When Sir Roger Scruton talked with me in 2018 about Conservatism: An Invitation to a Great Tradition, one of his more than 50 works of nonfiction, I assumed he’d felt the need to defend his strain of political thought, it being increasingly under attack. No, he said, he wrote it “because there was an opportunity to get a bit of money by way of an advance.” Disarming me further, he added, “Nor did I choose that subtitle. The publishers have you by the goolies, and they do what they want with the manuscript once they’ve got it.”
Scruton was a funny, scrupulously honest man. His unaffected modesty and light use of a colloquial but inoffensive vulgarism were typical. He could have given a stately, pompous answer of the type that in interviews commonly trip from the lips of authors, filmmakers, et cetera, but he abjured humblebragging in favor of real humility.
When he died this month, our culture lost a philosopher, novelist, composer, librettist, political essayist, editor, publisher, brave activist for freedom, and principled conservative — a modern polymath. For decades, he was almost always the most learned person in the room, and yet, or perhaps because of this, he was utterly without pretense.
Those of us who knew him personally lost a delightful friend. As well as being a scholarly yet accessible conversationalist, serious yet witty, he was also a competent and enthusiastic pianist. Often after dinner, he’d play, and it was normal here in Washington for his companions to gather around him as he sat at the keyboard and join him in belting out show tunes in a way characteristic of those who’ve had sufficient wine.
Memories such as this after his death naturally produce elegy. Importantly, however, they should also produce energy. Scruton was a dynamic man on a vital mission to spread the gospel of truth and beauty. Like the poet John Keats, but with more rigorous and less romantic thinking, he knew that they were indissolubly linked, and he argued perhaps more lucidly than any contemporary that the creation and the appreciation of beauty were part of what it means to be truly human.
He saw the Left, in art and politics, dismissing truth and beauty as delusions. He fought this falsehood, and so should we. It is not inconsistent that, being humane and tolerant, Scruton forthrightly rejected egalitarian postmodernism, which seeks to destroy so much that is beautiful and good — the things that he frankly said were part of “the higher life.” He was referring to the art, literature, music, and architecture that are the blessed inheritance of everyone surrounded by Western culture. This is an unfashionable idea, but it needs advocates to speak in its defense without apology, which the Left sees as an exploitable weakness.
[Related: Modern Conservatives: Roger Scruton]
Scruton did not compromise with disingenuousness in the vain hope of navigating to safety through a political discussion. He said what he thought. He not only recognized the dangers of speaking plainly but, ironically, laid them out to a lefty journalist whose tendentious editing briefly got Scruton fired from a government advisory position last year. Political enemies hide context and “put together a kind of patchwork of offenses,” Scruton noted. The journalist then hid context and put together a patchwork of offenses from Scruton’s remarks on Islam, China, and various other flammable materials.
Honesty and truth require ideas to be debated not only robustly but also in full. And those are also the requirements of conservatism. In our discussion 15 months ago, I noted that the Left seeks to shut down debate and marginalize conservative ideas by characterizing them not simply as wrong but as evil — racist, sexist, homophobic, and the like.
“Yes,” he answered, “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. … 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.”
The life and work of Scruton were animated by the idea that the good and true should be lived and defended vigorously and that, ironically, those essentials to civilization are best preserved in a conservative system in which the past, present, and future inform each other and work out how to get along.
