Fantastic talk. Thank you for pushing forward this essential discussion.

A brilliant lecture. Thanks for keeping Scruton’s legacy alive!

1:22:20 - interesting; as a huge fan of a very large amount of modernist architecture, I think I sympathise a lot with the person asking the question and also the response.

Would it be correct to say that, as Kant recognizes the human inability to rationalize its way through life in pursuit of truth, Hegel ultimately empowers the human intellect as the ultimate source of reality?

I am a Scrutonian from Kerala, India... 🙏🙏🙏

Roundy bits are more feminine than square bits. Maybe people have enough masculine energy in dealing with society and roundy bits are a respite.

Look at the new USC dramatic arts building.

He must have had some charisma to get his landlady pregnant.

Maybe there could be a program for writers, either through the Scruton Foundation or the UK Gov., where a young writer would get free room and board on a farm for a year. But they’d have to do farm labor for two days, and farming study for one day per week. The other four days they’d have free to write.

Good work, RSLF. Incidentally, I briefly thought that Jane Cooper was in the thumbnail because she was a stock photo labelled 'beauty'.

Folks, Mr. Scruton would never have endorsed the word “green” as it’s used today. He would’ve never put this “ green and pleasant land” in a corporate box to be traded for credits…

I envy the obvious huge joys engendered from owning a small farm, and hope to achieve such a thing one day.

Dirt and soil seems like an interesting book. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

Such an exceptional talk. Thank you for hosting.

Wonderful!

Prof. O'Hear, thank you for your wonderful, superbly written book "After Progress" and for this fine video. Before you told us the mereological fallacy's name, I noticed that fallacy in a video by a brain scientist who says that a person is a program running on an ape. God willing, people like that will learn philosophy from you and other scholars who know how to falsify scientific reductionism, When I programmed computers professionally, I thought like a mathematician and still do. But back then, computers and programming made me too sure of my beliefs. So, it seems that mathematics, natural science and computer science can make us reason scientifically and fallaciously about non-scientific subjects. People overspecialize. when they need to think like generalists.

A Normal Person Trying to Design a Classic Country House in Africa with an Expert . All Roads led me here to the M1! 🔥🔥🔥

I'm glad I found this. It was a good lesson on a fantastic book. Thank you.

Amazingly valuable conversation, thank you for this and I'd very much look forward to more of this!

You've just got to look at their camera placement to know that these are serious architects. Look at that background

Fantasic interview and fantastic development at Cayalá. I like "modernist" architecture but i don't like that it dominates our world's cities, to live i much prefer traditionalist architecture and then mixed in in their own barrios modernist style would be best.

Great conversation. If only there were more places of education like this, particularly in England!

Getting us 'in the mood,' MIKEY LIKEY. Excuse me I have to take this...

While I found their discussion of both tonality and Schoenberg superficial and misleading, I do wholeheartedly agree that the postwar European avant garde took music off the rails. But I disagree that the future of music is or should be a "return to tonality". Composers are still finding their way, in an extremely fragmented musical landscape. I personally value (1) clarity of form, (2) consistency of language, and (3) an aim for beauty. But NOT necessarily "tonality" as described here. I would also mention that I find David Matthews' music very interesting and admirable.

Such a rich conversation, thanks for the work you do in bringing these sorts of voices together to discuss humane subjects in the spirit of Scruton’s work!

Absolutely wonderful medicine against the virus of wokery

These gentlemen talk a good talk but does Jacob not see that his ‘broad church’ is basically totalitarian and that countless people are anxiously waiting for someone like Reiner Fuellmich to successfully empower citizens the world over via the Nuremberg Act so as to bring their so called leaders to justice?

