on our literary tradition" by showing the male as the dominant figure, and defended her against criticism for having used the word "sex" to describe the difference between men and women, rather than "gender", which Scruton called "politically correct". Scruton considered that moral education should be "endarkening" as well as "enlightening", with "endarkening" being used as the inverse of "englightening". "Endarkenment" is Scruton's way of describing the process of socialization through which certain behaviours and choices are closed off and forbidden to the subject, which he considers necessary to curb socially damaging impulses and behaviour:moral education cannot be … purely enlightened and enlightening … it cannot be simply a matter of teaching [people] to calculate the long term profit and the loss, while leaving .. desires to develop independently. It must involve an endarkened and endarkening component, by which [people] are taught precisely to cease [their] calculations, to regard certain paths as forbidden, as places where neither profit nor loss has authority. In Arguments for Conservatism (2006), Scruton marked out the areas in which philosophical thinking is required if conservatism is to be intellectually persuasive. He argued that human beings are creatures of limited and local affections. Territorial loyalty is at the root of all forms of government where law and liberty reign supreme; every expansion of jurisdiction beyond the frontiers of the nation state leads to a decline in accountability. He opposed elevating the "nation" above its people, which would threaten rather than facilitate citizenship and peace. "Conservatism and conservation" are two aspects of a single policy, that of husbanding resources, including the social capital embodied in laws, customs and institutions, and the material capital contained in the environment. He argued further that the law should not be used as a weapon to advance special interests. People impatient for reform — for example in the areas of euthanasia or abortion — are reluctant to accept what may be "glaringly obvious to others — that the law exists precisely to impede their ambitions". The book defines post-modernism as the claim that there are no grounds for truth, objectivity, and meaning, and that conflicts between views are therefore nothing more than contests of power. Scruton argued that, while the West is required to judge other cultures in their own terms, Western culture is adversely judged as ethnocentric and racist. He wrote: "The very reasoning which sets out to destroy the ideas