This book could have been predicted. Roger Scruton, the scourge of everything fashionable, could not be content with anathematising modern culture piecemeal. The time had to come when his enjoyable onslaughts on trendy cultural relativism, deconstruction, pop music and modern architecture would at last be gathered together in one annihilating blast.
But his new book is more than a denunciation. It is a lament for the passing of high bourgeois culture, and a search for its roots in the primordial experience of cult and community. What Scruton claims to offer is a theory of culture, but really it is a myth-a new myth of the Fall. The sense of belonging and moral certainty bestowed by a religiously-sanctioned common culture is Scruton's Eden; the Fall is the Enlightenment, which expelled humankind from that paradise. Every myth of the Fall must have a redemption-but where can it come from, given that, as Scruton says, "there is no going back... we must live with our enlightened condition and the inner tension to which it condemns us"?
The answer is high culture. Art creates an imaginary community, which assuages some of the pain of losing the real one. And its severity and seriousness creates an analogue for those difficult "rites of passage" through which the wayward adolescent passes to responsible adulthood. But-and this is what gives Scruton's book its heavy load of pathos and regret-the Fall shows no sign of ending. As real life and the imagined community of art move further apart, alienation and disillusion enter into the sanctuary of art itself. Modernism is the last attempt to redeem art from disillusion, to save it from the all-devouring marketplace. In post-modern art, the attempt is given up, and so falls into pretence and kitsch, which "eschews subtlety, allusion and implication, and in place of imagined ideals in gilded frames offers real junk in inverted commas."
It's a compelling myth, told with surpassing intensity and eloquence, and it contains many palpable hits on some deserving targets. There are also some startling interpretations of some familiar laments about modern culture; these are thought-provoking in a slightly barmy way. For example, Scruton is concerned about the environment, but his idea that our lack of reverence for the dead is what leads to the pillage of nature would probably not appeal much to Jonathon Porritt. His description of consumer society as "phantasmagoric, a place in which the ghosts of satisfactions are pursued by the ghosts of real desires" wouldn't be out of place in the former Marxism Today. But his suggestion that we escape from phantasmagoria by reviving a Confucian sense of piety certainly would be.
A bigger problem with the book is that it only engages closely with things it can denounce. Elsewhere its touch on reality is light, to say the least. Scruton's portrayal of the descent from the glory of the Homeric era, when men bestrode the era like gods, to the moral midgets of today who gyrate mindlessly at rave parties, is altogether too smoothly perfect. The 3,000 years of history in between disappear, subsumed in the vast swell of Scruton's narrative. Can it really be true that before the modern era, sex was always regarded as a sacrament? How does that square with the fact that prostitution has been around since Babylonian times? This cavalier treatment of history follows from Scruton's reverence for tradition. Once you've shown that an idea or value has impressively long roots, you've as good as proved that it's eternally valid (this is pretty much the Conservative defence of the House of Lords). The more a culture strays from those roots, the more shallow and trivial it becomes.
Scruton has decided that we live in a "value-free" society. But that contemptuous phrase only shows that Scruton has never taken a good look at it; at least not with that sympathy which he so admires in German Romantic philosophers. His picture of modern culture is weirdly skewed. Vast areas which any other writer would feel obliged to include are missing. There is no mention of the information revolution, or the internet. Television appears fleetingly as an agent of "moronisation"; science as a pernicious agent of fantasy. "Popular culture" for Scruton is always and only the most nihilistic songs of the most nihilistic pop bands. It is never the Comedy Store, or Gary Larson or The Simpsons. The arts get the same treatment. Damien Hirst is wheeled out as evidence that the entire arts world has been reduced to kitsch. Scruton's demolition job is so exhilarating that it's only later, when you put the book down, that you think: hang on-what about Lucien Freud, David Mamet, Adam Thorpe, Harrison Birtwistle? A constant refrain in the book is the way so much of modern culture offers the gratifications of fantasy, where a "pliant surrogate" is substituted for the difficult complexities of reality (pornography is the most glaring example). But surely what Scruton gives us in his book is a "pliant surrogate" for modern culture, purged of all the messy complexities which might impede the crushing juggernaut of his prose. Most of the time Scruton's posture of contempt is half-hidden, but sometimes it bubbles to the surface: "The world as displayed in the culture of youth is a world from which parents have absconded-as these days they generally do." Does Scruton really think most parents abscond from their responsibilities? Or did the gratifyingly sharp cadence of that tacked-on clause drown the need to measure it against reality? Similarly with Scruton's assertion that, repulsive though youth's tribal allegiances might be, at least they provide some semblance of community in the "urban jungle." The clich? gives the game away-as clich?s always do, according to the critic FR Leavis, (ironically one of Scruton's heroes, much quoted in this book). A sloppy reach-me-down perception can offer no resistance to Scruton's absurdly gloomy thesis.
There is another irony lying in wait for Scruton's thesis. If it is true that we live in a value-free society, there is only one place we can look for values-in high art, "which perpetuates the common culture from which it grew... with the ethical life transfixed within the aesthetic gaze and so immortalised." For "immortalised" read "frozen." But what use is an ethical vision which is frozen in the posture of a 200-year-old artwork? Is it not in the messy here-and-now that we need to know how to live-a here-and-now which in many respects is unprecedented, and in which a search for "roots" is beside the point? Scruton would say no-and he points to Confucius as an example of how we might live our lives: by acting as if everything we did had an eternal value. By pointing to the east, Scruton hopes to restore our faith in the aesthetic posture. But if there is a moral to Scruton's book, it is: don't put your faith in art. Because in the end history will turn a beautiful idealising vision of the ethical life into something merely beautiful, something which gives us a holiday from life rather than guiding us through it.
There is a slightly desperate air to Scruton's final pages, where he pleads for a return to a Confucian piety. But there is no need for desperation, once you let go the notion that the ethical and the aesthetic stand or fall together. Do that, and you'll find that the world, far from being "value-free," is teeming with value and value systems. Most of them have nothing to do with art or aesthetics-in fact, there is no one yardstick you can apply to them. But that's what makes them human. The irreducible plurality of human values is something to rejoice in, not fret over in some vain attempt to revive a lost wholeness. Try talking to that young man in the baseball cap, Roger; the cap may not be a sign of moral turpitude; in fact he may be one of the many millions of caring, non-absconding parents. Take a look inside your local hospital, where you'll find a vocational spirit as passionate as your aestheticism. Visit a research institute, where you'll find that far-from negligible value called the pursuit of truth. As DH Lawrence once said: "Let art go hang, and put your faith in life."
The Intelligent Person's Guide to modern culture
Roger Scruton
Duckworth 1998, ?14.95