Conservatives charitably ascribe unintended consequences to the Marxist Cosmopolitan Utopians. There are well meaning adolescents; a lot of this ‘meaning well’ derives from the overflowing love for humanity they felt under the influence of MDMA at Glastonbury (or equivalent) but most of what is going on is revenge, weaponisation of, for instance, the NHS, the ‘caring’ arm of totalitarian overreach. The NHS is, in no small way, a stand in for the trust at the root of English Common Law (Burke’s dearest domestic ties, oikophilia, little platoons) that mediates necessary compromise and mitigates fallen human excesses. Recall how Mr Darcy intervened and effectively rescued Lydia from possible destitution; the state now has the role of Mr Darcy but additionally has to ameliorate the mysterious ‘mental illness’ (bad conscience); consider the hostile reaction to the Texas Heartbeat Bill; easy access to abortion is a key tenet of the leftist ‘amelioration’ of the consequences of bad life choices. Confession? Contrition?

15:00 not saying what you’re suppose to say... or not wearing a NWO Compliancy Signifier. The insidious nature of cancel culture. Just yesterday I was talking to someone (in his fifties), he follows quite a lot of the conservative leaning social media, and hears rather a lot of conservative opinion from me, an yet when I mentioned Thomas Sowell, he hadn’t heard of him; I showed him a yt clip and sure enough completely unfamiliar. Same thing a few years ago talking to friends, one of whom very pro Brexit, they had no knowledge of Sowell; the MSM have obviously deemed the content of his character unsuitable for public consumption. I despise the BBC/Guardian types... I’ll have to see some serious contrition before I can forgive them.

One way that mediocre living people organize themselves is to establish memorial institutions and running memorial events in the name of great dead people. Most of the times it's ironically just a way of 'make a living', and meaningful things rarely come out, except that such very way of living lead them to believe what they claim to believe more that they really do.

Influential figures in the US also wanted a prussian prince to head their monarchy in 1786.

Check Michael out in his suit and tie, minding his P’s & Q’s!

Greetings from Brazil

This is absolutely excellent - thank you 🙏

Thank you very much for this. I should however point out that Roger Scruton was not an "Anglo-American", although he was certainly an English philosopher, writer and conservative. And I must say I'm surprised that a Channel focussed on Sir Roger should be misinformed about such a basic biographical fact.

Re architecture, I seem to recall Roger Scruton, in Soul of the World, comparing the Tower of Babel to the Temple/holy of Holies , the Tabernacle.

7:00 This quote from the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks May be of interest: “ Even God Himself, implies Maimonides, has to work with the grain of human nature and its all-too-slow pace of change. Not because God cannot change people; of course He can. He created them; He could recreate them. The reason is that God chooses not to. He practises what the Safed kabbalists called tzimtzum, self-limitation. He wants human beings to construct a society of freedom - and how could He do that if, in order to bring it about, He had to deprive them of the very freedom He wanted them to exercise and honour? There are some things a parent may not do for a child if he or she wants the child to become an adult. There are some things even God must choose not to do for His people if He wants them to grow to moral and political maturity. I call this Jewish sense of the need for time, the chronological imagination, as opposed to the Greek logical imagination. Logic lacks the dimension of time. It is essentially timeless. That is why philosophers tend to be either rigidly conservative (Plato did not want poets in his Republic; they threatened to disturb the social order) or profoundly revolutionary (Rousseau, Marx). The current social order is either right or wrong. If it is right, we should not change it. If it is wrong, we should overthrow it. The fact that change takes time, even many generations, is not an idea easy to square with philosophy (even those philosophers, like Hegel and Marx, who factored in time, did so mechanically, speaking about “historical inevitability” rather than the unpredictable exercise of freedom).”

1:02:00 ‘why people can never think for themselves... are told what to think’ Yoram Hazony recently tweeted how it’s not a lack of ‘critical thinking’ that is the problem, rather that there has been too much of it.

