The Four Reformers

On my commute over the last week I’ve been listening to the audiobook edition of The Wise Men Know What Wicked Things are Written on the Sky, a series of lectures by Russell Kirk presented in the early 1980s. The themes are decline and decadence, and the topics range across the loss of humane letters, the ideological capture of government and educational institutions, and reasons for hope. It’s good, and Kirk brings plenty of still-pertinent insight, even if his selected examples are often dated. Criticism of “Dallas” seems quaint when you know what the blood-drenched fleshpots of American culture in 2023 are like. Call it the Neil Postman problem.

In one of the final lectures, Kirk quotes a story by Robert Louis Stevenson from a book I’d never heard of: “The Four Reformers,” from Fables, an 1896 collection of twenty very short, pointed stories. Here’s the story in its entirety:

Four reformers met under a bramble bush. They were all agreed the world must be changed. “We must abolish property,” said one.

“We must abolish marriage,” said the second.

“We must abolish God,” said the third.

“I wish we could abolish work,” said the fourth.

“Do not let us get beyond practical politics,” said the first. “The first thing is to reduce men to a common level.”

“The first thing,” said the second, “is to give freedom to the sexes.”

“The first thing,” said the third, “is to find out how to do it.”

“The first step,” said the first, “is to abolish the Bible.”

“The first thing,” said the second, “is to abolish the laws.”

“The first thing,” said the third, “is to abolish mankind.”

By “reformer” Stevenson means the radical activist agents of societal change, of which there were plenty in his age and ours. The more radical the reform, the more radical the means of its implementation—especially when humans get in the way, as they do.

If I’ve run across this somewhere before I’ve forgotten it, but the final line must surely be the inspiration for the title of CS Lewis’s masterwork The Abolition of Man. Lewis, who was born four years after Stevenson’s untimely death, lived to see many such reformers put their plans into action, as well as the results.

Kuehnelt-Leddihn on hillbillies

Austria, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s homeland

Allow me a moment of pure parochialism. I have many irons in the fire right now—including on this blog, where I’m currently working on several different posts at the same time—and I’ve also been sick this week, consistently distracted by divers aches. So this is an unexpected post, one I didn’t plan for but couldn’t resist.

At National Review, the redoubtable Jack Butler has published a response to an article on European conservatism by Michael Brendan Dougherty. These are quite different writers, both of whom I like, but I was most excited to see the topic Butler took issue with and wanted to elaborate upon—Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, author of this immortal line, which I quote every time I teach modern history:

“For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution.”

— Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

You probably haven’t heard of Kuehnelt-Leddihn. His books are very hard to find and he is unjustly neglected. Here’s a short introduction from Butler:

Born in Austria-Hungary in 1909, the Catholic nobleman lived a fascinating life. He began working as a journalist at age 16 and continued as a serious writer and thinker until his death in 1999. He visited dozens of countries, and all 50 U.S. states. He spoke eight languages and could read eleven others. He claimed to have once seen the Devil himself. William F. Buckley described him as “the world’s most fascinating man”; he could quite easily have competed with the Dos Equis guy as “the most interesting man in the world.”

“His thought was as interesting as his life,” Butler writes, and goes on to give a very good précis of Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s fundamental ideas, assumptions, and suspicions. “He was an Austrian monarchist* . . . who believed that monarchy and aristocracy (and Catholicism!) could be better safeguards of liberty than democracy was.” And he “was skeptical not only of democracy, but also of nationalism. He viewed them as related phenomena.”

Reading Kuehnelt-Leddihn was a watershed for me. Up until discovering him during graduate school, whatever ideas I had about politics, culture, religion, and history were separately and often haphazardly formed, and influenced more often than not by whatever neocon happened to be expressing himself most pithily at the time. Kuehnelt-Leddihn challenged me at every point, and won me over in pretty much every category Butler mentions above. He reshaped me.

An uncredited reviewer of The Menace of the Herd, which I quote below, writes at the Mises Institute that “[T]o read [Kuehnelt-Leddihn] is to experience something of an intellectual liberation from every sort of conventional wisdom.” This was precisely my experience. Only Chesterton has struck more deeply into me.

I highly recommend Butler’s short article. (I haven’t yet read the one by Dougherty that provoked this; I was too excited to dive back into Kuehnelt-Leddihn.) Butler includes many good passages to give you not only the basics of Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s particular inflection of conservatism, but a feel for his writing and the manner—you could almost say texture—of his thought.** Among them is this passage on a crucial but often neglected distinction:

Patriotism, not nationalism, should inspire the citizen. The ethnic nationalist who wants a linguistically and culturally uniform nation is akin to the racist who is intolerant toward those who look (and behave) differently. The patriot is a “diversitarian”; he is pleased, indeed proud of the variety within the borders of his country; he looks for loyalty from all citizens. And he looks up and down, not left and right.

