REMEMBERING : Sir Roger Scruton.

 

 Obituary

Sir Roger Scruton obituary

 

Philosopher, writer and political thinker with controversial views on education, hunting and architecture

 

Jane O'Grady

Tue 14 Jan 2020 13.54 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/14/sir-roger-scruton-obituary

 

Roger Scruton, who has died of lung cancer aged 75, was a philosopher and a controversial public intellectual. Active in the fields of aesthetics, art, music, political philosophy and architecture, both inside and outside the academic world, he dedicated himself to nurturing beauty, “re-enchanting the world” and giving intellectual rigour to conservatism.

 

He wrote more than 50 books, including perceptive works on Spinoza, Kant, Wittgenstein and the history of philosophy, and four novels, as well as columns on wine, hunting and current affairs, and was a talented pianist and composer.

 

A member of the traditionalist-conservative Salisbury Group, he helped found the Salisbury Review, which he edited from 1982 to 2001. This quarterly, which was circulated in the Soviet bloc, often in samizdat form, was criticised in Britain for having retrograde attitudes. In 1984 it defended Ray Honeyford, the Bradford headteacher who had disputed the value of multicultural education. Consequent hostility from colleagues prompted Scruton to abandon in 1992 his professorship in aesthetics at what is now Birkbeck, University of London, where he had started as a lecturer in 1971. Though he felt this had scuppered his academic career, in the event it freed him for activities and adventures on a wider stage.

 

In 1978, Scruton co-founded the Jan Hus Educational Foundation in Prague. Under the codename Wiewórka, Polish for squirrel (“a tribute to my red hair”), he gave clandestine lectures, assisted dissident activism, and smuggled banned works (disguised as unused computer discs) into the Soviet bloc. As a result, he was arrested and thrown out of Czechoslovakia several times in the 1980s – and, after the collapse of communism, was awarded medals by the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary.

 

Scruton held academic posts at Boston University (1992-95) and the Institute of Psychological Sciences, Arlington, Virginia (2007-09); and he was visiting professor at Oxford University from 2010, and a professorial fellow in moral philosophy at St Andrews University (2011-14).

 

He and his second wife, Sophie Jeffreys, and their children, Sam and Lucy, eventually settled down in what he sometimes dubbed Scrutopia, near Malmesbury, in Wiltshire. He was an ardent Green and countryside supporter – as well as a keen huntsman – declaring that, while environmentalism has all the hallmarks of a leftwing cause, it is in fact about conservation, equilibrium and “oikophilia” (love of home), therefore “quintessentially conservative”.

 

In 1995, he and the campaigner for constitutional reform Anthony Barnett, who described the two of them as “at opposite ends of the political spectrum”, set up the Town and Country Forum, to tackle rural issues. Scruton was made a fellow of the British Academy in 2008 and knighted in 2016.

 

He exemplified Nietzsche’s aphorism that “every philosophy is a sort of memoir”. His was spun out of his life – often agonisingly.

 

Born in Buslingthorpe, north-east of Lincoln, Roger was the son of Jack Scruton, a teacher, and his wife Beryl (nee Haynes), and was brought up in a somewhat uncultured home. After the family moved to Buckinghamshire, he discovered the delights of high culture in Marlow library and from the Royal grammar school, High Wycombe, he won an open scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge (for which, apparently, his father never forgave him). Having changed from science to philosophy, he gained a double first in 1965, and, in 1973, a PhD in aesthetics. His thesis formed the basis of his book Art and Imagination (1974).

 

At the age of 24, he witnessed the événements of 1968 from a first-floor window in Paris, but, unlike his friends, was disgusted by the protesting students’ self-indulgent iconoclasm. “I suddenly realised I was on the other side … wanted to conserve things, rather than pull them down.” He began to read Edmund Burke, who “summarised ... all my hesitations about progress”, and defended authority and obedience.

 

Scruton was the exact opposite of a champagne socialist: he took terrible risks for his political beliefs, not just literally, in eastern Europe, but in continually expressing outrageously reactionary views, which led him to be ostracised by the “leftwing establishment”.

 

What he said in his younger days opposing feminism, liberalism, egalitarianism, homosexuality and anti-racism could be seen, at the very least, as worrying, and was constantly invoked against him long after his stance had mellowed with age and his happy second marriage, or else it was denounced as self-publicising hyperbole.

 

Indeed, lucid and clear-thinking though he was, it was difficult to know what he really did believe, and what trumped what in his multilayered thinking. He declared Thatcherism, with its free-market libertarianism, philistinism and contempt for education, “a betrayal” of cultivated Burkean conservatism, yet went on to support it.

 

He returned to Anglicanism (“my tribal religion – the religion of the English who don’t believe a word of it”), but it is a moot point whether or not he was an atheist (as most of his secular friends insisted) or whether, for him, God was part of what he called “the web of seeming”, the “life-world” (Husserl’s Lebenswelt).

