Why roger scruton is a better man than his critics | thearticle

The juggernaut of grievance which attempted to take out Sir Roger Scruton earlier in the year seems, after all, not to have inflicted fatal damage. You will recall that Sir Roger was removed

from his position as head of the government’s _Building Better, Building Beautiful _commission following an interview he gave to the _New Statesman_. The juggernaut was in truth being

readied from the time his appointment was announced, when the offence archaeologists of the Left excavated apparent instances of Scruton’s historical thought crimes. The charge sheet is the

familiar one: homophobia, Islamophobia and whatever else it is we are required to be outraged by this week. It transpired that the interview Scruton actually _gave_ to the _New Statesman_

was related to the interview he was _reported_ to have given only vaguely, in the manner that distant cousins are related despite never having actually met. Sir Roger has now been

reinstated. Quite right too, say his defenders and what, in any case, have his archived comments on Islam or homosexuality to do with his role as chairman of a housing quango? I want to

suggest that these comments _do _matter, though not in the way his detractors seem to think. To bracket away his previously expressed views, to insist on they are irrelevant to his

appointment, is unimaginative. Scruton has made it his life’s work to show that we can think creatively about how conservatism might express the best instincts of the human condition. We

would do well to return the courtesy by showing how (for example) his scepticism about the moral equivalence of all forms of sexual relationship, flows from a worldview which makes him the

perfect choice to reverse the desecrations of the urban planners and volume builders. So that’s where we will start, with sex (if only to keep you reading). Scruton has gone on record as

saying that homosexuality is “not normal”. Case closed? Not quite. The liberal consensus on sexual encounters is that they are types of contract and that the morality of the transaction

reduces to whether or not it is governed by a principle of informed consent. In his _Sexual Desire _Scruton challenges the consensus on the grounds that it offers only an impoverished

account of the metaphysics of desire. Erotic love, he argues, is not an emergent biological property, but is part of the structure of _thought_. The philosophy of mind therefore logically

precedes sexual ethics. To put it another way, our best understanding of the phenomenon of human sexual desire, will require a theory of the mind, which will shape a consequent picture of

sexual morality. When Scruton states that homosexuality is “not normal” he is stating that a distinction between homosexual and heterosexual relations exists at the level of _metaphysics_,

not of _ethics_. To suggest a consequent ethical distinction requires a further argument; Scruton does not promulgate such a distinction. But what theory of mind? Over several decades and in

many books Sir Roger has defended a sort of modified Kantianism. Kant believed that the human person instantiates a paradox. We are both subjects and objects; we are things _in_ the world

but also perspectives _on_ the world; we are both free and bound by the causal descriptions of science. This is mysterious and if there is a solution to the mystery it is glimpsed, Kant

avers, only fleetingly , frequently through the experience of Beauty. Kant wrote about aesthetic judgements as “judgements of taste” which are neither fully subjective nor objective, but are

“invitations to agreement”. They reflect -and therefore offer consolation for- our own paradoxical situation. Beauty, Scruton agrees, is an essential food for the human soul. One ingredient

in a spiritual “five a day”. And the contemporary urban landscape provides little in the way of nourishment. Architecture is art performed in the public space and the “invitation to

agreement” cannot be ignored. In his _Aesthetics of Architecture _and elsewhere Scruton laments the priority the contemporary architect gives to function over form. Beauty has vanished from

our public buildings and the ironic result of this is that nobody wants to be anywhere near them; when their original purpose has expired they are too monstrous to be adapted for another

one. Scruton’s insight is that the crisis in housing is also a crisis in Beauty. The environment of the inner cities causes a coarsening of the spiritual sensibilities of those who have no

choice but to live there. And the resistance to building on green field land is harder to maintain if Beauty is restored as a defining objective of those entrusted to do the building. It is

Scruton’s Kantianism that allows him an answer to the obvious objection: judgements about _what _is beautiful and what is not are _not _“merely subjective”. They are judgements about which

agreement is possible. As he has himself said, who would object if we responded to the volume crisis in housing by building more cities like Bath? All of the above is provisional, of course,

adding up to just a sketch: Scruton’s comments about homosexuality, or the hermeneutics of Islamic scholarship, are not things we need to forgive but flow from a deeply enriching

metaphysical worldview. Philosophy sees meaning in the everyday and attempts (or should attempt) to give an analysis of it. If we think deeply enough there ought to be a connectedness

between what we think about sex, art, music or, indeed, the protocols governing government housing policy.  A word about the juggernaut mentioned in the first paragraph. It ended up in a

cul-de-sac. Stuck. It was Sir Roger himself who assisted in its recovery. He agreed to his reinstatement, he has said, as a way of helping the (“conservative”) government that peremptorily

dismissed him “out of its embarrassment”. He is a far better man than his critics.