Book Review: “Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged” by Roger Scruton
It’s inevitable that art & culture must contend with argument around their subjectivity & objectivity. It’s expected from domains where aesthetic judgment must collide with personal, moral, & commercial forces. And culture, especially being the overall custodian & gatekeeper of values, mythic & material forms — including art — constantly struggles for its survival & how to stay revitalised through generations.
This book appraises this reality, inviting the reader into an objective appreciation of the intrinsic value of culture across taste, criticisms and articulating the difference between higher culture and its postmodernist counterpart. It’s an engaging book written with clarity and grace. Except for occasional satire, it’s not angry as one might expect from a book making a case against mainstream repudiation about its subject matter.
On the one hand, it justifies the (high) place of Western civilisation and how it has survived through its deliberate embrace of criticisms, assimilation of external influences and the fostering of institutions that serve to preserve its heritage. On the other hand, it’s a treatise for why culture, as an ennobling human asset, matters and why it must be rescued from the corrupting attitude of individuals and ideologies that treat it as an expired inheritance or a plaything of the bourgeoisie or, worse, a subject to be disparaged through the lens of political correctness and moral relativity.
Written by British writer and conservative, Sir Roger Scruton (I had posted about his death), “Culture Counts” is an engagement with the reader, nudging one to appraise preconceived cultural notions and a call to feel at home and protect our most valuable cultural inheritances. I like its subtitle “Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged.”
Highly recommended if you’re interested in Aesthetics, Culture and Civilisation (and if you need another perspective that challenges the wokenism of our new age).
Some of my highlights are on my Goodreads, HERE.
