Kass and U. Chicago

Leon Kass, who seems to believe that Murray Gell-Mann is a nihilist for doing physics without God, offers his endorsement of Roger Scruton's 2007 diagnosis on Faith and Feeling in "Culture Counts" (on the back dust jacket just above Robert Bork.)

Scruton, whose book is so devoid of content as to be a very light read, offers us that there are no values without faith because the species generates cultural knowledge out of religion.  No culture without religion.
Culture begins with burial, not with consciousness.  He has not yet argued for "no language without religion", but he has come close.  Curiously, at one point he seems to come quite akin to the later  Habermas. For all his attention to music, Scruton offers no mention of Langer. But imagine: linguists, braving Siberian summer insects, seeking to preserve a record of languages - but without a cross dangling about their neck or a holy book in their knapsack - surely it is obvious that they are victims of modernist nihilism.  Conservationists working anywhere on the global without a religious inspiration are only going through the motions.  But Scruton, a Kantian, has an option open to him to avoid this psychologism: the end is to transmit the sacred core of the culture.  It suffices that they teach the core: they need not believe it, just serve the end.  But ultimately, to what end?  And to ask that question is to already have succumbed to nihilism.  Start with faith, end with faith.

Scruton has paid too much attention to the merely trendy and the lowbrow post-modernist/deconstructionists to notice that science, history and literary criticism continue regardless of religious revivals.  What is most noticeable in the book is the lack of 20th century culture: those who fled the Nazis to England and America were not all pleading for a return to Torah and The Book of Revelation.  Modernism, in the hands of Scruton, was mere nihilism.  It makes a good sermon, but poor intellectual history.  Even Charles Taylor serves up better than this poor fair.

Contrary to Scruton, Gorecki can be appreciated by the atheist, the agnostic and the theist.  Even a coherent theology would be no guarantor of aesthetic judgment.  An atheist myself, Milosz remains one of my core poets of the century as I struggle to master enough Polish to assess his translators.

The real humbug has to be his appeal to Solzhenitsyn: the writer returned to Russia embracing Putin, talk radio and even further embarrassment.  They are not talking about Solzhenitsyn in Saint Petersburg - where they have not all returned to the Church.

The truly naive notion may be that an Islam that embraces science, art and history will not remain a threat to western freedom.  Even more naive is his total neglect of what has been achieved in nations which did not go through America's "revolution".  The romance of that War of Independence glosses over the fate of those who were loyal to the British throne and the revolutionary rhetoric which it spawned.  Scruton may know how America was spared townsquare slaughter, but he has not told us.  Nor has he explained away Jim Crow in a Christian nation.

Scruton's book is so sad because of the influence it may have on policy makers who need a light read.  A corrective to Scruton is to read literary critics of the DDR with their appreciation of Northrop Frye as the state prevented the rebuilding of churches.  Scruton is flat wrong: literary criticism and appreciation of the classics thrived in DDR, as did classical music.  These were Germans!  In a police state, but still Germans!

As a homophobe, Scruton may find his followers among Muslims in secular Turkey and in Egypt.  He will certainly appeal to the headmasters of Lutheran private schools across America.

The book is worth reading because of his true assessment that America remains a conservative Christian nation with no appreciation that neither history, nor science nor mathematics are in need of his God let alone the moral teachings of Jesus in the mouth of Saul of Tarsus (who never met the man.)

I stand by Elton John: Jesus was gay.  I stand by the gays of Holland: they should not be denied communion.

Scruton is a symptom of what befell Anglo-American philosophy when it was learned that Anscombe had secured a Catholic funeral for Wittgenstein: religion vindicated as essential.  It is difficult to convey to what extent the atheist Russell has been an embarrassment to a great many published philosophers.  The Ayers and Carnap doctrines combined with Ryle's behaviorism have all created an environment in which patent nonsense regains respectability: no values without God, no self without the soul, no evolution without design, no mathematics without God - and without God, only nihilism.

The anthropological facts are plain: a God as conceived by St. Paul or Augustine or Aquinas or Kant has not been necessary to all cultures.  It is simply not the case that in the absence of missionaries, that animism evolves into monotheism.  Not all cultures with respect for the bones of the ancestors are hiding deep-rooted theism.  A city of widows should be proof enough that not all is well under Krishna even without the missionaries of Christ or Mahomet (Scruton should take a look at the life of a Tagore.)

