Sir Roger Scruton taught worthless shit. Thus, he became incapable of writing a single sentence which wasn't egregiously false, foolish or both false & foolish.
His short book 'England & the need for Nations' begins thus
Democracies owe their existence to national loyalties
National loyalties can create Nation States. Some Nation States may become Democracies. But so may multi-ethnic Empires or Commonwealths. The Austrian half of Austro-Hungary had universal suffrage by 1907 even though it contained Czechs, Slovaks, Germans etc. The United Kingdom is a Democracy. Yet the Scots & the Welsh see themselves as separate Nations. Why did Scruton not know this?
—the loyalties that are supposedly shared by government and opposition,
they could be loyal to the same Emperor or President.
by all political parties, and by the electorate as a whole.
There may be separatist elements within the electorate. Some MPs may refuse to take their seats in the Legislature if an oath of loyalty is required of them.
Wherever the experience of nationality is weak or non-existent, democracy has failed to take root.
It has failed to take root in plenty of places where the 'experience of nationality' was as strong as fuck. Is the converse also true? Yes. Look at India. It is way less nationalistic than China but, perhaps for that very reason, way more democratic.
For without national loyalty, opposition is a threat to government, and political disagreements create no common ground.
Fuck off! Fascits & Nazis may have very fierce 'national loyalty' but they may also want to get rid of every vestige of not just representative government but also the rule of law.
Yet everywhere the idea of the nation is under attack
No. The idea of the nation is defended. What is being promoted is 'pooling of sovereignty'. If this means the nation is more likely to survive and thrive, then we would say that the idea of the nation is being safeguarded. True, a crazy shithead may say that all treaty based law is very evil and those fucking furriners are in bed with the secret elite (Homosexual, Jewish, Freemasons many of whom are directly descended from shape shifting lizards from Planet X) which runs everything. Also, did you know the Post Office is actually just a cover for a paedophile ring? Our kids are being sodomized by furriners so as to undermine their sense of patriotic belonging.
—either despised as an atavistic form of social unity, or even condemned as a cause of war and conflict, to be broken down and replaced by more enlightened and more universal forms of jurisdiction.
It is possible that some Pofessor as stupid and useless as Scruton said something of the sort. But that is because teaching shite turns your brain to shit.
But what, exactly, is supposed to replace the nation and the nation state?
Prior to 2007, when it was plausible that European per capita income would converge to that of the US, some believed there could be a Federal European union with substantial transfers & full fiscal & monetary integration.
And how will the new form of political order enhance or conserve our democratic heritage?
Well enough. The EU forced the UK to set up a proper Supreme Court. Nobody currently seems keen to go back to the old system.
Few people seem prepared to give an answer, and the answers that are offered are quickly hidden in verbiage, typified by the EU’s adoption of the ecclesiastical doctrine of ‘subsidiarity’, in order to remove powers from member states under the pretence of granting them.
Post-Brexit Britain is still going down this road.
Recent attempts to transcend the nation state into some kind of transnational political order
e.g. NATO
have ended up either as totalitarian dictatorships like the former Soviet Union,
Russia was autocratic under the Tzars & became more so under the Commies.
or as unaccountable bureaucracies, like the European Union today.
The suggestio falsi here is that the EU is like the USSR. Why not simply say 'millions of British patriots have been killed in Brussell's Gulags.'
Although many of the nation states of the modern world are the surviving fragments of empires, few people wish to propose the restoration of imperial rule as the way forward for mankind.
Maybe Scruton wrote this before ISIS became a thing. Plenty of people would like a Global Caliphate where Kaffirs get short shrift.
Why then and for what purpose should we renounce the form of sovereignty that is familiar to us, and on which so much of our political heritage depends?
Maybe, if there had been more pooled sovereignty, Europe would have rebounded froom the Crash as rapidly as the US. The US has had 45 percent growth in real per capita Income since 2008. The UK has had 7 percent. France has had 10 percent. Germany has had 13 percent. China has had 185 percent. This means the EU can be bullied by both Trump & Xi. As for the UK, even Pakistan can shit on us.
