Culture has this in common with religion that it is offering membership. Science, I don't think, does offer membership. It offers a sort of factual knowledge about the world. But it doesn't say you belong with this. Whereas part of deconstructing what you say about the historical and context dependence of culture is to say, yes, it's like that because it's telling you, here is something that you can belong to. And I think there are forms of knowledge that only come about through belonging. Everybody needs to belong and there's nothing wrong with roots. Nor in my view, speaking as a leftist, is there anything wrong with tradition? One thing that we vitally belong
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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