Here’s another item of note:
Readers of his columns and works of philosophy may wonder why he chose to tackle this through the medium of the novel. ‘I’ve always taken the view that works of art are not just things that we enjoy. They can convey truths about the world more vividly and to greater effect than ordinary philosophical prose can because they don’t just deal in ideas but show the emotional reality of them. And I think that our society has gone terribly wrong because people have not been confronting the great issues — the loss of the Christian faith, the inability to confront Islam, the loss of the sense of the sacredness of the sexual relation, and the exposure in particular of young women both to external predation and to this moral decay. All these things are real. In my book the principal teacher is someone who is also attracted to the girl victim and that raises another big question — the question of paedophilia, which has a huge hysteria about it in this country because it is the last remaining redoubt of innocence, of childhood, but it’s also the thing that everybody for that reason is assaulting.’ Why assaulting?
For example, see Roger Scruton helps Richard Dawkins’ “meme” find its way
to the wastebasket
and
Philosopher Roger Scruton on why it is okay to think that music fads are just awful