We in Europe stand at a turning point in our history.
No. Europe trundled a little further down the road of irrelevance.
Our parliaments and legal systems still have territorial sovereignty.
But, the EU will soon nationalize our rectums and rent them out to shape-shifting lizards from Uranus.
They still correspond to historical patterns of settlement that have enabled the French,
Alsatians? Corsicans?
the Germans,
they lost a lot of territory
the Spaniards,
Catalans?
the British
44 percent of Scots want Independence.
and the Italians
Northern idealogues
to say ‘we’ and to know whom they mean by it.
This is also true of people with tiny dicks even if we don't know who else is 'one of us'.
The opportunity remains to recuperate the legislative powers and the executive procedures that formed the nation states of Europe.
The opportunity always exists to fuck up the economy by doing stupid shit. Economists estimate that UK GDP per capita is approximately 6% to 8% lower than it would have been if the UK had remained in the EU. Personal wealth across the UK (including housing, savings, and pensions) has dropped by roughly 23% in real terms since 2020, suffering one of the sharpest declines among advanced economies. Worse yet, White Europeans have been replaced by non-European darkies- Non-EU (primarily non-White) employment in the UK more than doubled by 2024, reaching about 225% of its 2016 level.
At the same time, the process has been set in motion that would
cause dogs to marry cats
expropriate the remaining sovereignty of our parliaments and courts, that would annihilate the boundaries between our jurisdictions, that would dissolve the nationalities of Europe in a historically meaningless collectivity, united neither by language, nor by religion, nor by customs, nor by inherited sovereignty and law.
also kittens would say 'bow wow' while puppy dogs would say 'miaow'.
We have to choose whether to go forward to that new condition,
i.e. some fantastic nonsense this nutter pulled out of his arse
or back to the tried and familiar sovereignty of the territorial nation state.
Which would mean a fall in real income & wealth of the type the UK experienced. It may also mean less sovereignty as the country becomes a 'rule taker' & becomes subject to economic and diplomatic blackmail.
At the same time our political élites speak and behave as though there were no such choice to be made—just as the communists did at the time of the Russian Revolution
There were two of them in the same year. Communists said there were more choices- e.g. a separate peace & immediate expropriation without compensation of the landlord class.
They refer to an inevitable process, to irreversible changes,
which is the case with all entropic processes. Scruton himself inevitably and irreversibly changed into a corpse.
and while at times prepared to distinguish a ‘fast’ from a ‘slow’ track into the future, are clear in their minds that these two tracks lead to a single destination—the destination of transnational government, under a common system of law, in which national loyalty will be no more significant than support for a local football team.
Since about 1940, it has been obvious that Wilsonian Nation-States would have to be part of a Super-power alliance. Even India had to sign up with the Soviets.
Economists don't think there will be full fiscal convergence. Instead you will have different 'Tiebout models' offering different external economies.
In this pamphlet I set out the case for the nation state,
which is like setting out the case for cats. They already exist. The advantages of having them around are obvious. Why gild the lily?
recognising that what I have to say is neither comprehensive nor conclusive,
nor sensible
and that many other kinds of sovereignty could be envisaged that would answer to the needs of modern societies.
Some nation-states are Republics and thus have one type of sovereignty. Others are monarchies and have a different sort of sovereignty.
My case is not that the nation state is the only answer to the problems of modern government, but that it is the only answer that has proved itself.
Why isn't there a Kurdish nation-state? The answer is that some 'nations' (i.e. a bunch of guys speaking the same language or who claim a common descent from dudes who spoke the same language) have kicked ass and established themselves on an economically viable swathe of territory. They have absorbed 'broken people' of indigenous tribes or ethnicities as well as immigrants from elsewhere. But one could say the same of various species of plants or animals.
We may feel tempted to experiment with other forms of political order.
