The contemporary writer who has most influenced me is Roger Scruton. This Clarion Review interview is a good, short introduction to his thoughts about community, religion, culture, the importance of the sacred, political organization, urbanism, and architecture. Below the fold are a few selections worth pondering.
The problem with classical liberalism is that it never pauses to examine what is involved in ‘not harming others’. Do I leave others unharmed when I destroy my capacity for personal relationships, through drug-taking, promiscuity, or porn addiction? Do I leave them unharmed when I stupefy myself with pop music? I have nothing against individualism, so long as it is recognized that the individual is created by a community and by the moral constraints that prevail in it. The individual is not the foundation of society but its most important by-product.
A normal sexual relationship is one in which desire takes a personal and accountable form, which puts mutuality above gratification, and which envisions a long-term commitment as its fulfillment – a commitment that permits the partners to get beyond mere desire. This kind of normality is threatened by the cult of youth, by the new kind of sex education that makes technique more important than restraint, and by the fear of commitment. Pornography should obviously be removed from the public sphere: but the problem is that the line between public and private has been dissolved by the internet, and only radical measures could now be contemplated. If they are not introduced, however, I fear that human sexual relations will be so damaged that they will gradually retreat to a kind of universal narcissism.
The most important thing about the nation-state is that it defines a territorial form of loyalty, disciplined under a secular law. It says to us: live by the code of neighborliness, live with the strangers who are side-by-side with you, and defend your common home from those who would destroy it. The alternative to this kind of loyalty is not some global togetherness, of the kind that only makes sense at conferences of wealthy cosmopolitans, but a religious loyalty, of the kind exemplified by Islam, from which strangers are excluded, and which dismisses territory and secular law as unimportant. We will see the damage that will be caused by this religious form of loyalty in the coming years, and in response to it Europeans will begin to agree with me about the nation-state. But it will be a hard lesson.
The market, left to itself, puts everything on sale; hence the problem of pornography. We don’t allow children to be sold – not yet: but we do allow them to be treated as market commodities when they are in the womb. It is very obvious, when you look at these facts, that the market is a good only when controlled by moral sentiment – as Adam Smith recognized. The market should be limited by laws reflecting the needs of the moral life. Certain things should be withdrawn from the market, in the way that religion has always tried to withdraw the aspects of human life on which the reproduction of society depends.
Culture is a broad name for the realm of interpersonal feeling, and our way of coming to self-knowledge through relating to others. In all societies to date it has depended on a bedrock of religious faith, or at least on a sense of the sacred and of the observant presence of the gods. We lack that bedrock; but the fact that we are adrift doesn’t mean that we should eat each other like shipwrecked sailors. We should find the path back to the decencies, and that is what culture can offer us.
The most important rite of passage for an adolescent is the transition from self-centered relations to the declaration of a commitment – that was what marriage was all about. We have to rebuild that kind of rite so that adolescents can still have the experience – vital to happiness – of giving themselves to others, rather than taking.
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