Roger Scruton, Culture Counts

In Culture Counts, Roger Scruton mounts a defence of the heritage of high culture of the West against what he perceives as its enemies: fanatical Islam (only glancingly referred to), the operations of the market (briefly discussed near the end) and, above all, the attitude of 'repudiation' advanced by multiculturalists in the universities. He argues that the literature, music and art handed down to us - or at any rate the best of it - contains a body of emotional and moral knowledge that is intrinsically valuable and provides the imagination with a purer and better air to breathe in than the popular confections of the moment. The purpose of education in the humanities should not be to benefit the student with a set of instrumental skills, but rather to look after the culture itself by training a fresh set of guardians to look after it. The criticism we teach and practise should be to do with elucidating the aesthetic value and moral lessons of works. Despite the depredations he sees wrought by the multiculturalists, Scruton sees hope in the efflorescence of traditional practice in neoclassical architecture, music that returns to pre-Modernist tonality and writing that is similarly embedded in the conversation of canonical works.

One strength of Scruton is always the writing. He frames his arguments clearly and gracefully in a rhythmical prose that is a pleasure to read and a standing lesson for the tone-deaf scribes of the journals. His style is precise but also conveys deep feeling. Consider the phrasing and cadences of this sentence from his description of the decline of architectural teaching: 'Students of architecture were no longer to learn about the properties of natural materials, about the grammar of mouldings and ornaments, about the discipline of the orders, or the nature of light and shade'. Whatever one's views on building design, that is a beautiful summation of the essence of the classical view. The author is particularly strong at explicating philosophical points. I came away from his discussion of the different kinds of knowledge, for example, with that pleasant sensation of having had my mind tidied and cleared. And similarly with the passage on the thin crust of normality, with barbarous instincts beneath and the serene air of art and spiritual empathy above, and in many other instances. Some points are made in a single striking sentence: the few pages on Foucault, for example, ask us to consider whether that thinker can help us at all in elucidating the truth-value of any part of a governing discourse. He can be very funny, as in the attack on Le Corbusier. And I warmed to Scruton's sense of battling against the powers-that-be in academia. Though I am out of touch with the academic world now, I sense that his kind of traditionalism still has little purchase in the modern seminar and lecture hall. The book is an interesting contrast to John Carey's What Good are the Arts, which had the peculiar quality of an author sounding cross at the very idea of a higher culture, even though he was clearly on the winning side. One has to look hard for Carey's enemies - presumably Scruton and a few senior members of Oxford college common rooms - but Scruton's are at any rate easy enough to discern. I wonder if both authors overstate the influence of university courses generally.

Some parts of the book left me with reservations. Perhaps the weakest part is his chapter on teaching, with its wildly romantic vision of children rote-learning and acquiring a love of medieval Latin and the classic texts. There is no sensible suggestion here how such a programme could possibly be implemented, and I don't even see what he imagines happening in a lesson. Most of what he posits, concerning the slow acquisition of moral truths, would happen on a subliminal level anyway rather than by direct instruction. The chief enemy of promise in schools is not an academic culture of scepticism, but the dominant discipline of accountancy, which demands that any piece of work should be judged against a hyper-rational scheme which breaks down skills and 'objectives' into specific categories, each carrying percentage points. It is an insane approach to the business of learning (for a business is what it has become in all sectors of education), and has nothing whatever to do with the way the mind works or how culture lives. But unfortunately it is the system which dictates the practices of every single school and teacher in Britain today. Next to this one can gaze at Scruton's vision and sigh a little. But he must know that his kind of education has no chance whatever of taking effect, and so the chapter really reads as the indulgence of a fantasy.

Nor am I sure what our author would like to happen at university level, except for a mass removal of feminists, Marxists and the like. He castigates universities for adopting a programme based on various kinds of scepticism; but perhaps it is the job of a university to be sceptical. There are some well-aimed shots about some kinds of study which simply deaden the mind because the only tolerable answers are those known in advance; and the point that the so-called liberalism of some kinds of theoretical inquiry is simply a way of excluding anything off-message seems hard to counter, at least at an abstract level. It does seem to be the case that the same dismal left-wing dogma is preached across many university courses. What alternative is being offered, though? Elevating selected cultural artefacts to the 'high' category carries its own dangers. It misses the internal tensions which the great works and their creators leave us with. Is it repudiation to point out that in our greatest literature we also find anti-Semitic caricature? What are we to make of the fact the The Faerie Queene carries in its sumptuous verse the notion that the Irish are savages and should be exterminated by some kind of murderous robot? Is this a denial of our heritage? The issues seem to me rather to be things worth discussing. His reading of texts as embodiments of moral lessons seems painfully reductive (the single example of what we are meant to take from King Lear is most unconvincing. Nor do I see that one has to choose between Scruton's kind of reverence for art as embalming the best that has been thought and said on the one hand, and the hard-edged world of modern criticism on the other. I can be moved by King Lear one day and read a cultural materialist discussion of it the next, without the second experience damaging the first. This is, to be sure, a cognitive challenge, but the human mind is well equipped to perform distinct and even opposite operations at the same time.

Scruton's view continues a tradition from Arnold, Eliot and Leavis, and it is important that this tradition persists. In this book at any rate it seems to be deeply informed by a sense of some lost world of collective values, located chiefly in the shared beliefs of religion. Around Scruton's writing there hovers the yearning for community, for a way of thinking that confers membership in a society resting on firm foundations, at peace with itself. I simply have no idea where in history that world is to be found. I gained a great deal from this book, and would recommend it as a stimulating read; but I do not find myself sufficiently enchanted by the lament for an imagined golden age to seek membership of this particular club.