2020 in books: Roger Scruton
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The late Sir Roger Scruton interviewed on Uncommon Knowledge in 2017
Today marks the first anniversary of Sir Roger Scruton’s death. When he died, the foremost voice for a traditional conservatism rooted in virtue, a proper understanding of human nature, and love of home—in traditions and ideas rather than personalities and slogans—died with him.
His death came as a shock to me. I had received an invitation to an event to be held in his honor in 2019 but couldn’t afford to go and passed it up, thinking there would come another chance someday. Now I know there won’t. But what I did have were many of Scruton’s books—some of which I had read, many of which I just hadn’t gotten around to yet. With his passing I decided to set myself a project of reading as many of them as I could in the remainder of 2020.
It turned out to be a good year for it.
The Sir Roger Scruton Farewell Tour
I called my project “the Sir Roger Scruton Farewell Tour” both as a wry joke and as a way to draw out the goodbye. Learning of his death was an unwelcome surprise; a “farewell tour,” on the other hand—that would take a while, offering a chance for appreciation. I enjoyed it greatly, and ended the year more grateful than ever for Scruton’s life and work.
I read twelve books as part of the tour. All of them were good, but five were standouts even among the Scruton books I’ve read. I’ve given that top five its own section below. But first, here are the other seven:
Runners up
The Soul of the World—A dense but strongly and beautifully argued case against the scientific reductivism of modern atheism and a careful examination of the many hints of the transcendent that fill our lives—whether art, music, the world around us, or simply living with and knowing other people. This book builds upon his 2010 Gifford lectures, published as The Face of God, and is further refined by On Human Nature.
How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism—The longest of Scruton’s books that I’ve read, this one argues that conservation of the environment is, properly speaking, a conservative issue, and notes the irony of environmentalism’s place among the odd assortment of other modern progressive causes. He offers trenchant critiques of the dogmatism of activists and their search for universally applicable top-down solutions, as exemplified by the bungling environmental measures undertaken by the unaccountable bureaucracy of the EU. Scruton’s view of conservation and the environment, by contrast, is one rooted in what he calls oikophilia, love of home, and piety toward our inheritance. Conservation must be local and meet local needs. Long and detailed but compellingly argued. I shared a passage from this book on the blog back in the spring.
Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left—A recently revised edition of his most controversial book, Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands works through the most important Leftist ideologues of the twentieth century, from the New Left’s roots in pre- and immediately post-War German philosophy through its flowering in first French and then American universities. Scruton is most concerned with what he, borrowing from Orwell, calls “Newspeak,” which is the leftist use of language to conjure or cast spells rather than to describe an independent reality. Dense but rewarding reading, with clear and scathingly written critiques of the ideologies that have birthed the worst of our modern mental confusions. I posted a selection of excerpts on the blog over the summer.
An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy—A good short guide to major issues in modern philosophy, written in a friendly conversational style.
The West and the Rest: Globalisation and the Terrorist Threat—A short, compelling response to September 11. Scruton considers the post-Enlightenment political and social trends of the West that created a world in which non-Westerners, confronted with the rapidly spreading global challenge of secular liberal politics and culture, could find terrorism a viable response, and in which non-Westerners and the West would respond half-heartedly and with incomprehension. A considerably more nuanced assessment than most offered either in the aftermath or since.
Beauty: A Very Short Introduction—One of Scruton’s best and most accessible books, a witty and wide-ranging introduction to the concept of beauty—what it is, how to judge it (and whether we can judge it), why it matters, and what it says about us as human persons. Possibly the best starting point for reading Scruton.
Souls in the Twilight—The first of Scruton’s fiction that I’ve read, a collection of short stories about individuals struggling to find meaning in a world in which all of the old avenues to transcendence—family, community, faith—have disappeared, replaced with nihilism. Bleak but well written, this set of stories sold me on his fiction—I have his novels Notes from Underground and The Disappeared on standby now.
Top five
While I would recommend any of the books in this post, these five were my favorites—the ones I most enjoyed and that gave me the most food for thought, both as I read them and in the months since. Presented in no particular order, my five favorite Scruton books of the farewell tour:
A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism
An excellent collection of essays on a variety of topics of political importance, including marriage, evil, animal rights and vegetarianism, and the obscure bureaucratese of unaccountable government agencies. The best essay in the collection, and one especially relevant to our moment, is “The Totalitarian Temptation,” a critique of totalitarian government, an examination of its origins, and a warning against the appeal of power driven by resentment. Scruton delivered this address in 2003 but it reads like an explanation of all that has happened over the summer of 2020. You can read my more detailed Goodreads review here.
