Two voices echo through Roger Scruton's new book: those of Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott. A nation, wrote Burke, the founder of modern conservatism, "is a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born". For Oakeshott, perhaps the pre-eminent conservative philosopher of the 20th century, "to try and do something which is inherently impossible is always a corrupting enterprise". These two sentiments bind together Scruton's argument.
The book's central theme is not so much the idea of pessimism as of the "constraints and boundaries", both of human nature and human custom, that "remind us of human imperfection and of the fragility of real communities". Pessimism is the recognition that these constraints and boundaries make impossible any planned, rational transformation of society.
The villain that stalks the book is the "unscrupulous optimist" who disdains constraints and believes it is possible to transform the world through human will. French Jacobins, Russian revolutionaries, Nazi stormtroopers, Islamic terrorists, modernist architects, gay-rights activists, EU bureaucrats, child-abuse experts: the optimists constitute a rum bunch. What all have in common is a desire to impose their vision of the world from the top, often with violence, rather than see change slowly and organically develop from below.
Over the past two decades, Scruton has emerged from the fringes of rightwing politics to become one of the most significant philosophers of contemporary conservatism. The Uses of Pessimism embodies many of his virtues: the argument is passionate and provocative, yet rendered through exquisitely limpid prose. But it also embodies many of his weaknesses. There is a blinkered character to Scruton that enables him to understand the importance of tradition but rarely its regressive consequences. Tradition, he suggests, "is not part of a plan of action, but arises from the enterprise of social co-operation over time". Only the constraints it embodies make possible "the co-operation of strangers to their mutual advantage".
This is a comforting view for a conservative, but it is at best half-true. Tradition is not simply about the accumulated wisdom of humanity. It is also about the maintenance of power. Many of the greatest injustices have historically been defended through an appeal to tradition or to human nature. Like Burke, Scruton decries the French Revolution for its Jacobin excesses. Yet he never considers why the revolution happened in the first place. The mob stormed the Bastille because pre-revolutionary tradition meant the immiseration of the poor, the incarceration of thousands and the tyranny of an immovable feudal order.
Scruton appears equally complacent about the contemporary impact of tradition. The liberalisation of social norms in recent decades undermines tradition and defies human nature, he argues. So why, he asks, should the onus be on conservatives to defend the importance of traditional forms of marriage against "innovations" such as gay partnerships?
The answer is the one that would have been given to those who argued against miscegenation or giving women the vote. The unequal treatment of gay people is a moral wrong and no amount of tradition can make it right. It is up to Scruton to defend discrimination, not liberals to have to justify treating all equally.
Scruton insists that he is averse to optimism only in its "unscrupulous" form. The trouble is, what makes an optimist unscrupulous is, in his eyes, a belief in the possibility of "goal-directed politics". He dismisses as a "fallacy" the "belief that we can advance collectively to our goals by adopting a common plan, and by working towards it". Progressive changes, however, rarely happen by chance. History is a narrative of humans rationally and consciously transforming the world. To give up on "goal-directed politics" is to give up possibilities of betterment.
Burke once complained of the English revolutionary Thomas Paine that he sought "to destroy in six or seven days" what "all the boasted wisdom of our ancestors has laboured to perfection for six or seven centuries". To which Paine replied: "I am contending for the rights of the living and against their being willed away, and controlled, and contracted for, by the manuscript-assumed authority of the dead." Or, to put it another way, too often, what is corrupting is not the attempt to do the impossible, but the failure even to attempt it.
Kenan Malik's most recent book is From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Legacy (Atlantic Books).
