Roger Bannister: What you can't do is accept passively certain values which you're handed by certain cultural autocrats. That's a good old socialist case, and that's what the right is very nervous of. We don't need some transcendental criteria that we have both to subscribe to in order to argue," he says. "There are all kinds of right answers with certain degrees of loss" 'We may run the risk of implying that there is a universal human self that we can all discover through culture,' she adds.
What really divides the left and the right? To answer this question, Intelligence Squared brought together two giants of British intellectual culture for an ideological reckoning: Terry Eagleton, literary critic and long-time hero of the radical left, and Roger Scruton, right-wing philosopher who has written on everything from economic theory to literature, and architecture to wine. What we heard was two two irreducibly different views of the world, where each tries hard to understand the other’s view.
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