Culture Matters
by David Eaton
I first came upon British philosopher Roger Scruton’s writings in 2010. In addition to being a profound philosopher and social commentator, he was also an amateur musician and wrote several insightful books and essays about art and music. I cite him frequently in my book, What Music Tells Me: Beauty Truth And Goodness and Our Cultural Inheritance. The quote that I’ve cited above is from his book, Beauty: A Short Introduction. Scruton passed in 2020, but he leaves a distinguished legacy in the realm of philosophy and conservative thought.
“If we cannot justify the very concept of the aesthetic, except as ideology, then aesthetic judgment is without philosophical foundation. An “ideology” is adopted for its social or political utility, rather than truth. And to show that some concept — holiness, justice, beauty, or whatever — is ideological, is to undermine its claim to objectivity. It is to suggest that there is no such thing as holiness, justice, beauty, but only the belief in it — a belief that arises under certain social and economic relations and plays a part in cementing them, but which vanish when conditions change.” [Roger Scruton]
Because he valued the great artistic legacy of Western art and culture, he understood that creating anything beautiful was both challenging and difficult. Conversely, he observed that destroying beautiful things was easy, thus he was highly critical of those who would destroy or diminish beautiful art for ideological purposes. He referred to this practice as “a culture of repudiation.”