Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged

by Roger Scruton

Book Overview

What is culture? Why should we preserve it, and how? In this book, renowned philosopher Roger Scruton defends Western culture against its internal critics and external enemies, and argues that rumors... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1594031940
• ISBN13: 9781594031946
• Release Date: May 2007
• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Length: 118 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

Penetrating--and devastating--critique of modern culture

Lets face the truth: our universities now undermine western culture. Our universities and our chattering classes argue "that there is no objective procedure, no authority, no secure canon of classics" to pass on. And besides, isn't it a form of prejudice to insist our culture is superior in any way? This dismissal of western culture spreads across all the humanities. For example, when "Marcel Duchamp signed a urinal..and then exhibited it as a work of art" (p 9) it was an act of malicious undermining of all that had been true and beautiful in western art. Scruton sifts through the wreckage that is before us to find where the rot started. And with brilliant clarity he finds it in the growing "spirit of skepticism" (p 25) that has also drawn Europe away from religion. Scruton points out that "the goal of religious education is...the cultivation of the heart, not the head...(and) the education of the emotions through religion occurs only when the doctrines are believed. That is why culture cannot be a religion substitute" (p 39). The utter ruin of western civilization is all around us. We see it even in the fact that "mathematical competence is a dwindling asset in Western society" (p 57). The humanities appear to have simply disappeared. Art and poetry...so much lost. And music! Spend a second pondering a rap musician's cruelty to women and violence, all in childish rhyme and no melody whatsoever. That's western music today. Scruton indicates the only hope is in a religious revival. And the chances for that seem...

"Skewering The 'Culture Of Repudiation'"

Roger Scruton's "Culture Counts" is much more than just another tiresome, stale screed attacking the postmodernist establishment. Instead, it is a refreshing defense of the actual, if neglected, inclusiveness and meaningful "multiculturalism" of traditional Western culture, and, simultaneously, an expose of the rigid orthodoxies and crude censoriousness which mark that allegedly open-minded, postmodernist "culture" flourishing at our universities, one he calls the "culture of repudiation." This regnant "culture" he sees as unworthy of a university, since it is in grave contradiction, for it argues that all cultures are relative and therefore of equal value, at the same time as it demonstrates a fashionable self-loathing by bashing traditional Western culture as beyond the pale. It is, in fact, merely nihilist and has nothing substantive to offer in place of what it would destroy. Scruton is equally provocative in suggesting that current education has things just backwards. To him, the purpose of education is not merely the private benefit to the student, but rather the benefit to the culture, of which a truly educated student will himself be a future guardian. (Pace, John Dewey!) Finally, it should be pointed out that Scruton is as versed in contemporary art, architecture, music and literature as he is in the traditional, and thus he does not follow his serious analysis with a counsel of impotence and despair, seeing instead convincing "rays of hope" in such current practitioners as, for example, Jacob Collins, Quinlan Terry, David del Tredici, Ian McEwan, Michel Houellebecq, Alain Finkelkraut, Tom Stoppard, Alan Bennett, Paul Johnson, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and James Wood.

Concise and Compelling

Roger Scruton's book "Culture Counts" is meant as an answer to Western culture's two current threats: radical Islam and, from within, multiculturalism. To that end he offers up an examination of just what culture is: its origins and importance for a civilization. In a compact (108pp) format of seven chapters, Scruton discusses the development of cultures generally, using relevant topics from philosophy and religion, anthropology, and general history. When commenting on Western Culture in particular, he offers up specific examples of both popular and high culture drawn from literature and drama, painting, architecture, and music. In the chapter "Culture Wars" aim is taken at several factions of the multiculturalist brigades. The book is quite readable. However, for those only at the level of interested layman (such as myself), there are some passages that wend off into the esoteric. Fortunately, these excursions are few and brief, and they did nothing to dissuade me from enjoying the book a second time several weeks later.

A highly recommended, thought-provoking philosophical treatise.

Written by Roger Scruton (Research Professor, Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Arlington, Virginia), Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged declares that rumors of the demise of Western culture are greatly exaggerated. Countering academic, external, and internal critics of Western Culture, such as dismissive attitudes toward the legacy of "dead white European males", Culture Counts reveals Western cultural contributions to moral education, defends traditional architecture and figurative painting, and urges renewed respect for the positive achievements of Western civilization. "We should see culture as Schiller and other Enlightenment thinkers saw it: the repository of emotional knowledge, through which we can come to understand the meaning of life as an end in itself. Culture inherits from religion the 'knowledge of the heart' whose essence is sympathy. But it can be passed on and enhanced, even when the religion that first engendered it has died. Indeed, in these circumstances, it is all the more important that culture be passed on, since it has become the sole communicable testimony to the higher life of mankind." A highly recommended, thought-provoking philosophical treatise.