Professor Sir Roger Scruton, who died Jan. 11, was the greatest conservative of our era.
I realize that this is a big claim. Superlatives should be used, as the Book of Common Prayer says of marriage, “reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly.” (Scruton loved the prayer book but had a complicated relationship with Anglicanism: “my tribal religion, the religion of the English, who don’t believe a word of it.”) Still, I stand by my assertion. No contemporary conservative could match his range, his depth, the beauty of his prose, or the humility that softened the fierceness of his intellect.
We must reckon, first, with Scruton’s versatility. He was the most complete writer I can think of. He wrote some 50 books, covering every imaginable subject: Immanuel Kant, church architecture, wine, nationalism, opera, even fox hunting. All are exquisitely written. All, except perhaps his works of pure philosophy, can be enjoyed by the layman. Though he does his readers the courtesy of assuming a measure of intelligence, he does not assume much prior knowledge.
Second, there was his courage. Unlike some philosophers, he acted on his beliefs. In the 1970s and 1980s, he ran an underground student network in Czechoslovakia and other Warsaw Pact states. His approach was to act outside the remit of the authorities, albeit without explicitly breaking any laws. His university courses were held in private houses but otherwise offered the same package as any college in the free world. Students would work their way through reading lists, present essays, attend lectures, and even celebrate degree ceremonies.
In the end, of course, he was arrested and expelled. But he carried on supporting his friends behind the Iron Curtain at a time when, disgracefully, many Western academics were taking the side of the dictators.
The courses he was teaching were not anti-communist, at least not directly. He saw it as his task, rather, to keep civilization alive during those dark years. He and his associates taught literature, history, theology, aesthetics. Their rebuke to communism was implicit. They preserved the memory of something better: defending high culture in the face of regimes that detested it.
I was able to meet some of those samizdat academics during the anti-communist revolutions at the beginning of 1990 when, in my gap year between school and university, I carried various materials to them on Scruton’s behalf. They were remarkable men: courteous, clever, impoverished, deeply Anglophile, and dressed in the manner of 1950s Oxford dons, which made them stick out like sore thumbs.
They had not, by and large, resisted openly. In most cases, they had joined the protest marches only at the end. But they had done something more valuable and, in its way, more courageous. They had preserved the memory of European civilization in the face of official disapproval. They carried on teaching Richard Wagner, William Shakespeare, and Baruch Spinoza rather than Marxism-Leninism. That, come to think of it, is as good a summary as any of what Scruton saw as his purpose in life: to preserve high culture in an age of barbarism.
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He found himself, shortly afterward, having to do something similar in the West. In 1982, he founded the Salisbury Review, named after the most conservative prime minister in British history, the intellectually brilliant third Marquess of Salisbury, who dominated politics at the end of the 19th century and who once remarked: “If anything changes, it will be for the worse, and it is therefore in our interest that as little should change as possible.”
That quarterly magazine, which Scruton edited for 18 years, was itself almost a samizdat paper. It was a place where right-leaning academics and intellectuals could discuss ideas of the kind not voiced in senior common rooms. Needless to say, it was regularly howled down as racist, bigoted, and whatnot. As Scruton wryly observed, it helped a great many conservative academics, if only by allowing them to claim that it was more right-wing than they were.
Which brings me to his third and perhaps most important quality. He was, au fond, a teacher. He had a magical gift for engaging with young people. Although he was always the cleverest person in the room, he was so well-mannered, so patient in his replies, so ready to turn anything you said into an interesting conversational departure that you never felt intimidated.
One of the many people he inspired was a young Dutch classical musician called Thierry Baudet. He served as the supervisor of Thierry’s thesis, so inspiring him in the process that Thierry ended up turning it not only into a book, The Significance of Borders, but into a euroskeptic political party, the Forum for Democracy. Within two years of being founded, it was the most popular party in the Netherlands.
I asked Baudet what he thought the secret of Scruton’s didactic skill was. “It was impossible to have an uninteresting conversation with him. If you asked him where the nearest gas station was, he would have some apt reference to T.S. Eliot or similar.”
I remember inviting Scruton to a student dinner when I was an undergraduate at Oxford. We were all slightly plastered by the time he arrived, as was de rigueur in those days. For some reason, we thought it would be fun to test the theory, advanced by one of Scruton’s left-wing academic rivals, that he was “the unthinking man’s thinking man.” We decided to put various philistine propositions to him — Gilbert and Sullivan were better than any foreign music, say — just to see whether he could come up with some glorious Aristotelian defense of them.
Sure enough, he did, with just the tiniest quirk around his lips to indicate that he understood our game. At one point, an inebriated first-year historian from Exeter College waved a carrot on his fork in Scruton’s direction. “Why don’t foreigners cook their veg properly, professor? In this country, we know how to cook carrots. Europeans do that disgusting ‘al dente’ thing!” Scruton responded with a brilliant disquisition on the vital synthesis of cuisine and conversation, on the importance of cooking according to established norms rather than falling hungrily on underprepared food.
As usual, Scruton was living his ideals. He knew that by entertaining us as he did, he would impart deeper lessons than we would hear in the lecture halls. And he was right: More than a quarter-century on, every one of us remembers that dinner.
Scruton’s conservatism came in two phases. A moody, clever, anarchic schoolboy, he became right-wing when he watched the student riots in Paris in 1968. It made him understand, viscerally as well as cerebrally, how destructive revolutions are. As he was to put it many years later: “Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the 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.”
But his conservatism was fully realized only when he took up fox hunting. Until then, he had been, as he put it, “an actor in [his] own drama.” Joining a community that came together to create a common happiness that could not be achieved singly made him, so to speak, a properly social animal. Not long afterward, he married a beautiful woman who, in the best English rural tradition, was fiercely intelligent and fiercely anti-intellectual. Soon, he was the father of two children (both now at Oxford) and playing the organ in his village church.
He had moved, in other words, from abstract conservatism to lived conservatism, and he was the happier for it. Like all conservative intellectuals, he recognized the paradox of theorizing about a belief system that repudiates theories. He always saw conservatism as an instinct, not an ideology. Yet, paradoxical or not, his theories are the most exquisitely presented you will find.
If you doubt me, pick up one of his books. Start with one of the softer ones: Gentle Regrets, say, or England: An Elegy. Within five pages, you’ll be convinced.
[OPINION: Roger Scruton lived the higher life]
