Rarely is an author blessed with interlocutors and respondents who understand his arguments with unerring accuracy and add to them in rich and complementary ways. That is the case with the four responses to my January forum essay on “Scrutonian Conservatism Revisited.” Each of my respondents knows Roger Scruton’s thought and writing exceedingly well and engages it with an openness and seriousness that can only be admired. In the course of the month, so many themes and emphases that are central to Roger Scruton’s political, philosophical, and spiritual reflection, and his deeds on behalf of the freedom and dignity of human persons, have been laid out with clarity and grace. These include the limits of all reductionist accounts of who a human being is; the centrality of gratitude; the place of piety in any truthful account of human freedom; the fact that unchosen obligations are more fundamental and enduring than those that result from contract or voluntary choice; the defense of home (including the national home) and of our Western and Anglo-American civilizational inheritance against what Scruton called “oikophobia”; thoughtful and spirited opposition to the totalitarian degradation of man; and the necessity to save “the appearances” (represented above all by the “face” of the ensouled person) against every effort to reduce the human being to nothing more than a thing, an ”object” to be controlled and manipulated. 

To this rich list we can add Scruton’s noble efforts to rejuvenate an approach to education open to the wisdom of the ages and the “intimations of infinity” available to human beings who do not close themselves to the “transcendentals” that are human freedom, self-consciousness, moral obligation, and the beauty that takes us out of ourselves and that puts us into contact with those moments and experiences where “time and the timeless” truly come together. Scruton’s work entails a reasoned refusal to jettison the “life-world,” the world human beings inhabit when they are not deformed by scientism, totalitarian ideology, and “the nothing-buttery” that is so eager to explain our humanity away by reducing it to something other than itself. 

Scruton and the Liberal Order

While valuing the achievements of the liberal order—the precious freedoms, opportunities, civic peace, and material plenty made possible by the much-derided bourgeois order—Scruton refused to identify liberty with liberation, or to deride civic and social authority as nothing more than authoritarianism. He saw politics as “a form of nurture,” as he put it in Gentle Regrets, “‘a care of the soul,’ as Plato put it, which would also be a care for absent generations.” Here Plato met Burke in a conservatism that was much more self-consciously “philosophical” than, say, Michael Oakeshott’s (where theory and practice are almost wholly divorced) while adamantly rejecting the progressivist contempt for what has been passed on to us by our forebears. Like G. K. Chesterton, Scruton lauded tradition not because he thought the good was coextensive with the ancestral, but because in a correct and capacious understanding of the social contract, “most parties to the contract are either dead or not yet born.” Tradition, Chesterton strikingly observed, is the “democracy of the dead.” Scruton gave them—the dead—their due hearing. 

The Spiritual Foundations of Scrutonian Conservatism

With eloquence and a poetic flair and cadence worthy of Sir Roger himself, his literary executor Mark Dooley shows in his essay how “Roger Scruton’s philosophical vision” can “be entirely explained by focusing on the meaning of a smile.” Dooley’s choice of a smile is by no means idiosyncratic—Scruton returned to the human meaning of a smile again and again in his work. As Dooley says so well, Scrutonian conservatism is a “way of life that that seeks to preserve the personality of the world from those who would repudiate, denounce, or reject it.” In the surface of things, in the appearances, one can confront a smiling face for what it is, “a revelation of the human person mingled with their flesh.” We are at home in the world because every day we confront the countenances of other free and mutually accountable human persons who make a home with us. 

As Dooley would be the first to say, we should in no way confuse Scruton’s emphasis on the human and philosophical significance of the human smile with a sentimentality à la the once ubiquitous “smiley face.” As Dooley deftly shows, Scruton fiercely resisted the desecration of the human world, and took aim at “moral pollution” in the form of pornography and a view of sexual desire that reduced it (and the human person) to an assemblage of body parts. In his writings on art, politics, philosophy, and religion, Scruton nobly defended “the thin topsoil in which freedom, love, value, and home are nurtured and conserved.” We may not have direct access to the “noumenal,” as Kant called it, to the essence of things, but we are capable of recognizing “the transcendental dimension of art, culture, education, politics, and even religion” if we reject the false allure of scientism and reductionism. Without appreciating the “appearances” for what they are, as precious evidence of the personhood of human beings, we will succumb to soul-numbing alienation which in fact has “become the new norm.” To repudiate our civilizational inheritance, to repudiate our society “in wanton fits of oikophobia, or hatred of home,” is to consign ourselves to grief, alienation, and terminal soul-sickness.

