Conservative Conservation

I’m sat in a oak-panelled room. The floor is wooden, the ceiling is decorated with plaster mouldings – ceiling roses, cornices and covings – that show that this is a room where the decoration is restrained not because of matters of cost but because of matters of taste. On the walls paintings of be-robed academics gaze down on the crowd as it filters in and slowly raises the volume from a quiet hush to a vibrant chatter.

I’m in a room in the Wills Memorial Building, preparing for a talk by Professor Roger Scruton titled “The Only True Conservationist is a Conservative”. Those who know me or have read my blog may guess that I’m not exactly in agreement with this statement but I’ve come with an open mind and am prepared to be persuaded. The room turns out to be a good choice of setting, as it embodies one of the main theses of the talk, but more of that later.

Wills Memorial Building (image from Wikipedia)

The evening was begun with an introduction of Prof Scruton by Prof Ladyman. He explained that the speaker is a philosopher of aesthetics who focuses on music and architecture. He is a conservative thinker, largely of the ‘small c’ variety who has taken a stand against orthodoxy and regularly challenges the liberal left. Prof Ladyman emphasised that it is important to listen to views we disagree with, which I completely agree with, hence my presence here tonight.

The talk began usefully and non-controversially by explaining the philosophical assumptions that underpin the presentation. He explained that we are, in philosophical terms, rational egoists, in that we do what we think is best for ourselves and try to pass any costs on to others. This, unfortunately, leads to situations such as the tragedy of the commons, a theory first formalised by Garrett Hardin in 1968 in his seminal paper of the same name. Resources which are ‘common’, that is shared by all rather than owned by one or several, will be over-exploited as everyone tries to get as much as they can before the resource is exhausted. Without ownership there is no-one to control how much is taken, and there is the (philosophically rational) behaviour of taking what you can before someone else does.

We are then introduced to the term ‘oikophilia’ or ‘love of home’. He explained in great detail how oikophilia is able to act as a counter to rational egoism by moving us from caring about ‘I’ alone and towards caring about ‘we’, as embodied by our family, our home, and more broadly, our communities. By emphasising oikophilia it is possible to show that there are reasons for conserving, that by not exploiting resources for ourselves we leave them available for our descendants. This seems uncontroversial and if he left it there I would have thought it was a fine proposal if a little bland. However, the talk had only just begun and it is here, to my mind, it went off the rails.

Prof Scruton explained that is when we become unsettled, having no home with which to feel kinship with, that we cause environmental catastrophes. This makes sense – if you don’t have any attachment to an area its destruction is less of a problem. However, to illustrate what he means by ‘environmental catastrophe’ he used the example of wind farms.

Wind turbines (image from Wikipedia)

Hmmm.

In his view, they change the environment ‘irrevocably’, they ‘sacrifice’ our landscape and will stand derelict once they are no longer needed. I would hope that when it comes to decommissioning wind turbines we recognise the value of the material components and reuse them rather than leave them rusting, and if we are able to decommission nuclear power plants I fail to see why we would be unable to remove the remnants of wind turbines.

However, what puzzled me more than his dislike of wind turbines was how he contrasted them with the railways of the 19th century. While admitting that these were equally disliked by locals during construction he explained that the construction of viaducts and the like were acts of ‘sanctification’ of the countryside and this is why we find them aesthetically pleasing but do not have similar reactions to wind turbines.

This is where I fundamentally disagreed with him, as it because clear to me that this is all opinion. It is not that wind turbines are not aesthetically pleasing but viaducts are, it is that he finds wind turbines aesthetically troubling but is fine with viaducts. It is completely subjective. Personally, I love wind turbines. I find them elegant and beautiful and the fact that they are designed to try and help protect environments rather than exacerbate destructions through the effects of global warming only increases my affection for them. Who is he to say that my aesthetic judgement is inferior to his? (yes, he's a leading authority on the philosophy of ethics and I'm nobody, but that's not the point!).

Prof Scruton ended this section of the talk by saying that we should move on from the problem of energy because we have no solutions, which seemed rather fatalistic. We have many potential solutions but they won’t become actual solutions if we just throw our hands in the air saying ‘I can’t do it’.

We then moved on to discussing plastics. This was another area where I spend my time agreeing, disagreeing and being completely baffled, sometimes in scarily quick succession. The problem of plastics, he explained, is a global problem with local solutions, created by ’market failure due to externalities’. What this means is that businesses are, effectively, acting as rational egoists, outsourcing costs while retaining profits. His solution is regulation, which I found rather funny from a conservative – I thought their whole ethos was that the market will regulate itself and doesn’t need no stinking governments interfering. Unfortunately, his distaste for regulation became apparent in where he felt regulation was needed. He believed that packaging was largely a result of big businesses creating a mass of health and safety regulations which were impossible for small businesses to comply with, thus forcing them out of business and resulting in increasing the market share for said big businesses. Now, I don’t deny that big business can be underhanded, but if that underhandedness means I’m less likely to get food poisoning then I can’t say I mind that much. He complained that it meant farmers markets were unable to sell meat because they couldn’t package it. I don’t know what farmers markets he’s visiting but mine has several farms selling meat products, mostly pre-packaged. There’s also a fishmonger who has unpackaged fish and two cheese stalls – one sells pre-packaged cheese, the other, unpackaged. If his argument was true, the pre-packaged cheese stand would have forced out the other, but they exist happily together. So I’m forced to wonder whether his argument is really about wanting to reduce excess packaging or just a dislike of regulation (and maybe some weird fetish for stomach bugs).