Kuehnelt-Leddihn, the polyglot polymath, was nothing if not conscious of words and their etymologies,† the subtle shadings of meaning between concepts so closely related that they tend to be carelessly lumped together and used interchangeably. Patriotism and nationalism are both ultimately Latin loanwords, but with an important gap between their roots—a nation is a people with shared lineage, a patria is a homeland.

So on the topic of homeland and patrimony, here’s a passage that’s been a favorite of mine for a long time. I quote it at length to capture that texture and because I’m tired and just having fun. This is Kuehnelt-Leddihn, in his 1943 book The Menace of the Herd, or: Procrustes at Large—written under a pseudonym‡ after having fled the Nazis, who had annexed his mountain homeland in 1938—writing about the culture and characteristic qualities of both his and my people: mountain people.

Many people see the “real” Europeans in these mountaineers. In these parts of the world traditions have been better preserved; patriarchalism, piety, loyalty, altruism—all the truly “romantic” virtues are here more at home than in the progressive plains. Other manifestations, such as the blood feud, also exist. Of course, the mountains are poor and bravery alone does not secure collective political influence. Thanks to the greater resources of the plains the mountaineers were always defeated in the long run but they regularly revenged themselves by producing a proportionately large number of political and military leaders.

Mountain culture is not “advanced.” It is nevertheless aristocratic and “democratic” (demophil) at the same time. It is patriarchal by nature and we have mentioned the fact before, that serfdom practically never existed among the mountaineers. The mountains were essentially free. “Freedom thrives in the mountains,” Schiller exclaims justly. Yet it is also interesting to see how violently the mountain peasant was attacked by the urban writers of the second half of the nineteenth century, attacked and vilified for his loyalty to traditions. Having no social grievances (lack of large estates) he was the very despair of urban, leftist agitators.

The thwarted intellectuals, slaving in the gigantic cities under heaviest pressure, developed often an almost sinister grudge against the mountains and the snow-covered peaks; he at least considered himself to be a “modern” while the mountaineer dwelt in darkest superstition. Yet the mountaineer always despised the people from the plains and the large cities and regarded them as miserable wretches, as proletarians and collectivized rabble, with an utter lack of personality.

The age of the rule of the plains and the cities, which put an end to the rule of the mountains and castles, was indeed the beginning of the decline of Europe. The association of Berlin with Moscow, of nationalism with socialism, was, even in a geographical sense, a league of monotony against diversity.

It must be admitted though that there is a great strength in the collective onslaught of the people of the plains—from a military, political, and economic point of view. The first half of the nineteenth century produced the most spectacular victories of the French arms, the second half the victories of Prussia and of the Germanies led by Prussia. The great soldiers of the sixteenth and seventeenth century were the Spaniards and the Swiss, but technical civilization and industrial progress necessitated a soldier with a minimum of personal initiative and a maximum of obedience, cooperative spirit and lack of originality. The virtues of the sixteenth-century soldier are still necessary prerequisites of alpine warfare, but for the war in the plains—“total” wars and not “little wars” (guerrilla)—fight, to think, to decide. In the plains officers used to ride at the head of their troops and directed the solidly advancing carrés with stentorial commands. Nothing of that kind is possible in the mountains where personal initiative is of greater importance than mere discipline and drill; even modern warfare in these parts is still individualized and numbers play a less important role than in the Lowlands.

Today it seems that European culture and civilization, once conceived and born in the craggy hills of Crete, Greece, and the Apennines, will be drowned in the monotonous, muddy plains between Paris and Moscow.

I feel this deeply. These are my people, recognizable across divides of time, culture, and an ocean. Kuehnelt-Leddihn calls us “mountaineers.” I call us “hillbillies,” a term I use with pride.

Read Butler’s piece, and seek Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s work out sometime and let him challenge you—especially if you’re a conservative. The Menace of the Herd is bracing and full of great passages but not my favorite of his books; another early one, Liberty or Equality, is on the same level, and helpfully set two incompatible abstractions in opposition for me for the first time. I’d recommend Leftism: From De Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse for its scope and trenchant historical argumentation. The sort-of sequel, Leftism Revisited, is better remembered and seems more readily available, but I’ve yet to read that one. If you’d like a shorter read, seek out his early essay “Credo of a Reactionary,” which takes a bit of digging but can be found free online.

