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Roger Scruton: Conservatives must think. So come and do so at the second Conservative Renewal conference.

By Roger Scruton

During 13 years of opposition the Tory Party had the opportunity to think. Issues that were of ever increasing prominence in the minds and the feelings of the electorate were ignored or fudged by the Party hierarchy. There was a need to re-examine the core beliefs and assumptions of Tory politics, and to reconnect with the instincts and values on which the Tories had in the past depended for their support. But the Party entered into coalition government with virtually no intellectual contribution of its own, and with a rooted desire to avoid the places where thought was needed. It was as though the entire period out of office had been spent sipping cocktails in the Bahamas, watching the antics of the Labour Government on television with quiet murmurs of dismay. Issues where the Party should be taking the lead – the environment, marriage and the family, the place of religion in the public square, press freedom, policing, the armed forces – have all been addressed as though the Labour Party were still in office, and as though there were no need to change one iota of the left-liberal agenda. True, in the matter of Europe the Party has made moves to protect national sovereignty, though largely because UKIP has forced the Tories to recognise that, by not doing so, they have jeopardised their core support. Perhaps it is only in the fields of education and welfare that we see the evidence of serious thinking, with Michael Gove and Iain Duncan-Smith making a courageous attempt to unravel fifty years of egalitarian claptrap.

Roger Scruton: Truth in Politics

By Roger Scruton

Human beings make rational choices, and choices are rational only if they seek out the truth. But the truth may be uncomfortable, so that we have a motive to avoid it. Or it may be unacceptable to those on whom we wish to impose our decisions, in which case we have a motive to conceal it. Perhaps the deep truth about our condition is so uncomfortable that we stand in need of some collective delusion that will make us governable – so Plato thought, and advocated the ‘Noble Lie’ as a means of crowd-control. The totalitarian systems of the 20th century took this seriously, and rewrote the human condition in terms of mythical ‘struggles’ between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, or the master race and the human vermin. In due course the totalitarian project advanced in the way foretold by George Orwell, inventing a language and a doctrine that would make the truth inexpressible, so that people would have to ‘live within the lie’, as Havel put it.

Matthew Sinclair: The three elements of good climate policy

Matthew Sinclair is Director of The TaxPayers' Alliance.

I think Roger Scruton is absolutely right both in his book – Green Philosophy – and his article for this website about the motive that can cause people to protect their environment: it is oikophilia; love of the common home that we share with those dead and those who have yet to be born. You can see that motive at work when beautiful creatures, landscapes and buildings are threatened. No commandment from a politician or bureaucrat is needed to encourage people to rally to their defence.

Unfortunately, oikophilia has its limits. It works well when the environmental good at stake is something you can see, hear, taste or touch. It motivates what Peter Huber called – in his book Hard Green – hard greens, not soft greens who are more concerned about concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and similarly intangible problems. No one feels in their bones that an extra tonne of carbon dioxide in the air is an attack on the integrity of their home. They need to be told that it is even there.

Roger Scruton: Conservatism and the Environment

By Roger Scruton

There is no political cause more amenable to the conservative vision than that of the environment. For it touches on the three foundational ideas of our movement: trans-generational loyalty, the priority of the local and the search for home. Conservatives resonate to Burke’s view of society, as a partnership between the living, the unborn and the dead; they believe in civil association between neighbours rather than intervention by the state; and they accept that the most important thing the living can do is to settle down, to make a home for themselves, and to pass that home to their children. Oikophilia, the love of home, lends itself ­ to the environmental cause, and it is astonishing that the Conservative Party has not seized hold of that cause as its own.

The problem arises because the agenda has been set by the globalisers. Global problems, we are told, require global solutions, and global solutions are trans-national solutions, involving the loss of sovereignty and the surrender to treaties that tie our hands. There may be reason to fear what is happening. But much more important for the activists is the political use to which that fear can be put – which is to destroy national sovereignty and to exert a top-down control by the self-appointed experts over the ordinary activities of mankind.

Moreover, by concentrating on climate change the activists have managed to distract attention from the many other environmental problems that could be, and often have been, solved by people acting in the conservative spirit. Environmental problems arise when homeostatic systems break down – in other words, when the feedback loop that establishes equilibrium is, for whatever reason, destroyed. The homeostatic system that has been most studied is the free market, which returns to equilibrium in changing conditions, provided the participants bear the costs of their actions. Left-wing thinkers refuse to accept this, and constantly invent bogeymen – ‘neo-liberalism’, ‘corporate greed’, ‘market failure’ – in order to justify the intervention of the state, and therefore control by socialists. But intervention by the state is the major cause of disequilibrium, and the environmental consequences can be seen all across the former communist world – in the Soviet case in the form of total devastation. The market ceases to deliver solutions to environmental problems when participants can externalise their costs – in other words, when they can escape the internal rules of the system. It is this that gives rise to ‘the tragedy of the commons’.

