This is from last winter, well before his own public crucifixion:
His accusers are hyenas, baying into the wilderness they are creating. Do they believe they themselves will escape the fate they create ex nihilo for others?
England excels at creating martyrs.
Incredible post. Like many others here, I loathe the culture of political correctness as I do those who seek to impose it on us. Sir Roger’s dignified response shows us the way to fight against this vile ideology.
It is a moving and eloquent speech, but I suspect that Sir Roger, one of the most brilliant of living philosophers, slips into a basic philosophic error in the final thirty seconds or so of his delivery. Namely, he confuses what should be with what is. It is quite true that “we” — by which presumably Sir Roger means society as a whole — should step out of the narrow circle of the politically correct witch-hunting mentality. Given, however, that the scapegoat-seeking SJWs have lapsed into a savage type of irrationality, they have put themselves beyond the persuasion by which their victims might address them. How does one reason with a lynch-mob? The hysterical mob, out for blood, is what it is: A collective monster driven by rage. And then there is this — the mob has driven Sir Roger from an unpaid government advisory position, but he retains his sources of income. Others have not been so lucky. Countless people have been destroyed, through job-loss and ostracism, by the ubiquitous Sturmabteilung. Our friend Fjordman is a perfect example of the phenomenon.
Sir Roger nevertheless invokes Girard’s notion of the sacrificial crisis, with its resolution in the murder of an innocent victim with perfect justification. In an increasingly multicultural society, trust will diminish; a sense of social de-coherence will prevail; and given the retreat of Christianity, the old impulse to identify the malefactor will prevail. Can a nation of three hundred and thirty million people sink into the equivalent of a paleolithic crisis? I raise the question rhetorically because the evidence for a positive response is all about us every day.
England is after all the birthplace of mob-rule. Rationalism, the English disease, led to Adam Smith’s class system which was made ‘scientific’ by Karl Marx. Now money and quantity count, not quality. England is governed by the thief, the speculator, and the tub-thumper. Roger Scruton is a fly in the ointment.
“The birthplace of mob-rule”? We’re far from perfect, but I believe that honour (at least within “democratic” societies) belongs to the French, who’ve had several changes of unelected government in the last couple of centuries.