Our dreary present, in its moralizing arrogance, believes it can judge countless generations of our ancestors, while refusing to even try and grasp the spiritual richness of our past.
Contrary to what many Western journalists and politicians persistently assume, there exists little continuity between Imperial Russia and the Soviet regime, just as there was no ideological or political identity between pre-war France and the Vichy regime.
It is spurious to insist, as many do, on a contradiction between conceiving of Greek independence through a yearning for the Byzantine past, on the one hand, and the romantic-nationalist lionizing of ancient Hellas, on the other.
Western political philosophy focuses on inherent features of man, and so Europeans were able to build a system which recognises and respects them. It is arguably the best system in the world, which is evidenced by the success of the countries that adopted it. It safeguards everything we value, and we should do everything to preserve it.
If journalism helped Scruton to synthesise ideas in a single thought, it also displayed the rich literary gifts which first brought him to the attention of the British public in the 1970s. For him, journalism was much more than conveying information, news, or opinion. It was an attempt to stir the imagination of the reader so that the ‘unfashionable opinion’ being expressed might become theirs.
Francis Bacon was the talisman of Renaissance science, producing an inductive philosophy which he advanced with all the zeal of a religious convert. But as far as he was concerned, promoting such methods required no actual conversion from the Christian beliefs which prevailed in his day.
Eurasianism, with its glorification of the Mongol Golden Horde and eastward orientation, tends to divorce Russia from its European heritage, a divorce that is incompatible with any drawing closer to Ukraine.
Geography and natural resources will motivate political conflict, but identity and national construction will determine what social cleavages can be exploited by local and foreign agents in that conflict.
The notion that there are limits to our growth is holding the West in a psychological stranglehold. Whereas other civilizations are thriving, the West suffers from a weariness that stifles any belief in further progress. This weariness has had a name for almost 2,000 years: Acedia.
The idea of motherlessness in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Huxley’s Brave New World may help us understand our own age, in which state encroachment and market forces work together for the abolition of motherhood.
World order will tend to follow its own momentum. Rivals to U.S. hegemony like China do not, therefore, represent an alternative world-order, but an alternative bid for leadership over developing structures of biopolitical control.
Liberals like to claim that their political worldview is not even ideological, but simply what happens when kindness and common sense are allowed to prevail over dogmatism, tyranny, and impractical forms of political romance. But is liberalism, the ruling philosophy of our modern world, really so immune from the utopian temptation?
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