KUDOS to whichever wag at the New Statesman came up with the idea of making Roger Scruton the magazine’s wine critic all those years ago. Presumably the plan was conceived during a long lunch.
Scruton spent the 1980s helping to set up underground universities in Soviet East Europe, at considerable personal risk. He taught seminars in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia and distributed ‘anti-party’ samizdat philosophical literature to a hidden student body: the bus drivers, nurses and porters who went on to become the architects of the post-Soviet dispensation.
Decades later he was given the chance to reapply that tradecraft and to infiltrate the journal of choice for the armchair defenders of that tyranny, using a well-documented fondness for wine as his cover story. A fondness both for drinking it and writing about the experience of drinking it, that is.
Unlike many philosophers formed within the Cambridge analytical tradition, who were chiefly concerned with finding logically watertight ways to say nothing of interest to anyone else, Scruton was able to discern the deeper meaning hidden in the everyday.
He believed that it is the duty of writers and thinkers to write and think about the mysteries of the human experience. In his case that included drinking – particularly the drinking of wine.
He once said that all the interesting problems in philosophy were somehow present in the experience of listening to music. I suspect that truth came to him post-prandially as an intimation offered via benevolent intoxication.
In I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher’s Guide to Wine (2011), he develops a philosophy of wine as part of a more general critical phenomenology, aiming to situate it in an overall examination of consciousness and its structure.
The various modalities of sense experience – seeing, hearing, touching etc – have quite distinct qualities and grammars. That is the point of them. What Locke called the ‘ideas of secondary qualities’ tell us about the world in different ways. Or close it off from us, if you prefer.
Taste and smell connect us to their causes in ways that are more indirect, or differently directed, than vision and hearing. Scruton develops an account of this distinctiveness using wine and its intoxicating effects as its basis.
He wrote: ‘Winespeak is in some way ungrounded, for it is not describing the way the wine is, but merely the way it tastes. And tastes are not representations of the objects that possess them.’
He broadens the discussion to include themes of association and memory, the privacy (or otherwise) of mental states, the ethics of moderation and the connection between virtue and the consumption of alcohol.
In a spirit of Abrahamic comity, he makes the following observation on the tragedy of teetotalism as inflicted on Muslims today: ‘The acknowledgment of the social virtues of wine appears too in the world of Islam, in the poetry of Hafiz, Rumi and Omar Khayyam. It is a sign of the puritanical extremism of the versions of Islam that seem so threatening today that they emphasise the Koranic interdiction of wine, and forget that many of the rivers of paradise, according to the Holy Book, are actually made of the stuff.’
Wine is a civilisational and cultural phenomenon as much as a gustatory and olfactory one. When the Islamist scholars insist on its prohibition, they are urging a type of theological self-harm. The spurning of wine is the repudiation of a sacred gift. The deep mistakes Islamicists make about the nature of God and prophecy are somehow connected to this ingratitude. The more antagonistic characteristics of Islamism would be mitigated by the occasional drink, which would in any case be a return to original practice, and not a distortion of it.
Is it too much to imagine a situation where one of these excitable imams (in Birmingham maybe) is tempted into a glass of burgundy, over which it is explained to him how God uses communion wine to show that love is more about sacrifice of self than of others? And that this might be the better model moving forwards?
Not much of this speculative metaphysics found its way into the pages of the New Statesman, perhaps because it was beyond the appreciation of the usual readership, most of whom were, then as now, complete philistines. Scruton’s subversions were therefore very much of the low cunning sort, and all the more amusing for that.
The column became a safe space for correct thinking and reflective traditionalism. How can you write about wine without reflecting on its civilising effects? How can you itemise those without, purely for the purposes of clarification, commenting on the superiority of the Western cultural traditions prior to their soiling by the anti-intellectual ambitions of rampant EU fetishism?
Scruton’s column became a beautifully constructed and devastatingly subtle repudiation of the leftist dross that surrounded it. He used anecdote to affirm the importance of the traditional family structure and the eternal dialogue between climate and vine to suggest a tempered and realistic environmentalism. He was rightfully sniffy about the French (with a soft spot for Napoleon, who was said to know his stuff when it came to wine at least).
And because it was also funny, and his editors were avatars of a joyless ideology, it took them years to rumble him.