The solution is not automatically to call on the state to intervene but first to look for the social mechanisms that cause people to bear the costs of what they do. That is what the common law of tort has done in our country, acting often in conjunction with the law of trusts. It is what oikophilia naturally prompts us to do, as Elinor Ostrom has shown, when we are permitted to regard ‘common pool resources’ as shared by a defined and localised community. It is what the conservative instinct for trusteeship spontaneously urges upon us.

If we look at the history of the environmental movement in Britain we see those conservative principles working successfully, not through the state, but through the civil initiatives that challenge the state, beginning with the protests on behalf of the forests in the 17th century, initiated by John Evelyn's Silva, and leading to the creation of the National Trust at the end of the 19th century.
Vital to this conservative environmental movement has been the love of beauty. Through art, literature and local activism the British people have given voice to the idea of beauty as a shared resource, an irreplaceable fund of ‘social capital’. Beauty, they have recognised, acts as a barrier to the top-down brutalities of the exploiters and the social engineers.

But the environmental demagogues are determined to brush such obstacles aside. Littering the landscape with pylons and wind-farms appeals to them not because it has any scientific authority – for the science, such as it was, has been exploded – but because it refocuses the problem as a global one. To destroy the home that we have built over centuries is to afflict conservatives in the heart of their way of life. It is to deprive people of the primary source of oikophilia, and to make conservatism – the only political outlook that has ever done anything for the environment – irrelevant.

Moreover, it is through the pursuit of beauty that we could solve our most pressing environmental problem, which is the need for new homes. People resist large-scale development, because they know that it will produce an eyesore. Conservative-minded architects like Leon Krier at Poundbury and John Simpson at Swindon have shown that this need not be so, that we can learn from our traditional architecture how to build in ways that enhance the neighbourhood, and in ways that produce affordable housing too. People protest at the faceless estates that destroy the view from their window. But no-one protests at Poundbury except the modernist architects who sense the threat that it poses to their monopoly game.

The sad thing is that the Conservative Party has said so little to clarify what is at stake. Why do those old-fashioned words like trust, settlement, beauty and home so seldom pass the lips of those who are now, nominally at least, in charge? And why is the agenda still set by those for whom climate change, renewable energy and global warming define the problem, and for whom the favoured solution involves the total destruction of the things we love?

Roger Scruton on Lord Rennard, Cardinal O'Brien and Inappropriate Behaviour

By Roger Scruton.

Our society has not come to terms with the sexual revolution, and one proof of this is the extent to which people seem now free to accuse each other of sexual misdemeanours and ‘inappropriate’ advances, without knowing or caring whether these constitute a crime. This matter is of great concern to conservatives who, for all their reticence in the matter, are well aware that sexual life ought not to be a free for all, and that conventions, manners and a certain distance between the sexes are fundamental to both individual happiness and social peace. Like other modern people, however, they stumble through this dangerous territory without the light of religious principle to guide them, and leaning, when it is necessary to lean, on an entirely makeshift philosophy. Indeed, it seems to me that the absence of a robust view of sex is one reason for the ideological weakness of the Conservative Party. The hesitation over family values, the sudden and unexplained enthusiasm for gay marriage, the easy toleration of ‘non-discrimination’ laws that marginalise the old morality – all these are ways of papering over an enormous hole in the conservative vision, and one that simply did not exist when the founding fathers of conservatism wrote in the 18th century.

Roger Scruton: The Health and Safety culture is killing volunteeering and the benefits of risk

By Roger Scruton

The Conservative Party has rightly emphasized that it is civil society, not the state, that is the source of our shared values and our public spirit. Each function that is taken over by the state ends up in the hands of the bureaucrats. And the bigger the bureaucracy the more prone it is to invasion by special interests. That, in brief, is why the private schools in this country are succeeding in their education task, while the state schools are failing. To return our institutions to civil society, to encourage the emergence of a new generation of volunteers, to liberate the charitable impulse – these are the paradigm conservative causes, and the long-term goal of all the initiatives we might take to ‘get the state off our backs’. It is not that we want the state to be weak, but that we want civil society to be strong.

