PHILOSOPHY: How to Think Seriously About the PlanetBy Roger Scruton Atlantic Books, 457pp. £22
ROGER SCRUTON is something of a contradiction. A true-blue Tory and a real Green. A strident English nationalist but someone at home with modern German literature. An Oxford don who is the son of north-of-England, left-wing, working-class stock.
His new book is a provocative one, seeking to convince the reader that only conservatism will help us meet the environmental challenges we face.
The author baits what he depicts as unaccountable environmental NGOs that undermine the very causes they seek to advance by frightening ordinary citizens without recruiting them. He accuses them of defining their goals in international terms that make no sense without far-reaching legislative change. He claims they set unreal targets, pursued in ignorance of the means to achieve them, with no conception of how the attempt to do so will impinge on popular sentiment.
His disdain for international bureaucracies (except the former British empire) and for the European Union is even more pronounced. He sees European law as an instrument for regulating conduct rather than adjudicating conflict, as a system that becomes an obstacle to risk-taking and as another way of siphoning responsibility from society and transferring it to the impersonal state, where it can safely be dissolved and forgotten.
He sees the divide between left and right as being between those who see politics as a way to mobilise society towards an egalitarian goal and those who see it as a procedure for resolving conflicts and reconciling interests, with no overarching aim. He believes that only in emergencies can societies be conscripted to a shared purpose and that emergencies spell the end of civil politics. He argues that control from the top is never described as such but is always presented as control from below, by the people, for whom the revolutionary elite is merely the vanguard, anxious to capture power only in order to relinquish it to those who have the better claim.
Modern psychology is also given short shrift, for encouraging us to see each other as automata or as byproducts of processes that we do not control. Under the influence of depersonalising views of the human condition, people no longer orientate themselves easily towards the natural world, nor find their ecological and spiritual niche. Instead they drift on the current of their present appetites and waste both themselves and their world.
The question of how we quench those appetites and motivate people to act in a manner that considers future generations is at the heart of this book. Unlike some right-wing thinkers, Scruton does not seek to rely on market forces alone. Indeed he believes that a fight against consumerism, in favour of the environment, could be one of the few common causes that could heal a rift in our civilisation between left and right.
He believes that environmental problems are problems of morality and not of economics, and that until we see nature as a source of intrinsic rather than instrumental values we will not refrain from pillaging it. Morality requires a sense of responsibility, he contends, which makes people capable of renouncing what they want for the sake of what they value. He cites the late German philosopher Hans Jonas, who suggested that such a sense of responsibility is deeply implanted in the human soul and that acquiring it is a necessary part of existing fully in time as a being with a consciousness of past and future.
Scruton argues that Edmund Burke was the first major political thinker to place future generations at the heart of politics, following the systematic destruction of the stock of social capital he saw caused by the French Revolution. Scruton believes that the ideas of Burke on respecting the dead, on “the small platoons” of civil association and on the voice of tradition are what define conservatism. It is through the promotion of these values that we can take the future into account, not by fictitious cost-benefit calculations but by seeing ourselves as inheriting benefits and having a “line of obligation” to pass them on. Through these values, we conserve the past, not from nostalgia but from a desire to live as an “enduring consciousness” among things that endure.
That enduring consciousness is rooted in a trait that Scruton describes as “oikophilia” – in plain English, love of the home. The home of our early childhood is not just “where we start from” but where our capacity for interpersonal love and relational competence is formed. It is a place of sacred memory, to which our longings return and which has a status in our consciousness that grows to embrace all our projects.
Love of home is nourished by respect for simple things such as good manners, by the traditions of common law, by the activities of voluntary groups and organisations, and by the stewardship of the sacred beauty in our local environment, as personified by the exhortation from the Victorian writer John Ruskin that “when we build, let us think we build forever”.
Scruton’s inclination to return power and responsibility to the local level is so strong that he almost aligns himself with the anarchist element in the environmental movement, which has come to the fore with the likes of the Transition Towns campaign. He recognises that there are global issues, such as climate change, that will require international action but argues that we will not be able to develop the public spirit needed to enforce multinational regulation. He stands by his slogan that we need to “feel locally, think nationally” and invest in national research-and-development programmes for new clean-energy solutions.
I could argue with many of the assumptions in this book. I believe, for example, that sustainability and social justice can go together as political aims, that we can evolve a public spirit for global co-operation and that bold planning and firm action by the state can be a force for good. But whatever those differences, I would at least approach each issue better armed for a philosophical debate having read this most thoughtful book.
Eamon Ryan is leader of the Green Party
