You are here

Tag: Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton Britain Culture wars 

Roger Scruton knew the precious value of freedom

Melanie, ,

The death of Sir Roger Scruton is a loss that our troubled culture can ill afford. He was Britain’s greatest contemporary philosopher and also its most lyrical. Much misrepresented and traduced, Sir Roger analysed, defended and embodied conservatism which he understood to a rare degree. He articulated and championed the deep connections between conservatism, the English countryside and national identity. He recognised that without a shared home and culture based on the inherited values, customs and laws of a nation state there can be no sense of “we”. Above all,…

Read More
conversation Culture wars 

The secular inquisition

Melanie, ,

A few days ago, the philosopher John Gray wrote on the Unherd website a bleak but precisely directed analysis of why the humanities can’t be saved. It used to be said, he wrote, that the humanities taught people how to think. No longer. “Students learn an intra-academic argot – intersectionality, hetero-normativity and the like — that has zero utility in the world in which they will go on to live.They also learn that disagreement in ethics and politics is illegitimate. Anyone who departs from the prevailing progressive consensus is not…

Read More
Britain Culture wars 

The appalling treatment of Sir Roger Scruton

Melanie, , ,

The shocking character assassination and sacking of Sir Roger Scruton is beyond belief. Scruton, Britain’s pre-eminent philosopher, was interviewed by the New Statesman for its current issue. The interviewer, deputy editor George Eaton, tweeted that Scruton’s remarks were “outrageous”. What was outrageous, however, was the use Eaton made of them. For he tweeted about what Scruton had said: “On Hungarian Jews: ‘Anybody who doesn’t think that there’s a Soros empire in Hungary has not observed the facts.’” But in the interview Scruton didn’t mention that Soros was a Jew. He…

Read More