There are many obstacles to this cause, including the vast number of state-dependent clients, who lobby in the name of ‘compassion’.  New Labour greatly increased the number of these people, recognising that their vote would always tend in a socialist direction. But there is a more insidious obstacle, and one that is not often noticed because it seems so paradoxical to be opposed to it. The name of this obstacle is ‘health and safety’.

Civil society exists only where individuals have the courage and initiative to get things started. Sports teams, festivals, fairs and markets; shelters, dance-clubs and equestrian events; schools, colleges, scout troops and children’s outings – all these things, which are the stuff of civil society, are now tied in regulatory knots. Activities involving children have been effectively removed from the competence of ordinary unqualified people; playgrounds have been closed for fear of improbable accidents; premises where the Women’s Institute might have run a cake stall, or where teenagers could have got together for a dance, have been condemned by the health inspectors, and scarcely an activity now occurs in the countryside which does not have to be carried out in some clandestine version, for fear of the bureaucrats whose job it is to snoop on us.

Michael Bentley: The market cannot provide the cultural values we need to flourish

Michael Bentley is an historian of British politics and thought. His latest book, a biography of Sir Herbert Butterfield, appeared in 2011.

Conservatives often join forces with libertarians.  Some, indeed, would be happy to apply both labels to themselves.  But conservatism and libertarianism represent different ways of thinking about the world and the border between them is also a boundary.  Proponents of the free market want many of the things that Conservatives also want: a slimmed state, low taxation, maximum choice, individual responsibility.  They also prefer, however, to reduce political discussion to a single economic formula, which is not a Conservative way of proceeding.  The marketeers are perfectly aware that the prescriptions of the free market do not find a fit with the real world.  They encourage us to see the market as a form of Ideal Type, to use Weber’s expression: an intellectual construction against which to measure the messy deviations of reality.  The difficulty lies in what we are supposed to do once this exercise in subtraction has taken place.  And that is where the marketeers’ equations no longer balance, because policy in the real world can begin neither from an abstraction cultivated in the present nor from assumptions that deny the reality of a Conservative past.  More than any other formation of people, we Conservatives are what we have been. 

Little thought about our current realities is needed in any case to see that the market can decide some things and not others.  There exists an argument – a strong one – for extending market decisions; it could well be that an internal market within some present state monopolies  (education and health come to mind, but there are others) would enhance Conservative objectives rather than conflict with them.  Yet one objective trumps all others.  It is the point of a Conservative politics to promote a Conservative culture and that cultural requirement runs far beyond the boundaries of libertarian thinking.  Once we recognise this we must accept also that there are social goods and cultural benefits that only the state can nurture. Conservatives have understood this point for a hundred and fifty years.  Their problem and opportunity is, or ought to be, to identify those goods and the most congruent mode of furthering them.  To pretend that those goods do not exist courts not only moral repugnance, since certain fractions of our society require our collective protection and help, but also political illiteracy.  Marketeers seem to believe that, once their Enlightenment vision has been presented clearly to the masses, the electors will hurtle towards the Tory party like migrating wildebeest.  This is fantasy.  The best way to lose every election for the next century is to proclaim ‘Let the Market Decide’.  Instead, we, the thinking Conservatives, have ourselves to decide and to stop imagining that we can shuffle off the responsibility for our national culture and shared values onto an impersonal mechanism that operates without reference to any such things.

There are deep-structural difficulties in the way.  Time was when one could say that, whatever party held power, the country remained conservative in the sense of accepting what Oakeshott used to call ‘intimations’: unspoken values, unquestioned customs and subliminal expectations that defined a shared culture.  We are in a different place today: charitable giving at an all time low, the Church is falling into irrelevance; ‘society’ and ‘community’ merely sentimental labels for those fragments that have not yet been reduced to a state of nature.  The way back will be hard, but we won’t get there merely by burning bridles.  Freedom for everyone: certainly. Free for all: not on our watch.

Anthony O'Hear: The Riddle of the Voucher, Part Two

By Anthony O'Hear, Professor of Philosophy at Buckingham University, and editor of Philosophy journal.

Back in 1986, Arthur Seldon published an essay entitled ‘The Riddle of the Voucher’. The riddle was to explain why educational vouchers, having seen off all the intellectual and bureaucratic arguments against them the early 1980s, then disappeared from political view. Those who can think back that far will recall that the moral argument in favour of vouchers was that it put control of children’s education where it should belong, in the hands of their parents. They would then be able fulfil their proper role in relation to the up-bringing of their children, a source of both duty and happiness.