Scruton's pals were all like 'dude, lets kill King Charles & Sir Keir so as to try out a Lesbian gerontocracy'
But experiments on this scale are dangerous,
they are impossible.
since nobody knows how to predict or to reverse the results of them.
Sadly, that's how life works. You feel in your bones that turning 40 mightn't be a good thing. But you don't have a fucking choice, mate.
The French, Russian and Nazi revolutions were bold experiments;
No. They were the result of the previous leadership doing stupid shit.
but in each case they led to the collapse of legal order, to mass murder at home and to belligerence abroad.
The Glorious Revolution wasn't very glorious for Irish Catholics. The American Revolution was a fucking disaster for the indigenous people.
The wise policy is to accept the arrangements, however imperfect, that have evolved through custom and inheritance,
The unwise policy is to tell King Charles to kiss your black ass.
to improve them by small adjustments, but not to jeopardise them by large-scale alterations the consequences of which nobody can really envisage.
Which is why Brexit was a mistake.
The case for this approach was unanswerably set before us by Burke in his Reflections on the French Revolution
How come the American Revolution worked out great but not the French one? The answer is that the French are fucking horrible. Chances are, if the Government you have is shitty, it is likely that its successsor will be shitty.
and subsequent history has repeatedly confirmed his view of things.
No. It confirmed the view that a successful General may be able to turn himself into an Emperor- just as Burke predicted.
The truth is that the Brits saw that some reform, at home, was required. British support for the 'Holy Alliance' didn't last very long. The British Great Reform Bill was passed 22 months after the fall of the Bourbons in France.
The lesson that we should draw, therefore, is that
people who teach Philosophy have shit for brains?
since the nation state has proved to be a stable foundation of democratic government
as well as a stable foundation for Communism, Fascism, Theocracy, Imperialism
and secular jurisdiction, we ought to improve it, to adjust it, even to dilute it, but not to throw it away.
Also, we should not throw away Gravity. We must learn to work with it otherwise we might float off into outer space along with our kittens which say 'bow wow' and our puppy dogs which say 'miaow'.
Scruton published this shite in 2006. Should the UK have rethought joining the Euro and pushing for gradualist reforms within the EU? Was Scruton wrong to back Brexit?
The initiators of the European experiment—both the self-declared prophets and the behind-the-doors conspirators
many of whom were shape-shifting lizards from Uranus.
— shared a conviction that the nation state had caused the two world wars.
Macron says 'yes to patriotism, no to Nationalism'.
A united states of Europe seemed to them to be the only recipe for lasting peace.
With hindisght, it was indeed essential to European collective defence because the US might decide that NATO wasn't worth the expense.
This view is for two reasons entirely unpersuasive.
To a shithead- sure.
First, it is purely negative:
No. It was purely positive. The question was whether Europe really could have large scale transfers from the richer to the poorer countries such that it could reflate after a Stock Market Crash and also finance a kick-ass European Army. The answer, sadly was- no. But, maybe Europe will get its act together belatedly in view of the clear and present danger posed by a vast Eurasian block under the leadership of a China which can do its own bilateral deal with the US.
it rejects nation states for their belligerence, without giving any positive reason to believe that transnational states will be any better.
The problem was that if the EU expanded to its East, then it might come into conflict with Russia which in turn might be driven into the arms of China.
Secondly, it identifies the normality of the nation state through its pathological versions.
Which was reasonable if your next door neighbour was Germany.
As Chesterton has argued about patriotism generally, to condemn patriotism because people go to war for patriotic reasons, is like condemning love because some loves lead to murder.
You can be for patriotism, like Macron, and against nationalism. Sadly, Le Pen may replace Macron quite soon.
The nation state should not be understood in terms of the French nation at the Revolution or the German nation in its twentieth-century frenzy.
Can the UK be understood as a nation state or will Scotland go its own way?
