{"id":935,"date":"2019-10-15T12:00:24","date_gmt":"2019-10-15T11:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.icrei.fr\/en\/?p=935"},"modified":"2019-10-18T16:52:24","modified_gmt":"2019-10-18T15:52:24","slug":"roger-scruton-activate-the-right-motives-of-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.icrei.fr\/en\/2019\/10\/15\/roger-scruton-activate-the-right-motives-of-people\/","title":{"rendered":"Roger Scruton: \u201cActivate the right motives of people\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>In January 2012, Sir Roger Scruton gave a conference about his book: <a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.fr\/books?id=ORTUAgAAQBAJ\">\u201cGreen Philosophy: How to think seriously about the planet\u201d<\/a> (Atlantic Books, 2012). The talk was hosted in London by <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Royal_Society_of_Arts\">the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce<\/a> (RSA).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the below extract of the talk, the speaker discusses environmental consciousness with host <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Matthew_Taylor_(political_strategist)\">Matthew Taylor<\/a> (13\u2019 video). With the kind permission of the RSA, we publish a transcription of the conversation, with slight edits intended at readability. <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20131002044911if_\/http:\/www.thersa.org\/__data\/assets\/file\/0005\/566735\/20120118RogerScruton.mp3\">Full audio recording<\/a> (47\u2019) may also be downloaded, including audience Q&amp;A.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Green Philosophy\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/yLArNAs666c?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Roger Scruton.<\/strong> I suppose I\u2019ve always been somebody with a keen environmental consciousness. I was brought up in a socialist household and by a father for whom the human habitat was the principal problem of the day. He looked with dismay on the advance of the sixties styles in architecture, and in particular on the destruction of his town by the planners and by the local council then in the hands of the Conservative Party, which was in turn in the hands of the builders and the developers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We all know\nthis problem. We in England perhaps have a better track record than most of\nresisting this kind of destruction of the human habitats which we\u2019ve seen\nexpanding across our country since the last war. Just about every town which\nhas anything worth conserving in it has a local conservation society. My father\nindeed established such a thing in High Wycombe, the town where we lived. He regarded\nthis as absolutely fundamental to the socialist cause that really in defending\nhis historic settlement and the beautiful streets and facades that had been\nbuilt in it, he was actually just defending the people against the exploiters:\nthe people who were doing the damage with a great development companies coming\nfrom elsewhere, not people who lived in this environment, but people who\nexploited it for their own commercial purposes, and of course likewise the\nConservative Party for him was an instrument of these malign forces, one which\nthey could use to manipulate the law and the social opportunities from the top.\nAt the time, I agreed with him about that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I don\u2019t agree with him anymore but I did inherit from his activism this thought that the human habitat is every bit as important as any other habitat that we might protect. And indeed the protection of nature makes no sense if we don\u2019t at the same time also conserve the viable settlements in which people can make a home and take an interest in their surroundings because those surroundings are both home-like and beautiful. So this planted in me another conception of what environmental activism really would be, that it perhaps shouldn\u2019t be conducted at the high level of national and certainly not international politics but rather at the local level in which people protect things that they know and love, things which are necessary for their life and which will elicit in them the kind of disposition to make sacrifices, which is after all what it is all about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There is an\napproach which we have seen adopted and advocated by some of the big NGOs in\nour time and by the environmental movement on the continent, which believes\nthat really, these questions are so big that once we\u2019ve defined them, we can\nonly solve them by rearranging the world. And we can only rearrange the world\nif we have, as it were, a new plan for living, a new plan which has to be\nagreed among the nations, in treaties in which we all participate, and then\nimposed through the law as a central solution to the great problem that\nconcerns us all. It\u2019s not just that plans go wrong, it\u2019s that plans also depend\nupon information that comes to the planner from the activities of ordinary\npeople. We have seen many environmentally interesting plans imposed upon people\nwhich have gone wrong for this reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Environmental questions have settled on regular forum which has been called <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Tragedy_of_the_commons\">the Tragedy of the Commons<\/a>, a very well known article written by Garrett Hardin, and according to whom environmental problems arise when there is a common resource to which nobody has a specific entitlement, and in order to ensure maximum share, each person goes and grabs as much as possible. One solution, if it can be managed, is private ownership. If there is a person who actually has the right to exclude others from this resource so it is no longer common, then of course it is no longer subject to this tragedy. But that is not the way we want to go because after all we can\u2019t privatize everything, and in any case, we can\u2019t trust necessarily the person into whose hands it is privatized. But there have been historically many attempts at establishing forms of common right and common ownership which do solve these environmental problems. A very good example is that of the Lofoten Fisheries in Norway until it was nationalized at least, in which a community of fishermen over a period of a hundred years managed the fish breeding stocks around the islands in such a way as to be a renewable resource. Then it was never overfished. They shared the rights to it and there was a procedure of legal rights and ways of resolving conflicts, which led to producing cod right down to a sustainable level. Our coastal fisheries were like this until we were compelled to join the European <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Common_Fisheries_Policy\">Common Fisheries Policy<\/a>, which has introduced this tragedy of the commons, not only around our southern coast but all across the North Sea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And this\ntragedy arises as one case of a more general problem, which is that people\nexternalize their costs. If you can take the profit from something but pass on\nthe cost to someone else, then if you\u2019re a rational being according to the\nnormal models of rational conduct, that\u2019s what you will do. I would argue that\nmarket solutions are the right solutions only if the actors in the market\nactually pay the cost of what they do, and our environmental problems come\nbecause people don\u2019t pay the cost. They passed them on to future generations.\nAnd we see this in particular with the hidden subsidies that have made\nsupermarkets so much more able to deal with with the modern economy than their\nlocal competitors. Supermarkets can easily undercut a local economy but they do\nso only because their costs have been externalized, or a large number of their\ncosts have been externalized in a way that the local shopkeeper cannot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So what is the answer? I argue that we need to discover in people the kind of motive which enables them to confront these problems for themselves, to do the kind of thing that my father did, and that all the people who were animated by him, in other words to settle in a place and defend it as your home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the case of\nclimate change, we have been bombarded not only with noisy descriptions of what\nthe problem is and what it will amount to, but also so-called solutions which\nwere impossible to implement, like international treaties that we\u2019re all\nsupposed to sign up to, even though most states don\u2019t have a motive to obey\nthem. And also most of the states who would sign the treaties don\u2019t have a rule\nof law which would enable their citizens to enforce it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That kind of\ndistraction has led to us thinking, to ordinary people at least: \u201cThis problem is\ninsoluble, I am going to turn away from it.\u201d So I think that that we\u2019ve been\nbombarded with unreal solutions and that we ought to start again from the\nbottom and work out just how we could solve any kind of environmental problem\nand try and project the solution upwards to the big problems that frighten us.\n(\u2026)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Matthew Taylor.<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Cultural_theory_of_risk\">Cultural Theory<\/a> suggests, as\nyou know, four basic dispositions towards a problem:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><em>The hierarchical disposition<\/em> which is to say this will be solved by people in authority making plans. Whether that\u2019s the private sector or the state sector or whatever, it is authority strategy planning.<\/li><li><em>The individualistic view<\/em> which will say: \u201cWell, no, it will be individual ingenuity, it will be science, technology, markets, inventions. Human beings have solved problems in the past, they\u2019ll solve problems in the future.\u201d<\/li><li><em>Egalitarism<\/em>, which says it\u2019s really about us becoming vegetarians, turning down the heating, wearing jumpers and changing the way we think about the world and its satisfactions.<\/li><li><em>Fatalism<\/em>, which says: \u201cNo, I don\u2019t do anything until the water is lapping around out next, so I\u2019m gonna watch TV.