Populist ideologue Matt Goodwin celebrates the recent outbreak of national flag fetishism in England:
The English philosopher Sir Roger Scruton once said “the English are reluctant to display their identity — reluctant to sing their national anthem, to wave their flag, or to affirm their nationhood … But the cost of this reluctance is the steady erosion of something precious —a shared first-person plural.”
What he meant by that was the erosion of a “we” —the erosion of a community, an identity, a home.
The quote struck me as somewhat undeveloped. Is the “steady erosion” caused by this alleged English reluctance, or is it rather that the reluctance allows “steady erosion” by some other factor? And what are the causes of this “reluctance”? There is no actual argument here, just a portentous banality about how nationist rituals promote community feeling. We’re supposed to take this observation as self-evidently insightful because it issues forth from Roger Scruton.
Perhaps there’s some nuance of meaning that has been lost by the three dots – but good luck finding out what it is that has been excised. Goodwin doesn’t provide the source, and although the vocabulary echoes Scruton I’ve been unable to find it anywhere online – not in the Internet Archive, not on Google Books, not by searching several of Scruton’s titles on Amazon’s “search inside the book” function, and not on a website devoted to his work. No-one else has quoted it, either. Of course, that doesn’t prove that the quote is apocryphal, but given Scruton’s quotability the obscurity of its provenance is surprising. We cannot discount the possibility that it is from some uncollected magazine article or speech, or perhaps from Confessions of a Heretic, which is published by a small press that does not allow its books to be included in electronic repositories, but it is reasonable to be doubtful – and if that aggrieves Goodwin he has only himself to blame for not providing a reference.
Goodwin appears to have a stock of quotes that are difficult to pin down. Here’s anotherone he attributed to Scruton in July:
A nation is not merely a collection of people, it is a collection of obligations: inherited, assumed and passed on.
It sounds Scrutonesque, but again, where is it actually from?
And here he is writing in the Sun earlier this month, making a foray into Classics:
In Ancient Greece, the writer Pericles warned that leaders will only hold their state together so long as they listen to the people they lead, “for only then can leaders rule with their trust”.
And in Ancient Rome, too, the statesman Cicero reached the same conclusion, warning the leaders of the city state that unless they look after their own people first — which he considered their “highest duty” — then their civilisation will rapidly crumble from within and become vulnerable to external invaders.
Reference to “the writer Pericles” is not encouraging: there are speeches attributed to the statesman in ancient sources, but no actual writings. And as with the Scruton quote, we are again presented with banal maxims, here formulated in such a vague and offhand way that that original passages are difficult or impossible to identify and contextualise.
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