Early in 2020, as the nations of the world began tearing themselves apart in fear of a projected global pandemic, one of the most important minds of our time quietly passed away. Sir Roger Scruton (1944–2020) was a British philosopher and public intellectual who succumbed to lung cancer shortly after he was first diagnosed. More than any other intellectual of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first century, Scruton invited others to join him in an exploration of the manifold riches of historic conservative thought.
Though well-known and deeply respected within European conservative ranks, Scruton’s name is less revered in the United States. However, I am convinced that his work will be extremely important to our own brand of conservatism for the next few decades and beyond. What follows is part memorial and part intellectual survey. My hope is that it will serve as a humble invitation to join me in relishing an intellectual feast at a table set by a great man.
Modern American Conservatism
We are living in interesting times—especially for conservatism. The conservatism that our parents and grandparents knew was dominated by a global conflict between Communism and the free world. Thus the Neo-conservative cold warriors, as they are called, saw themselves as part of an international coalition in opposition to the atheistic world order led by the Soviet Union. However, in 1991 that threatening juggernaut suddenly collapsed, leaving everyone stunned. Neo-conservatives were exuberant about their success but soon began to lose their unity.
In part, their loss of an international identity reflects the inherent localism of conservatism. However, they were also suffering from a loss of cohesion in their thinking. Most continued to hold to sober economic policies, but the issue of religion was divisive. Conservative Christians expanded their focus on declining moral standards in the country and began working intensely to combat legalized abortions. Moderate Christians and secular conservatives found that they had little to offer politically beyond their commitment to free markets and balanced government budgets. As important as those issues were (and are), they lacked the moralizing force necessary to retain significant support. Both groups had lost their connection to their robust philosophical heritage that embraced culture as well as economics and politics.
But the past ten years have witnessed an interesting revival of more consistently conservative ideas even while many have embraced an instinctual populist conservatism that has raised the ire of establishment politicians, media, academics, and entertainers. While we can say much for the intuitive suspicion of powerful social elites, even in its populist form, we are better served in pursuing a more reflective and robust conservatism. Fortunately, we have historically unparalleled access to just such an intellectual heritage.
The free market has made books of all sorts incredibly accessible and cheap by historic standards. Further, the internet allows people to find new and interesting ideas while driving the car, cleaning the house, or mowing the lawn. As a result, many, like myself, have connected to an immensely diverse body of thought grounded in a historic conservative vision of the world that meshes well with an orthodox Christian worldview.
The political context of our times is an even more important factor in encouraging this retrieval. The utopian promises of Progressivism have grown increasingly hollow and the political left has become disturbingly militant in attempting to cudgel the rest of society into accepting radical positions on morality and the nature of mankind and reality. In 2015 the Supreme Court redefined marriage through its holding in Obergefell v. Hodges. The Obama administration celebrated this decision and began using the power of the state to support this redefinition and other moral sins as normal. During that time, the left also began irresponsibly and falsely accusing any opposition to their political aims as a form of hate. Clearly, ideology had taken control of the political left.
Roger Scruton: The Man
These various forces have encouraged many thoughtful conservatives to reassess their position, shedding shallow political conservatism for something deeper and richer. In many ways, recent interest in a better, more holistic conservatism demonstrates a disposition of ad fontes and “renewal through retrieval.” The British philosopher Roger Scruton answered that call with excellence. His thinking was unparalleled among European conservatives of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. But for many American conservatives, like myself, his influence has only begun to have its effect.
Scruton wrote more than fifty books, including on the subjects of the history of philosophy, aesthetics, art, music, architecture, environmental conservation, sex, and political philosophy, as well as a host of articles on hunting, dance, horsemanship, current affairs, and modern culture. In addition, he was a talented pianist and composer, who played the organ in his local church on a regular basis.
Raised in a blue-collar community, Scruton was introduced to high culture through his local library and grammar school. He attended Cambridge University where he earned his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1973. Though an intellectual, Scruton lived a full and exciting life. He loved the traditional British sport of fox hunting and was an adept horseman.
During the height of the Cold War, he traveled to Soviet countries where he secretly taught classes on philosophy, history, and art to Czech, Hungarian, and Polish men and women who were starving for truth amidst the lies and propaganda of the communist states. He was arrested for this work numerous times and eventually banned from reentering communist Czechoslovakia, all of which earned him medals from those states after the fall of communism.
