Confessions of a Heretic Read online

  Praise for Fools, Frauds and Firebrands:

  ‘Outstanding and very necessary’ – Laetitia Strauch, Standpoint

  ‘Unlike many conservatives, Scruton isn’t merely a debunker, but offers a way out of Marxism.’ – Ron Capshaw, National Review

  ‘The book is a masterpiece’ – Barton Swaim, Wall Street Journal

  Roger is a philosopher, public commentator and author of over forty books, including Notes from Underground (2014), The Disappeared (2015) and Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (2015). He has specialised in aesthetics with particular attention to music and architecture. He engages in contemporary political and cultural debates from the standpoint of a conservative thinker and is well known as a powerful polemicist. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the British Academy.

  CONFESSIONS OF A HERETIC

  Selected Essays

  –

  Roger Scruton

  Contents

  – Title Page –

  – Preface –

  – 1 Faking It –

  – 2 Loving Animals –

  – 3 Governing Rightly –

  – 4 Dancing Properly –

  – 5 Building to Last –

  – 6 Effing the Ineffable –

  – 7 Hiding behind the Screen –

  – 8 Mourning Our Losses: Reflections on Strauss’s Metamorphosen –

  – 9 Branding the Bottle –

  – 10 Dying in Time –

  – 11 Conserving Nature –

  – 12 Defending the West –

  – About the Publisher –

  – Copyright –

  – Preface –

  This collection of essays arises from a decade of engagement with the public culture of Britain and America. Some have been published in print or on-line; some are appearing here for the first time. I describe them as confessions, since they reveal aspects of my thinking which, if I am to believe the critics, ought to have been kept to myself. I have weeded out material of an academic kind, and have tried to include only those essays that touch on matters of concern to all intelligent people, in the volatile times in which we live.

  Scrutopia, Christmas 2015

  1

  – Faking It –

  ‘To thine own self be true,’ says Shakespeare’s Polonius, ‘and thou canst be false to no man.’ Live in truth, urged Václav Havel. ‘Let the lie come into the world,’ wrote Solzhenitsyn, ‘but not through me.’ How seriously should we take these pronouncements, and how do we obey them?

  There are two kinds of untruth: lying and faking. The person who is lying says what he does not believe. The person who is faking says what he believes, though only for the time being and for the purpose in hand.

  Anyone can lie. It suffices to say something with the intention to deceive. Faking, however, is an achievement. To fake things you have to take people in, yourself included. The liar can pretend to be shocked when his lies are exposed: but his pretence is part of the lie. The fake really is shocked when he is exposed, since he had created around himself a community of trust, of which he himself was a member.

  In all ages people have lied in order to escape the consequences of their actions, and the first step in moral education is to teach children not to tell fibs. But faking is a cultural phenomenon, more prominent in some periods than in others. There is very little faking in the society described by Homer, for example, or in that described by Chaucer. By the time of Shakespeare, however, poets and playwrights are beginning to take a strong interest in this new human type.

  In Shakespeare’s King Lear the wicked sisters Goneril and Regan belong to a world of fake emotion, persuading themselves and their father that they feel the deepest love, when in fact they are entirely heartless. But they don’t really know themselves to be heartless: if they did, they could not behave so brazenly. The tragedy of King Lear begins when the real people – Kent, Cordelia, Edgar, Gloucester – are driven out by the fakes.

  The fake is a person who has rebuilt himself, with a view to occupying another social position than the one that would be natural to him. Such is Molière’s Tartuffe, the religious imposter who takes control of a household through a display of scheming piety, and who gave his name to the vice that his creator was perhaps the first to pinpoint with total accuracy. Like Shakespeare, Molière perceived that faking goes to the very heart of the person engaged in it. Tartuffe is not simply a hypocrite, who pretends to ideals that he does not believe in. He is a fabricated person, who believes in his own ideals since he is just as illusory as they are.

  Tartuffe’s faking was a matter of sanctimonious religion. With the decline of religion during the 19th century there came about a new kind of faking. The romantic poets and painters turned their backs on religion and sought salvation through art. They believed in the genius of the artist, endowed with a special capacity to transcend the human condition in creative ways, breaking all the rules in order to achieve a new order of experience. Art became an avenue to the transcendental, the gateway to a higher kind of knowledge.

  Originality therefore became the test that distinguishes true from fake art. It is hard to say in general terms what originality consists in, but we have examples enough: Titian, Beethoven, Goethe, Baudelaire. But those examples teach us that originality is hard: it cannot be snatched from the air, even if there are those natural prodigies like Rimbaud and Mozart who seem to do just that. Originality requires learning, hard work, the mastery of a medium and – most of all – the refined sensibility and openness to experience that have suffering and solitude as their normal cost.

  To gain the status of an original artist is therefore not easy. But in a society where art is revered as the highest cultural achievement, the rewards are enormous. Hence there is a motive to fake it. Artists and critics get together in order to take themselves in, the artists posing as the originators of astonishing breakthroughs, the critics posing as the penetrating judges of the true avant-garde.

