Sir Roger Scruton (1944-2020) was a British writer and philosopher who published more than forty books in philosophy, law, aesthetics, and politics. His work has been translated into dozens of languages. He was a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature. Scruton most recently served as a Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford, a Senior Fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center, and the director of philosophy graduate programme at the University of Buckingham.
The son of a teacher, Scruton had his intellectual awakening in 1968 at Paris, while watching an “unruly mob of self-indulgent middle-class hooligans” LARPing revolution. Then he was the only conservative teaching at Birkbeck College of London. Then his academic career was wrecked when he began The Salisbury Review in the 1980’s. Then he marched into the belly of the beast of Communist Eastern Europe to teach freedom to “an underground network started by Czech dissident Julius Tomin, smuggling in books, organizing lectures”, and even awarding degrees. Then, just prior to Scruton’s death, the New Stateman’s George Easton had this “right-wing racist and homophobe” cancelled. Scruton was said to be a gentle soul; but also one with a never-failing courage that we all might hope to emulate.
Scruton died of cancer five years ago on Sunday, 12 January 2020, just before the entire globe was about to experience something called the Covid-19 Pandemic. He was among the most original and perceptive conservative thinkers of our time. Through his many books, articles, posts, and lectures, he worked to defend the ideas of national sovereignty, individual privacy, religious culture, and human liberty. His death was a great loss to conservatism and to the cause of freedom. Among Scruton’s best known books are An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture, The West And The Rest, and Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from A Life. In these and so many other works, he presented a coherent vision of what life ought to be—a modest endeavour to achieve “accommodation”with his neighbours, and to go about things meaningfully and productively.
In Gentle Regrets, he reviews many heartfelt moments in his long struggle on the side of a human and restrained ideal of life. His religious conversion, for example, occurred after years as a “voyeur of holiness”. As a result of contact with true believers, he realized how “Faith transfigures everything it touches, and raises the world to God” (page 63).
His understanding of socialism was equally profound. For Scruton, the ‘paradox’ at the heart of socialism was that “Human equality is to be achieved by an elite to whom all is permitted, including the coercion of the rest of us.” (P. 200)
In addition to his official online “Roger Scruton” website, he also maintained another site called “Scrutopia”, on which he and other contributors carried on a lively discussion of conservative issues. He also held an annual 10 day ‘Scrutopia Summer School’ near his home in the Cotswolds. Online and in his many appearances, Scruton was unfailingly generous to others and receptive to their opinions. His discourse was civil and intelligent, never partisan or confrontational. He believed in gently leading others by way of calm and intelligent argument. He thereby represented the best of what conservatism could be.
Scruton was also one of the first to analyze the failings of what we now call globalism. Throughout Europe and Britain, he witnessed the decline of genuine art, architecture and destruction of life on ‘the human scale’ as it had once existed in the British village. He fought a long intellectual battle to reform modern architecture and to revitalize the institutions that humanized existence—foremost among these being connection to the nation and local region, rather than to impersonal and distant bureaucracies like the EU or UN. It is a pity that Scruton did not live to see Britain’s final withdrawal from the EU—that nation consuming abstraction ruled by the remote and unelected “government” in Brussels that he so detested.
Along with his interest in architecture, Scruton was a strong defender of what might be called the ‘human scale’ of things. He looked askance at the great global cities and the internet culture that arose during his lifetime. Better to live in the countryside or the village and to converse with others one to one, personally. Even the North American suburb, with its comfortable homes and well maintained lawns, was an improvement over the glass-and-steel towers of the world’s new mega-cities.
Scruton believed that there is danger in urban placelessness—not just the effect on individual health as a result of anomie and detachment, but the loss of civic virtue and political involvement in its true sense. How can a society of persons with no real attachment to place or nation vote their best interest in the political sphere? In reality, those persons have no ‘interest’ to defend—only their abstract connection to ideas such as political correctness.
Indeed, this very danger has been realized in places like England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, the U.S. and Canada in the years since Scruton’s death in 2020.