Confessions of a Heretic
Another excellent essay collection, this one ranging more broadly than mere politics. In each essay Scruton offers his “heretical” opinions on a given subject, whether art, dancing, modern architecture, conservationism, the proper role of government, Western civilization and its defense, or death. Every essay is wittily argued, gracefully written, and offers sometimes surprising insight into familiar topics. This may be the Scruton book I most enjoyed this year.
Culture Counts: Faith & Feeling in a World Besieged
An excellent short account of Scruton’s views on culture, especially its collapse into ephemera, vulgarity, and vandalism in the modern world. This is also one of his most concise, clearly stated arguments against what he called “a culture of repudiation,” a culture we saw running in high gear through much of 2020. It’s excellent—a great starting point for Scruton’s philosophy and cultural critiques if you’re just beginning to read him. As a bonus, when Scruton summarizes he is at his wittiest and most trenchant, making this book a good deal of fun.
Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition
This was the first book in the Farewell Tour, read before I even knew it would be the farewell tour. I finished it three days before Scruton died. It’s excellent.
Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition offers the reader a guide to the prehistory and origins of conservatism, from Aristotle and Cicero in the ancient world to Burke, the father of the modern movement, and traces multiple sometimes competing lines of conservative thought from Burke to the present. Along the way Scruton examines such disparate figures as Hegel and De Maistre, Chateaubriand and Tocqueville; cultural conservatives like Coleridge, TS Eliot, GK Chesterton, and CS Lewis; and Americans like John Crowe Ransom and the Southern Agrarians or William F Buckley and Russell Kirk, opposite sides of the fusionist conservative coin. Especially helpful are Scruton’s examinations of the way conservatism, as an anti-ideology, has pivoted to account for or counteract new threats, from liberalism and radicalism in Burke’s day to socialism in the late 19th and early 20th century to the Soviet Union and big government liberalism in the post-war United States. Scruton’s Conservatism is a big-tent review of centuries of thought, and makes clear the variety and richness of the tradition. (Every conservative will find at least one person profiled here that they don’t think belongs.) It’s also short and deftly written, making it an excellent introduction to a movement far richer and deeper than is often credited.
The book includes a long list of recommended reading at the back, so that if any one of the numerous thinkers outlined here piques your interest you can follow that trail deeper in. A few months after reading the book I borrowed the audiobook, read by Mark Meadows, from the library via Hoopla and listened to it on my daily walks. Excellent the second time around, too.
Conversations with Roger Scruton, with Mark Dooley
The last book I read in the Farewell Tour, and appropriately so. This book, though written several years ago based on a few days’ worth of talk with Scruton while Dooley stayed at his farm in Wiltshire, feels like a sendoff. Nevertheless the book is light and hopeful, wonderfully brisk and—as I’ve said so many times before of the other books in this post—wide-ranging. Think of this as a Roger Scruton sampler.
Conversations begins with Scruton’s life story, growing up in urban Britain with a resentful Labour Party father and discovering literature, art, and music; discovering, thanks to the student protests of 1968, which he witnessed, that he was a conservative; and following from there his forty years of academic and journalistic work in support of conservative philosophy. Scruton touches on specific books; works through the growth and development of his ideas over time; describes his repeated denunciations—both as an academic and a journalist—by Leftist colleagues and total strangers; and talks about work for underground universities behind the Iron Curtain in Communist Europe, work that got him arrested by the secret police in Czechoslovakia and honored, years later, by Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic for his efforts.
There’s much, much more. I ended the book struck by the busyness and variety, the ups and downs, of his life, something he himself comments on a number of times.
Throughout Scruton is frank, humorous, understated, and self-effacing. Dooley also gives us some nice vignettes of Scruton at home on his farm with his family, giving the reader some sense of the environment which Scruton—this man to whom the oikos, the home, is so fundamentally important—has fashioned with his wife and children. When the conclusion comes, it’s hard not to want to stay.
I highly recommend Conversations with Roger Scruton. It would probably help to be somewhat familiar with Scruton’s work beforehand, but if you’re not this book could work as an excellent, friendly and accessible introduction both to his ideas and to the man himself. This intimate and personal book was, for me, a most welcome way to end the Farewell Tour.
Previously read
One reason I embarked on this Farewell Tour was because, despite my appreciation of Scruton, I felt like I had only read a fragment of what he had written. Which is not to say that what I had previously read was unsatisfactory. Far from it. I needed to make up for lost time.
