Philosophy Now Forum

Roger Scruton’s critiques of our actions are under scrutiny by Paul Keeling.

https://philosophynow.org/issues/98/Gre ... er_Scruton

Going by this review, as an American left environmentalist I feel strong kinship with Scruton. But the reviewer is right to point out that contemporary American "conservatism" bears no resemblance to Scruton's reverent localism, which is voiced in my country almost solely by left-leaning thinkers like Wendell Berry. Slow food, small farms, organic agriculture, local eating, urban gardens, NIMBYism grounded not in mere selfishness but in informed love of local places, advocacy for a carbon tax, indeed advocacy for any kind of legal restraint on any kind of pollution or devastation -- these are purely Left phenomena in the political ecosystem I inhabit. One could perhaps point to the "creation care" movement on Evangelicalism's fringe, but most Americans who call themselves "conservatives," from the grass roots to the highest rooms of the ivory towers and corporate zuggurats, bitterly hate and deride anything of the sort. Meanwhile, the totalitarian-trending Left that Scruton scolds simply does not exist here -- unless commonsense legal restraints such as Scruton himself seems to plump for are inherently totalitarian, as American conservatives now typically insist.

Scruton seems to me to inhabit a dream-landscape. Here in the waking world, the Right is represented now by Donald Trump, not J. R. R. Tolkien. Scruton himself may be sane, but the Right as a whole has gone mad, and it might better suit a conservative philosopher to set his own collapsing house in order rather than sniping at that environmentalist Left which is the sole real-world refugium of his own deepest values. Clarity begins at home.

Scruton is a class fascist, Tory, elitist moron. He'd have you serve his breakfast then chain you to the plough, and make you wash his horse with your tongue.