 

It may sound odd for a serious philosopher and intensely sincere person to exalt illusion, but, quoting Oscar Wilde, Scruton insisted that only someone very shallow does not judge by appearances.

 

In The Aesthetics of Music (1997), he brilliantly described the sense we have of a musical space in which tones are higher and lower, and the “virtual causality” that makes it seem inevitable for each particular sound in a musical composition to follow the previous one.

 

Permeated by “spatial metaphor”, our experience of music would be impossible without it. “If someone said that, for him, there is no up and down in music, no movement, no soaring, rising, falling, no running or walking from place to place”, would we count what he is hearing as music?

 

Similarly, said Scruton, with reality itself, or at least human reality. If not experienced through human-made metaphors, meanings and categories, what on earth could it be? Scruton in fact imitated Kant, but by inverting his metaphysics.

 

Kant said that all we can know is phenomena (“appearances”) of the real “things-in-themselves” which are tantalisingly, inexorably unknowable. Scruton, in a beautiful reversal, relegated knowledge of behind-the-scenes reality to science and declared that the most important task for philosophy now is to “re-enchant the world”. Because it attempts “to explore the ‘depth’ of human beings”, science “threatens to destroy our response to the surface”.

 

But it is on the surface that we live and act. A smile is “really” only the movement of facial muscles – except that it is not, any more (as Scruton insisted in Sexual Desire, 1986) than erotic sex is just the mutual manipulation of body parts.

 

Scruton demanded that we “resurrect the human person”, and “replace the sarcasm which knows that we are merely animals, with the irony which sees that we are not”.

 

For all his logical stringency, he had in some ways less an analytic than a continental style of philosophising. But that style, with its mixture of poetical metaphysics and subjectivity, runs the risk of being sentimental, which Scruton, much as he condemned and eviscerated sentimentality, was sometimes guilty of.

 

Adamant that beauty is essential for everyone, he advocated that any architect of public buildings should consult the aesthetic wishes of their future inhabitants. Having been appointed honorary chair of the government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful commission in 2018, he was sacked a few months later on the strength of an interview he gave to the New Statesman, which was pronounced to be antisemitic, Islamophobic and anti-Chinese. He was afterwards reinstated when a recording of the interview emerged and the New Statesman apologised for the way it had been selectively quoted from on Twitter. He insisted that his interviewer not be sacked.

 

He was capable of tendentiousness himself. In 2002, a leaked email to the company Japanese Tobacco International asked for an increase of £1,000 on the £4,500 a month it was already paying him for the placing of articles in the British press that could be deemed helpful to their marketing. Although Scruton had been a smoker himself, this did not exactly follow Kant’s categorical imperative (we should do only what we would be prepared for everyone else to have to do) of which he was such a clear, fervent expositor.

 

But he lacked nothing in courage, refusing to kowtow to popular piety, even if retaining a piety of his own.

 

Like Dostoevsky’s kindly Grand Inquisitor, he promoted illusions that he loved but could also see through, almost relishing the arcane discernment of reality’s bleakness. “Whatever its defects,” he wrote, “my life has enabled me to find comfort in uncomfortable truths.” He was a tormented soul, as manifest in his rather laboured way of speaking, but also extremely funny.

 

In 1973 he married Danielle Lafitte; they divorced in 1979. His marriage to Sophie came in 1996. She and their children survive him.

 

 Roger Vernon Scruton, philosopher, writer and activist, born 27 February 1944; died 12 January 2020

Account

Roger Scruton, a Provocative Public Intellectual, Dies at 75

 

A philosopher, author and columnist, he was an outspoken hero to conservatives in Britain and recently at the center of, in his words, a “hate storm.”

 

By Alan Cowell

Published Jan. 16, 2020

Updated Jan. 17, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/16/books/roger-scruton-dead.html

 

LONDON — Roger Scruton, a prominent British philosopher and public intellectual whose espousal of conservative causes and contentious views elicited both plaudits and opprobrium, which he likened to “falling to the bottom in my own country,” died on Sunday. He was 75.

 

His family announced the death on his website without providing other details. Mr. Scruton, who lived for many years on a farm in Wiltshire, in southwest England, was said to have been treated for lung cancer in recent months.

 

In the course of a long academic career, which included spells in the United States, Mr. Scruton wrote more than 50 books, ranging over topics like art, aesthetics, architecture, music, philosophy and sexual behavior. On the defining issue of the new century in Britain, he said, he voted in favor of leaving the European Union, the so-called Brexit that propelled the Conservative Party’s landslide victory in elections in December.

 

He also wrote four novels in addition to newspaper and magazine columns, in which he mused on wine, politics and horseback hunting, which he pursued enthusiastically until his final birthday. As a musician, he composed operas. He qualified as a barrister, too, but did not practice law.

