The English are not particularly prone to metaphysical flights of fancy, but they have the virtue of common sense, which they know how to express with clarity and erudition. As a result, they often produce thinkers who appear as beacons when darkness reigns; such was the case with Aldous Huxley during the crisis of the last century and Roger Scruton in the current crisis. I was surprised to find a contemporary philosopher discussing the same topic that led me to write my latest book, The Triumph of the Masses; one can understand my joy and relief in knowing that I am not alone in swimming against the current countercultural tide. Unfortunately, I only discovered this author after having finished my work, shortly after his death. Despite this untimeliness, I feel the need to comment on his thinking, not with the intention of reducing it to a summary, but to highlight his importance and encourage the reader to consider him seriously.

The fundamental similarity I find with his work is that he warns of the change that contemporary mentality has undergone, the causes of this change, and the need to recognise the values that have sustained and built our culture, which today are systematically questioned without offering new sustainable values. Far from it, what is proposed, as I have already pointed out, are nothing more than protests. Scruton aptly calls this mental and social state moral relativism, which is, in my view, a consequence of the prevailing subjectivism and egalitarianism, of the insertion and prevalence of the spirit of the masses and of the subculture that it stimulates and generates. Scruton rightly maintains that there are universal values that have been forgotten and that we must rescue. His work also corresponds with decisive aspects of mine, such as the exaltation of virtues, the recognition of merit (as I argue in The Roots of Morality) and the need for aesthetic contemplation.

His critique of Marxism seems to me to be entirely correct, as he uncovers the psychological roots that inspired Marx, in particular resentment, which is contagious among the proletariat, and highlights the importance of the individual and social damage caused by the rejection and even neglect of the humanities and the sciences of the spirit in general, through the indoctrination that has permeated the media and even universities.

Given the topics it covers, I find his work entirely complementary to The Triumph of the Masses, as well as to The Roots of Art, since Scruton is also a severe critic of contemporary art, and he has many good reasons for being so. Certainly, Scruton’s work is not merely a complement to my own; he has his own vision and a particular way of expressing it. For example, my work aims more at changing human beings than ideologies; his, aims to review and criticize them. But he has the same purpose: to extricate us from this cultural misconception into which materialism has plunged us, not only Marxist materialism, which he probes deeply, but also, in unscrupulous commerce, for which he offers feasible solutions, and their derivatives, which he calls the new left.

For my purpose I have elaborated sufficiently on Marx and materialism, and I have said something about these derivatives, but Scruton has had the patience (which I have not had) to offer an exhaustive critical commentary on them, including what have been called postmodernism, neo-structuralism, feminism, woke and other contemporary deviations, which, despite lacking intrinsic value, deserve comment because of their impact and, consequently, their contribution to the general bewilderment. This is how Scruton understood it, and I find his comments, which include his critiques of Foucault and Derrida, to be very astute. It is symptomatic and revealing that these postmodernists are indifferent to Nature and unmoved by Beauty, for they are alienated from their own Being and Essence; buried in the human anthill, they see nothing but mundane problems that they enclose in partial determinisms that they claim to be universal. But what is most astonishing is the public acceptance they have received, which leads us to believe that alienation is widespread. These new modernists claim to have overcome existentialism, but they fall even deeper into the gravest error of this philosophy: individualism and even subjectivism, from which everything becomes relative, and all values are relativised. In other words, all morality is questioned or excluded, creating an atmosphere of constant revolution which is highly detrimental to both the individual and society. This is the consequence of a fundamental deficiency: these relativists have not experienced a fundamental Unity, which governs the thinking of Scruton and all true philosophers.

Consumerism has reached the point of the extravagance of consuming ideologies simply because they are new. And this also coincides with a phenomenon that I have repeatedly expressed: the priority given in these times to ideologies over common sense, that is, over what is most intimate, decisive and human to us. Regardless of the number of victims, as if they were religious dogmas, their serious delusions are justified; and they are even accepted as philosophies, despite inciting violence. All ideologies contain partial truths, it is true, but it is surprising how absolute they become, as if they explained all of current reality; yet it is surprising that they are taken as definitive conceptions and applied with fanaticism. An unhealthy spirit underlies these attitudes, an internal non-conformity that nothing can satisfy.