Also educated as a lawyer, Scruton was masterful at articulating and analyzing the failings of modern culture and at defending the declining Judaeo-Christian civilization of the West against attacks on all sides. He understood the extent to which intellectuals in the West had turned against democracy and freedom. He called this betrayal of Western civilization “the culture of repudiation”, and was perhaps the most thoughtful of 21st century writers on this topic. We need not go far to discover this antagonistic culture in our media, our universities, and the leftist politics of our time.
Scruton’s conservatism was of an independent but always thoughtful sort. For instance, he argued that the rise of support for “family values” was not, in fact, a hopeful sign, since it marked what was actually a decline and narrowing of the broad Christian civilization that preceded it:
“Religious societies generate families automatically as the by-product of faith.”
(From The West and the Rest, p. 69)
There would be no need to defend ‘family values’ in a society in which Christian faith was accepted as a matter of course.
Scruton was a modest man who recognized the limits of his powers as a writer, a thinker, and a human being. All of us are limited in our powers, and dangerous temptation is the temptation to suppose that we are not so constrained. That recognition of our limited nature must have been especially acute in the last year of his life, as he battled terminal cancer.
Part of such characteristic humility was Scruton’s reverence for tradition. His argument here was elegant in its simplicity. Is it probable that we, as 21st century humans, have a monopoly on all that has ever been thought or felt or understood? Is it not more likely that our knowledge and understanding are small in relation to all that has ever been experienced and thought? That being the case, how can we afford to ignore those who came before or the beauty and value that they have contributed to Western Civilization? In short, for Scruton, we in the West all stand culturally and intellectually upon the shoulders of giants.
Scruton was one of the most selfless and authentic conservatives of our time. He was not a careerist, a self-promoter, or one who made his way by proclaiming the end of the world. His message was humble and circumscribed: we must return to a human scale of living, and personal existence and humanity to the centre of things—where they belong. Scruton did much to promote such wisdom, and his voice in defence of human freedom continues to resonate.
On 19 September 2019, Scruton accepted the Defender of Western Civilization Award from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute at the fourteenth annual Gala for Western Civilization.
Scruton gave a splendid address, his final one. The core message of the speech was that if Western civilization is under attack, this is happening precisely because it is ‘Western’:
“The word Western has been taken to be a standard term of abuse by so many people in the world today.”
Yet, he explained, Western civilization is not even close to what its detractors claim it is—namely, some narrow, small-minded thing called ‘Western’. It is instead:
“An inheritance, constantly expanding, constantly including new things. It is something which has given us the knowledge of the human heart, which has enabled us to produce not just wonderful economies and the wonderful ways of living in the world that are ours, but also the great works of art, the religions, the systems of law and government, all the other things which make it actually possible for us to recognize that we live in this world, insofar as possible, successfully….we are talking about an open, generous, and creative thing called civilization.”
These remarks spring to mind upon reading the first pages of Western Suicide, the new book by Federico Rampini, a prominent Italian journalist who lives in the U.S. but holds dual citizenship. If an attack in the heart of Europe caught us unprepared—he argues with reference to the Russian invasion of Ukraine—it is because we were engaged in our own cultural disarmament and self-destruction. The dominant ideology spread by elites in universities and in the media requires us to demolish self-esteem and blame ourselves for almost everything that goes wrong in the world. According to this ideological tyranny,
Western countries no longer have values to offer the world and new generations; we merely have sins to expiate and lessons to learn.
Thus is self-murder of the West. In many of our best universities, it is impossible for non- extremists on issues of sex and gender to have freedom of speech. The NY Times in particular bears heavy responsibility for playing a central role in creation of Critical Race Theory.
Putin’s aggression on Ukraine, backed by the CCP, Rampini concludes, flows from the fact that the two major autocracies know that we are sabotaging ourselves.