 

In the Cold War years of the late 1970s and ’80s, he transcended the frontiers of formal Western academia by traveling beyond the Iron Curtain — to Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia — to deliver clandestine lectures and smuggle samizdat works disguised as blank CDs to Soviet bloc students. In later years he was awarded medals in recognition of that role.

 

He was knighted in Britain in 2016. After his death, Prime Minister Boris Johnson tweeted, “We have lost the greatest modern conservative thinker — who not only had the guts to say what he thought but said it beautifully.”

 

Toward the end of his life, Mr. Scruton concluded that he had been treated unfairly in his own land, subjected to what he termed a “hate storm” inspired by critics who had accused him of Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and disparagement of Chinese people — allegations that Mr. Scruton called “fantastic and fabricated.”

 

The immediate cause of the furor was an article about him in April in the left-wing magazine New Statesman. Based on an interview with him, the article, which a New Statesman editor said on social media contained “a series of outrageous remarks,” prompted an uproar. Mr. Scruton was said to have belittled the term Islamophobia, spoken stereotypically of Chinese people and evoked a “Soros empire in Hungary,” referring to the financier George Soros, who is Jewish.

 

Within hours of its publication Mr. Scruton was sacked from an unsalaried position he had held as the head of a government-appointed body that advised on modern architecture, the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission.

 

But he was reappointed after the magazine acknowledged that his views “were not accurately represented in the tweets” that had been published along with the article. The magazine apologized.

 

The episode recalled Mr. Scruton’s longstanding reputation as an iconoclast. Peter Stothard, who had been his editor at The Times of London in the 1980s, when Mr. Scruton wrote a column for the paper on art and politics, was quoted as saying that “there was no one I ever commissioned to write whose articles provoked more rage” than Mr. Scruton’s.

 

Critics also assailed his views on homosexuality and gender issues. In his interview with New Statesman, he said that homosexuality was “different” but denied that he was homophobic. He described the 21st-century debate on gender and identity as “a kind of theatrical obsession which is being imposed on children whether or not they understand it.”

 

Mr. Scruton dated his conversion to the conservative cause to the Paris student riots of 1968, when, at 24, he observed young people, including his friends, clashing with the police in the Latin Quarter. “What I saw was an unruly mob of self-indulgent middle-class hooligans,” he said in an interview with The Guardian in 2000.

 

“When I asked my friends what they wanted, what were they trying to achieve, all I got back was this ludicrous Marxist gobbledygook,” he continued. “I was disgusted by it, and thought there must be a way back to the defense of western civilization against these things. That’s when I became a conservative. I knew I wanted to conserve things rather than pull them down.”

 

Roger Vernon Scruton was born in Buslingthorpe, a village in Lincolnshire, in eastern England, on Feb. 7, 1944, the son of John and Beryl (Claris) Scruton. His father was a teacher, his mother a homemaker. The couple also had two daughters.

 

Roger was educated at a grammar school in High Wycombe, West London, and won a scholarship to Jesus College at Cambridge University, where he studied philosophy. He met his future first wife, Danielle Laffitte, a teacher, while traveling in France. They married in 1973, the same year he was awarded his doctorate. They divorced in 1979.

 

From 1971 to 1992 he taught at Birkbeck College in London, where, he said, he was the only conservative on the teaching staff.

 

In later years he was sometimes depicted as providing the intellectual spine to Thatcherism in Britain, although he said he did not share Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s devotion to the free market.

 

In 1982, Mr. Scruton helped found a conservative journal, The Salisbury Review, which stirred controversy in 1984 by publishing an article by a headmaster in the north of England who raised questions about the value of multicultural education.

 

Mr. Scruton published a torrent of books, including “Art and Imagination: A Study in the Philosophy of the Mind” (1974), “The Aesthetics of Architecture” (1979) and “Sexual Desire” (1986). His novels included “Notes From Underground” (2014), based on his experiences behind the Iron Curtain.

 

In 1992 he became a professor of philosophy at Boston University; he returned to Britain in 1995. In 1996 he married Sophie Jeffreys, an architectural historian, with whom he had two children, Sam and Lucy. They all survive him.

 

The episode revolving around the New Statesman article, in the last year of his life, left Mr. Scruton feeling bruised.

 

In a column in the conservative magazine Spectator, under the headline “Roger Scruton: My 2019,” he wrote, “During this year much was taken from me — my reputation, my standing as a public intellectual, my position in the Conservative movement, my peace of mind, my health.”

 

But, he went on, “Falling to the bottom in my own country, I have been raised to the top elsewhere, and looking back over the sequence of events I can only be glad that I have lived long enough to see this happen.”

 

“Coming close to death you begin to know what life means,” he added, “and what it means is gratitude.”

