Motus Mentis

The great Roger Scruton would have been 80 this past February 27th, and to commemorate the event, Jash Dolani, a poster on X, put up a list of 11 Scruton quotes, which I repost below:

1. Scruton on the fundamental right-wing impulse: “Conservatism starts from the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.”

2. The hypocrisy of liberals: “Liberty is not the same thing as equality, and that those who call themselves liberals are far more interested in equalizing than in liberating their fellows.”

3. Scruton on when to ignore a writer: “A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t. Deconstruction deconstructs itself, and disappears up its own behind, leaving only a disembodied smile and a faint smell of sulphur.”

4. It’s impossible to even have a personal identity without social relations: “We are not born free, nor do we come into this world with a self-identity and autonomy of our own. We achieve those things, through the conflict and cooperation that weave us into the social fabric. We become freely choosing individuals only by acquiring obligations to parents, siblings, institutions and groups: obligations that we did not choose.”

5. In 1998, Salon asked Roger Scruton about censorship. He said: “Yes, I am in favor of censorship, but it has to be conducted by people like me. And that’s the difficulty.” Then he laughed. (He was talking about censoring porn.)

6. Tribes need Gods: “Tribes survive and flourish because they have gods, who fuse many wills into a single will, and demand and reward the sacrifices on which social life depends.”

7. Love is the source of the conservative worldview: “The real reason people are conservatives is that they are attached to the things that they love, and want to preserve them from abuse and decay. They are attached to their family, their friends, their religion, and their immediate environment.”

8. Tradition is never arbitrary: “In discussing tradition, we are not discussing arbitrary rules and conventions. We are discussing answers that have been discovered to enduring questions.”

9. Real art is always meaningful: “Art moves us because it is beautiful, and it is beautiful in part because it means something. It can be meaningful without being beautiful; but to be beautiful it must be meaningful.”

10. Liberty inevitably leads to inequality and people obsessed with equity have no answer to this conundrum. Scruton: “If liberation involves the liberation of individual potential, how do we stop the ambitious, the energetic, the intelligent, the good-looking and the strong from getting ahead?”

11. The entrepreneur who builds matters more than the bureaucrat who manages. Scruton: “The important person in a free economy is not the manager but the entrepreneur – the one who takes risks and meets the cost of them.”