt machine). Overseas, western powers sought to import their rationalist, liberal values into cultures to which they were alien, with predictably disastrous results.

The rise of leaders like Trump, Bolsonaro, and Salvini has undermined that post-Soviet order, but Scruton wasn’t uncritical of populism either. He took issue with its American variant’s opposition to free trade, and thought Trump, “a creation of social media,” lacked intellect.

Despite this, Scruton recognized the conservative instinct behind two central ideas of the Trump movement, opposition to mass immigration and a revival of national identity.

As he wrote in 2018:

National identity is the origin of the trust on which political order depends. Such trust does not exist in Libya or Syria. But it exists in America, and the country has no more precious asset than the mutual loyalty that enables the words “we, the people” to resonate with every American, regardless of whether it is a liberal or a conservative who utters them.

Those first words of the United States Constitution do not refer to all people everywhere. They refer to the people who reside here, in this place and under this rule of law, and who are the guardians and beneficiaries of a shared political inheritance. Grasping that point is the first principle of conservatism.

Our political inheritance is not the property of humanity in general but of our country in particular. Unlike liberalism, with its philosophy of abstract human rights, conservatism is based not in a universal doctrine but in a particular tradition, and this point at least the president has grasped.

Happily, Scruton lived to see the twilight years of globalism, the Oikophobe ideology that despises national identity. In the early 2010s, if you said you were a “nationalist”, or that place, culture, and people matter, you would receive funny looks at best or be denounced as a racist at worst. Some people still think that way. And yet, everywhere you look, nationalists are now openly campaigning and winning elections.

Roger Scruton may be dead, but his ideas, grounded in a deep understanding of how people actually are, not how 20th-century ideologies wished them to be, have a destiny that stretches far into the future.

SOURCE  





Church of England has 'swallowed political correctness wholesale', Queen's former chaplain says, as he converts to Catholicism

Dr Gavin Ashenden, who served the Queen from 2008 to 2017, said that the Church is increasingly bowing to the “non-negotiable demands of secular culture” and has remained “astonishingly silent” when it comes to defending Christian values.

Dr Ashenden stepped down from his role in the Church after objecting to the Quran being read during an Anglican service.

He has now chosen to convert to Catholicism because he believes it has the “courage, integrity and conviction to hold the Christian ground”.

“Freedom of speech is slowly being eroded; those who refuse to be ‘politically correct’ risk accusations of thought crime and Christians are being unfairly persecuted,” he wrote in the Mail on Sunday. “And where is the Church of England in this crucial culture war? Is it on the front line? Not that I can see. If anything, it has switched sides. “This isn’t just a shame, it’s a calamity.

“Too often, called upon to defend Christian values, it has remained astonishingly silent. Nowhere is this starker today than in the highly-charged debate over transgender rights, particularly regarding children and teenagers.”

Dr Ashenden criticised the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby for endorsing guidelines to primary schools in November 2017 that encouraged the use of gender neutral uniforms, which said that children "should be at liberty to explore the possibilities of who they might be without judgement or derision".

“Rather than resist such political correctness, and offer a Christian critique, the Church of England has swallowed it wholesale,” he said.

“In each generation, Christianity has a choice: convert its surroundings or be converted by it. Regrettably, I have come to believe that the Church of England has given up on the essentials of the faith at points where it really matters,” he added.

SOURCE 






We have to talk about these Pakistani gangs

The Manchester abuse scandal shows what a horrendous impact political correctness can have.

This week, we have seen the true toll of political correctness. PC isn’t just irritating or stupid. It isn’t just woke students banning sombreros or schools getting iffy about ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’. PC destroys lives.

A report into police and council failings in Manchester has found that gangs of predominantly Pakistani men were free to abuse up to 57 girls after chief cops and local officials turned a blind eye to this foul, cruel behaviour. Why did they turn away? Partly out of fear of stoking racial tensions. Partly because they were worried that drawing attention to the grooming and exploitation of mostly white working-class girls by Asian men might ‘incite racial hatred’ and damage multicultural relations.

Let’s put it plainly: they sacrificed girls to political correctness; they thought that preserving the ideology of multiculturalism was more important than protecting girls from harm.

The independent review into grooming and abuse in Manchester in the mid-2000s, published yesterday, makes for grim reading. It says there were up to 57 victims, mostly white girls aged between 12 and 16, and 97 potential perpetrators, mostly men of ‘Asian heritage’. The review makes clear, from some of the evidence it acquired, that some of the abuse networks were made up of ‘predominantly Pakistani men’. That is, similar to Rotherham, Telford and other parts of the UK, this was a case involving what is sometimes referred to as a Muslim grooming gang.

