Terry Eagleton in conversation with Roger Scruton
Intelligence Squared
The Distancing of Culture and Society
I would agree with your position that universities should be, especially in the humanities, a critical piece of either surrounding order. That is the function of culture. I think the distancing is part of the problem there. The way culture and the humanities were actually set up historically was in that necessary distancing themselves from an increasingly industrial society. So the values which were really dysfunctional in that society were increasingly as it were expelled and had to be preserved somewhere else. You call it the arts or the humanities or the university or culture, it doesn't matter. There's no way of bringing these values to bear on everyday social practices. A typically conservative view is that culture is one thing and politics is another