Well, this makes perfect sense, does it not? After all, would Putin have dared to attack Ukraine if Trump had won in 2020? And this is not only because of Trump’s personal charisma but mainly due to his philosophy and anti-WOKE narrative. From this viewpoint, the 2020 change at the White House was a disaster. The WOKE Biden Administration is a luxury the West could not and cannot afford.
The subtitle to Rampini’s new book is nonetheless as hopeful as the aforesaid Roger Scruton exhortation: “Why it is wrong to erase our values and and history.” From this refreshing perspective, the war in Ukraine could prove an opportunity for the West, paving the way to a new self-consciousness and better understanding of our collective past, present, and future.
This also begs several other questions that many are afraid to ask:
If we in the West are so horrible, racist, and bigoted, then why are people not trying to escape?
Why are so many migrants are crossing our borders illegally?
And why are Ukrainians so eager to enter the EU and NATO?
The answers to these and other similar questions are to be found in a correct understanding of what the West really is—of its soul, which makes its body live. As Scruton put it:
“Whatever we do, we must fight back against this accusation that somehow our civilization is narrow, dogmatic, bigoted, and exclusive. It is not so…Why are we now being forced into a defensive position when it’s so obviously the case to anybody who knows anything about it that what we call Western civilization is another name for civilization as such, and for all the achievements of civilization that young people need to know about and if possible to acquire. The problem, it seems to me, extends largely from the invasion of the academic and intellectual world by activist groups who do not take the trouble to learn enough to know what they’re up against but nevertheless define their position in terms of political agendas…I think this invasion of political activism into universities and into the humanities and into all those channels of civilization is one of the great disasters of our age.”
What we need to do, he thus concluded, is to
“engage in dialogue, which is what civilization is all about…Try to understand the human condition in all its complexity. And when people try to radicalize and politicize the curriculum and what is taught and thought about in universities, you don’t have to go along with this. You can even laugh at them. It still actually is legally permitted to laugh at people in our country and in our civilization. After all, comedy is one of the great gifts of civilization. And it’s up to you, I think, to exercise it.”
What a masterful teaching!
Roger Scruton spent his life defending conservative values. Formally Knighted in 2016, Sir Roger saw the antagonist culture as a rejection of inherited values. This includes gender distinctions, capitalism, patriotism, religious faith, and everyday morality such as honesty and prohibition against theft, adultery, and other evils.
Nobody understood antagonism better on a theoretical level than Scruton, who wrote with incredible passion and clarity. Anyone seeking to understand the culture of antagonism need look no further than Scruton’s many books, including The Meaning of Conservatism, The Aesthetics of Music, and How To Be A Conservative.
And yet even Scruton did not understand the full force of antagonist culture, since he did not live to witness just how destructive it could become. He did not see rules enforced against the use of gendered pronouns and applied to toddlers. He did not see the teaching of CRT and other forms of minority-supremacist ideology taking the place of actual learning in schools.
He did not see refusal to work on the part of millions and the subsequent collapse of the supply chain. He did not witness mobs swarming luxury stores and hauling off bags of expensive goods.
Scruton had profound understanding of the history, nature, and damaging effects of the culture of antagonism; but he cannot have felt or witnessed its destructive nature, other than in the vicious bias he faced as a conservative academic. That damage was softened somewhat by the popularity of his books and his resulting fame and fortune. Much like C.S. Lewis before him, Scruton had the last laugh over those small minds in academia. His alliance with Prince Charles in defense of traditional architecture was only one of many contacts that opened up as result of his principled conservatism.
Today, we understand the effects of cultural antagonism as Scruton simply could not have done. The antagonists are now in charge of the Democrat party in America; they control policy in the Biden administration; they control the Trudeau government in Canada, and the Starmer Cabinet in Great Britain, as well as the EU; they are everywhere in schools, colleges, and universities; they still control much of the courts and legal thinking in the West; and in all areas, they are determined to press their fiery nihilism to its destructive end, inciting a revolutionary crisis intended to sweep away constitutional democracy everywhere in favour of totalitarian rule.