The girls were groomed, sexually abused, plied with drugs and raped. They suffered, in the review’s words, ‘the most profound abuse and exploitation’. But little was done to help them. Their abusers were not brought to justice. And this catastrophic failing was in part fuelled by what the review refers to as Greater Manchester Police’s concerns about ‘sensitive community issues’. As one news report summarises it, the police were ‘keen not to be seen targeting [a] minority group’. As a result of this PC cowardice, of this mad multicultural sensitivity, the abuse continued.

The review focuses on the tragic case of Victoria Agoglia, a 15-year-old girl in the care of Manchester social services who died from a heroin overdose in 2003. Social services were aware that Victoria was being exploited. She was being injected with heroin by the gangs who used and abused her. She reported being raped. Scandalously, little was done to assist her. Following her death, the coroner said she was known ‘to provide sexual favours’ – a repulsive way of describing the sexual abuse of an underage girl by older men. As the independent review says, such a view of Victoria and her tragic fate ‘significantly underplays the coercion and control’ and ‘harrowing experience’ she was subjected to.

Think about this: we live in a time in which a middle-class woman’s complaint about overhearing a sexist joke or having a hand briefly placed on her knee becomes a huge scandal and can even dominate news coverage, and yet a vulnerable working-class girl can experience horrendous genuine abuse and a coroner, influenced by the view of social services, will refer to it as ‘sexual favours’.

Greater Manchester Police launched Operation Augusta following Victoria’s death. They identified 57 victims and 97 potential perpetrators. Yet hardly any of these people were brought to justice and their ‘activities [were not] disrupted’, as the review says. That is, they carried on abusing. Operation Augusta was wrapped up early and resources were devoted to other, less ‘sensitive’ crimes. As the review says, ‘The authorities knew that many were being subjected to the most profound abuse and exploitation but did not protect them from the perpetrators’.

This is a scandal of epic proportions. The very organisations that are charged with looking after young people who are at risk of abuse failed to do their duty. And they failed to do their duty because they did not want to ruffle community feathers; because they believed, as so much of the establishment does, that ordinary Britons are a vile racist throng and if we hear about an Asian grooming gang we will go crazy. They let their ideology – their commitment to political correctness and to multicultural censorship – distract them from the task of protecting girls from ‘the most profound abuse and exploitation’.

The silence around grooming gangs, in which largely Muslim men abuse largely white working-class girls, has gone on long enough. We need a serious debate about this.

And yet even discussing it is difficult. People are branded racist if they bring it up. You’re an Islamophobe if you talk about the background of most of these men. Sarah Champion was thrown out of the shadow cabinet for daring to write about gangs of Pakistani men abusing girls in her constituency of Rotherham. Corbynistas and Muslim groups accused her of racism.

This unwillingness to talk about, never mind take seriously, the abuse of hundreds of white working-class girls across the country can also be seen in the response to the Manchester scandal. As some people are pointing out, many of today’s newspapers have not led with this story in the way we should expect them to, given it is a huge social and political scandal. What’s more, feminists, so-called progressives and the allegedly pro-working-class left are silent about the whole thing.

There are no hashtags. There is no #MeToo solidarity for these abused girls. There are no expressions of concern from the left. Just shameful, cowardly silence. ‘Make it go away’, is the attitude of these people. Indeed, this week we have had the truly grotesque spectacle of lefties expressing more concern for a duchess, Meghan Markle, than for 57 working-class girls who suffered ‘profound abuse’. They’ve shed more tears over a few rude headlines about the painfully privileged Duchess of Sussex than they have over the revelation that working-class girls were degraded in the most awful way because the authorities couldn’t be bothered to help them.

All day yesterday the chattering classes were droning on about ‘white privilege’ while ignoring the reports about white, mostly poor girls in Manchester being abused. The cognitive dissonance is complete: ‘All white people have privilege’, they cry, as a review reveals the abuse and rape of white girls by mostly Pakistani gangs.

We have to talk about this. We have to talk about how officialdom’s shameful reluctance to investigate these kinds of cases allowed the abuse to continue. We have to talk about how the cultural elite’s silence on these crimes further denigrates the victims, treating them as if they are unworthy of public sympathy. We have to talk about how the new elite’s denigration of white working-class communities as backward and stupid and trashy could well inflame some people’s view of these communities as unimportant, as worthy of abuse. And we have to talk about how the ideology of multiculturalism, the PC unwillingness to look community tensions and divisions in the face, is harming the country.