Scruton is an aesthete by soul and profession, and it is in his aesthetic inspiration that he reaches his greatest heights. Although he does not venture fully into metaphysical territory, his aesthetic realm exudes a religious atmosphere. He perceives that The Soul of the World expresses the Sacred in Nature; Beauty projects us towards a transcendent reality; Bach reveals to him a universal aesthetic Order, and he goes so far as to affirm, like Schelling, that in art the subject and the object find their Unity. His aesthetics, and one could say his religion, are clearly imbued with the magnificent romantic spirit which is precisely, and very regrettably, what today’s society has lost. Throughout his work, Scruton constantly emphasises art and architecture. It is not surprising that he contemplates with melancholy how aesthetics in general, and in housing in particular, have been lost, with which I entirely agree, as I attach as much importance to this phenomenon as he does. However, we must concede that the tragic side of the matter lies in its inevitability. Indeed, during his lifetime alone, the world’s population has grown by more than a billion; the result is unavoidable: functionality becomes a necessity, and hive buildings are presented as a solution. I am not justifying them, I am simply pointing out that the issue is not only aesthetic but also due to uncontrolled population growth. Taking Le Corbusier as a reference, Scruton highlights the fundamental issue: the functional spirit has prevailed over the aesthetic spirit in the last century. The consequences, he astutely points out, are not only external, but also undermine our instinct and need for beauty, that is, our humanity (I also address this issue in The Roots of Art). I have consistently emphasised dehumanisation in all areas, which manifests itself in the neglect of the humanities in Western education, but Scruton examines in detail what clarifies the cultural landscape of our times.

I find two flaws in his general conception which I must highlight, making it clear beforehand that I in no way consider these flaws to invalidate his work; they are merely philosophical observations that, once taken into account, rectify and complement his vision. Firstly, his perspective is decidedly Western; it is from our culture that he views the world, history, its evolution, current events, and the authors he comments on. But as his vision and comments are, in general, correct, we can forgive him this error of omission. Secondly, in his system we observe an oversight or carelessness which, if not highlighted and rectified, causes his outline of a philosophy of history to collapse. I will use a supposition that I find sufficiently illustrative: without much effort on our part, we can transport Sir Roger Scruton from London to Rome in the fourth century. He would then also have been born into privileged circumstances, he would be a patrician, well educated, and, of course, a protector of his tradition with its values, religion, ethics and culture in general. He would then find himself in a similar situation: he would see his culture threatened by a foreign ideology imposed vertically by political forces, he would observe the destruction of his libraries and temples, which he would see transformed into churches, and he would suffer the prohibition of his rituals and customs in general. He would then employ against Christianity the same arguments that he uses against Marxism. And, curiously, they would apply perfectly to those similar circumstances. Christianity, in fact, displayed all the characteristics of the effects of the revolutions that he rightly criticises so severely. 

Everything that Scruton observes and criticises about the intrusion of communism into universities and culture in general, the indoctrination suffered by young people and children, can also be found in Rome from the third century onwards; so much so that Scruton himself does not realise that he is an indoctrinated spokesperson. None of this is surprising to those who have not been indoctrinated and see communism as a failed revival of Christianity; the same Semitic, fundamentalist, dogmatic, exclusionary, intolerant, envious and resentful mentality is once again bursting into our civilisation, causing similar havoc; that tribal mentality, which is obsolete in today’s cosmopolitan world, is once again imposing itself.  

In conclusion, if Scruton had adopted the perspective of a Roman patrician, he would have realised that his arguments do not hold. Now, if he accepted our culture as Greco-Roman, which I believe to be correct and incontrovertible, and recognised Christianity as a foreign ideology that had to destroy the former in order to impose itself, which is what all Romans believed, as expressed by Pliny, Celsius, Emperor Julian and countless writers of the time, and later by so many Renaissance figures, and then the Romantics, such as Schiller, Byron, Nietzsche, etc., his reasons would remain valid. They would have been valid if the process had been natural and spontaneous, if Christianity had followed a process of voluntary mimesis with respect to Hellenic culture; but this was not so, as persecution, torture and annihilation were used to impose an ideology completely alien to our culture. In The Triumph of the Masses, the reader will find proof of these assertions.

Scruton does not define himself as a Christian, but in his obsession with saving our culture, he goes so far as to say that Christianity had achieved a happy convergence between reason and (Christian) faith. The truth is that this can only be affirmed by dogmatically accepting Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica (which is what the Church has done), where, with an obvious tour de force, reason is adapted to faith. But rationalists never agreed with this arrangement; philosophical demands proved its incompatibility time and again, and Kant ultimately demonstrated it irreversibly.  

