THE PURSUIT OF kNOWLEDGE: Liberty and Liberation
Scruton, Roger
t H e P u R s u I t o F K n o W l e D g e Liberty and Liberation The first doesn’t stand a chance under a regime of the latter. by Roger Scruton liberty enters into conflict with women’s...
...scale destruction of native species and great suffering to the mink themselves, many of which have crawled back, cold, hungry, and miserable, to the farms that they remembered as home...
...They despise us for being content to follow the tried old ways of human ordinariness, for being eager to obtain wealth and freedom for ourselves while striving to live with our competitors on negotiated terms...
...In the liberated society of the future, the society built on the social contract, Rousseau argued, the dissenter must be “forced to be 6 6 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 Roger scruton, the writer and philosopher, is most recently the author of Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged (Encounter Books...
...The people of La Vendée—who had begged in vain for their ancient liberty to worship God as they chose—became the target of the first systematic genocide in modern history, in which 800,000 people perished...
...control of society, and also control of women as a part Tde Beauvoir are secretly seeking control— Some advocates of “liberty” are n o m S e i l n i t r e b “ f o s e t c d A y c e d he n wo . men v ’s o m a ovement l i exh a ibi o ts ” the k sam i e ten e - back, and they never contradict the aims and ambiof it...
...Their philosophers invariably write about the “birth” of this new human being from the “womb” of history or some such abstraction, and they blithely dismiss as “birth pangs” the violence that they advocate on the new human being’s behalf...
...Our response should be unequivocal...
...I incline to the latter explanation...
...Radicals envisage another and more perfect human type, one unpolluted by the history of human compromise, who will emerge from the ruins of the present, just as long as we set about to “liberate” him...
...In the end it is not freedom that they are advocating, but a change in human nature...
...The existing arrangement is vilified in massive programs of “re-education,” such as those launched by the “women’s studies” movement on every American campus...
...There is no such thing as “liberation” from human nature...
...But it does not follow that animals benefit in any way from the actions of their advocates...
...If we look back over the history of the radical movements that have shaped modern political thinking and teaching, we find that the advocates of liberation have almost invariably ended by promoting the oppression of those whom they promised to liberate...
...They want women to be free to choose, but only so long as they choose the life-style of a Beauvoir...
...Not so with radicals, who are, as a rule, people with no religious belief, but only a store of frustrated religious feeling...
...The “self” that is hidden in every woman, and which the feminists wish to free from its prison, turns out to be a man...
...by Roger Scruton liberty enters into conflict with women’s “liberation...
...It began at the French Revolution, so naively praised by Mary Wollstonecraft for its empty promise of liberty and equality and for its unthinking assumption that these two goals could be easily combined...
...And the actions that follow are the predictable result of it, for it is an imagery that allows precision only to acts of destruction and places the goal behind an impenetrable veil of wishful thinking...
...Workers were promised “liberation,” while capitalism was portrayed as a system of oppression in which the few benefited at the expense of the many...
...And in due course Robespierre established what he called “the despotism of liberty” in order to carry out Rousseau’s imperative...
...Animal liberationists have released mink from mink farms in Britain, causing largeIn the liberated society of the future, the dissenter must be free...
...Animals are very good constituents for a radical movement: they don’t answer diction in a way that they are not free today—and that the same is true of almost all those African peoples who had the good fortune to be part of the British Empire...
...She quotes the telling remarks of Simone de Beauvoir, sainted leader of the fem- Writing in this issue, Christina Sommers draws our attention to the way in which women’s inist movement, who wished to deny women their fundamental freedom—the freedom to stay at home...
...Paine even became a member of the Revolutionary Assemblée Nationale, only to be arrested and imprisoned by the Revolutionaries...
...There is, in all radical causes, a kind of disgust with human nature...
...tions of those who speak for them...
...Radicals cannot forgive us for being human beings...
...True liberty consists in permissions, not goals...
...Burke, who had insightfully warned against what was bound to happen, became the target of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man, in which the Revolution was defended in the same self-indulgent terms as it had announced itself...
...The Russian peasants, liberated from their enslavement to private property into the new freedoms of the collective farm, had to be forced to remain there, just as the new woman, liberated from domestic drudgery into a life of free love and self-expression, might have to be forced to remain in this condition from which her feminine nature recoils...
