The Uses of Pessimism and the Danger of False Hope
5th Jul 2010; 13:00
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RSA Keynote
Influential and provocative writer and philosopher Roger Scruton vists the RSA to argue that the tragedies and disasters of the history of the European continent have been the consequences of a false optimism and the fallacies that derive from it.
In place of these fallacies, Scruton mounts a passionate defence of both civil society and freedom. He shows that the true legacy of European civilisation is not the false idealisms that have almost destroyed it (in the shapes of Nazism, fascism and communism) but the culture of forgiveness and irony which we must now protect from those whom it offends.
Instead of utopian efforts to reform human society or human nature, he argues that we must focus on the only reform that we can truly master - the improvement of ourselves through the cultivation of our better instincts.
Join Roger Scruton at the RSA as he makes a passionate plea for reason and responsibility, at a time of profound change.
Speaker: Roger Scruton, Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute; Senior Research Fellow, Oxford University and author of over thirty books including Beauty and The Uses of Pessimism (Atlantic Books, 2010)
Chair: Mark Vernon, author and journalist
Suggested hashtag for Twitter users: #rsapessimism
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