This is the situation of parents who send their children to independent schools (and who often make considerable sacrifices to do so), but it is not the case with the 93% of pupils in the state sector, many of whose parents simply could not contemplate independent education. For all the governmental rhetoric of choice, the 93% simply have to go where the state and its bureaucrats see fit, according to its crazily restrictive admissions codes, a situation actually high-lighted by the introduction of ‘free’ schools. For once these are over-subscribed, the rest are left only the option of the very schools the free schools were introduced to avoid.

An independent school which fails to satisfy its customers will close in short order. This is not the case with state schools, whose clientele are not customers so much as suppliants, who have to be grateful for what they get (which, to compound the insult, is actually paid for out of their taxes). Hardly surprising then, that being denied even minimum influence over their children’s education, many parents simply opt out of any interest or responsibility. Hardly surprising that too many state schools, not subject to minimal economic discipline, coast along in complacent mediocrity or worse, the damage compounded by the attempts of successive governments to regulate standards by otiose regulation and ideologically driven inspection.

Gay Marriage and Real Conservatism

Mark Dooley is an Irish philosopher and journalist.

Dominating political and cultural debate in 2013 will be the contentious issue of gay marriage.  On the one side, you have a self-confident liberal lobby supported, ironically, by the Conservatives.  Opposing them is the silent majority supported by real conservatives, including certain members of the Christian clergy.

Lest we forget, the whole point of conservatism is to conserve.  This does not mean that customs, traditions and institutions cannot be reformed.  But it does mean that reform must always be carried out, to cite Edmund Burke, ‘as if in the presence of canonized forefathers’.  For what we have received from our forebears is not ours to do with as we please, but is a sacred bequest.

It seems to me that many within the British Conservative Party have forgotten this basic principle of conservatism.  In so doing, have they not forfeited their right to call themselves 'conservatives'?

Real conservatives oppose liberals, not out of prejudice, intolerance or bigotry, but out of a concern for absent generations – both for those who went before us, and for those who are yet to come. They follow Burke in believing that ‘a spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper’, and that ‘people will not look forward to posterity who never look back to their ancestors’.

The conservative neglect of culture

By Roger Scruton.

Nobody knows what a cultural policy should aim at, what means it should use, or how it could lead to legislation or other political initiatives. Hence, in Conservative Party thinking, considerations of culture remain on the margins. Worse, as in so many areas of political life, the Conservatives seem to have abandoned this fertile territory to the Left. Here is an instance of which I have some knowledge: the Arts Council has refused to provide funding to the English Music Festival, an initiative devoted to one of the greatest and least explored legacies of our national culture. The Council objects to the word ‘English’, and to all that it means by way of settled loyalties, old-fashioned decencies, and the love of our country and its past. For the arts establishment culture should be anti-national, disruptive, part of the ‘labour of the negative’ that I described in a previous contribution to this blog. My attempts to get conservative politicians, including the Minister for Culture and the Chairman of the House of Commons Cultural Committee, to take up this cause have been greeted with silence. Who cares about Granville Bantock, Arnold Bax or Ivor Gurney, and what have they got to do with GDP, RPI, VAT, or any other collection of  letters that the government cites in the place of a philosophy?

This neglect of culture is a mistake, and here are three reasons why:

1. Conservatives are, at their best, rounded human beings, who are attached to forms of life and practices which might reasonably be described as cultural: they tend to believe in family values and the rewards of family life, and to have a love of literature, art, music and natural beauty. Their tastes vary, but they gravitate towards the serious and the enduring, and indeed it is their sense of the seriousness of human life that turns them in a conservative direction. It disheartens them to think that there is nothing to conservatism except the bits that can be transcribed as economic policy, and they would be comforted by the spectacle of a party endorsing the cultural values that they share.
2. Policies towards culture may be futile; but policies influenced by culture issue all the time. And when the culture is trivial or ideological the policies can be very destructive – as we have seen in education, multiculturalism, and the rise of the leftist thought police. To be confident in one’s cultural base is therefore a prerequisite for making firm and durable political decisions.
3. It is good for the image of conservatism that it should not be caricatured as a business consortium or a neo-liberal conspiracy. It should be seen also to be tentatively exploring the deeper issues, and making reasonable but non-belligerent contributions to the debates that occupy intelligent people today: for instance, religion and atheism, social media, pop culture, the fate of real music, architecture and the city.