This Wednesday: class on Roger Scruton

Just a reminder that there is a class this Wednesday, 28 January, 6pm, at the Dominican Chaplaincy, Edinburgh. All welcome. (Free, but donations encouraged!)

I will be leading the class with a response by Dr Elizabeth Drummond Young. Scruton is a leading conservative philosopher whose writings contain much that Catholics should be engaging with, both in the field of social teaching, but also in the fields of art and religion.

I'll be concentrating on his work on society and politics. Whilst noting many points of agreement between Scruton and Catholic thought in this area, particularly in the importance of the 'little platoons' of civil society and the family, I'll also be noting points of tension. In particular, I'll be digging away at the following three areas:

a) Human nature. Scruton has a sense of human nature as being predominantly accessed through a particular culture and history. Whilst noting the truth in this, I shall argue that Catholic thought preserves a much stronger sense of a universal human nature existing across (and indeed often despite) more local cultures. In particular, our main end is the encounter with God in the Beatific Vision which stands outside culture and our salvation is mediated by a universal institution, the Church, rather than a national one.

b) Fragility. Scruton has a strong sense of the fragility of civilization, reinforced by his reflections on the current state of the West. Again, whilst noting the truths of this viewpoint, it runs counter to an ingrained optimism in Catholicism, perhaps most obviously expressed in the words of Matthew 16:17: Tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram aedificabo Ecclesiam meam; et portae inferi non praevalebunt adversum eam. ('You are Peter, and on this Rock I shall build my Church; and the gates of Hell will not stand against it.')

c) Nostalgia. There's strong sense in Scruton of passing glory. I suspect this is (in part at least) the result of Scruton's methodology which involves a retrospective understanding of tradition and a culture. (As Joni Mitchell put it: “Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got till it's gone"!) Again, whatever the truth in this, it runs against both the possibility of understanding the human condition apart from a local culture, and also of the prophetic office of the Church.

If you're interested in reading something before Wednesday, I'll be starting my reflections from the following papers by Scruton available online (click on them for the links):

Democracy and Islamic Law
Should countries by more like families?

Hope to see you Wednesday!