Sir Roger Scruton is a renowned conservative philosopher, the author of scores of books, fiction and non-fiction. He’s written operas. He’s an accomplished pianist, who is liable to play show tunes after dinner and to get his companions to sing for their supper. He visited the Washington Examiner during a trip to the United States this month, and sat down for a conversation with Editorial Director Hugo Gurdon. This is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Gurdon: Last night at the Encounter Books Gala, you were awarded the Jean Kirkpatrick Prize for Academic Freedom, and Larry Arnn of Hillsdale introduced you and, I thought, he said something witty and clever — that you had a privileged upbringing because you were not born into a family with money, and that obliged you to work. Could you tell me a little bit about where you grew up and what sort of household it was?
Scruton: I grew up in the suburbs of London. My father was a primary-school teacher, who had raised himself from the slums of Manchester but always retained his working-class outlook, and he was a Labour Party member, trade union activist, and all that. So, I lived amid clouds of resentment directed towards the establishment, the upper class, and all the things that you can work into a frenzy about in England.
So, I was brought up in that atmosphere, and we had no money. My father, who ostensibly was in favor of education, drew the line when it came to my education because that was getting ahead of myself and disgracing the household by acquiring the wrong kind of values. Which I very quickly did because I went to grammar school, discovered culture, discovered books, music, the higher life and ran away from home when I was 16 and that was it.
Gurdon: So, did your discovery of books and of culture and of music to some extent or to a great extent make you a conservative?
Scruton: No. I was apolitical. I had this wonderful sense, and it really exhilarated me, of belonging to this civilization and inheritance and wanting to know about it and to learn about it, but you know I’d absorbed from my father rudiments of normal socialist resentment and I felt that was what one was obliged to feel, but it shouldn’t dominate one’s life. It was a little corner of it.
When I went to Cambridge, like most students of my generation I was fairly apolitical but, if questioned, likely to lean to the left. But then I went to Paris after graduating, to France, and I was in Paris during 1968 and I saw what leftism really means. You know it means the destruction of that civilization that I’d come to love and, in particular in France, which was for me and object of pilgrimage, this place of high culture and wonderful literature and this history being at the heart of everything and the beautiful architecture. All that influenced me away from any leftist position and when it came to observing the street battles between the Maoist students and the terrified policemen, I found myself on the side of the latter.
Gurdon: One of the things that you write in your latest book, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition, is that conservatism at the moment seems somewhat beleaguered. Is it now more beleaguered, perhaps not more than ever but more than it has been during your lifetime?
Scruton: Well, I have been writing about conservatism ever since I discovered it as something there in my soul, which only had to be sparked into life by those demonstrations in ’68, and there it was forever. I don’t know whether it’s more beleaguered now. It has always been the case though, ever since I started writing on this theme, that in the intellectual world, conservatism is not viewed as a possible position which is opposed to the various liberal left positions available. It’s not actually a possible position because it’s not wrong, it’s evil.
And that sense of the evil of the other side is something that the left have inherited from their own religious psyche. They are people who would naturally be priests and religious people who define themselves as outside society.
Gurdon: One of the characteristics of the modern left which you’ve commented on is that through political correctness and intersectionalism, it seeks to shut down debate. It seeks to marginalize conservatives as you say that they are regarded as evil rather than having propositions that need to be debated. Is it central to conservatism — as it is to the founding of the United States — that conservatism believes ideas should be debated and they should be spoken?
Scruton: Yes. I think it’s a fundamental part of the conservative tradition that politics is not religion. It’s not the imposition of conformity from above by some sanctified elite, which is essentially the liberal position, but that it’s a form of continuous discussion between diverse and possibly conflicting interests, an attempt to conciliate, to arrive at a solution acceptable to everyone, which requires institutions like parliaments and Congress and so on and a rule of law, committees, and all the rest. So, it’s about procedure and it sees politics as aiming to conciliate rival interests rather than to impose conformity.
Gurdon: Is President Trump a conservative?
Scruton: Well, President Trump is a difficult case. He has made it somewhat difficult to declare one’s self to be a conservative in public. On the other hand, leaving aside his manifest personal eccentricities, let’s say, what he has done has not been a million miles from what any other conservative would do. I, myself, object radically to the use of social media to govern a great country. I think it should be governed by committees and discussions and all the other things and that the president should not play a very prominent part in this. But it’s not his fault. It’s partly Barack Obama’s fault that the president has suddenly come forward as the CEO of a great company rather than the father figure in the background.
Gurdon: To come back to the point about the left seeking to shut down debate and to impose a kind of uniformity, has that produced one of the characteristics of modern conservatism — a kind of irreverence?
Scruton: Irreverence for the establishment you mean?
Gurdon: Mm-hmm.
Scruton: Well, I think that there is truth in what you say in that there has been, since the 1960s, what many people refer to as the long march through the institutions — as Gramsci, of course, called it — whereby people on the left have installed themselves in prominent positions of power, and reorganized the establishment as anti-conservative in the sense that it’s based on a repudiation of the inheritance of our civilization rather than an affirmation of it. You see that very clearly in universities. The university administration is frightened of the Antifa people and therefore gives them maximum free rein, but it is contemptuous of conservatives because they can be shut up. Inevitably, the response of conservatives, a small but articulate minority, is to sneer at this.
