Book Review: The Uses of Pessimism by Roger Scruton
A calm, measured corrective to unscrupulously optimistic thinking
Roger Scruton in his later years was subject to a terrible display of gotcha journalism. The New Statesman’s Deputy Editor took to social media to boast at having Scruton cancelled from his advisory role on housing aesthetics. The magazine was forced to issue a groveling apology for taking his statements out of context and it issued the full audio recording so the true intent could finally be revealed. A sad state of affairs that would surely augment the pessimism of anyone previously Panglossian.
I am a big reader of John Gray’s philosophy and this book is actually quite similar in tone. At times the author could be switched without noticing much difference in messaging. We are urged to question progress at every turn, lest the outcome leads to an even worse state of affairs. The type of pessimism may vary slightly with Scruton’s being of a more gentle and conservative brand.
In the preface he distances himself from the deep pessimism found with Arthur Schopenhauer. He cites the hubris of Prometheus, the stupidity of opening Pandora’s Box etc. Anyone who has read The Iliad should know that humans have no chance of predicting the future let alone controlling it.
He pessimistically asserts that none of the book’s intended targets are likely to adjust their positions as a result of reading it. Those said targets are mainly the scheming individuals who utilise unscrupulous optimism. In their hands hope “becomes a mechanism for turning problems into solutions and grief into exultation, without pausing to study the accumulated evidence of human nature, which tells us that the only improvement that lies within our control is the improvement of ourselves.”
A repeated theme throughout is that of the optimist “I” versus the pessimist “we”.
“In all emergencies, and all changes that abolish old routines, the optimists hope to turn things to their benefit. They are as likely to consult the past as a battalion fighting for its life in a city is likely to protect the monuments. They strive to be on the winning side, and to find the path into the future on which the light of ‘I’ stays shining.
The ‘we’ attitude, by contrast, is circumspect. It sees human decisions as situated, constrained by place, time and community; by custom, faith and law. It urges us not to throw ourselves always into the swim of things, but to stand aside and reflect. It emphasizes constraints and boundaries, and reminds us of human imperfection and of the fragility of real communities. Its decisions take account of other people and other times.”
Most chapters deal with a different type of optimistic fallacy. The Best Case Fallacy ignores the conservatism of expertise and tradition. Optimism to Scruton is the reckless gambling of the 2008 housing bubble and banking crisis. Sub-prime mortgages were issued and gambled on being repaid.
Living unsustainably and passing on debt to the future generations and gifting them a negative cipher is also a symptom of this type of thinking. Getting into debt has been made easier, declaring bankruptcy has been made easier and all of the above misunderstands human nature and our short term desires.
He extolls the pessimistic prophets. Religion can be a positive form of pessimism for Scruton although he sees Muhammad’s explanations for opposing moneylending to be nonsense. He accepts that a more scrupulous form of optimism could uphold a pragmatic sense of rootedness and locality.
A judicious pessimism conserves that which works unlike communism and blind revolutionary optimism. He opines that it is the later that is pushed by the activist radicals in the media and universities.
Scruton has a belief in freedom with constraints. Hegel asserted that without limits we can only become masters and slaves according to the survival of the fittest. Obedience and duties can offer some protection from this but Scruton only sees institutions such as education, mental health diagnosis and other systems being attacked and destabilised by the aforementioned intellectuals.
He finds it telling that The French Revolution is lionised by so many modern thinkers. The good times are always just around the corner once more heads have been chopped off in order to cement the revolution. Similarly with Mao’s “utopia”, a few million more necessary deaths will bring utopia closer.
Utopian fallacies such as communism and nazism are too often immune to refutation, not least because they don’t present any real, workable pathway to their final solutions. They often need to create an enemy group to victimise as a regular purifying ritual. He talks with mocking contempt of Marx’s belief that within his “scientific utopia” all will just fall into place and then the citizens will spend their days ‘hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, tending cattle in the evening and engaging in literary criticism after dinner’.
He refutes the zero sum fallacy and believes that nothing is improved by transferring resources to corrupt tyrannies. Nor is there any incentive to improve if continued bad performance sees the charity keep flowing in. As American citizens were largely content economically they were thus immune to the stirring up of resentments by The Frankfurt School. He wryly remarks how the strange cabal of anti-western groups brings together an uneasy alliance of homosexuals and those that would be the first to toss them off buildings if they had the numerical courage.
When addressing the planning fallacy Scruton takes relatively early (2008) aim at The European Union. Especially the unelected bureaucrats and their one size fits all policies that trample over the hard won traditions nation states. These traditions allowed a group to co-exist and believe in overarching processes. As such he believes the EU to be a poor example of subsidiarity given it disempowers and runs roughshod over the interests of the localised regions.
The next fallacy is that of the moving spirit, essentially bowing to eternal progress and ‘wholesale repudiation of the past.’ We are clearly making advances in knowledge in technology but can the same be said morally? What about in the arts? Assigning the designation of new eras sees a call for customs, values and practices to be shaken off. Art benefited from constraints, something he sees as sorely lacking in modern efforts.
Replacing classical architecture with ugly, brutalist buildings is accepted under modernism. Ultimately it is very profitable to demand that everything shifts and often for the worse.
Next to be debunked is the aggregation fallacy, the belief that conflicted notions such as liberty and equality can co-exist. He gives The French Revolution as an example, it used violent despotism in the name of upholding liberty. A liberal used to be someone who valued freedom but now it so often refers to someone who seeks to restrict freedoms by state mandate and institutions.
Other contradictions include group discrimination as a path to anti-discrimination, affirmative action over the right to free association etc. This “liberation” of the private sphere undoes the trust and sympathies that once bonded a society by constraints. He is pessimistic that such a society can hold itself together.