As a final measure of my appreciation for Kuehnelt-Leddihn, a character in several stories and a novel that I’ve been planning is based directly on him. You’ll know him if and when I ever write these—just look for a version of the above remarks about the mountains, delivered as a speech by a man in khaki standing on a precipice in the Holy Land.

But that’s for another time. Meanwhile, get to the mountains.

Footnotes

*The Austrian aspect of this is crucial to understanding Kuehnelt-Leddihn. Butler: “In 1990, EKL lamented in National Review that the ‘democrats’ prevailed in urging the dissolution of the Habsburg empire. This left its former subjects ‘to their unhappy, and in some cases truly gruesome, fates.’” Just yesterday I was reading about Peter Lorre, a German-speaking Hungarian Jew born in a majority Slovak region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A vision of a lost world.

**Including many, many asides and discursive tangents in his footnotes. I excised the footnotes from the passage in The Menace of the Herd that I quote but include my own in this post as a tribute.

†William F Buckley’s Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription, an anthology of National Review letters to the editor and his responses, includes a genuinely hilarious exchange in which Kuehnelt-Leddihn spends several pages cataloging the linguistic, cultural, and historical errors and miscalculations in Buckley’s latest spy thriller. Buckley replies: “Dear Erik: Forget it. Am resigning, going back to school. What can I pay you not to read my next book?”

‡Anglophiles and Scots will get some sense of Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s loyalties and beliefs from his pen name: Francis Stuart Campbell.

Lewis and Scruton on monarchy, titles, and celebrity

I’ve been reading Against the Tide, a posthumous collection of Roger Scruton’s journalism and essays collected by his literary executor, Mark Dooley. It’s good stuff so far, though not as deep or meaty as Scruton’s longer work (like the essays in A Political Philosophy or especially Confessions of a Heretic) owing to the limitations of journalism. But, also owing to the limitations of journalism, these pieces are punchier, more humorously combative. You can feel Scruton winking in some of them in a way you seldom get when he’s unpacking Kant or Wagner.

At any rate, this passage on aristocracy and its vulgar modern ersatz, celebrity, published as a “diary” piece in the Spectator, August 25, 2016, particularly caught my eye:

Of course, in the first-name culture that now prevails, titles might seem merely decorative, and offensive to the cult of equality. The death of the Duke of Westminster has briefly raised the question of what a titled aristocracy does for us. My own view is that titles are much to be preferred to wealth as a mark of distinction, since they give glamour without power. They promote the idea of purely immaterial reward, and represent eminence as something to live up to, not a power to be used. Of course they can be abused, and a kind of snobbery goes with them. Take them away, however, and you have the mean-minded obsessions of ‘celebrity’ culture, the American idolization of wealth or the power cult of the Russian mafia. An inherited title sanctifies a family and its ancient territory. The poetry of this is beautifully expressed by Proust, who wrote of an aristocracy from which everything had been taken except its titles—think of ‘Guermantes’ and compare it with ‘Trump’.

That paragraph caught my eye because it echoes, at a remove of three quarters of a century but with startlingly precise parallels, this favorite passage from CS Lewis’s wartime essay “Equality”—coincidentally also published in the Spectator, and on almost the same date, August 27, 1943:

We Britons should rejoice that we have contrived to reach much legal democracy (we still need more of the economic) without losing our ceremonial Monarchy. For there, right in the midst of our lives, is that which satisfies the craving for inequality, and acts as a permanent reminder that medicine is not food. Hence a man’s reaction of Monarchy is a kind of test. Monarchy can easily be ‘debunked’; but watch the faces, mark well the accents, of the debunkers. These are men whose tap-root in Eden has been cut: whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach—men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, of film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.

You can read the entirety of Lewis’s essay “Equality” at the Spectator’s archives (paywalled) or here. It’s collected in Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays, which is perhaps my favorite short collection of Lewis’s writings. I’ve previously quoted the line about “gobbling poison” as recently as the new year, in this post on Ernst Jünger’s vision of the homo religiosus in The Forest Passage.

