Anti-Climacus

There's a phenomenon that I like to call "arguing through adjectives." It occurs when one is reading an essay that is a clear attempt to pit two views of the world against each other. Rather than argue out the comparative strengths and weaknesses of each, it gets creative in the way it denigrates the side it doesn't want you to believe. This is arguing through adjectives in spades:

To many people, Eliot’s theory of culture and tradition is too arduous, imposing an impossible duty upon the educated elite. To others, however, it has been a vital inspiration. For let us ask ourselves just what is required of "one who knows." Should he, in the modern world, devote himself like Sartre or Foucault to undermining the "structures" of bourgeois society, to scoffing at manners and morals, and ruining the institutions upon which he depends for his exalted status? Should he play the part of a modern Socrates, questioning everything and affirming nothing? Should he go along with the mindless culture of play, the post-modernist fantasy world in which all is permitted since neither permission nor interdiction have any sense?

To answer yes to any of those questions is in effect to live by negation, to grant nothing to human life beyond the mockery of it. It is to inaugurate and endorse the new world of "transgression," a world which will not reproduce itself, since it will undermine the very motive which causes a society to reproduce. The conservative response to modernity is to embrace it, but to embrace it critically, in full consciousness that human achievements are rare and precarious, that we have no God-given right to destroy our inheritance, but must always patiently submit to the voice of order and set an example of orderly living. The future of mankind, for the socialist, is simple: pull down the existing order, and allow the future to emerge. But it will not emerge, as we know. These philosophies of the "new world" are lies and delusions, products of a sentimentality which has veiled the facts of human nature.

Seductive flattering of his audience's own perception of itself? Check. Attempt to stack the deck against the opposition? Check. Egregious misreading of, at a minimum, Foucault and socialism (I suspect Scruton has never talked to an actual socialist, or at least not in the last 30 years)? Yes. Strength of the 'argument' once intensifying adjectives have been removed? Nonexistent. I mean, goodness, he can't even get Socrates* right: the same Socrates defends his unjust conviction by appeal to the power of the laws of Athens. But I suspect imagined interlocutors make for a better essay than the messy business of dealing with the arguments made by the proponents of alternative views.


*(I know of no reading of Plato in which the Crito represents Plato's view and not Socrates', except perhaps if you submit to a purely dramatic reading of Plato, which seems unlikely. Aristophanes thought Socrates too much a fool to take seriously. Perhaps this is from Xenophon?)