Want to Save the Planet? Turn Right

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Excerpts from writer Raymond Zhong's talk with the author of The Meaning of Conservatism...

Roger Scruton, Britain's foremost conservative philosopher, offers a traditionalist manifesto to discomfit both the left and American free-marketeers.

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"My own view," he tells me, "is that left-wing positions largely come about from resentment—I agree with Nietzsche about this—a resentment about the surrounding social order. They have privileges, I don't. Or, I have them and I can't live up to them. Things should be organized differently.

"And there's always some sense on the left that power is in the wrong hands. You know, that the world is misgoverned. And in particular, the nearer something is to yourself, the more you feel that on the left. There's this rejection of your own country, of your own government."

"That emotion is very strong," he continues. "I think it's the fundamental source of left-wing politics throughout the 20th century. And when it turns itself into an environmental movement, the resentment remains."

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"There are goals in life of a more spiritual and moral kind, which actually require us to control our appetites. I think this is an old religious idea, which is there in Christianity, in Islam, at least some forms of Islam, and of course in Confucianism as well. . . . And that is not a lefty position. It's rather an old-fashioned moral and spiritual position, which isn't asking governments to do something about it. It's asking individuals to clean their own souls."

He continues: "I think this whole environmental movement has arisen because people recognize that we do need that spiritual discipline, and they're looking for it, partly in the wrong place by trying to get the government to do that discipline for us."

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The philosopher of the English countryside knows that most of his intellectual kindred are to be found across the Atlantic—and probably across much of the coastal U.S., too. "America is the one place," he says, "where you can talk of 'this nation' and everyone knows exactly what you think. People put a flag on their porch, and they do have a desire to localize everything and celebrate things locally.

"You know" that, he says, "if you go to a rodeo in the West, or a point-to-point race in Virginia or somewhere like that, or a pigeon-shoot . . . where you see ordinary people getting together to have a beer or celebrate their community. It's happening all over America just the way it always did."

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