\u201d<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>I think\nCultural Theory would argue you need clumsy solutions, you need solutions which\ntake all of these elements of the solution and develop things which tap into\nall of these motives. And you\u2019re quite right cultural theorists attack Kyoto because\nthey say this is an egalitarian and hierarchical solution. It assumes that\npeople are nice and it says governments will make them do the right thing. It\ndiscounts individualism and fatalism in that way. But is there a danger in your\nbook that you\u2019re overstating this dichotomy that you\u2019re suggesting that only\nthe kind of bottom-up solution will work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Roger Scruton.<\/strong> Yes, you\u2019re absolutely right that there is a danger. My main concern was to present the complexity of the problem, so that one realizes that there aren\u2019t necessarily simple solutions that can be discovered and imposed, that the real solutions emerge. But the real solutions will only emerge if we activate the right motives of people. That\u2019s what I feel has been left out of account. People have not asked themselves the question of what leads people to protect their environment at all in the first place. (\u2026)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Matthew Taylor.<\/strong> It isn\u2019t so\nmuch that our attitudes have changed, but the ways that we live have changed.\nIs it the footloose fast-moving nature of modernity which undermines these\nvalues?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Roger Scruton.<\/strong> Footloose\npeople can also, as it were, come home. I\u2019m a great believer in the Hegelian\ndialectic which tells us that we begin from a state of immersion and inclusion\nand surrounded by things that love us and protect us. And we burst these chains\nasunder in order to affirm our right to be the obnoxious thing that we are. And\nyet, at a certain stage, love intervenes again and imprisons us. And we\ngradually come back and repossess the world as a home, instead of as a place\nwhere we are simply pursuing our own advantage. You see that in your own life,\nyou see it in people around you. The great problem in modernity is not that\nthis process has been extinguished, it\u2019s that too much emphasis is placed on\nthat middle bit. (\u2026)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Matthew Taylor.<\/strong> When I look at local environmental groups, transition towns, \u2026 I was in Todmorden recently, there was this fantastic project called <a href=\"https:\/\/www.incredible-edible-todmorden.co.uk\/\">\u201cIncredible Edible Todmorden\u201d<\/a> where they go around planting herbs and vegetables and fruit trees in local public spaces. It\u2019s fantastic projects, but if I asked those people about their politics, they would all say: \u201cWe are going to smash the multinationals, we need to elect a left-wing government that is going to impose regulation\u2026\u201d They wouldn\u2019t share your broader worldview, so even the people whose activism you favor also believe in some of the actions which you think tend to be counterproductive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Roger Scruton.<\/strong> If you look at it in its true historical complexity, you realize that these small-scale activist associations have not always been activated in this radical anti-capitalist way. Think of <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Women%27s_Institutes\">the Women\u2019s Institute<\/a>, which in our part of the world has been a major player in reviving the local group food economy, and supporting farmers in justice activity. Well think of <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/National_Trust_for_Places_of_Historic_Interest_or_Natural_Beauty\">the National Trust<\/a>: four million members. It\u2019s completely deeply a non-political organization and people join it because they think it\u2019s wonderful that the countryside is being protected. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In January 2012, Sir Roger Scruton gave a conference about his book: \u201cGreen Philosophy: How to think seriously about the planet\u201d (Atlantic Books, 2012). The talk was hosted in London by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). In the below extract of the talk, the speaker discusses environmental consciousness <a href=\"https:\/\/www.icrei.fr\/en\/2019\/10\/15\/roger-scruton-activate-the-right-motives-of-people\/\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"sr-only\">Read more about Roger Scruton: \u201cActivate the right motives of people\u201d<\/span>[&hellip;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":938,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icrei.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icrei.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icrei.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icrei.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icrei.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=935"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.icrei.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":947,"href":"https:\/\/www.icrei.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935\/revisions\/947"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icrei.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icrei.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icrei.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icrei.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}