His was a life characterised by courage, civility and curiosity. Credit: Flickr
I last saw my friend Roger Scruton on 23 December 2019, at his home in Wiltshire. I was shocked. He was emaciated from chemotherapy and told me plainly that he would die soon. “One has to be reasonable about this”, he said, “it happens to us all.” He was a philosopher to the end.
I railed against it, as I looked up at his wife and two children, saying when we parted that we would meet again in the new year. He contacted me in early January inviting me to visit him in hospital, that he had “something important” he wanted to talk about, but I will never know what it was. He died before I could visit, a year ago today.
Over the past year, as the pandemic took hold and politics fell apart, my thoughts have returned again and again to Roger, imagining what he would have made of lockdown, of the rise of China, of the Brexit deal and the squalid disintegration of the Trump Presidency. He was a gentle and curious man and I would have enjoyed his observations.
He was interested in many things, but he was also a curiosity in our intellectual culture; a conservative. He was viewed by the Left, as at best a nostalgic irrelevance, at worst a nasty reactionary. There was no place for the conservative philosopher in our universities, and yet I viewed him as an ally. I was always struck by his generosity and his appreciation of the conservative tradition within Labour. He truly understood the importance of loss and grief; the loss of a home and a community is vital to any comprehension of our present politics, but it is hard to grasp if you think that things can only get better.
Roger gave expression to the new era that is now emerging in which the nation state, democracy, a sense of place and the working class are not doomed remnants of a previous epoch, but the primary materials through which the effects of globalisation are mediated politically. He was a modernist in literature and style, but it was a modernity tempered by tradition and this was expressed in his view of people as longing for meaning, for attachment, for love and for beauty, who flourish in a society characterised by healthy relationships, a sense of being part of a “we”.
His conservatism, in which association, friendship, institutions and ultimately politics would encourage a shared responsibility for each other in a shared home, “an island of me in a sea of we”, is central to his thought. That theme of home, or oikophilia, was one of his great contributions to modern philosophy. It required a sense of solidarity, of sharing a fate with others.
Roger’s politics was local, conservationist and loosely sociable; he was far too much of a loner, though, to subscribe to a communitarian or collectivist anthropology. He thought that the Ancient Constitution, based upon the balance of interests rather than the separation of the powers was the system best suited to our country. He was enamoured of the Common Law as the defender of our liberties, and our environment. His book, Green Philosophy is a very significant contribution to this. His love of Kant and appreciation of secularism set him apart from reactionary thinkers.
His understanding of Christianity, meanwhile, and its relationship to the nation was understood in terms of civility and temper and not as the foundation of political authority. He thought that in England, following the civil war, there was an appreciation of pluralism and a suspicion of religious enthusiasm. The origins of authority remained political and revisable. It was the lack of that understanding that concerned him about Islam.
His final book, Where We Are, is a profound reflection on the basic assumption of national sovereignty. He evokes a “we” that provides the democratic authority of the nation state, which far from evaporating in the swirl of globalisation, retains the legitimacy to preserve meaning and attachment in people’s lives. He articulated the possibilities that leaving the European Union opened for renewing our civic and democratic institutions.
When I pointed out to him that the most significant consequence of slipping the constraints of the Lisbon Treaty would be for the Left to be able to actively challenge the destructive power of capitalism to commodify human beings and nature, he replied that Labour seemed more interested in hating Tories than in appealing to a broad range of people who might agree with that, and support it.
I enjoyed many evenings in his garret in Albany going through the papers, discussing our politics: the Left, community land trusts, American misunderstanding of conservatism. Those discussions echo still, and I see three areas where Scruton’s work can continue to be a source of vitality.
The first is his work on aesthetics and beauty, in which human scale and form take a central place within a tradition characterised by the sacred and the sensual, which he considered the basis of love. For him, sex was sacred. During this lockdown period, when we have inhabited a parallel world of no physical presence, in which the laughter of strangers has become a distant memory and when there is so little intimacy, Roger’s emphasis on sociability, conviviality and relationships has taken on a more intense prescience. His interest in what we have lost gives me strength.