The main section of the talk focused on urbanisation. It began with a philosophical exploration of urbanisation and why we have urbanised. We apparently have a need for settlement (I think the Bedouin and other nomadic people's might disagree with this). Cities were originally refuges from attack and became permanent settlements later, at times developing from sacred places – to paraphrase, ‘if it’s good enough for our god, it’s good enough for us’. They are a place of order, law and civility where there is an aesthetic of ‘fit’ not of ‘show’, whatever that means.

The problem comes when cities are no longer fit for purpose. Buildings designed with a single aim in mind become useless when that aim is no longer present. it leads to dead zones of derelict buildings, expensive to demolish especially when it is cheaper to just build on the outskirts of cities, leading to urban sprawl and ‘edge cities’ where all the activity is on the edge of the urban area. The solutions to this are constraints on constructions – limits on height, materials and areas of construction – and to produce buildings with transferable uses so that they can be reused when their original purpose is no longer required. The Wills Memorial Building, like many old buildings, can be used for many different purposes regardless of whether the university exists or not. This seems like a wise move, although I’d suggest that it is rare to want to build a building with a lifespan in the hundreds of years and that is probably a good thing. Can you imagine if we were all forced to live in Tudor-style buildings? They would be completely unfit for modern life, having no bathrooms, electrics, running water or any significant insulation. Is there any reason not to think that our homes will be viewed as equally unfit for purpose in 400 years?

To exemplify his problems with urbanisation in the UK Prof Scruton produces some statistics that sounded incorrect when he said them and have proved to be so. He said that ‘we are the most overcrowded country in Europe’ and ‘Europe is the most overcrowded continent in the world’. If you take ‘overcrowded’ to mean highest population density, then he is talking rubbish. The UK is the 10th most densely populated country in Europe. Even discounting islands and city states we are behind the Netherlands and Belgium. In terms of continents, as you have probably guessed, Asia is the most densely populated. In fact, every continent bar Australia has a greater population density than Europe. It is troubling he is able to play fast and loose with such easily verifiable facts and makes me less willing to accept his authority – if he can be wrong about this, what else is he wrong about?

The talk ended by explaining that we conserve for aesthetic reasons and that organisations like the National Trust were established because people wanted to preserve beautiful things. This may have been one aim, but it was one of many. The National Trust preserves buildings that are historically and culturally important and not just those that are aesthetically pleasing. Likewise, many who want to conserve the natural environment do so not just because they see beauty in nature but because they see other benefits, some tangible, some not, from doing so. Quantifying ecosystem services has become an important sub-discipline in ecology, conceived as a way to measure the economic ‘value’ of ecosystems, from their ability to provide us with oxygen through the value of the fish in rivers, lakes and oceans to the aesthetic beauty of the environment that makes people feel happy. This quantification, is it hoped, will enable people to justify conservation of habitats by showing their economic, rather than just aesthetic (subjective), value.

Without aesthetics, Prof Scruton argued, the world is ‘instrumentalised’ and everything becomes a means to an end. Yet people flee from ugly things and if they can’t they develop resentment of their surroundings and the area is drained of oikophilia either way. I don’t see a problem with this view but I do have a problem that there has been no clear definition of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ aesthetics.

At Trinity College in Dublin there are two buildings that exemplify this subjectivity. Shortly before I left I went on a guided tour of the campus and was told about the history of some of the buildings. The Museum Building, a Palazzo-style building constructed in the mid-19th century, was controversial at the time of opening with many people horrified by its ostentatious design. It is now considered as ‘one of the landmarks of Victorian architecture in Britain and Ireland'. In contrast, the Berkeley Library is, to my mind, a soulless building exemplifying everything that was wrong with mid-20th century buildings yet it is hailed by some as Ireland’s best example of modern architecture. 

Museum building (image from Wikipedia) vs the Berkeley Library (image from Arciseek)

Were the people in the 19th century wrong about the Museum Building? Many would say so. But will my views about the Berkeley Library be seen as just as wrong by those 200 years from now who see it in its broader architectural and cultural context? Aesthetics are often about emotional attachments to inanimate objects - I’m pretty sure that those southern plantation homes looked pretty hideous to all the slaves stuck out in the cotton fields even if those who lived inside thought they were beautiful. An item of clothing can be hideous to one person but beautiful to another. A scruffy chair can be only fit for the tip to a stranger but a cherished item to the person who has happy memories of curling up in it with a loved one. There is no right or wrong and there’s no reason to believe that current understandings of aesthetics are superior to those a hundred, or four hundred, or a thousand years ago, or that the architecture that is to come won’t be as conflicting in its aesthetic appreciation as any that has come before.

All in all I found the talk to be interesting but exasperating. There was much that could have been said that wasn’t and much that was said that I fundamentally disagreed with. I felt that his views were incredibly biased towards a Western middle-class view of what was aesthetically pleasing and what was ‘ugly’. His examples of ‘beautiful’ buildings were all from Europe and North America (specifically the USA). Where was the Asian or African or South American architecture? Or is that not aesthetically pleasing and worthy of conserving? Or is it that those cities are not experiencing urban sprawl in the same way and therefore contradict his thesis and are better ignored? I don’t know. But when someone talks in such generalities but uses such a limited set of examples that are clearly subjective I can't help but wonder.

I’m glad I attended but had really wished the talk was more substantial. It largely felt like someone who had decided what he liked and then built a plausible-sounding thesis to justify his views. The lack of strong evidence and the blatantly incorrect statistics added to the sense that this wasn’t an academically rigorous presentation but was rather a personal polemic that would have been dismissed had it not been dressed in such authoritatively-sounding words.

Suffice it to say, I do not agree that “the only true conservationist is a conservative”, indeed, I think that if it was up to Prof Scruton we would have architecturally limited urban areas full of classical buildings and 'quaint' homes that all end up just as homogeneous as the planned cities he clearly detests. And, I fear, many more cases of food poisoning!