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Scrutonian Conservatism Reconsidered

Sir Roger Scruton died just shy of his 76th birthday on January 12, 2020, after a short but valiant struggle with cancer. For many of us, he was the very model of personal and intellectual integrity, a courageous thinker and writer whose adamant “No!” to the culture of repudiation, as he was the first to aptly call it fifty or more years ago, was always accompanied by a humane and generous affirmation of everything that was choice-worthy in the civilized inheritance bequeathed to us by our forebears.

As the fifth anniversary of his death approaches, it is fitting to pay renewed attention to Scruton’s elevated (and elevating) conservatism, his eloquent defense of beauty and high culture, as well as his fierce opposition to scientism, totalitarianism, and every ideological effort to deny the ensouled human person. Scruton’s conservatism was much more than oppositional, however, and never merely aesthetic, even if it gave pride of place to sustaining the beautiful things that are never simply in the eye of the beholder. His conservatism informed his profoundly countercultural conception of patriotism and humane national loyalty, while at the same time, his patriotism informed his conservatism, and imparted to it a remarkable breadth and depth. The fact that Scruton wrote so well, like a fine draftsman of the human soul and of the intimations of transcendence, aided him greatly in his task of conveying the full range of human experience occluded by fashionable ideologies, whether utopian or cynical and nihilistic, that have no place for the most important thing: the human subject or person accountable to himself, to society, and to a moral law not of his making.

Scruton became a full-fledged conservative in the 1970s, and his first effort to provide a comprehensive articulation of that philosophy was his 1980 work The Meaning of Conservatism. That work was influenced by the non-historicist Hegel (the author of The Philosophy of Right), who rooted freedom and the ethical life in a conception of “membership” equidistant from “the dust and powder” of pure individuality (as Edmund Burke called it) and every collectivist effort to suppress freedom as it had come to sight in the modern world. That work is full of gems, even if it lacks the full clarity and finesse of his later writing. In this earlier incarnation, Scruton was more adamantly anti-liberal, rejecting the whole edifice of modern liberal political philosophy with a polemical edge largely absent from his mature writings.

Scruton’s approach to conservatism in his final book on the subject, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition, published in 2018, is more dialectical, more keen to emphasize certain affinities between conservatism and the liberalism that it aims to moderate and correct. In wonderfully lucid pages, Scruton reveals the dependence of the liberal order on certain non-liberal realities and points out that philosophical liberalism’s desire to free the individual from undue restraints ultimately ends in nihilism and moral disorder if it forgets the venerable customs and institutions that allow a regime of liberty to flourish in the first place. Conservatism, as Scruton came to understand, provides a “yes, but …” to the claims of classical liberalism. At its best and politically most responsible, conservatism aims to save liberalism from itself. At the same time, it can only pursue that salutary task if it is not complicit with self-defeating liberal presuppositions. This is a delicate operation.

Saving Liberalism from Itself

Conservatism of a Scrutonian type must appreciate the very real achievements of liberal theory and practice as they have emerged in the modern and late modern worlds. Rule of law, civic peace, religious tolerance, and the prosperity and abundance made possible by the market economy, are precious goods that have been encouraged and sustained by the modern liberal order. Justice requires they be acknowledged and defended. But that order is also haunted by pathologies and temptations such as an inordinate faith in progress and an insufficient appreciation of innate human imperfection. These are not passing “bugs,” but pathologies coextensive with the Enlightenment. There is something Sisyphean in conservatism’s task.

Scruton’s Burke is a partisan of moderation and prudence and the greatest modern critic of ideological thinking.

Thus, against persistent calls for radical innovation, and an accompanying fetish for “Progress,” conservatism, as Scruton understands it, defends continuity, and in contrast to a “single-minded emphasis on freedom and equality” takes note of the crucial premodern moral and cultural preconditions of ordered liberty. It is one with classical liberalism in opposing the petty dictates of a managerial state and the monstrous totalitarianisms of the twentieth century, but does so with philosophically and spiritually deeper arguments and resources.