The second concerns the meaning of a home. For Roger the primary story of humanity was that of exile and return, this was as true for the Odyssey as for the prodigal son. The sociable nature of the person required a form of settled community, a home to return to. In this, self-governing civic institutions play a central role, expressing the particular nature of particular people in particular places. He viewed the Left as increasingly embracing the renunciation and denunciation of any notion of a home, of attachment, preferring instead an emphasis on false consciousness and domination. His book, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, is worth reading right now. It was Roger who pointed out to me that the meaning of nostalgia is a longing for home and that is not to be despised.
The third area relates to housing and architecture. He railed against a dehumanised modernity, in which the greed of the market worked with the instrumentalism of the state and professional indifference to build homogenised and degraded houses in disconnected spaces that sapped culture of its form and meaning. His heart was grieved by what had happened to Birmingham and Manchester. The city centre of his local town, Swindon, was a source of sorrow beyond words. He loved the terraced housing which was demolished as slum clearance and replaced by something inhumane, rather than restored. For him this was where the coalition between the rich and the educated generated the greatest damage. It bears reflection still.
A very belated recognition came to him when he was chosen to chair the Government commission on “Building better, building beautiful”. It was an attempt to defy the developers and the professional architects so that people could participate in building and designing the new homes relying on local labour and materials.
His chairmanship came to a terrible end, in a storm of Twitter hate, generated by a false account of an interview with the New Statesman. The words I read at that time, full of demonisation, bore no relation to my gently stubborn friend, who argued that what matters is love, truth, beauty, friendship and meaning. Those are the concepts and categories through which we should judge our lives and our politics.
His life was characterised by courage, civility and curiosity. He had the courage to be a conservative when the intellectual world was moving against conservatism, and to be true to his tradition in the face of distortion and demonisation. I think it killed him in the end, but he lived it and engaged with civility when confronted with the hate.
He told me that his politics “if I have any, are probably Blue Labour”, and I asked him to keep quiet about that. That was cowardly of me, and a year following his death, there is a deathly silence in our national conversation where his voice once was.
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SubscribeThanks for this, we need Roger Scruton’s thinking more than ever today, but we also need his kind voice, his gentleness, his thoughtfulness, his whole approach. It is hard to separate the ideas from the lovely man. At least we still have his videos, for the time being.
You don’t mention the land though, probably because you are a person who prefers theory to reality. The trouble with biography is that the biographer can pick and choose. But just as Roger Scruton was the whole man, not just his theories, so for him, home was not simply an idea. He understood it as a matter of both geography and geology, soil type and stone type and the colour of the sky, the undulations, hills or flatness, the local building materials and styles, and the crops and wild flowers and trees, the particular smell of the earth.
Thank you. It’s nice to see an appreciation of Scruton from the Left, instead of the evil demonisation as perpetrated by the repulsive George Eaton of the New Statesman. Who knows how much that particular affair hastened his death?
Funnily enough I am currently reading Scruton’s ‘Understanding Music. Philosophy and Interpretation’. As with all his books on the subject of music it is highly stimulating.
I believe that more and more people are coming around to his way of thinking ‘in which the nation state, democracy, a sense of place and the working class are not doomed remnants of a previous epoch, but the primary materials through which the effects of globalisation are mediated politically.’
Over the Christmas holiday last year one of my daughters was writing a final year essay as part of her Music Degree for a module on Music and Philosophy. The question was about whether the emotional response people had to music was ‘real’ and whether the reality of these emotions could be tested scientifically. She thought the whole thing ridiculous and I pointed her in the direction of Scruton’s ‘Music as an Art’ so she used Scruton’s arguments to deal with the Scientism and fortunately got 72% for her essay, which was a great relief to me.
Thank you for this warm and thoughtful reflection on the life and influence of Sir Roger. I will be revisiting some of his work this week, as well as opening a nice white Burgundy and red Bordeaux in his honour.
Rare that the death of a public figure, whom one has never met, should seem like a personal loss.
It still does. The best antidote to the Left we have had in decades.