 

After a long career as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times based in Africa, the Middle East and Europe, Alan Cowell became a freelance contributor in 2015, based in London.

 

A Liberal’s Ode to Sir Roger Scruton

 

At 75, a colossus of conservative philosophy has died. A young liberal reflects on this great man’s life and legacy.

 

Ross Anderson

That Ross Chap

Ross Anderson

https://medium.com/thatrosschap/a-liberals-ode-to-sir-roger-scruton-964b2780cd8c

Published in

That Ross Chap·

Jan 13, 2020

 

Blue page numbers. The first book of Sir Roger Scruton’s that I read cover to cover was How To Be A Conservative. Released in 2014, this brief read, written in tight and masterful prose, distilled a life’s thinking on the nature of conservatism into one accessible, entertaining little book. A book with blue page numbers.

 

Of all the elaborate covers this titan could have chosen, he went for an understated solid blue with white text. Subtly fitting a book on conservativism. And yet, he had it published with those blue page numbers so that every single page used colour ink; no doubt at great bother and cost. This was what sold me on Scruton; a deep care for detail and beauty, told with a light smirk and gentle wit.

 

A philosophy professor on aesthetics, he released several books on the subject, including Art And Imagination, The Aesthetics of Architecture, The Classical Vernacular, The Aesthetics of Music, Beauty, and Understanding Music. This culminated in his BBC documentary aptly titled Why Beauty Matters. In it, he advocates for the meaning and significance of art and looks at that which dismisses it — Duchamp’s infamous urinal — with a quiet despairing hatred.

 

His form of conservativism is bound in and born of this love of beauty. Repulsed by the wayward destruction of the 1968 French university protests and riots, he was stuck by the carelessness of the progressive drive. That in the aim to tear down the old order and build a new better world, so often we lose what came before, much of which is of crucial value. If this strikes you as Burkean, it should; his political philosophy is grounded in Burke’s line that society was:

 

“a partnership… between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”

 

For Scruton, this meant the preservation of that which is meaningful in an objective, graspable sense. In his eyes, beauty - in classical architecture, painting, and music — was key to this:

 

“Beauty is a value, as important as truth and goodness… The beautiful work of art brings consolation in sorrow and affirmation in joy. It shows human life to be worthwhile”

 

And, as with truth and goodness, it is one of the clearest signs of objective meaning:

 

“Beauty makes a claim on us; it is a call to renounce our narcisissm and look with revererence on the world.”

 

This is bound to his belief in national identity - in a national soul. Contrary to a relativistic position, he argues that countries are not bound together merely by arbitrary in-group/out-group divisions. Rather, their people are tied to their lands by shared meaning, tradition, and culture. Science may explain the cosmos but it definitionally lacks soul. On the other hand, beauty and meaning nurture the soul.

 

This is not to say that art must be stagnant. Of course not. Rather, meaningful progress is only possible in tandem to that which we inherit. As he wrote in Modern Culture:

 

“Without tradition, originality cannot exist: for it is only against a tradition that it becomes perceivable. Tradition and originality are two components of a single process, whereby the individual makes himself known through his membership of the historical group”

 

And it is in this that you find his conservatism. Scruton best distilled this in a key passage from that little book with blue page numbers:

 

“Conservatism starts from a sentiment … that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created. This is especially true of the good things that come to us as collective assets: peace, freedom, law, civility, public spirit, the security of property and family life, in all of which we depend on the cooperation of others while having no means singlehandedly to obtain it. In respect of such things, the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation slow, laborious and dull. That is one of the lessons of the twentieth century. It is also one reason why conservatives suffer such a disadvantage when it comes to public opinion. Their position is true but boring, that of their opponents exciting but false.”

 

Too often do those on the left characterise the right as being curmudgeonly, uncaring for the poor, held hostage by nostalgia, and disconnected from the issues of today. It is something I in the past have been guilty of. And yet, any fair reading of Scruton and what grounds his philosophy reveals anything but that ‘Nasty Party’ image. Rather, his philosophy is firmly rooted in his love of beauty, heritage, and the passing of knowledge.

 

Lest his prolific writing and populated library not be evident enough, his love of books is most aptly shown in this wonderful little anecdote:

 

Humour arises from incongruity. With our mental faculties having evolved as a tool to best hunt bison and not ponder the nature of the universe, we and our thoughts on ourselves are full of contradictions. So, it’s unsurprising that much truly meaningful philosophy is rather funny. An example of this comes from another witty Englishman, Christopher Hitchens. When asked whether he believes in free will, his answer was; “I have no choice but to”.