Pondering the human meaning of the smile provides a powerful antidote to such forlornness: Through such a sustained meditation, we begin to appreciate that we human persons “belong somewhere rather than nowhere.” Dooley richly demonstrates the truth in Scruton’s final estimation of his life’s work as “nothing if not spiritual.” One might say that the English philosopher’s efforts to renew the great Western project of “care of the soul” presupposes the reality of the soul, not as the “ghost in the machine,” but as the being in whose eyes shine self-consciousness and a capacity for truth-telling and mutual accountability. The human face, and the smile that is integral to it, points to the “face of God,” to the transcendent sources of the human person “made in the image and likeness of God.”

Gratitude and Piety

Daniel Pitt’s essay rivals Dooley’s for Scrutonian elegance. It highlights two quintessential virtues and character traits of Scruton the man and thinker, namely gratitude and piety, that remain profoundly countercultural in the contemporary world. Pitt quotes the Hungarian political philosopher, Ferenc Hörcher (the author of a fine recent book called Art and Politics in Roger Scruton’s Conservative Philosophy) who emphasizes that for Scruton, “philosophy is not simply about epistemic claims” but rather about “certain truths about the natural world and the human realm” including “character formation, and the effort to live a meaningful and whole life.” A philosopher trained in analytical philosophy at Cambridge, Scruton very much remained a philosopher in the Great Tradition. As Pitt rightly states in a particularly lapidary formulation, “Piety, gratitude, and love are all important aspects of Scruton’s thought.” 

Pitt is particularly good at highlighting the connection between “unchosen and unsought obligations” and piety itself, themes that are central to Scruton’s moral and political philosophy. He might have done more to differentiate the more “sociological” discussions of piety in Scruton’s earlier work, where his discussions of the sacred draw on the likes of Maistre and Durkheim in ways that do not necessarily presuppose the truth of religion (despite Maistre’s “reactionary” Catholicism), and Scruton’s account of piety and the sacred after the English philosopher had turned away from his “atheistic apprenticeship.” As Pitt himself shows, Scruton came to see that “naturalistic explanations” tend to “threaten our sense of the sacred” and thus also “threaten … the impulse of piety upon which community and morality are founded.” Pitt helpfully demonstrates Scruton’s preoccupation with the “Permanent Things” (as T. S. Eliot put it), the “features of the human condition that cannot be changed.” To “love our home” is to cherish—and to renew—those reminders of the Permanent Things (whether in art, architecture, history, storytelling, and religion) that preserve (in Dooley’s term) the “topsoil” in which civilization flourishes and where human beings find a home worthy of free and mutually accountable persons. One cannot agree more with Pitt’s concluding remark that “we have much for which to be grateful.”

Gratitude is without doubt the trait, at once moral and intellectual, that above all defines the conservatism laid out by the political and philosophical reflection of Roger Scruton. It is the antidote to the willfulness, self-assertion, autonomy, or any of the high-grade or low-grade efforts at self-deification that reveal the spiritual dead-end that is radical or late modernity. 

The Place and Limits of Politics

The very thoughtful essay by John G. Grove raises fundamental questions about the place and limits of politics in Scruton’s philosophical reflection. Grove and I agree that a politics of gratitude must also be grateful for what is worthy of appreciation in a liberal order without “absolutizing” a perspective that risks separating rights and obligations and turning liberty into an abstraction devoid of respect for its crucial moral and cultural prerequisites. The latter include the self-governing nation that allows a “community of strangers” to live together as neighbors and fellow citizens, love of “home” in the rich and capacious Scrutonian sense, the Christian inheritance that distinguishes between non-negotiable good and evil while finding a place in the human heart for forgiveness, and a liberal education open to “the best that has been thought and said.” The post-liberals are right that liberalism has forgotten its indispensable “conservative foundations.” But they are wrong, and deeply irresponsible, to want to bury liberalism once and for all. 

Grove is correct that some among the young on the Right adopt tough if silly poses, playacting at being Nietzschean “Overmen,” and throwing away classical conservatism along with the best of the liberal inheritance. But their critics sometimes forget that liberalism is indeed prone to endless self-radicalization and that what we Scrutonians defend is a Western inheritance that is broader and deeper than modernity itself. We need to cultivate a politics of prudence that says “no” to all ideological poses, and that does not place all its hopes in the latest election results and the narrow preoccupations of the here and now. 

