Roger Scruton is a man who has found himself condemned for defending the right things in the wrong way. Love, home, happiness and justice are the overriding concerns of his work, but his arguments about how we can achieve them have been repeatedly damned as mad and dangerous by those kind enough to appoint themselves the moral policeman of public thought.
Mark Dooley, it is fair to say, is not one of those moral policeman. He is instead a Scrutonian acolyte whose aim in this book, The Philosopher on Dover Beach, is to outline and celebrate what he takes to be Scruton’s “philosophy of love”. Dooley does not try to hide his admiration for Scruton the man and Scruton the thinker. He believes that Roger Scruton’s writings form a coherent body with an overriding message which Western society is in desperate need of. This message is, in short, a lesson on how to live as human beings. It is the wisdom of accepting that all the important things in life are the superficial illusions (like love and happiness), which can’t be understood through abstract reason but can only be known by living lives full of real meaning. The implication is that we should always be afraid of people who tell us they can sweep away the irrationalities of the world and replace them with a rational order which will set us free.
‘Home’ is the idea which sums all this up for Dooley. Home is the place we are attached to by the irrational ties of memory and desire that make up who we are as people. More often than not, these ties are formed by processes we haven’t chosen for ourselves. Instead, they themselves have made us who we are. Modern society, however, has an increasing tendency to weaken our connection with a sense of being at home as we are forced to think of ourselves as global citizens on a planet without political, economic, or cultural borders.
Scruton, according to Dooley, shows us the way home. “Scruton teaches the reader how to take that homeward path through art, architecture, sexual desire, hunting, farming and even wine drinking”. It is this commitment to the local and the personal as an answer to the emptiness of life in a globalised society that Dooley singles out as Scruton’s unifying theme.
The strength of Dooley’s book is his ability to give this clear and unified account of Scruton’s ideas. He is also able to place them in a context which makes clear what he takes Scruton’s overall project to be, and why we should care about it. These strengths lead directly, however, to the book’s major weakness. Dooley is so keen to connect Scruton’s ideas together and explain their importance that there is barely a critical word in the whole volume. This is a book by a partisan for whom every criticism which has been levelled at Scruton is just another opportunity to affirm the great man’s genius and bemoan the short-sightedness (or more often the viciousness), of his opponents. Because of this, Dooley has not produced a rigorous assessment of Roger Scruton’s work. It’s more like the type of primer you might be given on Prize Day at a Roger Scruton Sunday school.
The Philosopher on Dover Beach gives a coherent overview of Scruton’s varied work and his major concerns. It is also an insistent advocate of his right to be considered a benign and significant thinker. But it is not a balanced or disinterested account. Newcomers to Roger Scruton might be grateful for such a clear introduction to his writing. But they may also prefer to begin by reading the man himself, in which case Dooley’s companion volume The Roger Scruton Reader might be a better place to start. Equally accessible, this covers all the same topics as The Philosopher on Dover Beach, but in the words of Scruton himself, rather than Dooley’s able paraphrase.
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