Omnipotent moral busybodies

Two quotations from dramatically different contexts that make the same broader point:

First—Orestes Brownson, in his essay “Liberalism and Progress,” October 1864. Brownson was a pro-Union, anti-slavery New Englander but was nevertheless impatient with the radical Puritan-descended ideologues surrounding him, radicals like the author of the unpublished manuscript to which he’s responding here, in which its author advocates “exterminating the southern leaders, and new-englandizing the South”—what in any other context would now be called cultural genocide. In this passage he critiques the culture that produces such men:

The New Englander has excellent points, but is restless in body and mind, always in motion, never satisfied with what he has, and always seeking to make all the world like himself, or as uneasy as himself. He is smart, seldom great; educated, but seldom learned; active in mind, but rarely a profound thinker; religious, but thoroughly materialistic: his worship is rendered in a temple founded in Mammon, and he expects to be carried to heaven in a softly-cushioned railway car, with his sins safely checked and deposited in the baggage crate with his other luggage, to be duly delivered when he has reached his destination. He is philanthropic, but makes his philanthropy his excuse for meddling with everybody's business as if it were his own, and under pretence of promoting religion and morality, he wars against every generous and natural instinct, and aggravates the very evils he seeks to cure.

Second—CS Lewis in “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” originally published in the Australian journal Twentieth Century in 1949 and collected in God in the Dock. Here Lewis argues forcefully that modern concepts of judicial rehabilitation are actually crueler than traditional imprisonment or corporal punishment:

It is, indeed, important to notice that my argument so far supposes no evil intentions on the part of the Humanitarian and considers only what is involved in the logic of his position. My contention is that good men (not bad men) consistently acting upon that position would act as cruelly and unjustly as the greatest tyrants. They might in some respects act even worse. Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

To return to Brownson’s picture of the New England radical reformer:

He has his use in the community; but a whole nation composed of such as he would be short-lived, and resemble the community of the lost rather than that of the blest.

The thing which I greatly feared is come upon us. Food for thought.

Compare Brownson’s portrait of the 19th-century activist above with Ernst Jünger’s description in The Forest Passage of the modern mass-man—“he will gush humanitarian theory, yet be equally inclined to awful violence . . . whenever a neighbor or fellow human being does not fit into his system”—which I blogged about here. And for a paradigmatic modern busybody, see here.

Chesterton vs Brooks

Two quotations on progress, presented without comment.

From David Brooks’s essay “What Happened to American Conservatism?” (AKA “Conservatism is Dead”) in The Atlantic:

“If [the Democratic Party’s] progressive wing sometimes seems to have learned nothing from the failures of government and to promote cultural stances that divide Americans, at least the party as a whole knows what year it is.”

Which brought to mind this line from GK Chesterton in an interview with the New York Times, 1923:

“My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.”

2020 in books: Roger Scruton

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.

Russell Kirk's Concise Guide to Conservatism

Conservatism today is not in good shape. Like Rome in Nero’s day, where the historian Tacitus wrote that “all degraded and shameful practices collect and flourish,” one can find just about any terrible thing you want to in the fringes of the movement. But mainstream conservatism, so-called, is not much better, riven as it is by debates between nationalists and globalists, traditionalists skeptical of modernity and technological triumphalists, advocates of small businesses and massive corporations, family values activists and anything goes social liberals, hawks and doves, and just as many big government porkbarrel technocrats as the other side of the aisle. If Yeats’s famous phrase was “the centre will not hold,” conservatism seems to have no center in the first place.

Russell Kirk’s Concise Guide to Conservatism, a formerly out-of-print handbook by one of the twentieth century’s great conservative thinkers, offers one to a movement desperately in need of re-centering. Kirk—a man of letters rather than a strictly political thinker or, worse, the curse of today’s political scene, a policy wonk—helped frame the meaning of conservatism at the time of its American revival in the 1950s, and this book is a refreshing throwback. It’s winsomely written, engaging and even funny, and a brilliant introduction to the true core of a movement that has lost its way.

Originally published in 1957 as The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Conservatism (the title being a riposte to George Bernard Shaw’s Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism), Kirk’s book sets out the principles of true conservatism simply and straightforwardly, drawing on the modern tradition from Burke to the 1950s. Anyone who has read the book that put Kirk on the map, The Conservative Mind, will recognize the names of many of the British and American conservatives Kirk invokes there, including John Adams, Orestes Brownson, John Randolph of Roanoke, Tocqueville, John C. Calhoun, Irving Babbitt, and Paul Elmer More, but Kirk also builds support from an even broader group of thinkers ranging as far back as Aristotle and Cicero and up to the 20th century British traditionalist liberal GK Chesterton.

This book also presents a condensed version of Kirk’s concerns in The Conservative Mind: the threat of materialist ideologies like Marxism; the leveling effects of industrialism and consumerism; the danger of totalizing, centralized state power; the collapse of community; the erosion of virtue, discourse, learning, respect for—or even knowledge of—the past; and much more. Kirk passionately explains the conservative views of freedom of conscience; private property; variety and diversity; traditional education in the liberal arts and humanities; the transcendent vision of the world offered by religion; church, community, and the other “little platoons” that make us who we are; and the family.