Without the partial critique provided by conservatism, liberalism is prone to consume itself, to follow the logic of liberation and emancipation to self-defeating conclusions. In Scruton’s rendering, conservatism is properly ambivalent about the Enlightenment—it neither adamantly opposes it nor endorses all its premises and conclusions. It strives to save modern liberty from itself while resisting the temptation to undermine the Good by identifying it unilaterally with a past whose achievements are hopelessly romanticized. The Good, while elusive, is more substantial.

The Roots of Conservatism

Scruton is also admirably sensitive to the “classical” roots of modern conservatism. More than a defense of tradition (which it certainly is), conservatism is an approach to life and politics that appreciates enduring truths about human nature. Conservatism properly understood “calls upon aspects of the human condition that can be witnessed in every civilization and at every period of history.” Scruton’s defense of moderation, constitutionalism, and the cardinal virtues (courage, prudence, justice, and temperance) owes much to Aristotle, for example. Scruton’s conservatism is also broadly Aristotelian in its recognition that human beings are social and political animals “who live naturally in communities, bound together by trust.”

Scruton therefore opposes the view that “political order is founded on a contract.” The state of nature is a chimera—an invention of modern political philosophers who had forgotten the primal reality of debt and gratitude to our predecessors, and those myriad obligations that are unsought, yet still binding on morally serious human beings. This fiction, so central to philosophical liberalism, obscures the fact that membership in a community, with its requisite duties and obligations, is a precondition for meaningful freedom. There is no such thing as “absolute freedom,” indeed such a misunderstanding of freedom wars with the civilized order, and salutary self-restraint, that are the conditions and complement of freedom.

Membership versus Contract

For Scruton, the nation is the political form that guarantees membership and self-government in the modern world, a form of loyalty and attachment to one’s own that leaves behind narrow and unduly exclusive familial, tribal, and sectarian forms of identification. But to be attached to one’s home in the form of what he called “territorial democracy” is not to make an idol of the nation. While the nation is indeed a form of secular jurisdiction, it readily finds a place for Christian neighbor-love, rather than the abstract humanitarianism that undermines the concrete obligations of the citizen and believer. On the other hand, Scruton does not leave us with a false choice between national membership and local attachments and loyalties. Both are crucial to our sense of home, and both are integral elements of self-government rightly understood. Together, they resist the allure of the “global,” an abstraction that replaces concrete loyalties with sentimental effusions of humanitarianism and with top-down bureaucratic domination in practice.

Often likened to Edmund Burke, Scruton is not exactly a Burkean in that his philosophical premises owe more to Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel. He did, however, profoundly admire the great Anglo-Irish statesman and political philosopher. His Burke operates at the intersection of liberalism and conservatism and is by no means reactionary. He is a partisan of moderation and prudence and the greatest modern critic of ideological thinking. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Burke saw into “the heart of things” and anticipated the revolutionary Terror before it had fully revealed itself. While he supported the American Revolution, he saw through the “literary cabal” that imposed fanaticism on the French people. For Burke, reformation and conservation formed an indispensable diptych: there could not be one without the other. Burke may have exaggerated the prospects for the reform of the old regime in France, but he saw the nihilism at the heart of the politics of the tabula rasa—the desire to begin everything anew at some ideological “Year Zero.”

Against the liberal idea of the social contract, Burke thought of society as entailing a “trusteeship” that connected the living, the dead, and the yet-to-be-born. A defender of the “little platoons” that shape the affections of citizens, Burke was also a partisan of the proud and independent nation that was Britain. He tried to maintain the equilibrium between the free individual and an orderly community that respected the moral inheritance that is Western and Christian civilization.

Burke remains important to conservatism because, as Scruton put it in his incomparable chapter “How I Became a Conservative” from his 2005 memoir Gentle Regrets, he saw through fatuous modern “cries for liberation” and rejected any notion of “Progress” that had no place for the dead and the yet to be born and for the moral obligations that define man as man. As Scruton put it, Burke renewed the Platonic call for a politics that was also a form of “nurture” and “trusteeship”—the “care for the soul” that is also necessarily “care for absent generations.” Neither simply a traditionalist nor an Old Whig, Burke was the prudent and wise purveyor of old and enduring truths to a world in the process of dramatic transformations.

