A Few Immediate Thoughts On An Exchange Between Roger Scruton And Terry Eagleton

 

Scruton v Eagleton https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=qOdMBDOj4ec

My note to a friend: 

I listened to their exchange till the questions started—first 42 minutes. Then I cut out happily as I had gotten restlessly impatient even before then. 

My impatience sprang from my feeling that each had his head in the clouds (and maybe a little up his derrière.) Both agreed that culture, circa 2012, has generally been degraded, cheapened and commodified. Both agreed that practical higher education—such as business schools, commerce departments, vocational schools, in a word “managerialism”—is a blight on the university’s mission. 

It for Scruton exists essentially to impart the greatness of the past and its wisdom that allows us to belong to a great tradition so as better to know ourselves and others so we can all live together competently. 

For Eagleton, the university ought be a liberal arts place for critique, for building down the powers that predominate and the economic order. They 1. make the quest for profit soul-destroying and energy-usurping such that no energy is left with which to engage the high arts and 2. form the vocational and business predominance in the modern university. 

Scruton’s answer to the dilemma of degraded mass culture is I’m not sure what, some kind of bottom up revolution that he says Burke called for, which is to say, people who respect each other freely associating in shared activities. Culture properly conceived can serve this and the university is vital to fostering it.

For Eagleton the answer *seems* nothing less than the transformation of society (by way of revolution?) into some kind of Marxist-conceived utopia where the quest for profit doesn’t dominate people’s lives. He doesn’t explicitly say this but I infer that’s what he has in mind. 

As between them in this, Eagleton’s head is  cloudier than Scruton’s. His strikes me as an attenuated view of modern life and the flourishing of which each of us is capable and so many of us manifest. For he says relentless profit seeking born of capitalism empties us of the capacity to flourish. 

I disagree with Scruton that great art makes us more competent human beings. And on this I agree more with Eagleton that great art is, as he says Marx said, “gloriously useless.” But he stops too short. We’re not made better morally or competently by great art. But we are enlarged by it. It’s axiomatic that we’re personally improved, made larger, by engaging the best that has ever been thought and created. Scruton perhaps doesn’t mean to, but the very instrumentality, everything for a purpose, that he rails against creeps into part of his defence of high culture: its wisdom makes us more competent to live together. He’s better when he’s explicit that when we engage the sublimity of great art, we engage the capacity for sublimity within each of us. 

For myself, I have no problem with the managerial side of universities. 

Doubtless, commodified, cheapened culture is everywhere around us because the means of its creation and conveyance to us are so pervasive and because, as Scruton notes precisely contra Eagleton, prosperity enables more people than ever to consume it. But the very same means and prosperity make possible more people’s greater exposure to great art as more people than ever in North America and the UK have available higher education.

Plus, I reject the rigid and static distinction they both make between the glory of great art and the crap in the popularly consumed rest. Greatness that they can’t see or concede exists in popular culture and it’s high falutin self-limiting snobbery that can’t see it. Too, it’s just not so that wanting to make a buck in creating art spells its necessary mediocrity.

Finally, on one huge point I am vigorously with Scruton and that is the impact of post modernism on the liberal arts. Eagleton defended post modernism, specifically deconstruction and Derrida as both valuably affirming and valuably negating. The horror show that college liberal arts and social science teaching have turned into is a direct consequence of the intellectual tradition that Eagleton defends. Scruton was emphatically correct to stand against it and decry it.