Arts & Letters Daily can always be relied upon for material to blog about when one has several million better things to do. But when it gives pride of place to Roger Scruton’s praising of conservatism, well the opportunity is too hard to pass up.
Most of the article is pretty much as you’d expect. Several thrown-off remarks to how hard it is to be a conservative in the academy, as if his status as a professional victim is so obvious as to be presupposed. The tacit, or not so tacit, rejection of reformism on the grounds that revolutionaries are often excessive. The frequent claim that conservatives are the realists and everyone else is governing for an unrealised, and unrealisable, ideal community. And, well given it is Scruton this had to be there somewhere, the fear of sex.
And the result [of the sexual revolution] is exactly as Burke would have anticipated. Not merely a breakdown in between the sexes, but a faltering in the reproductive process—a failing and enfeebled commitment of parents, not merely to each other, but also to their offspring. At the same time, individual feelings, which were shored up and fulfilled by the traditional prejudices, are left exposed and unprotected by the skeletal structures of rationality. Hence the extraordinary situation in America, where lawsuits have replaced common courtesy, where post-coital accusations of “date-rape” take the place of pre-coital modesty, and where advances made by the unattractive are routinely penalized as “sexual harrassment.” This is an example of what happens, when prejudice is wiped away in the name of reason, without regard for the real social function that prejudice alone can fulfill. And indeed, it was partly by reflecting on the disaster of sexual liberation, and the joyless world that it has produced around us, that I came to see the truth of Burke’s otherwise somewhat paradoxical defense of prejudice. [my emphases]
This is utterly bizarre. Last I looked, in 2003 throughout the Western world men and women work together on projects that require the most extraordinary amounts of trust. This happens in business, in politics, in the military, in science, and in families. In 1903, or 1803 or whenever Scruton wishes we would refer to, there were simply not that many opportunities for working together in ways that required substantive trust. By necessity, the modern world has seen a flowering of “trust between the sexes.”
And as for the claim that individual feelings were “shored up and fulfilled by traditional prejudices”, and that we now live in a “joyless world”, it is rather hard to know what to say, except that I doubt the self-styled “realists” have a more accurate picture of what the real world is now like in all its messy glory.
Shall we agree to let the loathsome new version of the “she was asking for it” defence in the middle of the paragraph pass as unworthy for serious comment? Well, maybe not quite. But I think a joke at the expense of “the unattractive” is in order. In practice it is very rare to see descriptions that really are best understood referentially, but this might an exception, especially since we can be absolutely certain that the speaker is well enough acquainted with the referent that there is no possibility of misidentification, or indeed misidenity.