Here, in no particular order, are the five books I remember reading before 2020. I would recommend any one of them:
The Uses of Pessimism and the Danger of False Hope—The first book by Scruton I read, a caution against unwarranted and uncritical optimism and an argument in favor of low expectations. Full of wry wit. Right up my alley.
The Face of God—Scruton’s 2010 Gifford Lectures. A critique of scientific reductionism. Thoughts established here are further developed in The Soul of the World (see above).
On Human Nature—Clarifies and further develops some ideas from The Soul of the World (see above). I read these three way out of order. One of these days I’m going to go back through chronologically.
Modern Culture—Much of Scruton’s pithy cultural critique in Culture Counts (see above) is foreshadowed here in deeper, more detailed and specific form. An excellent examination of the fragmentation and vulgarity of modern culture.
How to Be a Conservative—Perhaps Scruton’s most famous book, this is an excellent introduction to conservatism via chapters explaining the truth and the error in prominent modern ideologies. Linked below are a couple of interviews Scruton gave specifically about this book. They’re worth your while.
Video and audio
Scruton not only wrote every day, he appeared frequently in interviews, documentaries, and recorded lectures until not long before he died. The following is a selection of my favorites, ranging from ten-minute audio essays from BBC Radio to full length lectures with Q&A sessions.
Why Beauty Matters—One of his greatest legacies. In a number of interviews in his last few years Scruton mentioned that this documentary was one of the projects that students, correspondents, and others mentioned most often to him, the documentary having “found a second life” online. I blogged about this wonderful one-hour film last fall. You can read that here; Why Beauty Matters is embedded in a Vimeo player in that post.
Apprehending the Transcendent—Another video that I’ve blogged about before, Apprehending the Transcendent is the title of the moderated discussion Scruton had with psychologist Jordan Peterson at Cambridge a few years ago. A thoughtful and wide-ranging set of critiques and meditations. You can read my blog post about it here; the discussion is embedded in a YouTube player.
BBC audio essays—A number of Scruton’s audio opinion pieces are available on YouTube. These are a goldmine. Here are a few that offer short (usually ten minutes or less), pithy introductions to some of his representative concerns, especially art and its relation to human nature and society: “The Tyranny of Pop Music,” “Art Today, Fake & Kitsch,” “On Harry Potter,” “Offensive Jokes,” “Animals,” “The Religion of Rights,” and “The Witch-hunt Culture.”
Uncommon Knowledge: How to Be a Conservative—A good interview with Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution on Scruton’s book. Watch the interview here.
Christian Humanist Profiles: How to Be a Conservative—An especially good podcast interview from 2016 conducted by my friend Nathan Gilmour of the Christian Humanist Podcast. Listen here.
On The Future of Conservatism & Debate—A friendly conversation between Scruton and Spectator editor Douglas Murray. This wide-ranging discussion is especially worthwhile because of the wry, sometimes mordant British wit both men wield so well. Watch here.
A Thing Called Civilization—In 2019, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute selected Scruton for its Defender of Western Civilization award. Scruton recorded his gracious acceptance speech on video. As far as I know this was his last semi-public appearance—an appropriate note for his career to end on. Watch here.
There is much, much more good stuff from Scruton out there; these are just the best places to start.
Conclusion—what Scruton has to teach us
Scruton is missed. We need his insight, his careful work, and the model he offered of a thoughtful conservatism grounded in virtue and ideas more than ever. If I were to summarize what we need most of Scruton right now, it might be:
A proper understanding of human nature—what we are and what we need as rational and transcendent beings
Love of home—not as mere places to exist, but places where human persons are rooted and connect with each other
An understanding that persons are not free-floating individuals but exist in community
An understanding of tradition and organic development rather than revolution as the source of freedom
The necessity of order and the rule of law and its derivation from the bottom up, from a place and its people
And, finally, his most frequently repeated reminder, learned as he watched student revolutionaries trash Paris in 1968, that:
Good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.
There is much, much more to Scruton’s philosophy than these, but these are good starting points. It is clear, after not only the last week but the last year—or perhaps decade—that even those who claim the title of “conservative” need to start over from fundamentals.
Appropriately, Scruton died on the birthday of Edmund Burke, the father of conservatism. Burke took a set of traditions, intuitions, and dispositions and gave them coherent shape as a response to ideological radicalism, revolution, and political violence. That response has survived, in one form or another, to the present, though it is now in a bad way—certainly in America. My hope is that Scruton’s legacy will prove a similar cohering influence, shaping of a new generation of real conservatism in the face of a new generation of vandals menacing our homes from all sides.
Roger Scruton, RIP.
