https://thecritic.co.ukissues/april-2020/journal-de-combat-of-the-cold-war/
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The history of Encounter raises interesting questions about how magazines of this kind should be funded as well as to whether a totalitarian adversary can be defeated by purely transparent means. Private patronage has nearly always been a vital source of support for the artist, the writer, the social critic and composer, as well as that of the modern-day review of culture and politics which by its nature is never likely to make money. Its record over the centuries suggest that it is a far more discriminating patron than the state. The problem with private patrons is they can prove fickle, go broke, or die — which exposes all those who seek long-term funding to obvious risks.
Many of Lasky’s critics claimed that his fault was not that he took CIA funding but that he did not tell contributors and colleagues about its source. Yet had he done so many would not have written for it for fear of damage to their reputations. It is surely to Lasky’s credit that he cared more about the outcome of the contest to which he had devoted his life than the impact of unfounded allegations about his independence.
As events subsequently showed, private funding on a scale sufficient to achieve Lasky’s ambitious aims could not be relied upon over time. He concluded that the stakes were sufficiently high to justify concealment. It’s surely about time that the beneficiaries of the West’s defeat of communism — which is all of us — should acknowledge both the dilemma in which he found himself and the measure of his success.
One of the points Richard Taruskin continually came back to in the last volume of his Oxford History of Western Music was how understanding musical and cultural changes throughout the West in the second half of the twentieth century was explicable in light of the geopolitical conditions of the Cold War. With the Cold War as a backdrop constantly in mind a figure like Elliot Carter could make sense in terms of a man whose work was financed as part of a larger ideological battle between a Western conception of "freedom" and a Soviet conception of "responsibility" but that these were, if you will, the ideological and political agendas most often trotted out by the patronage systems of the time and place. Taruskin pointed out that paradoxically not very ironic irony of the ways in which both the composers in the Soviet bloc and the composers in the Western bloc felt hamstrung by obligations to commit to the agendas of socialist realism in the Soviet East and some form of integral serialism or aleatory in the democratic West. As Frances Stonor Saunders and others have put it in booklength projects, the extent to which the high modernist arts scenes turn out to have been bankrolled by organizations secretly funded by the C.I.A. retroactively gives us some cause to doubt about just how popular or populist high modernists arts ever were. Taruskin has been making a point of arguing that the ideals of aesthetic autonomy championed by intellectuals and artists in the academic scene in the West were not really autonomous ideals at all, they were part and parcel of the ideological and political battles of the Cold War. To, so to speak, more fully bare the teeth of his arguments, with the end of the Cold War the kinds of academic avant garde modernisms that represented the "antidote" to the perceived stifling conformities of socialist realist paradigms in the arts were, very quickly, revealed to be what Taruskin has described as the work of artists who turned out to not really have a public, i.e. audiences beyond the academic niches in which figures such as Carter could be likened to a hothouse plant.
Unsurprisingly, a link to an earlier article you can find with the above-quoted piece leads to another article on how there are "few heirs to spare" for conservatives in philosophy since the passing of Roger Scruton.
https://thecritic.co.uk/few-heirs-to-spare/
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Practice and theory stand in intimate relation but not equally so. Practice comes first and circumscribes theory. Theory cannot replace practice and should not seek to stand over it. There are different references in his work to what purpose theory serves but perhaps the most significant in this context is that it is pedagogical. It provides a way of entering into practices that can be communicated with varying degrees of complexity and sophistication. Finally, that tradition, distinct from traditionalism, is a form of communication that holds these in their proper relation in the continuing of a community through its customs, practices and common behaviours.
Thus for Oakeshott conservatism as a disposition is a way of attending to an activity that recognises his wider account of human and social rationality. Additionally, conservatism is not against abstract ideas as such but it is against the prioritising of abstract ideas over practice in human rationality. His reasoning for this is clear: if theory is given a predatory relation to practice we both suffer the loss knowledge and the damage done by the application of abstract ideas. As he writes in ‘The New Bentham’, after the rationalist has their way the world of knowledge ‘somewhat resembles a September orchard after a plague of wasps’.
