Shall I tell you the worst thing about our finger-wagging, prissy, censorious age? It’s not the nastiness on social media. It’s not the cowardice of bystanders who hang back and allow good people to be defamed by Twitter mobs. It’s the shift in power. Learning, truth, and decency are nowadays trumped by the imagined injuries of the permanently offended.
Last week saw a horrible hit job on Roger Scruton, arguably the most distinguished philosopher in Britain. The conservative writer gave an interview to the New Statesman, a British leftist weekly for which he used to write a wine column (“the best accompaniment to Chablis is more Chablis, sipped quietly at the desk as night draws in”).
Perhaps he believed that connection would guarantee a measure of fairness. It did not. What resulted was a juvenile and vicious smear by the magazine’s deputy editor, George Eaton. In a series of tweets, Eaton detailed a series of “outrageous” remarks the professor had supposedly made.
“Roger Scruton on the Chinese: ‘Each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one and that is a very frightening thing.’”
“On Hungarian Jews: ‘Anyone who doesn’t think that there’s a Soros empire in Hungary has not observed the facts.’”
And so on.
This was not sloppy journalism. It was malicious misrepresentation. Far from making a racial generalization about Chinese people, the mild-mannered academic had criticized Beijing’s authoritarian leaders. Here are his actual words: “They’re creating robots out of their own people, by so constraining what can be done, each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one, and that is a very frightening thing.”
As for Jews, Scruton said nothing about them at all. The “On Hungarian Jews” in Eaton’s tweet was sheer invention. For what it’s worth, Scruton is, as civilized Englishmen tend to be, a convinced philo-Semite. While he is critical of various leftist causes that George Soros funds, he has never stooped to conspiracy. Indeed, he tried to persuade the Hungarian government not to close down Soros’ Budapest university.
Scruton has done as much as anyone alive to bring pluralism and free expression to central Europe. In the ’70s and ’80s, he organized samizdat university courses for Czechoslovakian and Hungarian dissidents.
Perhaps Eaton didn’t know this and assumed all conservatives must be evil. Or perhaps he knew it very well but was determined not to let it stand in the way of his muck-spreading. It is hard to know, since, at the time of writing, he refused to release the interview tapes.
Not that anyone has been interested in accuracy. A Conservative minister, James Brokenshire, reacted to Eaton’s misleading tweets by immediately and outrageously firing Scruton from a government advisory post. Newspapers then distorted the story further, producing some truly grotesque headlines. “PM’s housing guru Roger Scruton sacked after going on racist rant,” said the Sun. “No. 10 adviser sacked over ‘white supremacist’ views,” said the Times. Eaton smugly posted a picture of himself swigging champagne, captioned: “The feeling when you get right-wing racist and homophobe Roger Scruton sacked as a Tory government adviser.”
You might ask why I am making such a fuss about a single case of character assassination. There is nothing new about the inhumanity of young, left-wing journalists who, in the curious belief that they have a monopoly on compassion, are quite prepared to destroy people who happen not to share their views. Nor is there anything new, alas, about the pusillanimity of conservatives when confronted by online lynch mobs. Several Tories piled in on the basis of the original false reports, and while some have had the grace to apologize in the light of the full facts, others have idiotically held their ground.
What makes this episode stand out is the sheer disparity between the two parties, the contrast between the civility of the victim and the vileness of the aggressor. Full disclosure: I have known Roger Scruton since he spoke at my school philosophy society when I was 16. In 1990, when I was 18, I carried various unobtainable materials to his dissident friends in the countries where communism was falling apart. You won’t find a more brilliant, civilized, high-minded man. Yet he has ended up losing his job while the dishonest journalist who framed him has, so far, kept his.
Back in my teens, the professor gave me some advice. “If the Left ever come to see you as talented, you will cease to be a human being in their eyes and become a target. Anything that hurts you will be justified.” At the time, I thought he was being bombastic. Now I realize he was being prophetic.