 

Whilst much of Scruton’s writing contains a delicate wit, that which made me smile widest was the premise of his slim volume, Animal Rights and Wrongs (2000). Facing the dour ideas of the overly literal Peter Singer, Scruton responds that it’s because he loves animals that he eats them. As though enough feathers hadn’t been ruffled, he ends his preface with:

 

I am indebted to creatures who have no idea of the fact — to Puck, who guards the gate, to George, Sam and Rollo who live in the stables, to the nameless carp in the pond across the field, to the cows next door and to Herbie, who has now been eaten.

 

The wit of it comes from its unexpected but clear truth, oxymorons retained. Another example is from his introduction to modern philosophy, where he disregards relativists with two deft lines:

 

“A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.”

 

Even the titles of his more than 50 books display this, most notably ‘I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher’s Guide to Wine’ — a favourite line of which being:

 

“... while we are familiar with the adverse effect of drink on an empty stomach, we are now witnessing the far worse effect of drink on an empty mind.”

 

He carried this love of wine, culture, and beauty in his Scutopia Summer School: a 10-day course consisting largely of sitting around discussing philosophy whilst drinking fine wine, eating good food and “evenings [involving] concerts, readings, or further discussion over wine.” The 25 students paid £3000 for the privilege.

 

I envy every one of them.

 

To note his wit is not to say he was not serious or invested. He was, both in his thinking and life. I cite Animal Rights and Wrongs for the amusement I found on beginning it, but that isn’t to say it’s frivolous and to be easily dismissed. Scruton brings the simplistically literal Singer to task in a way few have done on this subject, arguing his texts:

 

“contain little or no philosophical argument. They derive their radical moral conclusions from a vacuous utilitarianism that counts the pain and pleasure of all living things as equally significant and that ignores just about everything that has been said in our philosophical tradition about the real distinction between persons and animals.”

 

Whilst my conclusions align closer to Singer’s on animal rights, Scruton makes a thorough case against it, largely reliant on the relationship that rights have with obligations. Too often the word ‘rights’ is invoked without a thorough consideration of what something being a right entails — think of the many politicians running for office who say “X is a human right”. Paired with his clear delineations on the differences between humans and animals, he makes a sharp case that you have to answer if you are to hold that animals have rights.

 

Whilst unbound by political orthodoxy, it is worth noting that Scruton was anything but a simplistic contrarian. The depth of his thought seems incompatible with it anyhow. Not only a sharp critic of the cultural left, he also raising the spectre of issues many conservatives have abandoned; namely environmentalism (chiefly discussed in his book Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet). Rather than dismiss the issue, as too many on the political right do, Scruton wrote that it was among the most important political issues of our era and that:

 

“There is no political cause more amenable to the conservative vision than that of the environment.”

 

However, aligned with the importance he placed on personal responsibility, Scruton wrote:

 

“I argue that environmental problems must be addressed by all of us in our everyday circumstances, and should not be confiscated by the state. Their solution is possible only if people are motivated to confront them.”

 

Outside of the world of letters, Scruton’s dedication can be seen no more greatly than his courage during the Cold War. Recalling his efforts during this period, Anne Applebaum (expert for Russia, writing at The Washington Post and The Atlantic), recalls:

 

Recalling the period, Scruton wrote last year:

 

“In 1979, when teaching philosophy at the University of London, I responded to an invitation to address a private seminar in Prague. I travelled from Poland, already inwardly frozen by the eerie chill of Communism — and Communist Prague did nothing to raise my spirits.

 

… I was addressing a room of criminals whose ‘crimes’ consisted of uttering the wrong word, reading the wrong book, belonging to the wrong network, and in general trusting in the free life of the mind.”

 

He was ‘guilty’ of the same ‘crimes’. And yet, risking imprisonment, Scruton travelled behind the Iron Curtain to support fellow writers and thinkers within Poland and Czechoslovakia. With them, he set up an ‘underground university’ to spread knowledge against the wishes of the totalitarian regime. For this, he was awarded the Medal of Merit (First Class) by the Czech Republic in 1998. And, after a lifetime of appreciation abroad, the country he called home finally recognized one of its leading minds in 2016 with a knighthood.

 

Having defended those persecuted for thought crimes and false accusations on their words, it is only fitting that a smear merchant (George Eaton) at the New Statesman would attempt to ‘cancel’ the professor. Deliberately ripping from context comments Scruton made about China and Hungary, Eaton attempted to make him look like a racist. Unsurprisingly, Scruton’s comments revealed anything but racial hatred; he was continuing his lifelong defence of those robbed of freedom, namely those living under the rigid constraints of the Chinese Communist Party. For this smear, Scruton was fired from an unpaid position in the government consulting on architecture, which Eaton celebrated with champagne on Instagram. The New Statesman would later issue an apology and Scruton’s position was reinstated. As Douglas Murray states on the affair:

 

“…if there was a reason why such attempts at ‘gotchas’ consistently failed it was because nobody could reveal a person that did not exist. Of course Roger could on occasion flash his ideological teeth he was one of the kindest, most encouraging, thoughtful, and generous people you could ever have known.”

