From: Kharin (kharin@kharin.com)
Date: Mon Sep 29 2003 - 15:54:16 MDT
Replies to Kalkor and Blunderov as follows:
Blunderov wrote:
"It could have been, IMHO, even more educational from a specifically
Varian point of view had they more resolutely couched their value
judgments in terms of Scruton's conformity, or lack thereof, to the
Virian ideals."
How well do most religious conservatives you know of conform to Virian ideals? Still, since you asked:
Scruton on empathy:
"It is now orthodox to regard social stigma as a form of oppression, to be discarded on our collective quest for inner freedom... Stigma has evaporated in our era, and along with it much of the constant, small-scale self-regulation of the community, which depends on each individual's respect for, and fear of, other people's judgment... piety is a social necessity; it speaks of duties that lie above and beyond our desires and contracts. If people cease to recognize such duties, society will crumble into “the dust and powder of individuality.”
Scruton on reason:
"Burke brought home to me that our most necessary beliefs may be both unjustified and unjustifiable from our own perspective, and that the attempt to justify them will lead merely to their loss. Replacing them with the abstract rational systems of the philosophers, we may think ourselves more rational and better equipped for life in the modern world. But in fact we are less well equipped, and our new beliefs are far less justified, for the very reason that they are justified by ourselves. The real justification for a prejudice is the one which justifies it as a prejudice, rather than as a rational conclusion of an argument....
...This substitution of reason for prejudice has indeed occurred. And the result is exactly as Burke would have anticipated. Not merely a breakdown in trust between the sexes, but a faltering in the reproductive process—a failing and enfeebled commitment of parents, not merely to each other, but also to their offspring. At the same time, individual feelings, which were shored up and fulfilled by the traditional prejudices, are left exposed and unprotected by the skeletal structures of rationality. Hence the extraordinary situation in America, where lawsuits have replaced common courtesy, where post-coital accusations of “date-rape” take the place of pre-coital modesty, and where advances made by the unattractive are routinely penalized as “sexual harrassment.” This is an example of what happens, when prejudice is wiped away in the name of reason, without regard for the real social function that prejudice alone can fulfill."
Scruton on vision:
"In Burke’s eyes the self-righteous contempt for ancestors which characterized the Revolutionaries was also a disinheriting of the unborn. Rightly understood, he argued, society is a partnership among the dead, the living, and the unborn, and without what he called the “hereditary principle,” according to which rights could be inherited as well as acquired, both the dead and the unborn would be disenfranchized. Indeed, respect for the dead was, in Burke’s view, the only real safeguard that the unborn could obtain, in a world that gave all its privileges to the living. His preferred vision of society was not as a contract, in fact, but as a trust."
Clearly the sort of person we wish to have as a Virian saint. While we are at it, may I also take the liberty of nominating Aquinas, Augustine, Rasputin, Vlad the Impaler and George Bush?
Kalkor wrote:
"The object of this post is not to attack anyone, but to discuss
the finer points of peer review versus the Ad Populem fallacy."
I think that is a potentially interesting subject, but not one that is easy to apply in this context. Firstly, because a concept like peer review is rather more imprecise when applied in the context of the humanities than in the sciences. Secondly, because in the case of Scruton one has be reviewed at all in order for peer review to take place; this is not something that the individual in question is able to take for granted. As an example, the most obvious publication for such matters, the London Review of Books, did not think the West and the Rest worth bothering with. This is not surprising; Scruton's expertise in Middle Eastern history and Islamic theology was entirely undeclared prior to September 11th.
Admittedly, Scruton's two previous publications before that were reviewed. To read Scruton is to loathe him and I can confirm that the reviewers in question had most certainly read him. Conversely, Scruton does not appear to have been invited to contribute to the Review at all; instead he appears to largely write for non-academic conservative publications, such as City Journal (a US asylum-cum-publication that allows British conservatives to write particularly deranged pieces they can't manage to get printed here).
---- This message was posted by Kharin to the Virus 2003 board on Church of Virus BBS. <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=54;action=display;threadid=29368> --- To unsubscribe from the Virus list go to <http://www.lucifer.com/cgi-bin/virus-l>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Sep 29 2003 - 15:54:23 MDT