In Standpoint, Anthony O’Hear writes about Roger Scruton’s libretto, An Angel Passes, which Scruton completed shortly before his death in January and which is currently being set to music by David Matthews:

 To my mind, even as a bare libretto, An Angel Passes encapsulates some of Scruton’s most profound and revelatory thinking, nowhere more so than in the enigmatic words of our title . . . Without going into detail or revealing its denouement, An Angel Passes is set in Eastern Europe (possibly Czechoslovakia) a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It deals with the dilemma faced by those who had stood out against Communism but are now largely disappointed by the materialistic capitalism which replaced it. The liberation itself, and the new cost-benefit mentality which accompanies it, turn out to be yet another way of denying the deepest yearnings of the soul; yearnings which, under communism, had often found expression in religious thought and practice.

It may surprise some to think of dissidence in communist Czechoslovakia in religious terms. Doubtless not all of the dissidents were religious—some were explicitly agnostic or even atheist. Nevertheless many of those who visited that country in the 1980s and who moved in anti-regime circles were surprised to see the extent of unofficial religious activity there. In a (necessarily) pseudonymous article from Czechoslovakia published by Scruton in the Salisbury Review in 1983, we read that ‘the most revealing feature of the Czech intellectual atmosphere of the eighties is the growing religious revival’, particularly among those young people who are looking for firm ground and a meaning for life, which will be ‘unpolluted by the disgusting material and ideological “needs” propounded by the regime’ . . . But, and this is the paradox explored in An Angel Passes, when the explicit censorship and control is lifted, a vacuum arises in which more immediate, more noisy and more materialistic values can flourish unchecked, drowning out those intimations of something higher which had kept the spirit alive under communism. The situation is even more poignant when those who are profiting most in material terms from the new atmosphere of freedom include many who had belonged to the higher echelons of the old regime, together with westerners of a rapaciously exploitative bent.

In other news: There will be no Turner Prize in 2020. Instead, the Tate Britain will use the prize money to fund what it’s calling “Turner Bursaries”: “The prize, which typically awards a top British artist with £25,000 ($30,900), will be replaced by a series of £10,000 ($12,300) grants that Tate is terming Turner Bursaries. Ten artists will be selected to receive the grants at the end of June.”

The case against Mars: “It is too easy to dismiss all opponents of specific plans for space exploration, such as Mars colonization, as astro-Luddites. Like Arthur C. Clarke and Carl Sagan, Deudney is anything but.”

The problem with thought experiments: “While thought experiments are as old as philosophy itself, the weight placed on them in recent philosophy is distinctive. Even when scenarios are highly unrealistic, judgments about them are thought to have wide-ranging implications for what should be done in the real world. The assumption is that, if you can show that a point of ethical principle holds in one artfully designed case, however bizarre, then this tells us something significant . . . Although philosophers don’t often talk about this, it would appear that they assume that the interpretation of thought experiments should be subject to a convention of authoritative authorial ethical framing. In other words, the experiments are about what the author intends them to be and nothing else, much like Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty, who used words to mean whatever he wanted them to mean.”

Philip Terzian reviews Tevi Troy’s Fight House: Rivalries in the White House from Truman to Trump. “Entertaining, well-informed, and altogether sobering, Fight House serves a dual purpose: to explain the gradual but inexorable process that has transformed the White House in our time, and to remind us that the humans who work on the premises tend to behave in recognizably human ways.”

Christopher Silvester reviews the Christopher Booker’s final book, Groupthink: A Study in Self Delusion: “Would the late Christopher Booker qualify as a “weirdo” in the Dominic Cummings sense? Certainly: although he was prey to deeply conservative, Housman-like stirrings over the English landscape, as well as passions for classical music and cricket, he was always ready to challenge orthodox thinking. And there was his abiding devotion to Carl Jung, which emerges in the epigraph (warning against “psychic epidemics”) to this, his last book, which has been edited and finished by Dr. Richard North, Booker’s collaborator on his longstanding Sunday Telegraph column . . . In typically dispassionate and lucid prose, Booker looks at historical examples of groupthink: Cromwell’s England, post-1789 France, Bonapartism, Soviet communism, Nazism, the foundation of the ‘European Project’, and the vicious orthodoxy surrounding man-made climate change, which he regarded as the biggest and costliest scare phenomenon of all time. There is also a chapter on Darwinism: Booker did not argue against evolution, but opposed proselytising by evolution fanatics who ‘rest their case on nothing more than blind faith and unexamined a priori assumptions’.”

Photo: Otzberg

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