For those were nations gone mad,
The French were attacked. They fought back very successfully but then their Emperor decided he'd like his brothers and sisters to become Kings and Queens. As for the Germans, they genuinely believed that they needed to grab French gold & Eastern European land so as to avoid encirclement and eventual immeserization.
in which the springs of civil peace had been poisoned
by the Emperor of Japan? What poisons the springs of peace is the possibility of a profitable war. What preserves it is Nuclear apocalypse which poisons the entire planet.
and the social organism colonised by anger, resentment and fear.
also cats start marrying dogs.
All Europe was threatened by the German nation, but only because the German nation was threatened by itself, having caught the nationalist fever.
No. Its General Staff believed they could enrich their country, and gain vast agricultural estates for themselves, by going to war sooner rather than later.
Nationalism is part of the pathology of national loyalty, not its normal condition—a point to which I return below.
This is like Macron saying 'Patriotism is cool. Nationalism isn't.
Who in Europe has felt comparably threatened by the Spanish,
Franco claimed Portugal
Italian,
invaded Albania & Greece
Norwegian,
Sami people
Czech
Sudetens & Slovaks didn't like them
or Polish
Poland took a bite out of Czechoslovakia.
forms of national loyalty, and who would begrudge those people their right to a territory, a jurisdiction and a sovereignty of their own? The Poles, Czechs and Hungarians have elected to join the European Union:
for economic and geopolitical reasons
not in order to throw away national sovereignty, but under the impression that this is the best way to regain it.
Nonsense! They just wanted to grow their economies and converge to the European average per capita real income level.
They are wrong, I believe.
They were right.
But they will be able to see this only later, when it is too late to change.
Twenty years have gone by. None of the new entrants wants to leave the Union. The Greeks threatened Grexit but only as a bargaining ploy.
Left-liberal writers,
like ultra-conservatives
in their reluctance to adopt the nation as a social aspiration or a political goal, sometimes distinguish nationalism from ‘patriotism’—an ancient virtue extolled by the Romans and by those like Machiavelli who first made the intellectual case for modern secular jurisdiction.
Prophet Muhammad said 'hubb al watan min al iman'. Love of the fatherland is part of religion. But Islamists, like Iqbal, also say that Nationalism is the shroud of Religion. The same thing could be said of Catholic or Protestant or Orthodox or Buddhist Emperors.
Patriotism, they argue, is the loyalty of citizens, and the foundation of ‘republican’ government; nationalism is a shared hostility to the stranger, the intruder, the person who belongs ‘outside’.
One could equally say that patriotism is about xenophobia or loyalty to the clan, whereas nationalism is something broader and more inclusive. But why bother? If you aren't teaching worthless shit for a lving, you could say somethingg sensible instead.
I feel some sympathy for that approach. Properly understood, however, the republican patriotism defended by Machiavelli, Montesquieu and Mill
not to mention Mummy & the Milkman
is a form of national loyalty: not a pathological form like nationalism, but a natural love of country, countrymen and the culture that unites them.
Pathological love can lead you to inserting a District or a County up your arse. Kids, please don't try this at home. Let your love for your country remain decorous and wholly free of anal insertion.
Patriots are attached to the people and the territory that are theirs by right;
Oikeiosis? Animals are territorial. There is an uncorrelated asymmetry dictating a 'bourgeois strategy'.
and patriotism involves an attempt to transcribe that right into impartial government and a rule of law.
No. The two things are wholly unrelated.
This underlying territorial right is implied in the very word—the patria being the ‘fatherland’, the place where you and I belong.
No. Slaves or serfs have a patria. That doesn't mean they have rights of any type.
Territorial loyalty, I suggest, is at the root of all forms of government where law and liberty reign supreme
It may be a feature of forms of government based on cannibalism. It isn't a feature of any advanced economy though, no doubt, at some earlier period, territorial militias & 'Marcher Lords' may have had salience.