We need to defend the nation against the facile cosmopolitanism (and tyrannical “globalism”) that falsely sees the “world” as our home, while eschewing heedless displays of nationalism. At the same time, we must uphold the dignity of politics and do our best to repudiate repudiation on the political, cultural, educational, and spiritual planes. As Scruton wrote in his excellent essay “Governing Rightly,” which originally appeared in First Things and which can be found in his 2016 collection of essays, Confessions of a Heretic:

The truth is that government, of one kind or another, is manifest in all our attempts to live in peace with our fellows. … Government is a search for order, and for power only so far as power is required by order. It is present in the family, in the village, in the free association of neighbors, and in the ‘little platoons’ extolled by Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France and by Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America. It is there in the first movement of affection and good will, from which the bonds of society grow. For it is simply the other side of freedom, and the thing that make freedom possible. 

Scruton thus reminds us of both the limits of politics and its indispensability to free and decent human life. He is therefore an incisive critic of the “born free fallacy” as he called it in his 2010 book The Uses of Pessimism: Human beings do not “become free by removing the shackles of government. That is the opposite of the truth.” 

Scruton’s Daring

Titus Techera’s essay, “Freedom’s Philosopher,” is magisterial and highly to be recommended. His searing essay reminds us that Roger Scruton was the scourge of political correctness and twice victim of cancellation efforts, in the 1980s and 2019 near the end of his life. Most fundamentally, Techera reminds us of Scruton’s “daring,” his courage in taking on “post-totalitarian” Communist tyrannies in East-Central Europe in the 1980s and providing aid to the beleaguered intellectual underground in Poland, Hungary, and his beloved Czechoslovakia. Scruton saw nobility in these proud peoples still subject to Communist captivity, and appreciated their heroic struggle to come out from underneath the rubble left by totalitarianism. Communism embodied the darkest current of radical enlightenment, while “liberalism” was not a sufficient solution to the wreckage that would be left in its wake. 

Techera pays tribute to a man of daring and courage, of immense erudition and high culture, who was also a political educator, and guide to the undaunted men and women behind the old Iron Curtain who attempted to found new “modes and orders” based on true respect for liberty and human dignity. His portrait rings true in every respect. 

A Brief Excursus on Scruton and the Pressing Issues of Our Day 

Contemporary readers may want to see more topical questions addressed. What would Roger Scruton think of the proponents and practitioners of coercive political correctness today? We know the answer to that question. Would he be saddened by the self-inflicted wounds of a British Conservative party that was increasingly afraid to conserve anything of importance, including old Britain itself, or to even begin to build on the promise of Brexit? Undoubtedly so. And there is no doubt he would be appalled by the insouciance by which Western elites have disregarded borders, which provide the crucial precondition for the kind of membership that defines self-governing “territorial democracies.” He would also be alarmed by the blatant and systematic disregard for free speech and political dissent that has marked Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s new Labour government since its first day in office. 

More speculatively, what would the great English conservative think of Donald Trump, the rough-hewn but indomitable scourge of the very wokeness Scruton excoriated? This avatar of high culture and gentle high-mindedness could not admire Trump’s crassness or his preoccupation with “the little arts of popularity,” or celebrity, whether in the form of tweets or mass rallies, as he made clear in a 2017 op-ed included in Mark Dooley’s posthumously published volume of Scruton’s journalism entitled Against the Tide. But perhaps the defender of patriotism and common sense, would also see in Trumpian populism a legitimate and necessary, if ultimately inadequate and imperfect, response to nihilistic elites in Europe and America that had long ceased to be accountable to those they govern, and who no longer know how to love or defend the inheritance whose care was entrusted to them. Trump affirms imperfectly, they negate and repudiate with a truly destructive ideological fervor.

In his essay, Techera mentions that today “Roger Scruton is least reputed of all among young men, who are increasingly of the opinion that he was soft or even foolish, though they have never tried anything as dangerous or adventurous as what Scruton did.” I have never met such young men and know many deeply thoughtful young men who have learned much from Scruton and look up to him with profound respect. But the types Techera describes undoubtedly exist among the impatient and demi-educated among the New Right. How foolish and ungrateful such sentiments are. It is a mark of brutishness to confuse urbanity, erudition, and self-command with foppishness. And it is anything but conservative to be ungrateful to those who kept the light of civilization alive when what Eric Voegelin called “modernity without restraint” reared its ugly head in the twentieth century. Thankfully, this symposium has been an exercise in thoughtful gratitude and a salutary reminder of what we wish to conserve and renew. An engagement with the thought and writings of Roger Scruton provides an excellent, even indispensable, starting point for civilizational renewal so understood.