A Kingdom of Ends: Roger Scruton's Compelling Vision of Beauty in a Postmodern World

Few thinkers have articulated the need for beauty in a postmodern world better than Sir Roger Scruton, a British philosopher and novelist who has for decades been highlighted as a dissident conservative but who has offered remarkable contributions to the fields of aesthetics, religion, and sexual ethics. I first discovered Scruton in college and absorbed his book Beauty: A Very Short Introduction with highlighter and pen in hand, leaving almost every page marked and annotated. It’s become one of those books where I might as well have left the pages untouched since just about everything seemed to deserve emphasis. Hungry for thought provoking and accessible writing on the subject, reading Scruton put me into a world where writers still practiced the reason, wit, and elaboration of someone like C.S. Lewis or even an earlier figure of the canon such as John Calvin or Samuel Johnson. At the same time, he writes in a way that communicates his point plausibly, striking the reader as commonsensical, at times almost obvious. There’s no hint of political agenda, no vain hankering for originality, just a simple fidelity to the truth. In a world confused between the poles of emotivism and cold skepticism, Scruton is a necessary voice, and it’s unfortunate he’s often so quickly dismissed for his conservatism. What might save him is his compassionate insistence that recognizing beauty is possible, and when achieved, can redeem our world into a place of virtue and order.

Sir Roger’s book on beauty enlightened my views on love, relationship, and perceptions of the true, good, and beautiful. He did this especially in using entertainment and pornography as apt indicators of our cultural condition and setting these up against the original ideals: disinterested attention to the beautiful and relational love offered between “free, individual subjects.” I read the book during a time when I intellectually acknowledged pornography’s harm and yet still lived under the influence of its warped vision of sexuality and love. Porn understands sex as contract, as bodily, mechanical pleasure, reductive and existentially meaningless. I downplayed the tremendous role pornography played in eroding my relational attachments, for which reason I’m deeply grateful for Scruton’s work on the subject. The point here that I want to belabor alongside Scruton is that pornography is a form of idolatry, and not only injures relations between the opposite sex, but fundamentally reworks all our human connections for the worse. It’s an example of a common practice—approaching the world not as a gift to be enjoyed for its own sake, but a product to be consumed for its side effect, for the perceived wealth we believe it to offer. Seeing beauty, encountering transcendence, is what has historically empowered generations to overcome their idolatries, and we’ve our own modern ones to deal with.

Scruton illustrates his point also in terms of culture’s deviation from architectural beauty and artistic integrity. The will to idolatry is everywhere. He writes under the heading Art and Entertainment, “In confronting a true work of art it is not my own reactions that interest me, but the meaning and content of the words…when seeking entertainment, however, I am not interested in the cause but in the effect. Whatever has the right effect on me is right for me, and there is no question of judgment—aesthetic or otherwise” (p. 85). I’m convinced Scruton was imitating the thoughts of his predecessor and fellow Anglican, C.S. Lewis. Lewis expresses something strikingly similar in his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy, putting this addiction to “effect” in terms of emotional states of mind: “A desire is turned not to itself but to its object. Not only that, but it owes all its character to its object…it is the object which makes the desire harsh or sweet, coarse or choice, “high” or “low” (p. 220).

Scruton and Lewis would agree then on the need for some moral education in forming our judgments of what is good and what is not. If it’s the object of desire and feeling that counts, then we’d better learn what is good to pay attention to, and how. If not, the mere side effect, achieved through denying our need for relational bonding and connection, will reign supreme through an array of methods. If we so lack this moral discernment, it follows that we will opt for the simpler route of idolatry—the mode of life that sees everything in terms of objects instead of “free, individual subjects.” It’s here that Scruton makes his sobering connection between idolatry and pornography addiction. He does so by first recalling us to the familiar story of the Israelites worshipping the Golden calf at the foot of Mount Sinai, provoking God to jealousy. He explains, “Idolatry is the paradigm of profanation, since it admits into the realm of worship the idea of ‘currency.’ You can trade in idols, swap them around, try out new versions, see which ones respond best to prayer…And all this is a profanation, since it involves trading that which cannot be traded without ceasing to be, which is the sacred object itself” (p. 150). God, or the sacred, is not among the items to be traded for personal lust but is to be revered as the Object of our worship, done out of adoration for the kind of Object it is. The great “I Am that I Am” states the centrality of Personhood in God, indicating, according to Scruton, that we live in a world of “free subjects.” Because God and persons are so individual, they cannot be swapped or exchanged like other goods. They must be revered as subjects to which we are in relation with. Pornography stands out among the denials of human “subjectivity.” It is an addictive idol because “Addiction is characterized by a loss of emotional dynamic that would otherwise govern an outward directed, cognitively creative life. Sex addiction is no different in this respect from drug addiction; and it is against true sexual interest—interest in ‘the other’” (p. 155). Scruton preludes this conviction by remarking that “cognitive states of mind are seldom addictive, since they depend upon exploration of the world, and the individual encounter with the individual object, whose appeal is outside the subject’s control. Addiction arises when the subject has full control over a pleasure and can produce it at will” (ibid). If we are in control of the pleasure, then we can be assured that the god we’re worshipping is controlling us.

Scruton suggests a revival of “aesthetic education” to counter the prevalence of addiction, citing a disinterested love of beauty as the end goal. Of course, we’re left wondering at this point what such a vision of beauty really looks like, and question whether we’re to blame for our idolatries if such a vision isn’t available. However, Scruton reiterates what he’s already hinted at, concluding that an appreciation and pursuit of beauty over idolatry demands a recognition of the “transcendent.” A religious frame of mind, it seems, is necessary for apprehending the beautiful. “Nobody who is alert to beauty, therefore, is without the concept of redemption—of a final transcendence of moral disorder into a ‘kingdom of ends’” (p. 156).

Just as Lewis’s desires led him ultimately to Christ, so Scruton also believes that our escape from disenchantment relies on our ability to appreciate God and his gifts as ends in themselves. We must enter a “kingdom of ends” in which we pursue what’s good simply because it is good, and praise what’s beautiful because it is what it is. This ability, Scruton finally asserts in the book, depends on the cultivation of a certain kind of character, one ordered and oriented by a true vision of the good. Of this he doesn’t expound but we can infer from his Anglican roots that such a vision involves the God of love at its center and a multitude of free subjects created to exist in relation to him and to one another. One might argue we all share this religious frame of mind but simply direct it towards the improper things, hence the idolatry.

Sir Roger concludes with these remarks, “For a free being, there is right feeling, right experience, and right enjoyment just as much as there is right action. It may express their pleasure and their taste: but it is pleasure in what they value and taste for their true ideals” (p. 164).

Maybe this sounds too Platonic for our worldly sensibilities and concerns. We suspect Scruton might be telling us to emotionally detach ourselves from the world for a beatific vision in the skies. But I don’t think it’s like that. The way of the world revolves around the idolatry Scruton rightly condemns, and he condemns it because it’s an idolatry that corrupts the world we are meant to cherish. C.S. Lewis, after reading a fantasy book by George MacDonald, remarked that the story had “baptized” his imagination, not because he saw a fairy tale world to escape to, but because the world somehow took on a new color just because he saw it according to this imaginative vision’s beauty and depth. I think that’s what Scruton is praising here. He bids us see the world with eyes of faith, accepting the unseen as a central part of the cosmos, and having our lives and communities renewed by a grounded vision of the true, good, and beautiful.

Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12th, 2020 due to months of battling cancer. He was 75.