Thirty years ago one of the guests at the Polish-British conference in Krasiczyn was Roger Scruton. His arrival became a breakthrough event for people from the Podkarpacie region, it changed their view on ideas, the Church, politics. For him, Przemyśl of the communist times was a haven of civil society in a grim and dirty socialist state, where he was followed, where people spoke in whispers or sat in silence.
On Sunday, during the Europa Karpat conference in Krasiczyn, the philosopher, who died in January, was remembered. In a video recorded last June, Scruton recalls his stay in Przemyśl and his meeting with Marek Kuchciński, who was "fascinated with culture and art" at the time. Scruton believed that before regaining freedom, identity and culture had to be regained. It was culture that was to bring about a true rebirth.
- There are certain watershed moments in each of our lives, events that shape and change our lives. And there are people who do that. I count Roger Scruton among such people. I met him in the mid 80's. When we were looking for a way to separate our private life from the system around us, this hero of values showed us how to act", recalled Marek Kuchciński during the panel "Roger Scruton - community of experience, community of goals". The Marshal emphasized that the topic of Carpathian Europe is close to Scruton's teachings - in Przemyśl people felt free among other things because the Church, aesthetics and nature were more important than communism.
Zbigniew Krasnodębski asked how it is possible that the West seems to be free while limiting the freedom of speech and recalled that Poland became for Scruton the place where intellectual freedom disappeared from the West. He noted that today our country suffers from the same ills that Scruton described in the 1980s. "Reading his writings, one can understand why the intellectual elites today contest conservative governments," he said.
Other participants in the discussion included MEP; Jonathan Price, research fellow at Oxford University; Marek Matraszek, political advisor and president of CEC Government Relations; and Georgy Schopflin, former MEP from Hungary. Marek Matraszek argued that before Roger became a politician, he was a philosopher...when he looked at communism in the 1980s, he saw it as a blemish and an insult to us all; as an aesthetic insult. Communism strips things of their meaning, refuses to judge that something is good, has a cultural code, recalls the past, takes away the transcendental aspect, denies the existence of beauty, denies the existence of moral rules, of God. According to Scruton, it led to the disruption of interpersonal relations, destroys the social structures that are the condition for the existence of freedom. He himself was read in the books of John Paul II
Jan Jarosz, Director of the National Museum of the Przemysl Region: The meeting with Scruton was the quintessence of attic meetings. We intuitively sensed what he was saying to us.
