To him, being conservative meant taking the natural order of the world seriously. While he hesitated to use the term environmentalism, he often went to great lengths defending conservatism and conservation of nature. “Kitsch tells you how nice you are.” How nice I must be to engage in the empty platitude of political marches while doing nothing to change my life to make an impact in what I’m marching for, I cannot help but thinking. Though “Faking It” is an essay mostly on art, we can draw connections and conclusions to the tyranny of sentimental political activism so dominant in 2022 and beyond. Kitsch is the ultimate form of narcissism. Roger’s wrestling with love, its meaning, purpose, and our own bastardization of love in modernity-turning it either into a commodity of utilization or sentimental kitsch-is what is found spanning the anthology of essays.įor instance, in dealing with kitsch and faking artistic genius, Roger writes, “All sentimentality is like this: it redirects emotion from the object to the subject, so as to create a fantasy of emotion without the real cost of feeling it.” In other words, rather than love objects for their own worth and value, we fake love of objects to make ourselves feel good. If there is one theme that unites the seemingly disparate collection of essays ranging from how to love animals to music to politics to environment, it is love. I have written elsewhere that the Roger I knew, and that the Roger that everyone should know, is the Roger of love. Art, music, politics, animals, conservationism, nationhood, the meaning of conservatism, are all sampled by the selection of essays offered in this pithy little volume originally published in 2016 but now given a brilliant short introduction by his late in life friend Douglas Murray whose short introduction sets the stage and context for Roger’s life and work. He still won the laurels and admiration of others despite not being a tenured professor at Oxbridge or the Ivies.Ĭonfessions of a Heretic is Roger’s attempt to bring together the depth of his intellectual considerations. He enjoyed the freedom of life as a result of that excommunication. Per Murray, “After all, while other people might have been able to write one of his books, who else could have written them all?”īut perhaps Roger’s excommunication from the Ivory Tower was to his benefit. The fact that Roger wrote on politics, wine, music, art, beauty, philosophy, religion, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Wagner, and other individuals and subject matter is a testament to his erudition not amateurism as unread critics might charge (which was all too common in critiques of Roger the great unlearned and unread, faking as if they were learned, assaulting a man who was unarguably learned and read). It was because he dared challenge the public leftwing orthodoxy by skewering leftwing icons in 1986: Thinkers of the New Left, now republished as Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands. Roger’s academic life came to an end not because of he lacked intellectual substance-far from it, the fact that even after he embarked on a career outside of the academy and still wrote well-received works on Kant, Spinoza, and introductions for Oxford University Press speaks for his intellectual depth. It is, then, appropriate that this short volume of essays begins with a distinction between the liar and the fake the liar is bad enough, the faker, worse-and Roger undresses the fake. Not merely because he was a self-declared conservative, but also because he wasn’t a “faker” in the intellectual life. In a world dominated by pseudo-intellectuals, almost all of whom are liberal or lefties, Roger stood apart. If people know anything about Roger Scruton it is that he was something of a conservative philosopher. As Murray notes, “After all, while other people might have been able to write one of his books, who else could have written them all?” As a former student of Roger’s, when asked what of the many voluminous works of the sage to read, where should I point them? His writings on Wagner? His writings on aesthetics and architecture? His writings on conservatism? What about wine? Perhaps this little volume now suffices. In the wake of Roger’s death in 2020, the British public and cultural intelligentsia lost a figure who was one of a kind. “Heretic might seem like a strong word to describe Roger Scruton,” writes Douglas Murray in his introduction to a new edition of Roger Scruton’s anthology of essays Confessions of a Heretic.
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