My criticism of Christianity is in no way intended to contribute to its destruction, but rather to point out its errors so that they are not repeated. As I have already explained in The Triumph of the Masses, communism is a sick (in spirit) offspring of Christianity, so it is not surprising that it adopts its most serious error: the policy of taxation, the destruction of existing values and of the current civilisation. Christianity is being repaid in kind, in the same way that led to the fall of the Hellenic tradition and with it an entire civilisation. And this is what must be avoided at present; that is why I point it out. We have not learned over four millennia that civilisations are not built on the ruins of the past, but by building where nothing has been built before.

Scruton attributes this desire for destruction to the adoption of ideologies opposed to tradition, which is correct, but there is a psychological factor in the masses that underlies their beliefs, which is an emptiness in the soul due to a lack of values, generating apathy, dissatisfaction, resentment and a spirit of protest. People want to destroy because they are destroyed, they want to explode because they are bursting; and this is characteristic of times of decline (see The Spirit in History). And this sick spirit easily adheres to nihilistic ideologies.

With keen insight, Scruton traces the current cultural nihilism back to Rousseau, who, as we all know, gratuitously believed that it was culture that corrupted our originally good nature, and who, more than anyone else, propelled the French Revolution, particularly in its anarchist aspect that inspired Robespierre and led to the Reign of Terror. It is also in Rousseau that he finds the origin of the supposed individual authenticity that in our times has become a contagious disease affecting a multitude of young people who express their rebellion before knowing either their cultural heritage or themselves. But Scruton overlooks Voltaire, a key figure of the 18th century, who ardently defended culture but simultaneously exposed the errors of Christianity and the horrific excesses of the Church, which also encouraged the Revolution, although that was by no means his intention. 

The fundamental problem in our civilisation today, which Scruton fails to acknowledge, is the failure of Christianity. Voltaire’s well-known statement, in which he foresaw this failure, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”, expressed his fear of a general decline in values, which is precisely what has happened. In effect, Christianity had managed to impose a cultural monopoly, and in its progressive decline it has dragged down with it numerous values and customs, not only Christian ones, which our culture had patiently incorporated, so that the masses have been left without elevated paradigms and, in their place, adopt values, customs and ideologies with the frivolity of fashions, for the sake of entertainment, since nihilism is already in their souls. The loss of faith in the Christian God has led to the simple adoption of agnosticism in all spiritual matters. The dogma of faith imposed by the Church was the root of the problem that would lead to the fall of religion in general, for now it is common to hear, “I don’t believe in religions”, as if everything consisted of believing in a God, without investigating the immense number of nuances that this concept implies. Indeed, if, instead of dogmatic faith, knowledge of the Transcendent had been advocated, as proposed by Buddhism, Hinduism and my philosophy, it would not have been necessary to “create” a God. The Search for Universal Consciousness (see this) would have continued naturally, without imposition, without accusation, without struggle, without punishment, without revolution; and transcendent values would have continued to nourish hearts and minds.

Perhaps Scruton feared that the decline of Christianity would lead to the collapse of our civilisation, which is why he insisted on its preservation; but this fear, which is surely shared by many of his contemporaries, is unfounded. The Renaissance proved that the foundations of our civilisation lay in the Greco-Roman tradition, and demonstrated this by updating them, building upon those foundations. This phenomenon of updating and building is repeated in Romanticism. He subsequently said that, unfortunately, the West had lost the romantic spirit, and rightly so: Romanticism had achieved the long-awaited union of Spirit and Nature, and it is with the lack of perception of that Reality that the decline of the West begins. It was not another ideology but a level of consciousness that was lost with the faith that was poured into industry, the production of goods, the economy and materialism. The task, then, is to recover that level of consciousness, and from there to take the final leap towards the Transcendent, towards the realisation of our Destiny. My philosophy offers the means to that end.

In conclusion: just as Scruton’s thinking strikes me as a valuable complement to my work, I believe that mine, in turn, can complement his, by adding to it as a foundation a philosophical system whose transcendent roots he intuits, but which he has not developed. But the unquestionable value of this British thinker, we must insist, is that in this age of disillusionment and consequent dissolution, in which intellectuals have set out to discard all that is established, he rescues what they discard, he builds, while others destroy. In the face of this hunger for novelty, he reminds us of the perennial values that have made, make and will make civilisations, and this is what our mental health and today’s societies need most, not to consume novel ideologies, but to recognise permanent truths. The times demand an end to this cultural carnival and for us, as responsible citizens, to accept the commitment to prevent the fall of the West and, once firmly rooted in our tradition, take the leap towards our fulfilment.

Julio Ozan Lavoisier, December 2025