“Yet the ability of liberal reformers to ignore the signs of social decay, and to press on with the pursuit of their agenda, is not the least remarkable proof that they live in a world of false hopes.
Since the sixties Western countries have adopted policies in the matter of immigration that no person schooled in the elementary truths of pessimism would have endorsed. Anybody who has studied the fate of empires, and the difficulties of establishing territorial jurisdiction over communities that differ in religion, language and marital customs, knows that the task is all but impossible, and threatens constantly to break down in fragmentation, tribalism or civil war. Take the lid off multi-ethnic and multicultural empires — such as the Ottoman Empire or communist Yugoslavia — and bloodshed and destruction immediately ensue.”
The defences against the truth chapter references delusory beliefs in society. The examples given include supporting the breakup of the family unit when boyfriends and stepfathers statistically pose a much bigger threat to children than the biological father. The western CND campaign to disarm the military, often encouraged and assisted by enemy Soviets during the cold war was another.
Ressentiment is shown to that which is accessible and allows criticism so in the absence of Al Qaeda being interested in discussion the victims of 9/11 become “Little Eichmanns” who deserved their fate. Similarly as past anti-western citizens took aim at their own countries for criticism, Stalin countenanced no such forums in his communist state.
Roger takes a swipe at the purposely impenetrable gibberish and gobbledygook employed at universities, stating that: “The best way to create a left-wing orthodoxy in the academy is to fortify the leftist position with armoured nonsense: for then criticism becomes impossible.”
Finally he makes a defence of the villainised Enoch Powell. He shows how the ‘River of Blood’ reference was starved of its context (also “whip hand” is a secondary quote) and suggests that he has been vindicated by history.
“The Madrid and London bombings and the murder of Theo Van Gogh are viewed by many Europeans as a foretaste of things to come. It is now evident that, in the debate over immigration, in those last remaining days when it could still have made a difference, Enoch Powell was far nearer the truth than those who instantly drove him from office, and who ensured that the issue was henceforth to be discussed, if at all, only by way of condemning the ‘racism’ and ‘xenophobia’ of those who thought like Powell. As for the racism and xenophobia of the incomers, it was indiscernible to the liberal conscience, which has never been able to understand that liberalism is an unusual state of mind.”
All the fallacies and the unscrupulous optimism that they contain are then brought together within a highly speculative theory that posits them to all be evolutionary hangovers from when they served a positive purpose. Risk takers within the tribe were perhaps valued over the reflective etc.
He is no purveyor of the “Noble savage” myth and denigrates this lifestyle of the “I”. I feel he goes overboard in glorifying the “we” of modern civilisation and its unsustainable cities of waste products and demands for imports and constant growth.
Sometimes our evolutionary past speaks to instincts that remain healthy for us. We aren’t meant to be overwhelmed with thousands of humans around us in this mass society. As Dunbar’s number has shown we are best adapted to living within small groups. He concludes this chapter by stating optimists are counterintuitively the pessimistic ones, underrating as they do how wonderful modern humans are.
Which leads us to “Our Civil Present”, a plea to human exceptionalism, more city worship etc, but how are we to live with eight billion rapacious apes? The invention of agriculture has been described as our greatest mistake given it led to settlement and burgeoning families and subsequent requirements. He describes cities as secure and settled but they remain one broken link in the supply chain (food, oil, water etc) from collapse. The veneer of civilisation is thin indeed.
Elsewhere he points to the rationality of prejudice, drawing as it does on the collective wisdom of past generations.
“For Burke, the principal gift of tradition was the state of mind that he called ‘prejudice’, by which he meant a form of thought evolving from the pooled experiences of absent generations. Prejudice eschews abstract solutions and serves as a barrier against the illusion that we can make everything anew, according to some ideally rational plan. It is not irrational: on the contrary, it strikes a path towards collective reasonableness.”
Scruton might be a little optimistic himself in the city worship, he suggests they allow us to co-habit harmoniously but then immediately has to accept the enclaves that pose a threat. The city cannot survive a dose of the cohesive and tribal, where a God is first and foremost submitted to by a Brotherhood. He accepts that the interlinked lack of forgiveness and irony is incompatible to living alongside a society of co-operating individuals. Settlement is a reproach and to kill and die fighting the ‘Great Satan’ is angelic.
“The Pleistocene mindset of the Islamists is indifferent to public opinion, and has set itself the task — parallel to that adopted by the tiny band of Bolsheviks in 1917 — of entirely destroying the forms of settled government. It is drawn to terrorism not because of anything that could be achieved by it, but because terrorism is a refuge from settlement and a return to the all-commanding ‘T’. Terror is therefore not a tactic used to accomplish some negotiable goal. It is an end in itself and a source of exultation.”
Echoing Keats’ famous quote that “the best lack all conviction” Scruton bristles against the fallacies seen in the French Revolution, The Bolsheviks, Maoism and in the modern context, Islamism.
“The optimism of the Islamists, like that of the revolutionaries down the centuries, excuses every kind of destruction on the grounds of necessity and the long-term plan. It overlooks all the facts that make the long-term plan absurd and necessity a willed illusion. We should turn away from such comprehensive visions, and hold before our minds the image of human imperfection.”
The book finishes up with a short chapter in which the posthuman cyborg goals of transhumanists are surprisingly compared to the failings he identified in the Pleistocene ancestors . He wishes to prop us up as “settled, negotiating creatures” and gaze with ironic eyes on our flawed condition.
All in all this book offers great food for thought and is a very engaging read. I would recommend it as a primer on Scruton’s philosophy, touching as it does on all manner of topics that are key to his life’s work and message. A gentle pessimism pervades the entire oeuvre as he cautions us to be careful what we wish for.