If we don’t talk about this, far-right elements will continue to make mileage from this issue, girls will continue being abused, and society’s divisions will never be tackled. Only honesty and firmness can stop these things from happening again.

SOURCE 





Wilson Gavin: Online pile-on mob is medieval in its malice

Go now to Twitter — yes, I know, why would anyone? — and you will find messages like that popping up pretty much everywhere after prominent Aust­ralians hurried to delete their mean tweets about Wilson Gavin, who killed himself on Monday.

Gavin, who was gay and ­conservative and just 21, threw himself in front of a train. He is lost now — to his family, and his wide group of friends.

The train driver will never recover­. Also the passengers. And those who watched in horror.

“Don’t care. He started it.” That’s just one of the tweets that appeared online after his death was announced. Can you believe that we live in this world? Because we do. And pity young people. They always have, and likely always will.

Some background: Gavin was the president of the University of Queensland Liberal National Club. He was part of the group that turned up to shout at drag queens reading to children at a Brisbane City Council library event on ­Sunday.

The protest was filmed, and the video got posted on Twitter, and Gavin was seen shouting: “Drag queens are not for kids.”

He soon found himself subjected to what’s known as a pile-on: a mass social media attack. He’s fat! He’s ugly! He’s a miserable beast. A vile homophobe!

But Gavin was himself gay. “I’m not a homophobe. I love gay men,” he said in an interview on Sky during the same-sex ­marriage debate.

But he was a conservative, so people are now saying: “Ah, yes, but he was filled with self-loathing. He hadn’t come to terms with his sexuality. He was living a life of misery.”

It’s a sad and ugly spectacle, but of course we’ve been here before.

Charlotte Dawson was a Sydney model, gorgeous inside and out. Loud and outrageous. She was bullied online, and she blamed trolls for driving her towards ­suicide, before killing herself in her luxury apartment in 2014.

There was also a girl called Dolly, star of the Akubra ads, who was bullied to death in 2018.

Some of those who piled on Gavin — many of whom were middle-aged women with promin­ent media careers — are now mourning his death.

Then you have people saying: but you contributed. You piled on. Have you no shame?

It’s such a complicated story. Gavin is not a sweet little girl in an Akubra being bullied at school. He went to that library. He ­con­fronted the drag queens, said they were “not for kids”. His Facebook page was filled with hateful posts.

Much of the criticism of him was mild. Liberal National Party MP Trevor Evans called the UQ kids “ratbags”. Party leader Deb Frecklington just distanced herself.

But some was vile. Pile-ons ­almost always are intensely ­personal. They go for individuals. It’s not about your argument. It’s about how disgusting you are. How ugly. How slovenly, how ­sluttish. How you should really kill yourself. And yes, people do ­actually say that.

Roman Quaedvlieg, the former Australian Border Force chief, describ­ed it this way: “Shout out to those Twitterati opening the app with gloves on, mouthguard in.”

Because that’s what it’s like: being pummelled. Or else you’re the one throwing the virtual punches, from behind the safety of your screen.

But it’s not just you. It’s millions of people all saying the same thing: gross pig, go and die! Mobs form online, just as they used to do in town squares, and they are just as unpredictable as they ever were. They can swerve in ways you can’t predict.

Pile-ons also aren’t concerned with political argument or nuance. It’s personal abuse. It’s broken. It’s unedited, unfiltered, it’s garbage. It’s doing untold harm to children, and young people, but also to anyone­ in the firing line.

Everyone claims to be in the group copping it most:

Conservatives get the most hate!

No, it’s liberals!

No, it’s those who work for Murdoch!

No, it’s those who work for the ABC!

Public shaming is the subject of the book You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, by British journalist Jon Ronson; and an episode of Black Mirror, Hated in the Nation. It was the subject of Monica Lewinsky’s most recent tour. It’s not new: in the olden days, they’d cast you out beyond the city walls, in sackcloth and ashes, or they’d make you carry a billboard, or throw fruit at you, or sew letters on your clothes.

Now you get the pile-on, and it may make you want to kill yourself. But even that won’t stop them. “Absolutely no sympathy!” said one man after Gavin’s death.

No sympathy for a 21-year-old man who threw himself in front of a train? Nope. Because there’s a Twitter war to fight.

Question is: who’s winning?

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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