Sir Roger Scruton has Died

For me, his writings on beauty and art were the most important. He put a name and a description to something I knew was lacking in my life. It felt like I finally awoke from the world when I discovered beauty. I will confess I do not have the discipline, and possibly not the intelligence, for Sir Roger's more philosophical works, but I cherish essays like this one on dancing:

All young people need to dance, and – unless social convention forbids it – they need to dance in ways that put their sexuality on display. Put a group of young people together in the presence of rhythmical music and they will begin to move in time to the music, and to use the music to coordinate their movements. They might arrange themselves face to face, body to body, throwing arms and legs about in imitative movements. Nowadays, however, those movements rarely involve dance steps; they are not learned but spontaneous; and the dancers tend to avoid contact with each other, since there is no agreed convention as to what form their contact should take. 

In order to set young people in motion in this way it is necessary to overcome their awkwardness. Their fear of conversation, lack of small talk, and generally clumsy manners, are the natural result of the education to which they have been exposed, which is directed to removing all ideas of elegance, distinction or grace from their behaviour, those old fashioned virtues being judged elitist and politically incorrect. But still, young people need to dance, and this result can be brought about, provided the music is loud enough to make conversation impossible, and provided the pulse is regular enough to jerk the body into reflex motion, like the legs of a galvanised frog. The best music for this purpose is not music produced by a band, since bands like to be appreciated and listened to, and will adapt what they play to the mood of their audience. The best music for the purpose is produced by a machine, perhaps only with the faintest hint that a human being had some part in its creation. Hence has arisen the new phenomenon of DJ music, in which the music is not created by the person who controls it but extracted from a variety of pre-packaged computer sounds, and used as a means to manipulate the movements of the crowd. Music becomes an instrument of crowd control, in the hands of a person whose position is justified by no talent that could conceivably excuse such a dangerous allocation of power. 

Once the young people have been jerked into motion in this way a vestigial desire for partnership is naturally aroused, since the music suggests sexual motions and sexual union. Hence they will tend to pair off, so as to pulsate face to face, not usually looking at each other and certainly not speaking, but acutely aware, nevertheless, of each other’s bodies, as things replete with movement and governed by the machine. Their bodies become sexual objects, voided of personality, since personality is a relational idea, and no relation exists on the dance floor except that between bodies. Hence, when this kind of dancing happens, it is very disturbing to see children or old people joining in: the first because it transgresses the boundaries of the sexually permissible, the second because it excites our sense of the undignified and the shameful. 

The spectacle I have described is related to dancing in something like the way a group speechlessly scoffing hamburgers in the street is related to a formal dinner party. It places a social void where our shared humanity has in the past been displayed, enjoyed and exalted, and it presents animal functions in the place of personal relations. Unfortunately, just as bad money drives out good, so does bad dancing drive out the older kind from any occasion where dancing is required. Weddings, hunt balls, village fêtes, the May Balls of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges – all the places in which elegant and sociable forms of dancing would in the past have been fundamental to the meaning of the event – are now dominated by the DJ, and by the conversation-stopping music that has no virtue beyond its galvanising pulse.

Read the full essay here.