  In this way Duchamp’s famous urinal became a kind of paradigm for modern artists. This is how it is done, the critics said. Take an idea, put it on display, call it art and brazen it out. The trick was repeated with Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes, and then later with the pickled sharks and cows of Damien Hirst. In each case the critics have gathered like clucking hens around the new and inscrutable egg, and the fake is projected to the public with all the apparatus required for its acceptance as the real thing. So powerful is the impetus towards the collective fake that it is now rare to be a finalist for the Turner Prize without producing some object or event that shows itself to be art only because nobody would conceivably think it to be so until the critics have said that it is.

  Original gestures of the kind introduced by Duchamp cannot really be repeated – like jokes they can be made only once. Hence the cult of originality very quickly leads to repetition. The habit of faking becomes so deeply engrained that no judgement is certain, except the judgement that this before us is the ‘real thing’ and not a fake at all, which in turn is a fake judgement. All that we know, in the end, is that anything is art, because nothing is.

  It is worth asking ourselves why the cult of fake originality has such a powerful appeal to our cultural institutions, so that no museum or art gallery, and no publicly funded concert hall, can really afford not to take it seriously. The early modernists – Stravinsky and Schoenberg in music, Eliot and Pound in poetry, Matisse in painting and Loos in architecture – were united in the belief that popular taste had become corrupted, that sentimentality, banality and kitsch had invaded the various spheres of art and eclipsed their messages. Tonal harmonies had been corrupted by popular music, figurative painting had been trumped by ph
otography; rhyme and meter had become the stuff of Christmas cards, and the stories had been too often told. Everything out there, in the world of naive and unthinking people, was kitsch.

  Modernism was the attempt to rescue the sincere, the truthful, the arduously achieved, from the plague of fake emotion. No one can doubt that the early modernists succeeded in this enterprise, endowing us with works of art that keep the human spirit alive in the new circumstances of modernity, and which establish continuity with the great traditions of our culture. But modernism gave way to routines of fakery: the arduous task of maintaining the tradition proved less attractive than the cheap ways of rejecting it. Instead of Picasso’s lifelong study, to present the modern woman’s face in a modern idiom, you could just do what Duchamp did, and paint a moustache on the Mona Lisa.

  The interesting fact, however, is that the habit of faking it has arisen from the fear of fakes. Modernist art was a reaction against fake emotion, and the comforting clichés of popular culture. The intention was to sweep away the pseudo-art that cushions us with sentimental lies and to put reality, the reality of modern life, with which real art alone can come to terms, in the place of it. Hence for a long time now it has been assumed that there can be no authentic creation in the sphere of high art which is not in some way a ‘challenge’ to the complacencies of our public culture. Art must give offence, stepping out of the future fully armed against the bourgeois taste for the conforming and the comfortable, which are simply other names for kitsch and cliché. But the result of this is that offence becomes a cliché. If the public has become so immune to shock that only a dead shark in formaldehyde will awaken a brief spasm of outrage, then the artist must produce a dead shark in formaldehyde – this, at least, is an authentic gesture.

  There therefore grew around the modernists a class of critics and impresarios, who offered to explain just why it is not a waste of your time to stare at a pile of bricks, to sit quietly through ten minutes of excruciating noise, or to study a crucifix pickled in urine. The experts began to promote the incomprehensible and the outrageous as a matter of course, lest the public should regard its services as redundant. To convince themselves that they are true progressives, who ride in the vanguard of history, the new impresarios surround themselves with others of their kind, promoting them to all committees that are relevant to their status, and expecting to be promoted in their turn. Thus arose the modernist establishment – the self-contained circle of critics who form the backbone of our official and semi-official cultural institutions and who trade in ‘originality’, ‘transgression’ and ‘breaking new paths’. Those are the routine terms issued by the Arts Council bureaucrats and the museum establishment, whenever they want to spend public money on something that they would never dream of having in their living room. But these terms are clichés, as are the things they are used to praise. Hence the flight from cliché ends in cliché, and the attempt to be genuine ends in fake.

  In the attacks on the old ways of doing things, one word in particular came into currency. That word was ‘kitsch’. Once introduced the word stuck. Whatever you do, it mustn’t be kitsch. This became the first precept of the modernist artist in every medium. In a famous essay published in 1939, the American critic Clement Greenberg told his readers that there are only two possibilities available to the artist now. Either you belong to the avant-garde, challenging the old ways of figurative painting; or you produce kitsch. And the fear of kitsch is one reason for the compulsory offensiveness of so much art produced today. It doesn’t matter that your work is obscene, shocking, disturbing – as long as it isn’t kitsch.

  Nobody quite knows where the word ‘kitsch’ came from, though it was current in Germany and Austria at the end of the 19th century. Nobody knows quite how to define the word either. But we all recognise kitsch when we come across it. The Barbie doll; Walt Disney’s Bambi; Santa Claus in the supermarket; Bing Crosby singing ‘White Christmas’; pictures of poodles with ribbons in their hair. At Christmas we are surrounded by kitsch – worn out clichés, which have lost their innocence without achieving wisdom. Children who believe in Santa Claus invest real emotions in a fiction. We who have ceased to believe have only fake emotions to offer. But the faking is pleasant; it feels good to pretend; and when we all join in it is almost as though we were not pretending at all.

