Aristotle and the Boy Scouts

As a long-ago Boy Scout I was intrigued by Michael Duffy’s article “Staying Prepared” on the Scouting movement in its centenary year. Anyone who remembers anything of the old scouting manuals or knows something about Baden-Powell will know that they are large targets for the easy amusement of another age. (“Don't be disgraced like the young Romans, who lost the empire of their forefathers by being wishy-washy slackers without any go or patriotism in them”, is a typical enough Baden-Powellism, and it’s difficult to read it now without hearing a John Cleese/Monty Python voice in your head).

Duffy, however, thoughtfully resists cheap shots. The old Boy Scout Handbook, he suggests, quoting Paul Fussell, was into the ’70s “among the very few remaining popular repositories of something like classical ethics, deriving from Aristotle and Cicero”. And he concludes optimistically:

The ethics of Scouting for Boys have not been lost; they have been adopted by such a large proportion of society that the scouts, at least in Western nations, no longer need to preach them. If we laugh at Baden-Powell now, we do so because we can afford to, thanks in part to his success in civilising males. All this is good. As is the fact our boys no longer need be prepared for the vast range of disasters that hung over the youth of 1908.