Fools, Frauds and Firebrands by Roger Scruton: Review
Following the shameful sacking of Sir Roger Scruton as Government's Housing advisor (for things he never said) I became determined to read this book, which shows the power of ideas, the more our permissive yet simulatneously cencorious society marginalises those outside the liberal metropolitan bubble, the more intriguing those ideas become. In this book he sets to deconstruct a narrative set by the 'deconstructionists'. It is a kind of intellectual revenge if not a scholarly reply to the kind of thinking which inspired the student riots in 1968 Paris which he witnessed and became a Conservative as a result of it and the kind of So-called intellectuals who drove him out academia for the crime of being a Conservative.
This book is generally a very difficult read if not totally impenetrable. But the blame cannot be laid on the author himself but on the left wing authors which he effectively reviews. Scruton's own style is erudite yet entertaining and understandable and even he himself calls out the authors quoted in the book for their meaningless bureaucratic dither and their 'nonsense machine'. He begins by debunking Marxian Historical Materialism explored by left-wing historians such as EP Thompson and their deliberate attempt to view history through the lens of class association and class struggle and Eric Hobsbawm and György Lukács' shameless blind-eye if not justification for Uncle Joe's oppression in the Soviet Union in the name of the emancipation of the proletariat. In his view, Marxian historiography is nothing but a conscious effort to demonise the 'ruling class' and to romanticise the working class; a narrative which places 'Class' on top of the agenda. He is very hesitant to use terms like Capitalism or to describe economies as 'capitalist' but instead prefers to classify them as 'free economies' and goes on to define them as 'one where the order is spontaneous not planned and where the unequal distribution of assets arises by an invisible hand'.
Scruton patiently explains why the two goals of the French Revolution, Liberté and Egalité, are essentially incompatible. "If liberty means the liberation of the individual potential, how do we stop the ambitious, the energetic, the intelligent, the good looking and the strong from getting ahead and what should we allow ourselves by the way of constraining them?". He mentions how some on the left see literature as either politicised and specifically 'socialist or fit for flames'. He also dismisses JK Galbraith's work on economics as nothing more than psychological observations and assumptions about human behaviour dressed up in economic terms to grant it scientific respectability, but also praises him as a 'witty commentator'. Scruton is very dismissive of Dworkin's dominance in interpreting the rights afforded in the US Constitution to the individual (though not to the unborn after Roe v. Wade) and his unflinching advocacy for positive discrimination or as he sees it 'treatment as an equal rather than equal treatment'. Dworkin in Scruton's view has eroded people of their individuality and instead sees them as mere members of a sectional interest group, some of whom in Scruton's words 'burdened with an immovable handicap, notably the white males'.
He briefly mentions the Frankfurt School and how Post Modernist thinkers began to attack, challenge and deconstruct well-established ideas and beliefs which people for years held to be true. They fearlessly attacked the leading narrative and questioned the nature of truth and dismissed objectivity as 'bourgeois ideology'. This is quite interesting since the liberal left assumes that it was the populist right and Donald Trump who attacked objectivity and that 'post-truth' is a new phenomena, not knowing that that ship began sailing many years ago. Foucault is also slammed for seeing the world through the prism of power. Scruton also touches on how revolutionaries establish a monopoly over language, to formulate a kind of newspeak which gives them the high ground 'previously occupied by the truth'. This observation automatically reminds the reader of political correctness and the ongoing (if not completed) cultural revolution within the modern academia to which Scruton himself has fallen a victim. The chapters on Lacanian psychoanalysis are extremely difficult to follow and Gramsci's theory of Hegemony is only semi-intelligible. It does begin to become interesting near the end of the book where he briefly touches on the contribution of the Islamic civilisation and criticises Said for showing no regard for Western Enlightenment values. The paragraph at the penultimate chapter on Khrushchev's contradictory character is also quite interesting, about how he made himself a friend of the intellectual by denouncing Stalin and then to be turned into the enemy of the intellectual for denouncing artistic modernity. It must also be noted that Trotsky's view of the British ruling elite (he thought that the British elite thinks in terms of centuries and continents) provides a very delicious Irony in the age of Brexit and the Tory Party's tactical Short-termism. Sir Roger writes as though he is in awe of Zizek's breadth of writings and his publishing rate of 2 or 3 books a year, notwithstanding the fact that he himself has written on many fields and publishes at a faster rate than his readers can read.
Overall, Scruton's defence of the Right against the Left is not motivated by the love of money, wealth creation and commodification of everything as today's Post Thatcher Neoliberal Right views the world. But a kind of Conservativism which is more concerned about preserving the worthwhile and beautiful elements of our civilisation like beauty itself in the arts and architecture instead of the modernist monstrosities, an active and free civic society (agaisnt the potential abritary powers of big government and big business), the family, some belief in transcendence, order, virtue and truth, all of which came under attack by the New Left. He believes that the onus of proof should be placed upon those who want to deconstruct the established order and replace one elite with another, rather than those who see and appreciate the necessity of certain concepts and practices and the potential dangers of a radical alternative.
