经济学人讣告 | 英国保守主义哲学家罗杰·斯克鲁顿

右翼卫士

英文部分选自经济学人2020018期逝者版块

Defender of the right

右翼卫士

Sir Roger Scruton, conservative philosopher and controversialist, died on January 12th, aged 75

好辩论的保守主义哲学家罗杰·斯克鲁顿爵士于1月12日去世，享年75岁。

On frosty winter mornings, or at any season, there was no greater pleasure for Roger Scruton than to ease into woollen breeches and a frock-coat, pull on his boots, mount his old horse and, in the wake of the milling hounds, set off for the hunt. His life, he had concluded, fell like Caesar’s Gaul into three parts. In the first he was a wretched youth, fighting an often drunk, ardently socialist father who, after he had won a scholarship to Cambridge, would not speak to him. In the second, restless part he travelled, wrote, and built up an academic life in philosophy at Birkbeck College and elsewhere. And in the third, from the early 1990s, he went hunting. It combined in one activity his three abiding passions: conservatism, controversy, and Englishness.

对罗杰·斯克鲁顿而言，最快乐的事莫过于在寒冬结霜的、或任何季节的清晨，轻松套上羊毛马裤和礼服大衣，穿上靴子，跨上老马，赶着一群猎狗去打猎。斯克鲁顿总结，自己的一生如同凯撒的高卢之战，可以分为三个阶段。第一阶段，他是个可怜的年轻人，和整日醉醺醺又力挺社会主义的父亲争执不休。他赢得剑桥大学的奖学金后，父亲就不再同他讲话了。第二阶段，他不知疲倦地旅行和写作，在伯贝克学院等地开启了自己的哲学学术生涯。第三阶段，他从20世纪90年代初开始狩猎。狩猎这项活动将他的三项爱好融为一体：保守主义、辩论和英国范。

There was no doubt that in mid-life and later he more often felt like the fox, the individual plucked from his species to be scapegoated and killed. His opinions got him barred from universities and dismissed from a government commission—though, since his remarks had been distorted, he was quickly reinstated. They made him such a figure of scorn at Birkbeck that he read for the Bar in case they threw him out. Running against the prevailing modernist orthodoxy of the liberal-left, lamenting the loss of everything from classical education to stiff upper lips to England itself, he often found himself as lonely as Reynard racing for the coverts.

中年之后，他常常明显感觉，自己就像同类中替人受过惨遭杀害的狐狸。他先是因言得咎，被赶出学院和政府委员会后来事实得到澄清，是他的本意被曲解了，他也很快恢复原职。但是，这些事仍让他在伯贝克学院成为被排挤的对象，他因此学习法律，唯恐被赶出校门。当时，自由主义左派的现代主义正统观念盛行，斯克鲁顿却对此持反对意见。任何传统的丢失——从古典人文科学教育到坚定沉着的作风再到英格兰这个国家本身——都让他深感痛惜。他经常发现自己孤立无援，就像急寻掩蔽的那只名叫雷纳德的狐狸。

注：

(keep) a stiff upper lip：to keep calm and hide your feelings when you are in pain or in a difficult situation （面对痛苦或困境）不动声色，沉着而不外露 （选自《牛津词典》）

Reynard the fox：狐狸雷纳德，中世纪欧洲部分讽刺时事的短诗中的主人公。他狡诈，毫无道德，胆小如鼠，自私自利，却又为了生存只得如此。

Being alone, he lashed out all the more. Targets worth attacking lay on every side, beginning with that ludicrous gobbledygook of Marx and Foucault and the sanctimoniousness of those who promoted it: the unparalleled bigotry of the left. He moved on to leftist “intellectuals”, fools, frauds and firebrands, as he characterised them in “Thinkers of the New Left” in 1985. He took on multiculturalism, which harmed immigrant children by not instructing them in the ways and customs of England—as well as the ridiculous charge that he was a racist, rather than a patriot, for encouraging that argument in the Salisbury Review when he was editor. Then he wondered aloud whether homosexuality, like incest, had been stigmatised for the justifiable reason that it threatened the healthy survival of the human race.