Now we see the full destructive force of antagonistic culture. We begin to feel what it is like to live without freedom of speech, association, and other basic rights. We now understand the destructive effects of post-modern gender distinctions; how the teaching of CRT can divide society and turn the young against their own shared history and traditions. We see the breakdown of law and order as gangs of young thugs pillage stores and attack helpless citizens stripped of police protection by ‘defund the police’ movements. We see the elderly on their way to church, beaten and killed by those who murder for fun.
And to all of this, the Western left, infected by the culture of antagonism, is callously indifferent; but for much of the West, there is no refuge from antagonistic culture. For the left, it is no longer sufficient to allow traditionalists to go our own way and practice our own beliefs. Those beliefs are under savage attack; our faith and liberty are being stripped away in the process.
Even our children do not belong to us when they are in the classroom. If we own a business, it can and must be taxed away. The West is not exceptional—all cultures are equal, and so ours deserves to be taken down a notch or three. White people—especially a white male heterosexuals—are inherently guilty of racism and privilege. We must at all times pay obeisance, apologize, and make reparations to those who have suffered repression—even though the so called oppressed have already benefitted from affirmative action. If we believe in God, then we must remain silent about it or else be punished with loss of employment, lawsuits, and even imprisonment. It is time to understand how pervasive the antagonist culture is and to oppose it at every point. We can no longer accept the dominance of radical viewpoints in the media, politics, or education. We are conservatives, and are inherently free to practice our beliefs in public, without interference or questioning. We must speak out against anyone who tries to curtail our liberties, just as Sir Roger Scruton did so eloquently.
Finally, let us close this biopic with a brief look at Sir Roger Scruton’s faith life. It is said that, much like the better known Dr. Jordan Peterson, this admirer of Christ never quite became a follower. He threaded his way haphazardly through the borderlands between belief and unbelief, never wholly at ease on either side of that divide. Scruton was gripped by gratitude for the sheer gift of existence—a gratitude he believed most fittingly directed towards God.
For Scruton, God did not belong to a set of esoteric positions tacked awkwardly onto more quotidian beliefs, but rather a comprehensive attitude toward reality—a state of mind. If he never fully embraced Christianity, Scruton was far more trenchant in his distaste for philosophy’s rejection of religious belief in favour of atheistic materialism. For him, materialism foreclosed the very possibility that we are not primarily objects animated by blind mechanical forces; but rather subjects who bear the imprint of God at least insofar as we are free and conscious persons accountable for our actions; seized with aesthetic wonder, and endowed with the moral awareness to recognize sins against the sacred and our need for redemption from them. To the extent that he insisted throughout his life that as persons we always transcend our materiality and that we are therefore beings for whom biological death could not be the final word, Scruton was on the side of the angels.
Moreover, the moral stances which flowed from this unwavering commitment to the sanctity of the human person set him at odds with the slow drift of political conservatives away from their historic commitment to social conservatism. Most notably, Scruton refused to abandon his sacramental conception of marriage as an intrinsically heterosexual union, or his view that sex was only ever consecration or desperation, or his insistence that the unlimited expansion of choice trampled underfoot the dignity of the most vulnerable (MAID for example).
Many years ago, a slightly awestruck Dutch journalist—for Scruton was a prophet without honour only in his own country—pressed him on the seemingly futile transience of human life. Scruton replied that:
“We have two choices: one is to go towards our end accepting it, the other is to be dragged kicking and screaming towards it, but it’s the same outcome: the only thing we have the freedom to do is achieve the serenity beforehand.”
We pray that Sir Roger Scruton did finally achieve such serenity in the twilight of his life.
Those of us transformed by the dizzying array of vistas his writings opened up may never adjust to a world now bereft of his erudition, courage, piety, and humour. That Scruton was never morose about mortality even in his final months is testimony to a life lived in fervent pursuit of beauty, truth, and goodness—all facets of a singly transcendent reality immune to death and decay.