 

For a fuller summary of the issue, I would recommend this piece of his on the matter.

 

Scruton’s work means a lot to me. Those most intelligent people who you disagree with have the greatest opportunity to reveal truths previously hidden from you. That they are simultaneously brilliant and yet, to your mind, wrong is both humbling and exhilarating. It is from such people that you learn the most. And there is no subject where Scruton influenced me more than his discussion of beauty:

 

“ Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference: beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend. If there are people who are indifferent to beauty, then it is surely because they do not perceive it.”

 

Scruton did not share my love for the artistry in hip-hop, pornography, or smartphone design. I doubt Shame or The Neon Demon would have done much for him either.

 

But that’s beside the point.

 

Few showed the philosophical and ethical importance of beauty greater than Scruton. It’s because of his work that I place such importance in great works even in areas he would not approve of. It’s because of this that I wear a suit every day; that I work hard to own beautiful items, and stop and admire that of others. He would never praise Kanye West’s ‘Gorgeous’, the work of Vixen or PlayBoy, or the Essential Ph-1. But without his thoughts, I would be robbed of some of their artistic significance.

 

This is not to claim my seeing porn or rap differently than Scruton arises from blindness on his part. Not at all; accusing Scruton of ignorance is a claim borderline impossible to justify. But nor do I think I am incorrect.

 

Rather, there are giants who raise us up, give us the tools and perspective to see the world radically differently than we ever could before. Sometimes they show a completely different world. Other times they recontextualise it. Or perhaps they lift us above the clouds and allow us to see what we knew was there but was just out of sight. Once given this new perspective, this new height, we may see something different than that of the giant who raised us. That doesn’t invalidate either position. But it is to acknowledge that they are giants and we are but mere people. And that we see by standing on their shoulders.

 

And so, with the passing of Sir Roger Scruton, a giant died yesterday. Amongst conservatism, he carried the torch from Edmund Burke and Michael Oakshott. For beauty, few defended it as passionately and thoroughly. And interpersonally, be they in agreement with him or not, all records show him to be as kind, gentle, courageous and humorous as he was brilliant.

 

As stated by the Prime Minister:

 

Reflecting on the life of his friend, Douglas Murray writes:

 

“One of my first grieving thoughts on hearing the news was how much I still had to ask him. But in that spirit which he encouraged I will instead turn to the shelves I have full of his books and marvel again instead about the huge amount he gave us.”

 

And it’s in the libraries that Scruton loved that his legacy is to be found. A man who spent a lifetime defending the importance of history, of tradition, of speech, of ideas, of writing, who carried the baton of knowledge from those who proceeded to hand to those who will follow, he has left a legacy of thoughts that will influence many generations to come. With simple covers, blue page numbers and black ink, his legacy lies within book covers and the minds and lives of those he influenced. And that those books proudly sit on the bookshelves of a young liberal, I think says it all.

Confessions of a Heretic – Roger Scruton

(Notting Hill Editions 2016)

by R.J. Rasmussen

https://traditionalbritain.org/blog/book-review-confessions-of-a-heretic-roger-scruton/

 

Roger Scruton is probably the most widely read and respected of modern conservative writers, having written widely on subjects such as religion, art, music, aesthetics, political philosophy, hunting and wine.  He is also a bona fide heretic; bona fide in the sense that he has genuinely suffered for the heresies that he is alleged to have committed.  His editorship of The Salisbury Review, for example, brought him untold heartache in the form of lawsuits, character assassinations, and the loss of what would have been a glittering academic career in Britain, such that he had to retreat to the States to practice his trade.  He has earned the contempt of conservatives and liberals alike and endured police scrutiny over the Ray Honeyford affair.  However, he maintains that it was all worth it for “the sheer relief of uttering the truth”.  The mark of the true heretic is the willingness to suffer and the unwillingness to recant, and it is arguably because of this, as well as his considerable intellectual talent that Scruton has undergone something of a renaissance in recent years, having been allowed back into the journalistic fold in print and even at the BBC.  To cap it all he has recently been knighted.

 

In this collection of essays, which span a decade of engagement with the public culture in Great Britain and America, Scruton describes what I would call gentle heresies; truths that remind us of what we have lost in the tumult of latter modernity, and what we can retrieve from the ruins of tradition.  Many of these ideas are unpopular and scorned, and if Scruton’s critics are to be believed, ought to have been kept to himself, but because they are eternal they always recur at some point in time or other.  Beauty, objective truth, organic community, moral tradition, hierarchy and the redemptive power of love are some such ideas that won’t get you burned at the stake, but may earn you unending derision no matter how obvious it is that we cannot live our lives without them.