What of the world of politics in particular? Whilst the conduct of politics may not be pre-eminent in respect of this disposition it is at least one of great significance – politics is a concern for us all in some way or other. One may have a conservative disposition in respect of politics if in nothing else. As Oakeshott writes in ‘On being conservative’:
“It is not at all inconsistent to be conservative in respect of government and radical in respect of almost every other activity. And, in my opinion, there is more to be learnt about this disposition from Montaigne, Pascal, Hobbes and Hume than from Burke or Bentham”
Oakeshott does not intend ‘disposition’ to be understood as something equivalent to someone’s personality. It is a disposition that can be the result of thinking, deliberating and arguing. It should not escape our notice that Oakeshott is doing philosophy in writing on politics and in a way that can shape our political conduct. But it should also be noticed it often comes in the form of the critique of rationalist and ideological modes of thinking. It is reactionary. Not in the sense of restoring the status quo ante, but in seeking to exterminate the plague of wasps in the political orchard.
This focus on criticism is not to stay that conservatism cannot have principles of its own in politics or anything else. Oakeshott himself accepts as much in the opening paragraph of On being conservative even if he prefers to speak of his positive account in terms of disposition. Much of Scruton’s writing was an attempt to do this.
Returning to the causes of conservatism’s philosophical ills above, the mistake is to consider it as a disposition and against abstract ideas in a fairly blunt way. When we return to Oakeshott as one of the sources of these characterisations we find a much richer, more nuanced account than many conservatives have told themselves.
Yet whether these are actually the, or even a, cause of conservatism’s philosophical ills is an entirely different issue. More importantly, so too is whether conservatism’s ills are connected to having few philosophers. It’s certainly true that the left has more. Which has had for them all the consequences, or none, that that success brings with it.
One of the topics I've been thinking about with conservatives and philosophy and particularly the arts is whether or not conservatives have altogether considered what it is they are really trying to conserve and why. It is maybe too easy for those on the left to say that conservatives are trying to preserve a legacy that amounts to patriarchal white supremacy. The problem with such an assertion is that progressive eugenicists a century ago had no problem enforcing sterilization on Latina and Native American women and "imbeciles" to prevent future generations of their children. We live in an era in which white progressives/liberals and conservatives/reactionaries have made cottage industries or, rather, large industries of scapegoating each other in the present for the the ultimately shared legacies of a range of establishments having a cumulatively racist past. What has been interesting to consider about Roger Scruton in particular is how he set himself against Theodor Adorno while, often enough, making use of Adorno's argumenst about and against popular songs as "serious art". I've written about how I regard the legacies of both philosophers on aesthetics and music to be intertwined already. What is interesting to consider about the late Roger Scruton is that in his later work, particularly Understanding Music, he came around to advocating that the revitalization of tonality in classical music might have to pass through the process of taking popular song seriously, particularly taking popular songs more seriously than Adorno did.
In the previously quoted passage about how practice precedes and circumscribes theory as understood by conservatives, we may see the later Scruton reveal this aspect of philosophy on the part of a conservative. When the time came to decide whether to repudiate popular song as a practice on the basis of an aesthetic theory Roger Scruton balked at insisting that there was no art to popular song because he admired the American songbook. Adorno, famously, inveighed against the American songbook and mounted a theoretical attack on popular song as art and on the possibility of the culture industry providing any of the preconditions necessary for serious art.
So, yes, perhaps philosophers have abounded more on the contemporary conceptions the left has about the left than the right yet this can be a mixed bag, to put the point colloquially. Philosophers and scholars of Adorno have spent at least half a century attempting to extricate Adorno's most vitriolic condemnations of American popular song in general and jazz in particular from a belief in the overall viability of his criticisms of capitalism, the culture industry and other aspects of technocratic societies.
That in the end Scruton began to consider that what "we" collectively needed was a way to eliminate the distance between popular song traditions and concert music traditions, and also by implication what Richard Taruskin has described as the chasm between the academic canons and the repertoire canons in music (the distance between the concerts people pay money to go hear and the musical canons music historians and theorists and musicologists regard as "necessary" for vetting students' musical education and credentialing), suggests that Scruton was a conservative philosopher on aesthetics after all and that, for his various flaws (we're all human, after all) his turn toward endorsing some kind of bridge between pop songs and concert music suggests he ended up being a consistent conservative in the sense of recognizing that practice comes before theories defending practices.
That can seem like a defense of injustices and systemic evils to many a leftist but in the case of popular songs being taken seriously as musical art and craft I doubt that even anyone who identifies as left could sustain that polemic for long, except maybe for legendary examples such as Adorno.
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