1:01:00 ‘once you take away the institutions which mediate that freedom, then it’s a fight to the death’. And I think we’re seeing this very clearly in the US... Darren Beattie at Revolver News is doing some very interesting reporting on how those institutions are being, frankly, inverted (eg FBI Colour Revolution) to deliberately bring about the chaos to justify the yet more Emergency Powers... hell, Biden regime must have been bitterly disappointed with the pitiful ‘Insurrection’ on 6 January. The ‘fiery but mostly peaceful protests’ of BLM and Antifa caused an estimated two to three billion dollars worth of damage... I suspect the Biden/Obama/Clinton regime operatives extrapolated on that basis that their infiltrations could agitate (‘nudge’) patriots (with their devotion to the Second Amendment) to far greater ‘extremist terrorism’. Fatally, fortunately, they didn’t anticipate the grassroots movements on several fronts - parents against CRT and mandatory mask wearing and vaccines for their children, veterans against CRT in the military, patriots relentlessly demanding forensic audits for election integrity, Mike Lindell symposium on CCP hacking of machines, investigative reporting getting to the bottom of the Wuhan ‘gain of function’ experiments, increasing anger re the invasion at the border etc

47:00 ‘the slave/servant shaping the world in his own image and likeness’ Hmm... this presumes a somewhat counterintuitive idea of the ‘servant’ not slavishly carrying out the onerous dictates of the master. Now, I think you’ve already emphasised the counterintuitive/unusual nature of this otherwise trope/dynamic. I’m very interested in McGilchrist’s The Master and his Emissary; he makes no secret of the influence Hegel has had on his thesis. The dialectical process, I think, is more obviously internal - brain hemisphere lateralisation/interaction, which obviously interacts with the external world (*not* an absolute Cartesian dichotomy; per impossible). The following may be of interest: This is really a book about attention (all quotes McGilchrist unless stated otherwise) “Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede. What a thing is depends on who is attending to it, and in what way. The fact that a place is special to some because of its great peace and beauty may, by that very fact, make it for another a resource to exploit, in such a way that its peace and beauty are destroyed. Attention has consequences.” “My thesis is that the hemispheres have complementary but conflicting tasks to fulfil, and need to maintain a high degree of mutual ignorance. At the same time they need to co-operate. How is this achieved, and what is their working relationship like? The corpus callosum, and the other subcortical structures, such as the cerebral commissures, which communicate between the hemispheres also have complementary but conflicting roles.They need to share information, but at the same time to keep the worlds where that information is handled separate.“ “If one thinks of the relationship between the hemispheres as being like that between the two hands of the pianist (whose two hemispheres do indeed have to co-operate, but equally must remain independent), one can see that the task of the corpus callosum has to be as much to do with inhibition of process as it is with facilitation of information transfer, and co-operation requires the correct balance to be maintained.” As I understand it, only the left hemisphere (the Emissary) can go rogue, so to speak (though that’s not actually a term McGilchrist uses). Now, to speak in this way should probably set off alarm bells, (especially if you have a rogue LH that is anxious to discredit a theory that might thwart your will to power) however... “The image suggests, of course, that the two hemispheres have wills that may not always be in harmony. How legitimate is it to think of the hemispheres as having wills in this sense? Bogen refers to two ‘crucial facts’: that ‘it takes only one hemisphere to have a mind’, and that ‘hemispheres can sustain the activity of two separate spheres of consciousness following commissurotomy’. Sperry writes that, ‘in commissurotomy patients, each hemisphere can be shown to experience its own private sensations, percepts, thoughts, and memories that are inaccessible to awareness in the other hemisphere. Introspective verbal accounts from the vocal left hemisphere report a striking lack of awareness in this hemisphere for mental functions that have just been performed immediately before in the right hemisphere. In this respect each surgically disconnected hemisphere appears to have a mind of its own, but each cut off from, and oblivious to, conscious events in the partner hemisphere.’ And though this phenomenon is most pronounced in commissurotomy patients... wait for it... for people generally: “It turns out that one or other hemisphere may predominate - its particular cognitive and perceptual style as a whole more greatly influencing our experience of the world... ...We can even have, as personalities, characteristic and consistent biases towards one or other hemisphere, certainly for particular kinds of experience, associated with differing degrees of arousal and activation in either hemisphere. This phenomenon is known as ‘hemispheric utilisation bias’ or ‘characteristic perceptual asymmetry’.” Bet ya didn’t see that coming! If you are experiencing “anxious apprehension” (anxiety characteristic of LH cognition, as opposed to “anxious arousal” I.e grief, sorrow, pity - RH) that’s because you have a rogue LH... and you’re likely a Cultural Marxist. (Says me anyway, that’s not quite how McGilchrist puts it) According to the considerable research that McGilchrist has drawn from, for the twenty or so years that it took him to write his book, there are a host of symptoms/conditions that are consistently associated with damage to the right hemisphere (therefore relying predominantly on the left hemisphere); such as anosognosia, asomatognosia, prosopagnosia, impairment of proprioception, palinopsia, perseveration and so on and so on. He goes into considerable detail about the nature of these symptoms, what they have in common, and the massive implications this has for society, civilisation. It would appear the medical ‘experts’ have generally missed these extraordinary insights because they tend to be under the spell of the metaphor of mechanism; ‘what’ things do rather than ‘how’ ‘in what manner’. This is largely because the mechanistic model has proven to be devastatingly effective and it also flatters the disposition of the analytically minded because it tends to confirm their (autistic? Left brained?) way of perceiving and manipulating the world. McGilchrist is by no means entirely opposed to the mechanical model... he uses, for instance, the example of a thermostat to help illustrate how biological systems tend toward homeostasis. I’m sure he’d agree that you can legitimately compare the heart to a pump or the kidneys to filters, and even the brain to a computer (actually, disturbingly his thesis is largely about the fact that that comparison is becoming more and more apt, for pretty much all the wrong reasons) but such comparisons (filters? Reductions?) do leave rather a lot out.

