An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture

This is a rewarding book with a somewhat misleading title that makes it sound like less than it actually is. Scruton says that the book is written for the reader with a minimal amount of cultural literacy. He assumes, e.g., that the reader will have read Baudelaire. Fair enough, but the book is much more of a series of philosophic essays than a ‘guide’.Scruton’s inspiration is Eliot, an influence which he makes explicit. He is also, obviously, influenced by Arnold. I find that his conclusions are very close, in some respects, to George Steiner’s. The argument is not unfamiliar. Traditional culture was fractured by the Enlightenment, whose principal targets were sacerdotal and aristocratic power, its substitute authorities reason and science. This led to the ‘death of God’. However, the loss of religion had unintended consequences. Traditional thought, including our views of time and eternity, of justice and equity, and of the act of aesthetic creation itself (which Steiner emphasizes) were underwritten by the belief in a deity. Absent a deity our attempts to navigate what Scruton elsewhere calls the ‘lebenswelt’, the world of interpersonal human discourse, is significantly compromised. The current affection in some circles for ‘anti-foundationalism’ is reinforced and extended.Without traditional religion the post-Enlightenment cognoscenti turn to art, but absent that religion, art (particularly art as a part of tradition itself) is altered. We now live in a world of commodification where price trumps value and salesmanship trumps inspiration and creation. Tradition itself, i.e., traditional education and culture, might help to serve as a surrogate for religion or poetry, but the hour is late and the distance between today’s students and the students of traditional art and letters grows apace. Faced with these difficulties many members of the humanities professoriate punt, either undercutting the value and authority of the traditional with the French Nietzscheans or simply joining the students and studying their transient, shallow pop culture.Scruton’s arguments are very searching and engaging, but they are subject to a single serious criticism: they accept the state of contemporary letters and thought as a given, one from which there is really very little appeal. This is a problem for the intelligentsia; common readers and commonsensical readers don’t care an iota for Derrida. They don’t know who he is and if they were told about his basic beliefs (which Scruton summarizes) they would find them as ultimately vacuous as Scruton does. Scruton, however, sees intellectual history through the intellectual’s lens and argues that it is very difficult, if not impossible to now believe (A) or to continue to take seriously (B). It is as if the tides of opinion have already left us panting on the shore and there is no way that we can now resist. I’m not sure that Scruton truly believes that, but he succumbs to that narrative’s rhetoric.No one can now say, as Johnson did, that Rousseau should have been hunted down and driven from society, but that is in part because today we have so few Samuel Johnsons and those we do have must be prepared to endure professional vilification. Nevertheless, one can challenge prevailing dogma as, e.g., David Berlinski routinely does, and there are many distinguished thinkers who argue rigorously for the existence of God in the face of neoatheists and a materialist culture and materialist hermeneutic. Scruton is really of their party and he does go so far as to accuse Derrida of literally doing the devil’s work.The chapter on youth culture and popular music is worth the price of the book.Highly recommended.

Scruton is passionate in his defense of traditional and politically conservative culture, to a fault at times. However, what won me over was his exploration of the loss of the sacred in modern culture. While he looked at this loss primarily through a Christian lens, the message is true regardless of ones spiritual traditions. The ways in which the secular and materialism has marginalized the sacred in our lives and culture is powerful and unsettling. Re-membering the eternal and even magical in our lives is an understanding that feels imperative for the creating of meaningful lives beyond the surface of things. I appreciated Scruton for making this case strongly and illustrating what is lost in our lives without a sacred foundation in our lives and cultures.

Brilliant bookThank you

My son loves this book

I like Scruton's books, but this is the weakest one I've read. He's conservative in the manner of the British philosopher he is, so in a very reasoned way and quite different from much the term implies for Americans in the context of our virtually content-free and logically-challenged contemporary excuse for political discourse. The book takes TS Eliot's Notes on the Definition of Culture as its point of departure, ranges through concepts and definitions of culture since the term came into use during the Enlightenment, agrees with Eliot that all cultures are fundamentally based on religion, and attempts to deal with the problems of common and high culture in a society that's lost its faith.He tries to replace the sacred things of the once-faithful with high culture but admits he fails, consoling himself that no one else has succeeded at this and insisting the attempt is important as otherwise the common culture disappears while society needs what it provides. It gives people both purpose and a reassuring context into which their lives fit, therefore a basis for a cohesive society. High culture is the closest thing available to the sacramental or transcendental in a faithless society, but in the end it's not really an adequate substitute.Scruton makes many insightful arguments and observations, including a lucid critique of pop music based partly on aesthetic and music theories, also on anthropological and sociological analyses. He makes fairly convincing cases that modernist art was a last gasp of Western culture trying to maintain a distinction between high and low, even maintaining a troubled engagement with the religious foundations of Western culture; post-modernist culture has simply given up and lazily merged the serious with the trivial; deconstructionism is essentially nihilistic; and contemporary pop culture is basically one of permanent rebellion without cause, sexuality without purpose or promise, ungrounded youth-orientation without rites of passage to maturity within structured society; blind, unhealthy and counterproductive idolization of pop stars; and of course pop's endless vapidity and its corrosive ubiquity.The most interesting aspect of this book is that it reveals what was obliquely hinted at in Conservatism but never made express: without making reference to it, Scruton clearly subscribes to the noble lie concept in Plato's Republic - people have to believe something which isn't true for a society to get on. It was the central flaw in the state discussed in Republic, and it's the central flaw here. I sympathize with Scruton, and he's made a noble attempt, but I'm glad I'm able to join Eliot in returning to the faith that's been largely abandoned by the cognoscenti.To non-believers that faith's a noble (or ignoble) lie, but for me it's truth and possibly the only effective basis for a sustainable, cohesive and coherent society in a post-Enlightenment world. Noble lies can work on duped populations but not on relatively free and educated ones. And as much as I love Beethoven's late string quartets, as Scruton does, and much as they may be the last, best hope of secular humanity to reach the transcendent, in the end they only appear to come close, and only temporarily.

As would be expected by anything written by Roger Scruton the erudition and perspicacity of his arguments is generally faultless and another vital weapon in the now embarrassingly rich arsenal of the increasingly triumphal new right/conservatism.Ii say this however with one caveat - the chapter entitled 'Yoofanasia' . There was no need for the section in the first place with pop music and fashion being a transient superficial but generally harmless thing which occupies and should occupy the position it does of providing low involvement trivial entertainment for anyone who's interested in the way the music of the masses always has and in the form of music hall or non-conformist hymn singing how it did 150 years ago. To fulminate about it is only to give it the kind of misplaced dignity that the embarrassing (and now rapidly antiquating) chattering class music and culture writers tried to once win for it.And the chapter is made even worse by how the ephemeral nature of the subject has already made the popular musical fashions of 25 years ago as described look positively antidiluvium. And then there is the complete ignorance of the subject matter which Scruton had (or at least pretended too - shades of those 1960s judges pretending to not know who The Beatles were). However trivial the subject matter to write in any way acutely on it without looking slightly ridiculous you need to show at least a modicum of basic knowledge of the topic. The idea that such 'nice' Guardian approved artists such as REM or Sting (yes he unbelievably uses these as examples) were ever untamed creatures of wild youth is clearly laughable. And to me this chapter undermines the rest of the book rather like a chapter on women's football would a work on 'the greats of football'.The rest of the book however was a complete delight and a reminder of what we've recently lost with his untimely death.

Thank you

only a roger scruton fan knows why is he the best

Excellent

good