Attempts to denounce the nation in the name of patriotism
can succeed if 'nationalism' causes you to be driven out of your natal territory. Conside the plight of the Muslim Leaguer from Uttar Pradesh. The two Nation theory meant that he had to emigrate to Pakistan.
therefore contain no real argument against the kind of national sovereignty that I shall be advocating in this pamphlet.
Because it is of a pie-in-the-sky kind.
I shall be defending what Mill called the ‘principle of cohesion among members of the same community or state’,
or any other situation where cohesion is displayed. But why defend it? Is it being sodomized by the principle of derision? What if it is totes gay & is enjoying the experience?
and which he distinguished from nationalism (or ‘nationality, in the vulgar sense of the term’), in the following luminous
not luminous. Boring and stupid.
words: We need scarcely say that we do not mean nationality, in the vulgar sense of the term; a senseless antipathy to foreigners;
that's xenophobia- but it can apply to people who live on the other side of the river and who speak pretty much the same language you do.
indifference to the general welfare of the human race,
as Blake says, only scoundrels talk of the 'general good' rather than focus on 'minute particulars'.
or an unjust preference for the supposed interests of our own country;
nothing wrong in that at all. Mill had shit for brains.
a cherishing of bad peculiarities because they are national,
I suppose this describes what Scruton was doing. England has a long tradition of boring shitheads writing nonsense.
or a refusal to adopt what has been found good by other countries. We mean a principle of sympathy, not of hostility; of union, not of separation. We mean a feeling of common interest among those who live under the same government, and are contained within the same natural or historical boundaries. We mean, that one part of the community do not consider themselves as foreigners with regard to another part; that they set a value on their connexion—feel that they are one people, that their lot is cast together, that evil to any of their fellow-countrymen is evil to themselves, and do not desire selfishly to free themselves from their share of any common inconvenience by severing the connexion.
Mill was aware that the Irish were a Nation and had always been very patriotic. But they had a decentralized system of 'Brehon law'. England was less national but more centralized and eventually prevailed. The question was whether the Irish should acquiesce in this arrangement. The Potato famine suggested that literally anything was better than British rule.
The phrases that I would emphasise in that passage are these: ‘our own country’, ‘common interest’, ‘natural or historical boundaries’ and ‘[our] lot is cast together’.
Mill thought Ireland should stick with Britain albeit on the basis of thoroughgoing reform.
Those phrases resonate with the historical loyalty that I shall be defending in this pamphlet.
Sadly, such loyalty has to give way with what can keep you alive. Sometimes it is better to be part of an Empire than to live in a shitty nation state.
To put the matter briefly: the case against the nation state has not been properly made,
I just did. It may be that there has to bee a world government to properly deal with 'externalities'. The opposite may be more likely. A world government is bound to do catastrophically stupid shit because there is no competitive pressure or possibility of 'Exit'.
and the case for the transnational alternative has not been made at all.
sure it has. A World Governmnt would suppress negative externalities and 'nuisance goods'- like 'loose nukes'
I believe therefore that we are on the brink of decisions that could prove disastrous for Europe and for the world, and that we have only a few years in which to take stock of our inheritance and to reassume it.
No such decisions were made at that timee.
Now more than ever do those lines from Goethe’s Faust ring true for us: Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen. What you have inherited from your forefathers, earn it, that you might own it.
What Goethe's generation hadn't inherited was a united German nation. They didn't want to earn or own a shitty situation which left them at the mercy of France.
We in the nation states of Europe need to earn again the
ability to walk up-right?
sovereignty that previous generations so laboriously shaped from the inheritance of Christianity, imperial government and Roman law.
not to mention the ability to make fire
Earning it, we will own it, and owning it, we will be at peace within our borders.
Scruton forgets that what Goethe's generation earned was 23 years of war.
Would he have written anything so foolish if he hadn't wasted his life studying & teaching nonsense? Sure. Stupid policies should be justified by stupid rhetoric. Scruton made a bit of money out of his stupidity. That is more than most of us can say.
No comments:
Post a Comment