One of the strengths of Kirk’s book is his handling of the tensions within conservatism, of which we have plenty. I think one of the reasons “conservatism” so-called today has been pulled so badly out of shape is the attempt eliminate these tensions one way or the other, creating a balkanized political movement of simplified, un-nuanced sub-conservatisms. This is an essentially ideological search for a resolution to tension, one that insists on consistency and going to the logical extremes. Kirk avoids that temptation—insisting throughout that true conservatism is properly non-ideological—and retains these tensions.

Kirk deals with the tension between the individual and the community—both objects of immense respect and importance within conservatism—especially well, rejecting both “‘Individualism’ as a radical political ideology” (cf. Ayn Rand) as well as pure collectivism. But the best example, and possibly the best chapter in the book, is his treatment of permanence and change. Call it the tension between stability and Progress, or the status quo and the god Change. “The conservative is not opposed to progress as such,” Kirk writes, “though he doubts very much that there is any such force as a mystical Progress, with a [capital] P, at work in the world.” Invoking Coleridge, he continues:

The permanence in society is formed by those enduring values and interests which give us stability and continuity; without that Permanence, the fountains of the deep are broken up, and society slips into anarchy. The Progression in a society is that spirit and that body of talents which urge us on to prudent reform and improvement; without that Progression, a people stagnate, and society subsides into an Egyptian or Peruvian lethargy.

Kirk wrote in 1957—the year my dad, now a 62-year old grandfather, was born—but his description of an affluent, technologically sophisticated but hollow society poised between anarchy and stagnation could have been written yesterday. A faithful advocate of what he, borrowing from TS Eliot, called “the permanent things,” he could not have produced a more permanently relevant little book.

Russell Kirk’s Concise Guide to Conservatism also includes a good introduction from historian Wilfred McClay. Coming in at just over 100 pages, this book is a much-needed refresher at a time of crisis. You won’t find much about economic theory or policy—those are all downstream of culture—but you will find a lot about principle, virtue, family and community, respect for the past, and the right ordering of affections that makes up the conservative worldview. I hope it gains a wide readership—both among those seeking to understand conservatives and conservatism, and conservatives in search of a center that will hold.

A warning for conservatives

Abtei im Eichwald, by Caspar David Friedrich

While visiting home in Georgia this weekend, my wife and I went to my parents’ church. The sermon came from the Book of Exodus, but an aside from Ecclesiastes caught us both off guard and gave us a lot to think about:

“Say not, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’
For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.”

— Ecclesiastes 7:10

For my wife, this brought to mind changes at work, a difficult new generation of students, and a longing for years past, before present troubles. I thought immediately of conservatism—not the political position, but the attitude or temperament that is prior to any particular political idea: a disposition rather than an ideology, according to Michael Oakeshott; a state of mind, an instinct to preserve and maintain, to adhere to tradition and custom, to guarantee continuity, according to Russell Kirk; an understanding that good things are hard to create and easy to destroy, according to Roger Scruton. We could go on much further.

So while I am a conservative, both by temperament and because I agree with the above, I’m not talking about political conservatism, which is in bad shape in the United States anyway. I mean the general disposition, to which even self-described progressives are susceptible, and what I see as its besetting danger.

That danger is what is commonly called nostalgia now: a sentimentalized reverence for a past that—probably—never existed.

This shouldn’t be news—conservatives are accused of nostalgia all the time—but I do wrestle with a longing for a time without our present troubles. There were good things about the past, things it is good to preserve or recover, and there are serious problems at present, problems to which the past may—and I think often does—hold the solutions. But I have to remind myself that while the people of the past may not have had our problems, they had plenty of their own, and there were even then people like me who cast longing backward glances at their own simpler, more peaceful, less troubled pasts. It’s simpler times all the way down.

And there stand the words of the preacher. In the magisterial archaism of the KJV: “Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this.”

This is not, of course, a resounding endorsement of nostalgia’s opposite error, progressivism—“a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.” And it is good to remember that Ecclesiastes is hardly a straightforward collection of proverbial wisdom. But this passage is a good reminder of the unwisdom of two related mistakes: assuming the past was necessarily better than the present, and using that assumption as an excuse to neglect the present.

Mea culpa. This is a tall order for someone who is both a conservative and an historian, and I’ve been mulling it over ever since.

Food for thought at an obsessively nostalgic time of year. To conclude with a warning against focusing obsessively on the future—a New Year’s warning, perhaps—here’s the Gospel of Matthew:

“Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

— Matthew 6:34