By Roger Scruton April 2015. U niversities exist to provide students with the knowledge, skills, and culture that will prepare them for life, while enhancing the intellectual capital upon which we all depend. Evidently the two purposes are distinct. Literature, and criticism that I had absorbed at school and university, I felt that I was. Apr 07, 2016 Roger Scruton vs. The New Left Fools. The English philosopher Roger Scruton has devoted much of his career to the articulation of a complex and highly positive account of.
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In “The New York Intellectuals,” his seminal 1968 essay looking back on the coterie of writers who burst on the scene in the late 1930s and exercised an outsize influence on the American mind until the rise of the New Left in the early ’60s, Irving Howe nicely captured what is distinctive about intellectuals in all times and places.
Cultivating a “style of brilliance,” the New York writers ranged widely across literature and politics, continually aiming to push beyond the ostensible topics of their essays “toward some encompassing moral or social observation.” When it came to style, they took “pleasure in dispute, dialectic, dazzle,” prized “freelance dash, peacock strut, daring hypothesis, knockabout synthesis,” and “celebrated the idea of the intellectual as antispecialist, or as a writer whose specialty was the lack of a specialty.” All of this made their writing and thinking “radically different from the accepted modes of scholarly publishing and middlebrow journalism.”
For all of their differences in method, scholars and journalists tend to aim in their work for something like impartiality, bracketing their individual idiosyncrasies in favor of a largely selfless pursuit of objectivity through focused, meticulous research. Intellectuals, by contrast, aim to be “specialists in generalizations,” as another New York intellectual (the sociologist Daniel Bell) once put it, pronouncing on the world from out of their individual experiences, habits of reading and capacity for judgment. Subjectivity in all of its quirks and eccentricities is the coin of the realm in the Republic of Letters.
In the four years since Christopher Hitchens’s untimely death at age 62 from complications brought on by esophageal cancer, I’ve often found myself wondering what he would say about this or that event in the news. What I wouldn’t give to read him on Hillary Clinton’s email imbroglio, the rise of ISIS or, best of all, the darkly demotic presidential campaign of Donald Trump.
Objectivity has nothing to do with it. Hitchens — fair-minded on Hillary? Levelheaded on Islamic terrorism? Impartial on a demagogic bully? You’ve got to be kidding. What I miss is this man, with this unique sensibility, these foibles and blind spots, this particular mix of literary and cultural references, moral obsessions and undeniable brilliance as a prose stylist.
“And Yet . . .” is the closest any of us are likely to come to a resurrection of the man. There is, alas, no Trump in this collection of four dozen articles, book reviews and opinion columns, most of them written for The Atlantic, Vanity Fair and Slate during the final seven years of Hitchens’s life. But there is so much else: dazzling, vintage Hitch on Che Guevara, George Orwell (twice), Clive James, Edmund Wilson (who “came as close as anybody has to making the labor of criticism into an art”), Arthur Schlesinger Jr., V.S. Naipaul, Barack (“Cool Cat”) Obama, Rosa Luxemburg, Joan Didion, Charles Dickens and G.K. Chesterton.
Even better are the essays in which he simply opens his eyes, describes what he sees and ends up hitting on more human truth than you’re likely to find in a score of more properly scientific studies. Follow this proudly impious, native Brit through “My Red-State Odyssey” across the South as he describes the scene at a Nascar race and visits a rock formation in southern Virginia that the locals treat as a sign of God’s wondrous creation. Or come along for the ride as he looks into the possibility of election fraud in Ohio during the 2004 presidential contest and concludes that far too often Americans are “treated like serfs or extras when they present themselves to exercise their franchise.”
Most delightful of all may be the riotous three-part essay “On the Limits of Self-Improvement,” in which Hitchens endures a full-body makeover, on Vanity Fair’s dime, that includes massages, spa treatments, facials, a keratin hair-repair treatment, teeth whitening, hot-wax hair removal (colloquially known as the “sack, back and crack”) and a halfhearted effort at getting himself to lose weight, exercise, quit smoking and change his incorrigibly alcoholic ways. The essay tells you, in hilariously sardonic detail, far more than you ever wanted to know about the author’s corporal imperfections — and nearly everything you need to know about the strange blend of decadent excess and harsh asceticism that prevails in a certain segment of elite American culture.
If Hitchens flourished when he brought his literary sensibility to bear on the kaleidoscopic spectacle of American life, his greatest weakness as a critic and analyst was his tendency at times to take his instinctual hatred of illegitimate authority to absurd lengths. This led him to elevate a seemingly arbitrary list of villains — Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Saddam Hussein and God — to the status of History’s Greatest Monsters. Thankfully, these personal moral fixations, and the reckless judgment calls they sometimes inspired, make relatively few appearances in this volume. (Yes, I’m talking about his foolish, and never withdrawn, enthusiasm for the disastrous Iraq war, but also the unalloyed, incurious contempt for religion that filled every page of his best-selling “God Is Not Great.”) “And Yet . . .” really does give us Hitchens at his best.
What leads some intellectuals to make so many bad judgments that there’s nothing worthwhile to salvage? That, in a way, is the subject of Roger Scruton’s “Fools, Frauds and Firebrands.” It’s an important question, though one that Scruton’s book fails to answer in a satisfactory way. Author of more than 30 books and one of Britain’s leading conservative intellectuals, Scruton chooses to examine a series of writers through an explicitly and uniformly political lens. Imagine a doctrinaire leftist writing a book on a group of conservative luminaries, then reverse the ideological polarity and that’s what we have here: a one-sided polemic against the New Left masquerading as a serious reckoning.
The problem is not that the authors Scruton chooses to examine are entirely innocent of the charges he brings against them. All of them have said numerous silly things about politics, economics and history — Scruton does quite a lively job of cataloging them for us — and some of them (Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek, in particular) have an especially impressive track record of fatuous pronouncements. The problem is that Scruton displays such blanket hostility to the assumptions that undergird everything from American liberalism to the most radical Continental theory that he’s incapable of writing about anyone situated more than an inch over the center line with even a modicum of sympathy.
Does Scruton really think the voluminous, wide-ranging writings of Jürgen Habermas, the most important German social theorist of the past several decades, can be tossed aside so cavalierly? The same might be asked of his facile treatment of Michel Foucault’s often fruitfully provocative studies of the place of power and domination in the rise of modern institutions, and of his decision to write off Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze as purveyors of “nonsense in Paris.” And really, what could possibly justify placing a nice, moralistic American liberal like Ronald Dworkin between the same covers as the quasi-Stalinist Jean-Paul Sartre and postcolonialist bad boy Edward Said?
If you’re a Sean Hannity fan who likes to put on airs at a Tea Party rally, Scruton’s book will tell you everything you need to know about the thinkers it so confidently dismisses. But those who seek genuine illumination about the characteristic insights and follies of the New Left will need to look elsewhere — for an intellectual guide whose generalizations are less narrowly ideological.