 

For example, in the essay “Faking It”, Scruton tackles the themes of originality, beauty and kitsch in culture, more specifically art, and more specifically still, visual art.  As religion declined in the 19th century the romantic poets and painters turned their backs on God and embraced the cult of the artist as a God-like substitute, a tradition which endures to this day.  Since the time of the romantics, however, beauty itself turned into kitsch and fake originality.  Popular taste quickly became corrupted as the egoism of the artist created each new work as an ‘original’, and in a society where art is valued as the highest cultural good, the motive to fake it was strong.  The early modernists, such as Stravinsky and T.S. Eliot attempted to rescue truth, sincerity and genuine emotion from the plague of fakery, but then this quickly gave way to fakery itself in the form of the transgressive artist whose statements of offence, such as Duchamp’s urinal quickly turned into hackneyed clichés.  Then came the supposedly sophisticated parodies of kitsch, such as Andy Warhol’s brillo pads and the art of Jeff Koons. Who could say something so self-consciously mocking of itself was kitsch anymore?

 

In order to rescue art from this never-ending cycle of narcissism and banality Scruton suggests we recapture the ideas of beauty, form and redemption.  Kitsch is a means to cheap emotion, by transferring it from the thing observed to the observer.  It matters not what I feel about the tortuous excretions of some avant-garde painter or other, only the sheer fact of my feeling it.  Beauty on the other hand is an end itself, and an end that is hard won. Formal perfection requires knowledge (which implies tradition), discipline and attention to detail.  It is not simply a question of turning on the taps and letting it all flow out.  Beauty is also a redemptive presence in our lives; a reassurance that our life is meaningful and suffering is not pointless, but a restoration of the moral equilibrium.  Tragedy reminds us that beauty and thus love, both filial and erotic, is redemptive.  Much of this kind of thought can be found in the mature operas of Wagner.

 

It is the moral burden of love and the flight from genuine emotion which is the key theme of ‘Loving Animals’.  Scruton argues here that a sentimental, cloying affection for animals as pets has gradually replaced the genuinely burdensome act of loving one another.  The latter kind of love is not cost-free - it positions us in a relation of individuals I to I that assumes that both subject and object are morally invested and obligated in such a way that there is no easy out without genuine human suffering.  That is the nature of the moral sphere we inhabit, and animals simply cannot enter into it.  However the idea that we can love animals as equals (impervious to the impossibility of their reciprocation) has given rise to the liberal industry of animal rights.  But rights, duties, obligations and virtues depend on the essential quality of self-consciousness that humans possess and animals lack, which is why Kant maintained that humans are not really part of nature at all.  Thus those who espouse the ideology of animal rights, such as Peter Singer in Animal Liberation elevate animals to a moral plain they are by nature prohibited from understanding, which in turn corrupts both them and us.  Albeit counter intuitively this ascribing of rights to animals actually gives way to an unscrupulous favouritism which makes it a crime to shoot a cat, the most destructive of all alien species, but praiseworthy to poison a mouse and thus infect the whole food chain upon which other less favoured animals depend.  A proper love for animals involves a respect for natural hierarchy and the wider environment. The hierarchy that the ideology of animal rights has as its core assumption is based on an anthropomorphic sentimentality which assumes animals can be moral subjects in the same way humans can.

 

There are many more such instinctive conservative positions eloquently defended, such as the natural distrust of big government that overreaches, and an appeal to the idea of government as the free consent of responsible individuals of a particular community, who are free not because the state is absent, but because of the natural human disposition to hold one another to account.  This is not a rejection of overarching government, which must take over when the capacities of what might be called Burke’s “little platoons” have been exhausted, but a rejection of the liberal abuse of government, which has designed it as a kind of redistributive machine, in which the state allocates the social good according to supposed principles of “fairness”.  This is the liberal idea of government most notably espoused by John Rawls.  It is perhaps a peculiarly Western tradition: what might be called the ‘associative habit,’ which was exemplified by the pioneering communities of America who formed clubs, schools, committees and other bodies to deal with the issues they could not deal with alone.  This is government by consent, and any leader’s authority derives from the consent of those over whom he holds sway.  As Tocqueville saw, this is not just an expression of freedom, but an instinctive move towards government.  Contrast this with the Arab world, where the basic relation of accountability is absent.  This was observed during the ‘Arab Spring’ which left a void of power in its wake, since there were no offices, customs or traditions to embody the relation of accountability beyond that of family, mosque or tribe.

 

Further ‘gentle heresies’ that are dared to be expressed are the celebration of the Apollonian art of traditional communal dancing in which participation was an invitation to join a community dancing to rhythms and melodies handed down over centuries, as contrasted with the individualistic, spasmodic jerking and twerking which passes for dancing today, practised in the clubs and disco halls, and driven by computer generated sounds.  Such ‘dancing’, which is nothing more than a full-body dry heave set to music, has become an overtly sexual phenomenon, in which couples eventually pair off and perform something akin to a public foreplay ritual.  Another is the defence of traditional architecture and the ‘New Urbanism’ movement of Krier, which attempts to build settlements along classical or neo-classical lines, in which instead of encouraging urban sprawl extending to the suburbs, encourages centripetal development, where commerce and dwelling exist as one.  A good example of such a dwelling is Poundbury, on the outskirts of Dorchester.