  The Czech novelist Milan Kundera made a famous observation. ‘Kitsch,’ he wrote, ‘causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: how nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!’ Kitsch, in other words, is not about the thing observed but about the observer. It does not invite you to feel moved by the doll you are dressing so tenderly, but by yourself dressing the doll. All sentimentality is like this: it redirects emotion from the object to the subject, so as to create a fantasy of emotion without the real cost of feeling it. The kitsch object encourages you to think ‘look at me feeling this; how nice I am and how lovable’. That is why Oscar Wilde, referring to one of Dickens’s most sickly death-scenes, said that ‘a man must have a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell’.

  And that, briefly, is why the modernists had such a horror of kitsch. Art, they believed, had, during the course of the 19th century, lost the ability to distinguish precise and real emotion from its vague and self-satisfied substitute. In figurative painting, in tonal music, in the cliché-ridden poems of heroic love and mythic glory, we find the same disease – the artist is not exploring the human heart but creating a puffed-up substitute, and then putting it on sale.

  Of course, you can use the old styles; but you cannot seriously mean them. And if you use them nevertheless, the result will be kitsch – standard, cut-price goods, produced without effort and consumed without thought. Figurative painting becomes the stuff of Christmas cards, music becomes spineless and sentimental, and literature collapses into cliché. Kitsch is fake art, expressing fake emotions, whose purpose is to deceive the consumer into thinking he feels something deep and serious, when in fact he feels nothing at all.

  However, to avoid kitsch is not so easy as it looks. You could try being outrageously avant-garde, doing something that no one would have thought of doing and calling it art; perhaps trampling on some cherished ideal or religious feeling. But this way also leads to fakes – fake originality, fake significance, and a new kind of cliché, as in so much Young British Art. You can pose as a modernist, but that won’t necessarily lead you to achieve what Eliot, Schoenberg or Matisse achieved, which is to touch the modern heart in its deepest regions. Modernism is difficult; it requires competence in an artistic tradition, and the art of departing from tradition in order to say something new.

  This is one reason for the emergence of a wholly new artistic enterprise, which I call ‘pre-emptive kitsch’. Modernist severity is both difficult and unpopular; so artists began not to shun kitsch but to embrace it, in the manner of Andy Warhol, Allen Jones and Jeff Koons. The worst thing is to be unwittingly guilty of producing kitsch; far better to produce kitsch deliberately, for then it is not kitsch at all but a kind of sophisticated parody. Pre-emptive kitsch sets quotation marks around actual kitsch, and hopes thereby to save its artistic credentials. Take a porcelain statue of Michael Jackson cuddling his pet chimpanzee Bubbles, add cheesy colours and a layer of varnish; set the figures up in the posture of a Madonna and child; endow them with soppy expressions as though challenging the spectator to vomit, and the result is such kitsch that it cannot possibly be kitsch. Jeff Koons must mean something else, we think, something deep and serious that we have missed. Perhaps this work of art is really a comment on kitsch, so that by being explicitly kitsch it becomes meta-kitsch, so to speak.

  Or take Allen Jones, whose art consists of female look-alikes contorted into furniture, dolls with their sexual parts made explicit by underwear, vulgar and childishly nasty visions of the human female, the whole as frothy with fake sentiment as any
simpering fashion model. Again the result is such obvious kitsch that it cannot be kitsch. The artist must be telling us something about ourselves – about our desires and lusts – and forcing us to confront the fact that we like kitsch, while he pours scorn on kitsch by laying it on with a trowel. In place of our imagined ideals in gilded frames, he offers real junk in quotation marks.

  Pre-emptive kitsch is the first link in a chain. The artist pretends to take himself seriously, the critics pretend to judge his product and the modernist establishment pretends to promote it. At the end of all this pretence, someone who cannot perceive the difference between the real thing and the fake decides that he should buy it. Only at this point does the chain of pretence come to an end, and the real value of this kind of art reveal itself – namely its money value. Even at this point, however, the pretence is important. The purchaser must still believe that what he buys is real art, and therefore intrinsically valuable, a bargain at any price. Otherwise the price would reflect the obvious fact that anybody – even the purchaser – could have faked such a product. The essence of fakes is that they are not really themselves, but substitutes for themselves. Like objects seen in parallel mirrors they repeat themselves ad infinitum, and at each repetition the price goes up a notch, to the point where a balloon dog by Jeff Koons, which every child could conceive and many could manufacture, fetches the highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist – except, of course, that he isn’t one.

  Fake originality, fake emotion and the fake expertise of the critics – these are all around us and in such abundance that we hardly know where to look for the real thing. Or perhaps there is no real thing? Perhaps the world of art is just one vast pretence, in which we all take part since, after all, there is no real cost to it, except to those like Charles Saatchi, rich enough to splash out on junk? Perhaps anything is art if someone says that it is. Perhaps there is no such thing as a qualified judge. ‘It’s all a matter of taste,’ they say. And that’s about as far as thinking goes. But is there nothing to be said in reply? Do we have no way of distinguishing true from false art, or saying why art matters and how? I shall make a few positive suggestions.