I was aware of his lecture on why beauty in architecture and daily life matters, but I was not aware of his work in the 1980s establishing seminars in communist Czechoslovakia: trying to keep these ideas alive under repression.
The irony? He was later accused of "racism" and had his career destroyed in London for his non PC ideas.
UKMail article from last June notes the irony of this.
This was my first encounter with ‘dissidents’, and I felt an immediate affinity. Nothing was of such importance for them as the survival of their national culture.Deprived of material and professional advancement, they were forbidden to publish or to travel. The authorities had concealed their existence from the world and had resolved to remove their traces from the book of history.
How had this situation arisen, I asked, and I was flabbergasted by the answer. These people, who included some of the most distinguished teachers of their generation, had been condemned to menial employment, either because they had signed Charter 77, which called on their government to respect citizens’ rights, or because they had refused to denounce a colleague for doing the same. (The founding members of Charter 77 included Vaclav Havel, who would later became president when Czechoslovakia was freed from Soviet control.)
Some of the young people had been expelled from university for organising reading groups. Others had been punished as members of the ‘imperialist Zionist conspiracy’ (a codename for the Western alliance but with a nice hint of anti-Semitism along the way) and so had been removed from their posts following a campaign of vilification in the national press.
In short, I was addressing a room of criminals whose ‘crimes’ consisted of uttering the wrong word, reading the wrong book, belonging to the wrong network, and in general trusting in the free life of the mind. Does this sound familiar? Then read on…
alas, the censorship of traditional ideas has now come to the west, under the dictatorship of political correctness:
The witch-hunting hysteria has returned with a vengeance, not in Eastern Europe but here, where open enquiry and the presumption of innocence have been, until this moment, the foundation of moral order and the guarantee of civil peace.
Even the Divinity School at Cambridge, which once bravely helped us in offering degrees to our students, has joined in the witch-hunt, revoking a fellowship offered to the conservative thinker Jordan Peterson in response to a petition littered with the signatures of ignorant snowflakes.
And when, just a few months ago, I was summarily removed as the (unpaid) head of a Government quango – Building Better, Building Beautiful – for things I had neither thought nor said, my Czech colleagues said: ‘Yes, it is starting again.’ And by ‘it’ they really did mean It.
Now in Britain, as then in Czechoslovakia, the true intellectual is a dissident, and if our national memory is to survive, it will be because we have succeeded in building here, as once we built there, an underground university devoted to knowledge.more HERE.
via Instapundit
the dangerous idea: Why Beauty matters:
a lecture about the same idea: (transcript here):
more here:
some of his books can be borrowed or downloaded from internet archives (many in other languages) including his book on Beauty,
but they also have an audiobook of his book "The Soul of the World": LINK
from the summary on that page:
the book is an extended reflection on why a sense of the sacred is essential to human life and what the final loss of the sacred would mean. In short, the book addresses the most important question of modernity: what is left of our aspirations after science has delivered its verdict about what we are?
Drawing on art, architecture, music, and literature, Scruton suggests that the highest forms of human experience and expression tell the story of our religious need, and of our quest for the being who might answer it, and that this search for the sacred endows the world with a soul.
Evolution cannot explain our conception of the sacred; neuroscience is irrelevant to our interpersonal relationships, which provide a model for our posture toward God; and scientific understanding has nothing to say about the experience of beauty, which provides a God s-eye perspective on reality. Ultimately, a world without the sacred would be a completely different world one in which we humans are not truly at home. Yet despite the shrinking place for the sacred in today s world, Scruton says, the paths to transcendence remain open.”
I was listening to one of Jordan Peterson's lectures that essentially said the same thing.
Ironic, isn't it, that while the Pope is pushing ugly Madonnas, the idea of moral relativism ("who am I to judge" was a comment about a pedophile he had rehired) and deconstructing the idea of truth, and destroying the traditions of the church, it is the secular types who are reminding one of the need of the transcendent.
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