...It was the original advocate of liberation, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who put the point most clearly...
...Why is it that tyranny advances in this way behind the banner of liberation...
...It exists when the ordinary person is allowed to find his own way to perdition, regardless of the exultant intellectual who believes, like Rousseau, Robespierre, Marx, Lenin, and Beauvoir, that he is making a terrible mistake...
...The example illustrates a principle that has governed radical movements from the beginning: the principle of opposition...
...Radical movements don’t have a clear idea of what they are for, but they have a passionate conviction about what they are against...
...Consider the movement for animal liberation...
...Victims must be obedient to the role carved out for them by history...
...The Revolutionary Tribunals, established to promote the cause of liberty and “the rights of man,” allowed to the accused no right of defense and appointed the prosecutor as both judge and jury...
...The wars of “liberation” from colonial “oppression” in Asia and Africa have had the same effect...
...His fate made no difference to his opinions, and the pity is that his head was not cut off with those opinions still inside it before they spread across the civilized world...
...Women’s liberation in our day has, it seems, advocated the liberty of women to be themselves, but not to be women...
...All that was necessary to rid the world of injustice, according to the socialists, was for the oppressed to unite against their oppressors...
...Religious people usually avoid this disgust...
...The interesting thing is that radical thinkers and politicians took no lesson from these events...
...t H e P u R s u I t o F K n o W l e D g e Liberty and Liberation The first doesn’t stand a chance under a regime of the latter...
...they gather up the defects of humanity under the all-comprehending label of “original sin,” and then set about the task of forgiveness...
...History makes no difference to the advocate of “liberation,” who continues to act to the detriment of those whose interests he presumes to serve, moving not offended so much by the sight of the ordinary housewife at home with her children as by the thought that, if you grant women the choice, this is the life that so many of them would choose...
...They are not offended so much by the sight of the ordinary housewife at home with her children as by the thought that, if you grant women the choice, this is the life that so many of them would choose...
...The writings of Marx and Lenin are full of this imagery, as were those of the French Revolutionaries...
...forced to be free...
...Does the fault lie with those who take up the banner...
...It may be politically incorrect to say it, but it is nevertheless true that the people of Zimbabwe were free under British colonial juris6 4 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 R o g e R s c R u t o n on like Tom Paine from cause to cause and learning nothing from their failure...
...And France had declared war on just about all its neighbors...
...But when the victim shows the first sign of reluctance to comply with this dramatic role, when he or she crawls back to the farm like the liberated mink, or flees back to the home like the liberated woman, the drama is jeopardized...
...They are better even than women in this respect, and it is not surprising if frustrated feminists move on to animals to give vent to their political spleen...
...Or is there something wrong with the very ideal that it holds aloft...
...Within two years of seizing power on behalf of the people, the Revolutionaries had stuffed the jails of France with half a million of those very people...
...For, in the long run, the freedom to make mistakes is the only way to avoid them...
...at best there is the attempt to understand it, to live with it, and gently to pressure it in a direction that it will bear...
...And the victim is chosen for its dramatic potential, the ability to cast the “liberator” in a heroic light, and to justify whatever violence and destruction he might see fit to inflict...
...As the Communist Manifesto famously expressed it, they had “nothing to lose but their chains...
...The net achievement of those advocates in Britain has been vastly to increase the J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R 6 5 t H e P u R s u I t o F K n o W l e D g e number of domestic cats (responsible for the cruel deaths of 190 million small animals annually), to hamper most methods of meat production, to outlaw the most humane forms of pest control, and in general to upset the balance of interests on which husbandry depends...
...It is hardly surprising, therefore, if the Marxist idea of emancipation led in due course to Stalin’s cult of the “new socialist man”—the man who would freely choose the life of slavery and privation fashioned in the Soviet Union...
...The socialist movement began in earnest in the mid-19th century with the same tendency...
...And if they don’t obey willingly, they must obey by force...
...And yet, in every instance so far observed, the liberation of the workers from capitalism has been followed immediately by their imprisonment by the state...
...They are invariably animated by a negative energy, which targets some existing arrangement with an urgent desire to destroy it, and which justifies its rage with the vague promise of “liberating” a “victim...
Vol. 41 • July 2008 • No. 6
