Mark Dooley’s Roger Scruton and my modest proposal
It occurred to me, in reading Mark Dooley’s Roger Scruton: The Philosopher on Dover Beach ( Continuum, 2009, ISBN9781847060136) that I might be becoming a gap hunter, or, better, as in more accurate, I might become a gatherer of what people throw in the gap. As trophies? No, as litter.
There is always a gap.
“A rational being has need of such concepts, which brings his [sic] emotions together together in the object so enabling him [sic… —Etc.] — as the Hegelians would say — to find his identity in the world and not in opposition to it. A culture, more-over, is essentially shared; its concepts and images bear the mark of participation, [by who? him?] and are intrinsically consoling, in the manner of religions’ communion, or an act of worship. They close again the gap between subject and object which yawns so frightening in the world of science.”
This is from page 21 (my emphasis) and here Mark Dooley is directly quoting Roger Scruton in his own The philosopher on Dover Beach: Essays published by Carcanet, 1990, reprinted by St Augustine Press (St Augustine? yes, no joke) in 1997, page 109.
This is odd. I can only assume the confusion between the titles is deliberate, but not obvious to me why. No gap between them at all. A stalker perhaps rather than a condensed ghost writer?
Now, I use some of those terms in that quote, and even in that way, but I suspect even when I would use them in that order, I, then, do not claim a special insight for my own preferences.
More importantly, Scruton apparently has an avowed dismissal of Darwin because of his anti-science aesthetic choices, and thus no evolution? What?
I can’t even…
It looks like Scruton has thrown his own very special mix into the gap: god/tradition/meaning/beauty/home/notscience. But for him it is a horse with no name at all, uses the pronoun they for it though (in bold in that quote).
The book itself is like a handy Reader’s Digest Condensed Book for Roger Scruton’s work. I never read him knowingly, dimly aware in a way of him that I am not lacking in awareness of the mountebank Jordan Petersen, who is like everything Roger Scruton fears, but weirdly, both are speaking to a similar “audience”. It’s a generational difference I imagine. Look:
“We might say, therefore, that if philosophers like Plato, Marx and Foucault wish to prioritize the ‘really real’ at the expense of ‘appearances’, Roger Scruton seeks to emphasize the appearances at the expense of the really real.” (page 18)
Some sort of romantic then, except no-science-please-we’re-British.
It’s as if an evil scientist called Friedrich August von Hayek invented a time machine and successfully mated Edmund Burke with Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein, and the baby was left in a doorway to be found by a drunk beadle (namely me it seems) staggering home in Oxbridge. (This way Charles Darwin can be ignored because he never existed on this timeline. Netflix are you listening? ChatGPT is.)
Please consider this last paragraph a trigger warning for the following.
Mark Dooley’s Roger Scruton: The philosopher on Dover Beach is full of weird things from a framework with that time-dilated alt-notright parentage:
- “banks have souls” p138
- markets have spontaneous order (good) but revolutions do not (bad) (this has not aged well in light of January 6, 2021 malarkey and given how good Trump is at business) or revolutions are bad so they do not have souls, or something (Scruton died in 2020)
- quotes Thomas Aquinas to virtuous businesses (p138 ) probably to “advise them” not “work for them” p2
- apparently bad businesses are bad because: liberals (I think he is using this term in this book in the American way, because apparently the market is a wonderful thing, but as markets co-evolved with liberalism to out-perform feudalism to become capitalism… — I am confused by the conservative usage here)
- apparently bad businesses are bad as well because: environmentalism (Enron engaged in greenwashing which destroyed it’s soul or something) page 138 (see “ banks have souls”)
- bad aesthetics are what cause environmental disasters (example? *windmills) p141–2
- Dooley says “I said above that aesthetics and conservative politics are directly linked, in so far as both seek to fulfil man’s [sic] primal [but not as far back as evolution][no Darwin] longing for membership” p141. They have obviously never heard of Mary Douglas, a conservative Catholic anthropologist who could explained they have a bias for that, this does not mean it is the only bias.
- ‘teh left’ is dedicated to the destruction of home p142
- he/they cast nasturtiums on other people’s worldbuilding, but his is pure, you wouldn’t understand anyway
- “Scruton’s only sin was to have pointed out that man [sic] is instinctually conservative” p122 (See comment on Mary Douglas.)
- there is a very curious taxonomy of institutions, which seem to provide the fudge factor for any dissonance between attacking liberals, while endorsing the market with its emergent powers, but then tempering that by saying while state control of all that is bad, corporations are a natural outcome, and there is a sort of vitalism here (don’t mention the evolution) for organising things via share capital, (and this is unavailable to other forms of organisation?? why?)
- Roger is nice because he loves love and collegiality
- uses a reactionary-logism oikophobia to cast nasturtiums on peeps who say xenophobia is bad
- leftists want to destroy home (actually capitalism is doing that, i.e. liberal capitalism, soI guess guild-capitalism as a vitalist force would be good for us)
- markets should be subservient to institutions (by institutions I think he means rich people, like in the good old days when a rich person was king and the state in one person?? not sure really) p131–132
- so markets are ok→ because: institutions | because: rule of law.
I also feel there is some dogwhistling to those worldbuilders who view inflicting pain as a necessary and good part of the job. Cannot pin this one down.
Imagine the framework in which that all makes emotional sense. It compares in weirdness with Putin’s Ruzzia in some ways. I wonder what Scruton said about Putin.
I also have in my reading pile a title by Roger Scruton, but its under a dozen other books, and including Purity and Danger by Mary Douglas, Matt Ridley’s The Origins of Virtue, and two bookbinding manuals. I am not at all tempted to get it out and peer into The face of god.
Ruminations: if Mark Dooley is lower middle brow, and Scruton is higher middle brow, with of course, Hayek, Burke, Wittgenstein being highbrow… hmmmh, this classist taxonomy has helped me generate my own modest proposal as a low brow (me not being a liberal, nor a revolutionary, nor a leftist windmill, nor a corporation with a soul).
The context for me is that the home (that the leftist-liberal-unsouled-revolutionaries are destroying, bastards) is actually being ruined by demography and a likely population bust, but instead of indigenising robots like Japan is doing, I have another proposal.
What we should do is make rich people have lots and lots of children, at least one child per one million dollars. There is no reason Bill Gates or Elon Musk or Gina Rinehart cannot have hundreds of children, if not thousands, thousands I say!
They could get extra wombs attached like butt implants.
This is how we can eradicate poverty.
Reposted and revised from whyweshould.substack.com in Feb 2023