他孤身一人，四处出击。到处都有他值得攻击的目标。首先是马克思和福柯荒谬的官样文章以及支持者们假装的虔诚——左派对这些文章表现出了难以置信的偏执。接着他的攻击转移到左派学者身上。他在1985年出版的《新左派的思想家》中，将他们描述成傻瓜、骗子和煽动家。他批评多元文化主义，认为不对移民的后代采用英国传统方式进行教育会害了他们。在担任《索尔兹伯里评论》主编时期，他鼓励反对多元文化主义的言论，因此被骂成种族主义者，而不是爱国者。他对这些指控均予以反击。然后，他公开质疑，同性恋是否会像乱伦一样，因不符合正统而威胁到人类的健康存续，所以遭到污蔑。

All this got him into a good deal of trouble. He did not see why it should. To speak his mind openly was surely not such an intolerable thing. His biggest lapse from the morality he saw fading on every side came when he was not open, but plotted secretly in 2002 to place pro-smoking articles in several magazines while taking a fee from Japan Tobacco. The disgrace that followed disrupted his academic life and caused him to flee to America, his pariah’s wounds now, as he admitted, deserved. After a few years he returned, though. He had to; he missed hunting too much.

所有这些给他惹下不少麻烦，他也百思不得其解。于他而言，直言无讳显然无可厚非。他认为左右派的道德都在沦陷，而当自己犯下最严重的道德失误时，他却没有做到直言不讳。2002年，他收受日本烟草产业株式会社(Japan Tobacco)的好处费，密谋将多篇支持吸烟的文章发表在多家杂志上。这一耻辱性的事件中断了他的学术生涯，迫使他逃往美国。他也承认，自己被社会唾弃也是罪有应得。但是几年后，他又回到了英国，因为他太想打猎了。

注：Japan Tobacco日本最大烟草制造企业

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Tobacco

A Hegelian in Albion

大不列颠岛的黑格尔主义者

The landscape he rode through was the Wiltshire claylands, lying under the ancient chalk figure of the White Horse on its hill, a country with its ancestry still evident in villages, Jacobean mansions and the patchwork of the fields. This sense of deep belonging in a place was expressed in English common law, laid down by custom, habit and precedent like a stratum of stone; it was reinforced by membership of institutions, from the cricket team to the Church of England, each with their observances. All this had to be preserved. That was why he was a conservative and, though a Kantian by instinct, a Hegelian in his conviction that people’s ideas of the world were shaped by language, tradition, culture, the spirit of a place. He had seen enough tearing down, whether by vandal developers ripping the heart from Georgian towns or by rioters in Paris in 1968, to know that he was firmly on the other side.

他骑马穿过古老的白马象山下维尔特郡的黏土地，这里的村落、詹姆斯一世时期的宅邸和成片的田野都诉说着这片土地的古老历史。这种对某个地方的深入人心的归属感是由英国的社会风俗习惯奠定的，它就像岩层一样形成于很久以前，甚至也体现在英国的普通法中；而加入某一组织机构则可以进一步强化这种归属感，从英格兰国家板球队到英国国教会，都保留着各自的风俗习惯。所有这些都应当予以保存。这就是为什么他是个保守派，尽管他是个天生的康德主义者，却有着黑格尔主义的信念，认为人们的世界观是由其语言、传统、文化和一个地方的精神所塑造的。他见证了太多的破坏，不论是无良的房地产商蓄意破坏的乔治王朝风格的（都柏林市）中心城镇建筑，还是1968年巴黎五月风暴的暴徒造成的毁坏，这一切都坚定了他站在另一派（右派）的立场。

注：

1. English common law：又称英国法系或海洋法系，起源于中世纪的英格兰，目前世界人口的三分之一（约24亿人）生活在普通法司法管辖区或混合民法系统中。该法系与欧陆法系（又称“大陆法”）并称为当今世界最主要的两大法系。

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_Dublin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_68

2. the cricket team：这里加了定冠词the，应当是指英格兰国家板球队

参考：https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/英格蘭板球隊

3. The Westbury or Bratton White Horse is a hill figure on the escarpment of Salisbury Plain, approximately 1.5 mi (2.4 km) east of Westbury in Wiltshire, England.

And this was a frustrating place to be. English conservatives found thinking precarious, and did not unite round abstractions like the French; they believed that ideas should be inherited, then ignored. He was not happy with a full-throttle defence of capitalism, and worship of the free market, as in Margaret Thatcher’s reign of terror, did not seduce him either. As he wrote in “The Meaning of Conservatism”, the core conservative value was not competition, but attachment: the defence of civil society and a certain way of life. The state should stay small not just because bureaucratisation was bad, but because when government intervened people ceased to help each other and social capital dwindled. He saw this exemplified in eastern Europe, where in the 1980s he secretly supported the Czechs against a withering communist regime which, controlling everything, left them only with emptiness. By contrast, thrown from his horse on the hunt once, he was rescued by a fellow-member who instinctively stayed behind. This precious pre-modern soul became his second wife.