Rickie Gervais might wonder when Scruton will argue that the Viking custom of burial in a flaming ship is truly at the core of the Danish heart of English culture but masked by Guillaume le Batarde - and from there it is one step to throwing the wife on the teak vessel so that her life can be complete.  And why stop at tossing one wife into the flames?  Some undergraduate needs to remind Scruton that since the Salic laws, marriage in our culture has been understood as a contract.  Christianity came close to disavowing marriage altogether - as have various Christian sects in history.  Marriage based on the Bible was not an experiment that Kant himself attempted, nor did Spinoza.

The clue to Scruton may be in Kant on the subject of masturbation; maybe one of Scruton's students can enlighten us on that subject.

One baffling element: Scruton throws in a passing reference to Lessing.  What can he have been thinking?

The key pieces missing for his book to make anything like his argument that the core of culture is faith: a response to some of the great poetry to emerge in this century from poets very far from his standpoint (oh, yes, all poetry in English is only possible because of the translation of the Bible which itself engendered the very English we speak ... what was I thinking ... all poetry in German devolves from Luther's Bible ...)

Who might this book serve? Undergraduate believers who are feeling brow-beaten by students or lecturers versed in  Adorno?  But for all Scruton's attention to Adorno, not a single mention of Weber.  Porridge, when the late hour suggested a hot meal - and porridge served cold at that.

Humour: I wonder whether Ruth Padel had been reading Scruton when she decided to take on Derek Walcott? She merits one mention in his book, deservedly so, I would say - but the zealous moralizing, the naiveté ... it really does seem to fit.

I predict that Scruton has a future at the U. of Chicago and, regardless, is sure to be seen often in America at one of the many institutes or foundations now pandering to the thoughtful theist and the ready book.  Those theists: so much can be done with so little research (this book on secularism is almost devoid of references to accounts of the nature and rise of secularism.)  And in America, as in most cultures, there is always work for a homophobe.

We are not in a world besieged: in America we have seen the enemy - and they be us.

Scruton has seen first hand the role that religion played in over-throwing Communism is the DDR, in Poland and in the former Czechoslovakia: what he must answer is the question of the extent to which organized religion had itself undermined any alternative, any liberal option, to the conservatism which did so much to sustain Bolshevik and Communist extremism and disarm opposition when it was needed.

The thesis that religion is the ultimate vessel conveying culture into the future is one thing - that it is religion that will ensure the survival of what is best in our western societies is quite another (oops, mere Western civilization, and tawdry at that.)  Would the views of Scruton have kept the West from colonizing Africa, kept the missionaries at home, stayed us from forcing concessions in Japan and China?  Would his views have moderated "Manifest Destiny" and protected both the indigenous and the bison?

The role of religion in the confident onset of The Great War seems to have escaped Scruton.  Europe as a continent of wars is what America escaped.  Not a colony, she was not obliged to provide canon fodder for England.  This resource is the resource which would not be available to England.  This has escaped Scruton.  He is not a New Zealander.  Nor did his great-uncles from Punjab die in the trenches of Belgium or France.

But Scruton is infatuated with America.  It is good for academic business.

Corrective to Scruton: Raymond Aron on philosophy of history
Corrective to Scruton: international maritime law without religion
Corrective to Scruton: a ban on torture, without mention of religion
Corrective to Scruton: a ban on draglines over coral reefs without mention of "God for Cod".

Recent lesson: fundamentalist US President with no regard for international law or the role of the UN or prohibitions on torture.

Question: what possible end is served by protecting the great apes if doing so serves to foster secularization?
Scruton's Answer: Because he likes to have his cake and eat it, too.

The conservative education credo: teach them the classics.
The American conservative education credo: teach them the classics in expurgated translation.

Corrective to Scruton: Richard Feynman in the exotic dancers bar.
Motto: keep bongos near your deathbed

A vacation tip for Scruton: visit multicultural Toronto on a busy summer day mid-week and listen to the languages spoken on Yonge Street between the old railway station and Bloor to the north.  All that, and without a revolution.  Oh yes, they tagged God on when they got a constitution.  Habit.  And the PM of the day was a closet RC.

The final corrective to Scruton and kin will come when a Scandinavian nation becomes predominantly atheist while producing films which people want to see and books which they will want to translate.  And maybe one major poet per century (and do you really need more than that?)  But no cartoons about the Prophet, if you please.

Roger: Jesus was gay!
A better read: "A House for Mr. Biswas"