There is a work of conservation which you mustn't overlook, even if you're on the left. It's possible to lose cultural knowledge much more easily than it is to gain it. I think this is one of the important things that has been happening in our time. The right is so often said, here are the timeless cultural values. Take them or not. And that autocratic attitude has been quite as damaging to education and culture as those on the left who have ignored the conservation aspect.
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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