I feel exactly the same.
You know, I’m an American and I had a similar response. I’m not sure I can point to anyone over here who has his mix of personal ingredients. Interesting times here, currently. We could use a voice like his.
Thank you for such a warm-hearted tribute. I have been a too-quiet admirer of Roger Scruton for many years and was very saddened by his death. In a prominent place in my study hangs a high-quality print of Lindsey Dearnley’s evocative “The Conservative Philosopher Roger Scruton at His Desk”, painted in 2018.
I am a professional musician; and although I disagreed profoundly with his castigation of many trends in twentieth-century music, I admired many of his insights into individual works. In that area I especially respected his ability to talk about individual works in ways that acknowledged their mysterious power, without falling for those intellectually and morally sloppy faults common since the late eighteenth century ” deification of the artist and of seeing music as a spiritually mediating force.
For someone such as myself, who worked primarily in academia, admitting publicly to an admiration for Roger Scruton could be professionally dangerous. What sickened me about this prejudice was that it was based more on association than on familiarity with his writings or lectures. He was Margaret Thatcher’s favourite philosopher. What more was needed to prove that he was not only wrong, but bad?
Looking back, I wish I had spoken up more than I did; for I suspect that there were more admirers than I realised. His virtues, beautifully sketched in this short article, in many other pieces written in posthumous tribute, and conspicuous in his many writings and lectures, highlight that Roger Scruton was a far better man than most of his critics.
I hadn’t engaged with Scruton or his work at all until fairly recently but have been thoroughly enjoying the interviews and speeches which are available on YouTube. A kind, gentle, intelligent man – and also brave. To be a conservative in academia must have been extremely challenging; especially in the light of the omnipresence of social media and the unhinged behaviour that encourages. When I finally get through my pile of unread books, Scruton may be one of the next authors I turn to.
“His book, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, is worth reading right now.”
Quelle coincidence! I am indeed reading FF&F right now.
A second coincidence is that one day a year ago I bought another work of his – Conservatism – and was saddened to learn on my return home that he had passed away that very day.
So much of our politics over the past 60 years has been brutal – brutal socialism in the ’60’s and ’70’s with its brutal architecture, standards, attitudes, strikes and class-warfare.
And then mirrored during the ’80’s and ’90’s with its liberal-economic opposite: greed is good, glass skyscrapers, grotesque inequalities, corporate monopolistic corruption, the Banking Crisis, gated communities, north/south, London vs Rest of the Country battlelines.
Roger Scruton is a reminder of a better way of doing things and engaging with people as people and understanding that beauty and civility transcend class, political label, race, age, class and orientation.
If the New Statesman waged a war of vindictive hatred against him, it says everything about them and the kind of politics they represent.
I believe the forces of conservatism (with a small ‘c’) are back again and long overdue. The selfish, self-indulgent left-liberal orgie is over. RIP and good riddance. The change is happening, people do feel emboldened to speak out, and for that we thank Roger Scruton for providing a lead.
‘engaging with people as people and understanding that beauty and civility transcend class, political label, race, age, class and orientation.’
Yes, well, as long as those people are not black, gay, Muslims or members of the Labour Party…
But Lord Glassman IS a member of the Labour Party.
It only takes one example to prove a generalisation wrong.
Then there’s Douglas Murray, and Shaykh Hamza Yusuf (American born muslim scholar)…
Scruton was something of a bette noire to me and my peers when i was a young lefty. Now i’ve read his works i can see why – his thinking was lucid, sound and also warm and humerous. I still don’t get on with his almost jeering promotion of things like fox hunting, classical music and the CofE liturgy. Not because i disagree with him, but because he hands
people still afflicted by leftism low hanging fruit to bolster their childish arguments. Plus the most exciting way to hunt foxes IMO is with a steppe eagle, not foxhounds.
Maybe. But how many steppe eagles have we here?