 

However, of all the heresies that the author dares to speak, and that which will probably chime most forcefully with readers is the idea that Western civilisation itself is under threat, and that the proper response to this is to cherish and defend it.  The particular and primary threat we face here in the West is the proliferation of Islam, aided by our constant efforts to appease it.  This threat is not only embodied in the form of the violent jihadist, armed with bombs and guns, but that of the creeping colonisation of much of Western Europe by a conquering theocracy which has a civilizational project in mind, and a repressive legal framework to impose.

 

Scruton suggests we are entering a dangerous period of appeasement in which the legitimate claims of our own culture and inheritance are ignored in order to prove our peaceful intentions, since we have lost our appetite for war.  He identifies several critical features of our Western inheritance that are in conflict with Islam which go to some lengths to explain why this is an incompatible belief system that we need to defend our civilisation against.  In summation these are: Citizenship, nationality, Christianity, irony, self-criticism, representation and alcohol.  The reader can explore the arguments for himself, since there is no need to rehearse them here, but there is one aspect in particular with stands out as possibly the most fundamental and that is the idea of citizenship.

 

In the West we define citizenship as the right and duty of consensual participation in the making and enacting of law.  Laws are made legitimate by the consent of those who obey them, which is our duty to do, and our right is conferred within the substance of these laws.  This is how we can draw a distinction between Western and Islamic societies: the former are secular communities of citizens, whereas the latter are religious communities of subjects.  The former consent and the latter submit.  Indeed, ‘submitted’ is the primary meaning of the word ‘Islam’.  In essence it is the conception of law (since laws are what we freely consent to be governed by in the West) that illustrates the most fundamental divide between Western societies and Islamic ones.  In Islam, the law is a system of commands laid down by God, and their legitimacy does not originate from a freely given consent to obey them, but exists purely in virtue of the fact that God has ordained it so.

 

As our law in the West has developed, particularly due to the system of common law that has grown up over centuries in Great Britain and America, religion and morality have gradually been privatised.  For instance, it seems absurd to us that the ‘sin’ of adultery should have a legal sanction, despite the fact we may recognise adultery as inherently sinful.  In Islam however, and according to the shari’ah, there is no such distinction; both morality and law are one and have God as their source.  There is some mitigation in the system of recommendations that is contained within the shari’ah but this does not alter the fact that there is no room for the private moral life, let alone the religious one, and it is typically women who suffer the most in this system, as obvious crimes visited upon them are taken to be judgements upon their virtue.

 

However it is Scruton’s prescription for dealing with this threat to our political and cultural inheritance (he assumes that our territorial one is not at issue, although it soon may be) which constitutes the only criticism of any substance I can raise against him in this whole volume.  While arguing that we must never show weakness, or a willingness to apologise for who or what we are, he inadvertently invokes that very defect in his suggested response.  The argument is that resentment animates the terrorist, and it is by the Christian gift of forgiveness that we overcome it.  The actions of Islamic terrorists are discredited by our looking soberly on them and by our example of forgiving them.

 

Firstly, the idea of forgiving terrorism of any form will be offensive to many, and this is an easy criticism to level.  But secondly and more importantly we protect ourselves against these actions in the normal course of our lawmaking and enforcing.  In fact, the terrorist is not the real threat and should not be the focus of our attentions at all.  The real challenge is the ideology of Islam itself, and what most Western appeasers of this religion see as its benign influence and proliferation.  Forgiveness on the battlefield of what is really at heart a cultural and religious war is ridiculous and useless.

 

So instead, I would argue that instead of employing one of Christianity’s more useless and naïve assumptions, we should step back and realise that it is Christianity itself that is our strongest weapon.  Surely this is the religious inheritance we can draw upon in order to re-assert our identity and reclaim our heritage.  The terrorist, or for that matter any follower of Islam does not envy or resent our Western traditions, especially our religious ones.  Many Muslims regard Catholics, for example, as one step away from them; on the brink of conversion.  It is in fact the withering of our Christian tradition and the atheistic individualism and liberal materialism that has resulted that has created the spiritual vacuum into which Islam has seeped.  Our moral and religious compass points to nowhere save greed, decadence and vapidity.  It may be a hard pill to swallow, but both Islamists and Muslims alike do not resent one iota of our culture.  In actual fact, they are disgusted by it, as we should be too.

 

The book itself is presented in a small, attractive casewrap hardcover from Notting Hill Editions.