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220970e
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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.
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Roger Scruton |
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ff59247
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Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.
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Roger Scruton |
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9b77b13
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GK Chesterton once said that to criticise religion because it leads people to kill each other is like criticising love because it has the same effect. All the best things we have, when abused, will cause bad things to happen. The need for sacrifice, to obey, to make a gift of your life is in all of us and it's a deep thing. In the Islamic world today, people are trying to rejoin themselves to an antiquated and ancient faith and the result i..
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Roger Scruton |
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727286e
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The sense of beauty puts a brake upon destruction, by representing its object as irreplaceable. When the world looks back at me with my eyes, as it does in aesthetic experience, it is also addressing me in another way. Something is being revealed to me, and I am being made to stand still and absorb it. It is of course nonsense to suggest that there are naiads in the trees and dryads in the groves. What is revealed to me in the experience of..
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Roger Scruton |
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32a5a61
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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.
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relativism
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Roger Scruton |
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0de01bd
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Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter.
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Roger Scruton |
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67c74cc
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Richard Dawkins and his followers have recycled the theory of evolution not as a biological theory but as a theory of everything - of what the human being is, what human communities are, what our problems are and how they're not really our problems, but the problems of our genes: we're simply answers that our genes have come up with, and it's rather awful to be the answer to someone else's question, especially when that thing is not a perso..
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Roger Scruton |
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bf0cc17
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It is not the truth of Marxism that explains the willingness of intellectuals to believe it, but the power that it confers on intellectuals, in their attempts to control the world. And since...it is futile to reason someone out of a thing that he was not reasoned into, we can conclude that Marxism owes its remarkable power to survive every criticism to the fact that it is not a truth-directed but a power-directed system of thought.
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Roger Scruton |
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42055ff
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Take away religion, take away philosophy, take away the higher aims of art, and you deprive ordinary people of the ways in which they can represent their apartness. Human nature, once something to live up to, becomes something to live down to instead. Biological reductionism nurtures this 'living down', which is why people so readily fall for it. It makes cynicism respectable and degeneracy chic. It abolishes our kind, and with it our kindn..
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Roger Scruton |
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2d6d877
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Whatever our religion and our private convictions, we are the collective inheritors of things both excellent and rare, and political life, for us, ought to have one overriding goal, which is to hold fast to those things, in order to pass them on to our children.
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Roger Scruton |
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482c1f7
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Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.
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Roger Scruton |
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32466d0
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The disposition, in any conflict, to side with 'them' against 'us', and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably 'ours'. Being the opposite of xenophobia I propose to call this state of mind oikophobia, by which I mean (stretching the Greek a little) the repudiation of inheritance and home.
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Roger Scruton |
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30ba8cf
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We live in an extremely anxious age in which the core of our beliefs has been undermined to a great extent by scientific thinking. People have a hunger for answers but an inability to formulate the questions, partly because of the short-term view of things that's encouraged by the media and partly because there seems to be no centre to which people can turn in order to see what the heart of the discussion is. I think this is a failure of ph..
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Roger Scruton |
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e63a527
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We appreciate beautiful things not for their utility only, but also for what they are in themselves--or more plausibly, for how they appear in themselves.
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Roger Scruton |
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c20e264
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while we are familiar with the adverse effect of drink on an empty stomach, we are now witnessing the far worse effect of drink on an empty mind.
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wine
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Roger Scruton |
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cb866bc
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Music is a wonderful example of something that's in this world but not of this world. Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.
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Roger Scruton |
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1d03f20
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The contradictory nature of the socialist utopias is one explanation of the violence involved in the attempt to impose them: it takes infinite force to make people do what is impossible"."
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Roger Scruton |
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ca496a6
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The doctrine of Original sin, which is contained in the story of Genesis - one of the most beautiful concentrated metaphors in existence - is about the way we human beings fall from treating each other as subjects to treating each other as objects. Love, respect and forgiveness come from that. When we treat each other as objects, then we get the concentration camps.
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Roger Scruton |
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7158608
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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.
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Roger Scruton |
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3080752
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Neuro-nonsense occurs when people take on board the supposed discoveries of neuroscience - all these brain images that tell us, for instance, that we've discovered now exactly what love is, it's this little bit in the hippocampus, so we have no need to question what the meaning of these things is. But these images have no meaning, any more than a chemical reaction in a test-tube has a meaning. All kinds of nonsense comes into being as a res..
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Roger Scruton |
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ae30a8a
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Sanctions make a substantial contribution to power based on privation, and they have never hurt a single despot in the whole history of their use.
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international-sanctions
iraq
saddam-hussein
iraq-sanctions
kim-jong-il
north-korea
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Roger Scruton |
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75351e2
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The fictions were far more persuasive than the facts, and more persuasive than both was the longing to be caught up in a mass movement of solidarity, with the promise of emancipation at the end. My father's grievances were real and well founded. But his solutions were dreams.
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Roger Scruton |
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8af8081
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There's a real question as to what beauty is and why it's important to us. Many pseudo-philosophers try to answer these questions and tell us they're not really answerable. I draw on art and literature, and music in particular, because music is a wonderful example of something that's in this world but not of this world. Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.