Gurdon: I want to turn to the Supreme Court and the recent confirmation battle over Brett Kavanaugh. At bottom, this was probably about abortion, but perhaps even beneath that was the idea that there are some people on the left who believe that the Constitution is a living document and should be interpreted variously as time goes by, by judges of different opinions. And there are those who are texualists. I remember Robert Bork in one of his books saying that surely one of the essential things about law is that it doesn’t change its meaning according to the person who’s reading it. Is that also a central part of conservatism?
Scruton: This is a deep and really interesting question. In literary theory, we’re often confronting the so-called death of the author thesis, that meaning is hostage to the reader and it’s only because you read something that it has a meaning. Words are otherwise inert. They depend upon your thoughts in order to animate them. So, you can’t say absolutely that something means just what it was thought to mean by the person who first uttered it.
Obviously, Shakespeare’s great plays have acquired meaning over the centuries. That doesn’t mean you can just say what you want them to mean, as you say. So, there’s a big question here about how laws are and should be interpreted and I think it connects to perhaps a deeper question, which is that, as Burke put it, we can only conserve if we also admit the possibility of change, that we change in order to conserve.
In other words, our institutions survive by adapting and I think the Constitution has, in that way. It does have to adapt to a certain extent to the flow of human life. But, of course, that doesn’t mean that it should be just used as an instrument to impose minority liberal values on the majority of Americans, which is what has happened.
Gurdon: One of the points you make in your book is that social cohesion is what allows accountability, that the first-person plural “we” allows a society to be self-governing. Does that suggest that as the left pulls society apart and the “we” is disappearing, there is a danger of an unaccountable government? And there’s an irony that a lot of people who criticize President Trump say he is instinctively authoritarian. But is there a possibility of authoritarian government in the United States because the left is destroying the “we,” the first-person plural?
Scruton: A huge question. I would say yes. Accountability does depend upon some form of civic trust, various levels of society, various professions and forms of life, ways of gaining a living, and so on. They have to be bound together in mutual trust before anybody feels that he has to account to anybody. And I think we had that trust in America especially and anybody who’s traveled the world and seen the extent of its absence from everywhere else will recognize that America was a society based on mutual trust.
After all, the first words of the Constitution: “We the people.” You know it’s there, but of course it’s also the case that people on the left are fundamentally snobbish in their reaction to the people. They want to withdraw from the contamination of those people out there and organize things according to their enlightened ideas. And that’s why whenever the left has taken power since the French Revolution, taken power fully, accountability is the first thing to disappear. The next thing that happens, of course, is the gulags and the executions.
Gurdon: Right at the start of your book, you make the point that conservatism developed as a reaction or a response to liberalism. Correct me if I misinterpret, but my understanding of liberalism in the way that you write about it is that it’s purely about ideas. It’s a mode of thinking directed towards government and society which is entirely theoretical and doesn’t draw on the customs of the country. But did conservatism emerge not just because those who were conservative felt that liberalism ignored the customs, or was it because they looked at the results and they said, “We don’t want this to happen”?
Scruton: A bit of both. I think liberalism, as it was understood in the 17th century with John Locke and Montesquieu and so on, was really what we now call liberal individualism, the view that society was composed of individuals and that its political legitimacy depended upon individual consent and these individuals choosing freely; the sovereign individual is the ultimate criterion of political legitimacy and we all benefit from this because we are sovereign individuals.
But what the conservative reaction said was, “That’s all very well, but liberal individuals freely choosing and engaging in consensual relations, they don’t exist in the state of nature,” as Hobbes famously said. They only exist because they are born into a society which provides them with the customs, the institutions, and the settled ways of being which enable them to be liberal individuals. Otherwise, they’re a threat to each other.
Gurdon: Conservatives sometimes — I sometimes feel this myself — have a tendency towards pessimism and the feeling that things are going wrong. But you strike me as being an optimist.
Scruton: Well, I think I’m the kind of rational pessimist who is always agreeably surprised. But I do think that there is a kind of duty to hope. Not to hope necessarily for a radical transformation of anything, but to keep hoping and to keep trusting in human nature and to be prepared to be amused by things and to enjoy the spectacle of human folly, as long as it doesn’t wear you down too much. You know much of what’s happening now, the whole transgender movement, actually is something which is profoundly comic and we ought to be laughing a lot more than we do.
Gurdon: Tell us a little bit about your new book, Souls in the Twilight.
Scruton: I’ve always written quite a bit of fiction, but these are stories that have accumulated over quite a few years and they’re my attempts to get inside characters who are experiencing from within the uprootedness of the multicultural societies in which we live, and looking for something to cling to, sometimes recognizing this as a religious need, sometimes not. It’s just tracing their adventures through the world. Some of these episodes are in Britain, some in the Middle East, etc., but trying to find themselves. My own view is there’s a kind of poetry in the lostness of modern people and I’m trying to bring that poetry to the surface and, at the same time, tell an interesting story.