Roger Scruton: An Introduction to Conservatism
As an adult, Scruton turned to Anglicanism primarily for cultural reasons, it seems, rather than doctrinal conviction. In An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture (2000), Scruton detailed how consumerism worked together with the destructive ideas of Modernists like Friedrich Nietzsche and Post-modernists like Michel Foucault to hollow out Western culture. The products of mass pop culture scamper and leer with raucous license through the screens of our devices and the speakers in our earbuds. Scruton shows how significantly these commercialized cultural forms differ from traditional cultures’ focus on submission to the broader community, including the generations who went before.
In order to regain a sense of order and beauty in society, Scruton sought to reclaim high culture through engaging in live performance of excellent music, dance, art, and rituals that exemplified the best aesthetic standards. The Anglican Church, with its lush pageantry and deep historic ties to his British community, served as both an avenue of aesthetic excellence and a submission to local tradition. In this manner, Scruton thought, the church stood as a secure and steadying buttress to the framework of a just and vibrant society.
Scruton’s religious practice also reflected his understanding of the gravity that the local community holds over the individual. In Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition (2017), Scruton, like Edmund Burke (1729–1797) and Russell Kirk (1918–1994) before him, argued that all human relationships begin in the family and extend out from there. We are born into an existing web of relationships that have a distinct and unique history filled with traditions, rituals, benefits, and obligations. As David Hume (1711–1776) held, we should then recognize the legitimacy of the community we have been gifted by our consent to its strictures. For Christians the legitimacy of the community is even more important, since God has providentially placed us within that nest of interpersonal and historic ties.
Still, Scruton recognized that no community is perfect. For this reason, the individual has the responsibility to apply the Natural Law, which he comes to know by the agency of the divine Logos (Rom. 1:18–20; Col. 1:15–17), to specific problems in the local community in a manner that is careful and incremental. Since each community is unique, the application of the Natural Law will also reflect that community; it will be distinct and contingent, responding to the diverse, intricate, and specific natures of peculiar groups of neighbors. Such an approach promotes and preserves true diversity within specific communities rather than artificially imposing abstract rationalized standards of equality down from above and outside the local context.
These sorts of localized solutions to specific problems also serve to solve much larger dilemmas. In Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously about the Planet (2012), Scruton argues that care for the environment, with its emphasis on preservation and conservation, intrinsically is a conservative commitment. However, he eschews the universal, abstract, global solutions proposed by most environmentalists and national and international institutions. Instead, he points us back to the power of the local community over the individual.
Most people, and very likely all people, find it extremely difficult to manufacture a deep and motivating concern for THE PLANET. On the other hand, we all have little corners of creation that are intensely meaningful to us for very specific reasons. Such a love for an exact place, usually in our community (what Scruton refers to as oikophilia—love of home) inspires us to tend and preserve our small nook of creation with excellence.
Drawing from Adam Smith’s thinking on the unintended collaboration of individuals working toward their own goals in the free market, Scruton argues that encouraging people to embrace unique solutions to their specific communal problems will result in the “invisible hand” of environmentalism producing a cleaner, healthier planet for us all. This approach preserves the freedom of individuals to pursue their own interests and encourages initiative and imagination in contrast to abstract universal solutions that find little support and show even less promise of making significant changes.
The same affect occurs in regard to justice. In Conservatism, Scruton draws on the thinking of the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) to argue that true justice is best found through the myriad particular solutions and compromises that a community develops for dealing with conflict. The common law that arises from this historical process best preserves legal order and equilibrium in society, ensuring that individuals know what is expected of them by their community. Hayek called this the theory of “spontaneous order,” which differs greatly from the abstract systems of justice thought up by Modernist ideologues.
Scruton specifically addresses socialism’s attempt to rationalize justice to achieve their ideological commitment to equity. These social justice goals and methods, he argues, are “a form of moral corruption,” that “suck out the meaning of ‘justice,’” and reward “people for feckless behavior.”[1] Such an abstract system produces only further injustice. Whereas the spontaneous order that arises from communities working out their own specific solutions to particular problems best promotes equal treatment before the law and honors the natural diversity of communities.
Conclusion
This brief overview of Scruton’s life and introduction to some of his thinking cannot adequately honor what he has done for conservatism in general and for me in particular. However, I hope that I have captured some vague sense of the man’s character and breadth of thought. If nothing else, please see this as a humble invitation to meet a good friend of mine whom I have never met but whose life and words have changed mine.
[1]Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition (New York: All Points, 2017), 110.
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