The Uses of Pessimism is a wonderful little book, one of Roger Scruton’s best. Its terms, however, are a tad imprecise. He contrasts optimism with pessimism but then must add qualifying adjectives. What he is actually talking about is the conflict between utopian leftism and worldly-wise conservatism. On the one hand we have those who believe they have uncovered a grand new solution to our problems, one that will efface the past and bring us to a brightly-lit future. Unfortunately, we might have to break a few eggs to create that omelette, but we are prepared for the violence that intrinsically accompanies radical, positive change. On the other hand there are the individuals who have read and internalized their Burke and see civilization as an evolutionary product of law, conventions, mores, compromises and local customs.
While the revolutionary must suddenly recreate all of human experience and establish state controls over millions and millions of human transactions, the market-driven economist benefits from the trillions of transactions that have created modern commerce and social organization. Fundamentally, Scruton is talking about an abstract, ‘new’ world view that privileges the “I” and an established world view that privileges the “We.” He is talking about ‘tribal’ societies that rely on kinship and the desperation (and resulting forms of dominance) that accompany survivalism vs. the society that is, literally, settled. Historically, he is tracing the transition from tribal society to agricultural society, the pivotal, most important process in human history, one in which strangers find ways of settling with one another (physically, legally, morally, psychologically) and evolve practices and processes which, in their totality, constitute civilization.
In charting this larger pattern he looks at a series of fallacies that undergird the leftist/utopian vision. One, for example, is the zero sum game fallacy that argues for ‘equality’ but assumes that for every one person’s gain there is another person’s loss. Rather than attempting to foster common success, we get redistribution that will somehow bring ‘justice’ by restoring equilibrium to a system. Churchill’s and Samuel Johnson’s famous responses to this process are that everyone will be dragged down to a lower level. RS’s personal take on this particular fallacy is related to the current debate on charter (and other) schools. He points out that the local grammar school which he attended at High Wycombe set out as its task the goal of replicating the curricula and expectations of the grand British public schools. The result was that it produced a number of Cambridge fellows second only to Eton in its numbers. (Parenthetically, this is what we should have done rather than dumbed down all of American education; we should have demanded that the schooling previously available only to elites would now be available to all.)
While the book feels like an analysis of the errors of socialism and the recent, intellectual currents which have used obscurantism and an attack on traditional learning (there is no such thing as meaning, no such things as facts) to reinstate a socialism whose violent failings have prevented direct and honest defenses, the book actually ends with a very trenchant analysis of Islamic radicalism and the manner in which it fits the preestablished template. This is very shrewd and subtle as well as pressing, urgent and contemporary.
Bottom line: this is a must read, one of RS’s sleepers, a small book which draws together a great deal of learning to make a series of points whose importance and relevance have never been more compelling.
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- Reviewed in the United States on October 30, 2014
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- Amazon CustomerReviewed in Australia on March 15, 2024
Concise, easy accessible, useful to general readers
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