There are 7 on birdtrader.co.uk £1-4k, i assume they all have A10s otherwise its a breach of CITIES and UK law. Its really Russia/the Stans/PRC and Mongolia that fly them at foxes (and anything else that moves). birdtrader last part of URL: uk/birds-of-prey-for-sale/eagles/ The good thing about the Asian Austringers is they release the birds a year or two before they reach breeding age which is usually 5-6 yrs. Some live for 40+
There are 7 on birdtrader website £1-4k, i assume they all have A10s otherwise its a breach of CITIES and UK law. Its really Russia,the Stans, PRC and Mongolia that fly them at foxes (and anything else that moves). The good thing about the Asian Austringers is they release the birds a year or two before they reach breeding age which is usually 5-6 yrs. Some live for 40+
There are about 7 on the bird trader website
Judging from your spelling and general use of the English language and its constituent parts, I can only assume that you were the victim of some extremely leftie teachers.
True and i was well into my 20s when i realised how easily i was groomed!
Thank you Maurice, that was an eloquent and fitting tribute to, an obviously, dear friend. But take heart, his book ‘How to be a Conservative’ is still echoing in surprising places – after the flash comes the bang!
I just ordered his take on Parsifal. I wonder what he has to say…
If only glasmans confession had come earlier it would have helped me grasp why glasmans work has such resonance with my own scrutopianism
From Wikipedia:
“He argued that human beings are creatures of limited and local affections.”
While being full of contradictions is a typical conservative trait, one would hope that even Scruton must have realised this is a recipe for “identity politics” of a particularly narrow kind.
But alas, no. A man who argued that “affections” should rarely travel further than one’s own kind – in his case, conservative Englishmen – spent his last years fuming against the “identity politics” of the left, which sought to be more inclusive.
In fact his main complaint against lefty identity politics seems to be that they included little room for the traditional prejudices of conservative Englishmen.
“There was no place for the conservative philosopher in our universities”
Yet one of the first books I was assigned as an undergraduate at the University of Kent in the early 1990s was his “Short History of Modern Philosophy”, published by Routledge.
Thank you. He was a most valuable thinker. It is good of you to remind us of our great loss.
Accidental post, sorry 🙂
“He was viewed by the Left, as at best a nostalgic irrelevance, at worst a nasty reactionary.”
I’d imagine most modern left-leaning people have never heard of him, or only vaguely as an old right-wing writer they’re never likely to read. Thus it’s hard for me to accept that he’s “more relevant than ever”, except presumably to bookish conservatives.
To me, Scruton’s weakness as an intellectual was the lazy, mystical Romanticism that informed his philosophy and much of his worldview. His interpretation of Wittgenstein makes little sense and contradicts his later rejection of “moral relativism”, but apparently allows him to feel free to dispense with much in the way of rational argument when writing on other subjects, particularly religion, in favour of a feeble appeal to tradition and sentimentality (while pretty much ignoring science altogether). It’s wishy-washy stuff that would have been discarded by a more demanding and self-critical intellect.
As for his other views, I sympathise much more with this piece by Kenan Malik than with Glasman’s article:
The uncomfortable truths about Roger Scruton’s conservatism
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/18/the-uncomfortable-truths-about-roger-scruton-conservatism
I think Kenan Malik sums up Scruton along with Maurice and Paul Embery’s Blue Labour in saying that for them ‘it is impossible to conceive of society without prejudices and exclusions, discrimination and inequality’. Scruton at least had the decency to frequently be honest about that.
Instead of looking backward to some idealised 1950s I am with Malik in that we need ‘new ideas of solidarity, community and belonging that [confront] both the individualism of liberalism and the conservative demand for inequality and obedience’. And, no, I have no idea why that was impossible whilst we remained members of the EU.
Kenan Malik is the living embodiment of all that is worst about the Guardianisa left. Anybody who doesn’t like Paul Embery must be a very nasty person indeed.
What of Kenan’s views are so repulsive to you? Is it his robust defences of free speech, or his belief in the primacy of class emancipation over that of identity?
As for Paul, I’m sure at heart he is a very nice chap, but he does seem blind to the fact that he cannot have his cake as a communitarian and eat it as a socialist. Does that view make me ‘a very nasty person’?