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Roger Scruton has presented himself in many different guises: as self-described Conservative thinker, as aesthetician, composer, novelist, moralist, ruralist, memoirist, elegist of a lost England, celebrator of fox-hunting and of wine, and polemicist - against postmodernism, the European Union, women's studies, gay marriage, pop music, in general anything that offends his notion of tradition. However, central to all his writing is the defence of culture - especially of what he calls 'high culture' - against its detractors. Indeed, one of his many books bears the title Culture Counts. Its subtitle is Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged. But whose faith? And whose feelings? And by what are they besieged? The full answer to these questions can only come from a consideration of Scruton's work as a whole, but this slender book, addressed primarily to an American audience - and which, for all its George- Steinerish jeremiads, finds time to praise some contemporary British art and, en passant, P.N. Review - offers a convenient entrée into the Scrutonian world-view.
Bearing his audience in mind, Scruton here dutifully praises America's 'viable democracy and masterful technology' but denies that it can offer a sustainable outlook on human life to stand up 'either to the sarcastic nihilism of the West's internal critics or to the humorless bigotry of Islam'. He sees in art, like Arnold and Leavis before him, 'the repository of a threatened store of moral knowledge'. For Scruton culture takes over from religion by 'symbolizing the spiritual realities that elude the reach of science'. However, he also tells us that as human beings we 'move on the surface of things' and that through the spectacles of art 'we see the world as it really seems'. This, implicitly, is a Nietzschean approach, where we dare to be superficial, though it is hard to square with what Scruton refers to as 'the deep truths of the human condition'. How can there be any deep truths about us at all if we are always only at the surface of things? In the first case art offers us truths, in the second only the consolations of a world that 'seems'. As we shall see, this is one of the many fault-lines that run through Scruton's work, and it comes -...