And about as likely to work.
by Ed West
I have a book review in this week’s Catholic Herald of Roger Scruton’s The Uses of Pessimism. Professor Scruton is the leading conservative political philosopher of our age, which explains why he’s often been sidelined. As he once recounted, when he arrived at Birkbeck in the mid-70s there was just one other conservative in the entire university – the Neapolitan cleaner. His latest book explains how unscrupulous optimists have brought disaster on the world, from the Jacobins to the Bolsheviks, Nazis and Eurocrats, but his most controversial assertion is that mass immigration is the latest example of this utopian thinking, and doomed to never realise its unachievable aims.
As I write in the Herald:
And the optimists are behind two related utopian ideas that dominate their age. The European Union, like Soviet Communism, is “an unachievable goal chosen for its abstract purity, in which differences are reconciled, conflict overcome and mankind soldered together in a metaphysical unity, can never be questioned, since in the nature of the case it can never be put to the proof. All the crimes committed on the way to it are deviations, perversions or betrayals, things that the ideal was designed to prevent.”