然而坚守自己的保守主义立场并不总是尽如人意。英国保守派认为人的思维不稳固，不能像法国的（极端右翼）保守派那样团结在抽象概念的周围。他们认为应该先继承思想，而后再将其遗忘。他不推崇竭力捍卫资本主义，也不崇拜自由市场，哪怕玛格丽特·撒切尔夫人的恐怖统治也没能使他屈服。他在《保守主义的内涵》（The meaning of Conservatism）一书中写道，保守主义的核心价值观并非竞争，而是归属感，即捍卫公民社会和特定的生活方式。政府机构应该精简，不仅因为官僚主义很糟糕，还因为政府干预之后，人们不再互相帮助，社会资本也随之减少。他在东欧看到了活生生的例子。在二十世纪八十年代，他秘密支持捷克人对抗正在逐渐衰落的共产主义政权，这个政权控制一切，闹得人们一无所有。与之形成对比的是，有一次他打猎时从马背上摔下来，而后被身后的同伴搭救，这位难得的前现代主义者（极端保守主义者）后来成为了他的第二任妻子。

The hunt epitomised other values for him. It brought the classes together not as equals, but in a common purpose. It expressed his freedom, by custom and tradition, to follow that purpose over his neighbours’ fields. The hedges he jumped were a vestige of old livestock agriculture which he, too, had preserved for some years by running a farm at Sunday Hill and leasing out his grass. The beauty of his land as he returned to it went, as Kant said, beyond the limits of reason. It made him feel at home in the universe.

狩猎体现了他的另一种价值观。狩猎不是以平等的身份，而是为了一个共同的目的，把不同阶级的人聚集在一起。在邻家的田野上狩猎，表明了他从习俗和传统上追寻这一目标的自由。他跳过的障碍物是一些畜牧业的老物件，这都是他多年来在周末山坡（Sunday Hill）经营农场和出租自己的草场时保留下来的。返乡的时候，在他面前的故乡就像康德所说的那样，美得超乎寻常。故土让他在世间感到有所归属。

And that, in the end, summed up England for him. As he argued in “England: An Elegy” in 2000, it was not a nation—it had never quite succeeded at that—but a home, in which, as in his old farmhouse, he could ease off his boots, pour a glass of wine, and know the place as his. As occupiers went in his particular part of it, he was very new, a town boy who also kept two rooms in the Albany off Piccadilly and whose accent was still foreign. But like Mustafa, the local craftsman cobbler, he had learned the ancient art of fitting in.

最终，故土于他而言就是英格兰。正如他2000年在《英格兰挽歌》（England: An Elegy）当中所说的那样，英格兰不是个民族，也从来没有成功化身一个民族；它是舒适的家，就像他的老农舍，在那里他可以脱掉靴子，倒上一杯红酒，并且知道这个地方属于他。与那些住进他的地盘的新人一样，他当年进城时还是个操着陌生口音的小镇男孩，在皮卡迪利大街上的阿尔贝尼公寓楼里租了两间房。但就像当地的修鞋匠穆斯塔法一样，他早已学会了入乡随俗这门传统的艺术。

His ideas, too, had mellowed amid the grass. He spoke warmly of feminism as part of natural reform, decrying only the destructive kind. He regretted his thoughts about homosexuality, which was complicated. Towards any nonsense from the left, however, he remained on high alert—ready, as soon as he heard it flustering the hen-coop, to seize crop and helmet and cry “Tally ho!”

他的观念也在草场当中变得愈发老练。提及女权时他非常温和，认为女权是自然改造当中的一部分，只谴责其中有害的部分。他曾后悔自己关于同性恋的看法，认为这个现象很复杂。然而，对于任何来自左派的胡言乱语，他仍然保持高度的警惕，只要听见鸡窝里头炸了毛儿，他就会立刻抓起谷子、带上头盔高呼:“呔呵！”（且慢！）

翻译组：

Alex，不务正业的理工男

Mosy，绘本、演讲、戏剧英文教育践行者

Ronnie，东北人，南开大学在读，房地产行业预备役

校核组：

Mona，悦读悦译，以译会友

Lixia，女，爱爬山的健身小白，美食狂人

Nikolai，热爱想象的小双鱼，蒙特雷候补生，AKB49