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Roger Scruton |
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73d816e
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Human beings, in their settled condition, are animated by oikophilia: the love of the oikos, which means not only the home but the people contained in it, and the surrounding settlements that endow that home with lasting contours and an enduring smile.
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Roger Scruton |
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44b4096
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People who are always in praise and pursuit of the beautiful are an embarrassment, like people who make a constant display of their religious faith.
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Roger Scruton |
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28f8abf
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wanting it for its beauty is not wanting to inspect it: it is wanting to contemplate it--and that is something more than a search for information or an expression of appetite. Here is a want without a goal: a desire that cannot be fulfilled since there is nothing that would count as its fulfilment.
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Roger Scruton |
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f0faa9b
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Realism...is a kind of disappointed tribute to the ideal.
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Roger Scruton |
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a60fac9
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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.
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Roger Scruton |
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5a79a6d
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John O'Sullivan has forcefully argued that the simultaneous presence in the highest offices of Reagan, Thatcher and Pope John Paul II was the cause of the Soviet collapse.
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Roger Scruton |
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7be5caf
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Had Heidegger attached his great ego to the cause of international socialism, he would have enjoyed the whitewash granted to Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Hobsbawm and the other apologists for the Gulag.1 But the cause of national socialism could enjoy no such convenient excuse, and the sin was compounded, in Heidegger's case, by the fact that it was precisely the national, rather than the socialist aspect of the creed that had attracted him.
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national-socialism
marxism
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Roger Scruton |
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0174030
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There are big questions science doesn't answer, such as why is there something rather than nothing? There can't be a scientific answer to that because it's the answer that precedes science. There are all sorts of questions like that that which at the periphery of scientic inquiry but which wiggle in the mind like worms: the question "what am I, what is this word 'I'"? Does it refer to anything? If you try to capture the "I", you don't captu..
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Roger Scruton |
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ca18ded
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Left-wing politics has discarded the revolutionary paradigm advanced by the New Left, in favour of bureaucratic routines and the institutionalization of the welfare culture. The two goals of liberation and social justice remain in place: but they are promoted by legislation, committees and government commissions empowered to root out the sources of discrimination. Liberation and social justice have been bureaucratized.
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Roger Scruton |
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5839b0b
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Nonsense has taken up residence in the heart of public debate and also in the academy. This nonsense is part of the huge fund of unreason on which the plans and schemes of optimists draw for their vitality. Nonsense confiscates meaning. It thereby puts truth and falsehood, reason and unreason, light and darkness on an equal footing. It is a blow cast in defence of intellectual freedom, as the optimists construe it, namely the freedom to bel..
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light
freedom
meaning
reason
darkness
optimism
heart
truth
falsehood
optimists
public
scheme
schemes
unreason
feeling
feel
plans
debate
plan
equal
believe
vitality
nonsense
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Roger Scruton |
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943c76c
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Conservatism and conservation are two aspects of a single long-term policy, which is that of husbanding resources and ensuring their renewal. These resources include the social capital embodied in laws, customs and institutions; they also include the material capital contained in the environment, and the economic capital contained in a free but law-governed economy. According to this view, the purpose of politics is not to rearrange society..
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Roger Scruton |
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4bfafd7
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Given that Europe's legacy to the world consists in the two great goods of Christianity and democracy it is hardly surprising if the EU no longer has the endorsement of the European people, even if it has created a network of clients upon whose support it can always rely.
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Roger Scruton |
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9d08ab3
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When, in the works of Lacan, Deleuze and Althusser, the nonsense machine began to crank out its impenetrable sentences, of which nothing could be understood except that they all had "capitalism" as their target, it looked as though Nothing had at last found its voice."
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Roger Scruton |
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9696b3a
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The first axiom of Marx Scientist is that everything they tell you is a lie. The second axiom is that it doesn't matter, since you are lying too. The third axiom is 'Kill all liars!
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Roger Scruton |
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0f69f9e
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The identification of any object in the first-person case is ruled out by the enterprise of scientific explanation. So science cannot tell me who I am, let alone where, when, or how.
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Roger Scruton |
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0601ae4
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The great benefit of philosophy, which is also its great weakness, is that all its steps are taken in the spirit of doubt.
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Roger Scruton |
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7c0f7b7
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beauty is an ultimate value--something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given. Beauty should therefore be compared to truth and goodness, one member of a trio of ultimate values which justify our rational inclinations.
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Roger Scruton |
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97b6406
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Beauty is not the source of disinterested pleasure, but simply the object of a universal interest: the interest that we have in beauty, and in the pleasure that beauty brings.
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Roger Scruton |
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f472171
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Many people under the influence of science, and particularly neuro-nonsense, will say the sacred is an old concept, it's just a hangover, but you can easily see that's not so, because everyone has a sense of desecration: there are things everybody values which, when they are spoiled are not just moved or destroyed, they are desecrated. Something that is vital not just to you but the world. People have this sense when they see their towns pu..
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Roger Scruton |
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fb78f6e
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Its true that we learn a lot from science about how we function but there's a danger in thinking knowledge of how we function is the full account of what we are. If you're a chemist who is really interested in the optical properties of certain pigments you could analyse the Mona Lisa and describe it completely but you would never have mentioned the face, which is the meaning of this thing. In that way a neuroscientist can put together an en..
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Roger Scruton |
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71e2f1d
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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.
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Roger Scruton |