If Western culture does not re-prioritise the traditional family (husband, wife, children), then the number of people who adhere to it (to the pathetic extent to which they do adhere to it) will continue to diminish until the culture of currently Western lands will be determined by non-Western people.

‘The new cause has to be the other’. Hmm... supposedly “The comes from the latin ligare: to join, or link, classically understood to mean the linking of human and divine.” These intellectuals were/are in denial, negation, of the Other, as in I Thou. I think of how Scruton - responding to Christopher Hitchens who extolled the wonder of the cosmos, as viewed through the Hubble telescope, and contemptuously sneered at the notion of the Burning Bush - calmly reflected on how the voice that emanated from the Burning Bush “I am that I am” is essentially the profound ground of being.

Edgar I nothing am

Enjoyed this discussion immensely.

Thank you. As a newcomer to this subject I find it quite challenging to understand but thanks to this exposition some glimmers of light did fire up inside my brain.

how boring. a repetition of what has been said 1000 times. That Jacob Rees-Mogg joins such Neo-Cons is just ackward.

Any government that manages to reverse this trend of ugliness would be extremely popular, I can honestly say that I can count the number of what I would consider aesthetically beautiful housing (post war) on the fingers of one hand. If I had the choice between swathes of dull dark red brick ugly boxes or high rise oddly shaped modernist monstrosities verses so called pastiche housing I would take the latter any day. Tudor and Victorian gothic are my personal favourites. Most towns and cities are so ugly that people have no connection or love for them hence graffiti, litter, lack of pride in gardens and open spaces etc etc adding to this our often grey climate we need brighter, greener more beautiful places to live. There is no coincidence that the most desirable places to live are the most beautiful

Interesting conversation, most study’s and polls show that the general public overwhelmingly prefer traditional architecture and the most desirable places to live are aesthetic beautiful. Most British towns are mostly beautiful at their core but usually quite neglected and butchered with modern materials then they are circled by ugliness that is mostly depressing. Why should big builders and often quite arrogant architects decide how our once beautiful country should look. What will our country look like in 30 years? just a select few beautiful places left that the average person could never even dream of living in surrounded by ugly urban sprawl.

Some new houses today are really ugly, the ones where the tarmac runs right up to the front door, front gardens seem to be dissapearing on some new developments, I guess it saves space....streets without any trees 🌳 too along look sad and empty sometimes. The design of lampposts can make a surprising difference too.

Lovely opening picture. If only every street looked like this. Where's all the traffic? Most households seem to be 2 car families, more sometimes if you have young adults still living at home with parents. Generally areas work well with lanes, cycle paths linking streets up, a local train station is really useful too. Hope more derelict train lines are reopened again after closing in the 60s.