Humane National Loyalty and the American Case

Scruton’s understanding of humane national loyalty stood in contradistinction to both self-assertive nationalism and facile, anti-political cosmopolitanism. There is nothing cramped, mean-spirited, or xenophobic in Scruton’s defense of England and his understanding of what genuine political and social membership requires. Scruton was at home in France (he admired the conservative patriot de Gaulle—who was also a man of letters—even as he adamantly rejected the revolutionary soixante-huitards who denounced the great French statesman as “the old fascist”), loved the Czech people (whom he helped during the period of Communist captivity and whose trials under ideological totalitarianism he chronicled in his captivating 2015 novel Notes From Underground), and was a true friend of the United States. This British patriot and “good European” knew American things well.

But wasn’t America founded on the conceit of the social contract, and thus on the modernist illusion that politics is pure artifice and thus far from rooted in the deepest wellsprings of human nature? Yes and no. As Scruton wrote so luminously in his chapter on “The Social Contract” in his book The West and the Rest (2003), the American decision “to adopt a constitution and make a jurisdiction ab initio” in 1787 still presupposed a preexisting people (“We, the people”) shaped by the Western inheritance, the Christian religion, traditions of republican freedom ancient and modern, “modern discoveries in political science,” and the colonial experience of self-government. The American bonds of membership presuppose the whole “web of non-contractual obligations” to which all civilized peoples adhere, as well as a people and nation whose debts, obligations, and loyalties endure in time. One only needs to read Lincoln on “the mystic chords of memory” in his first Inaugural Address to appreciate this profound truth that contract can only bind when it gives expression to existing “membership” and the memories and obligations that inform it.

The bonds of membership, the memories and loyalties of a self-governing people, transcend what is chosen in any given moment of time or delineated in any original contract.

The bonds of membership and the memories and loyalties of a self-governing people transcend what is chosen at any given moment of time or delineated in any original contract. With it comes duties to which one is honor-bound, and not just rights to do as one wills. To be sure, Scruton valued rights within their legitimate sphere. The rule of law, not soulless legalism, was a sacrosanct principle of his, and at the heart of the English liberty he loved. But he saw only a brutal diminution of both moral and political life under the new “ideology of human rights,” as he called it, a diminished understanding of “autonomy” that is shorn of moral and civic duty and hence of the mutual accountability that defines persons living in free and lawful political communities.

The Task of Conservatism Today

At the end of Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition, Scruton recapitulates the trajectory that he so suggestively traced in its pages: “Modern conservatism began as a defense of tradition against the calls for popular sovereignty; it became an appeal on behalf of religion and high culture against the materialist doctrine of progress, before joining forces with the classical liberals in the fight against socialism.” This is a perfect recapitulation of the argument as far as it goes. Scruton then proceeds to argue that conservatism today is best seen as a champion of Western civilization against its cultured despisers, the advocates of “political correctness” who see the West as uniquely culpable among all peoples and civilizations, and against “religious extremism,” especially in the form of militant Islamism.

The last formulation suggests an ambiguity in Scruton’s self-presentation. Sometimes he presents himself as a defender of the Christian inheritance, sometimes as a defender of the secular state against religious forms of membership. The two affirmations are of course not necessarily incompatible. Occasionally and only occasionally, however, he seems to suggest that Islam reveals something essential about the nature of religion as such. (Much more often he identifies with the Christian call to repentance and forgiveness—to “turn the sword inward” rather than pursuing the path of fanaticism and religious imperium). One is tempted to say that Scruton’s legitimate revulsion against Islamist fanaticism led him to accentuate his emphasis on secularism as the crucial ingredient in modern liberty.

But, as always, Scruton’s approach turns out to be dialectical, in the rich-non-Marxist sense of the term. As he put it in his 2017 book Where We Are: The State of Britain Now, at the political level he was content with “day-to-day habits of neighborliness” that persist in a territorial democracy not unduly distorted by ideological effusions and political fanaticism. “Belonging,” he suggested, is the basic political fact, and it would have to do, especially since the British people “are essentially without religious belief, even though retaining a core of Christian feeling.” Orwell had compellingly argued much the same in his great 1940 essay The Lion and the Unicorn. Scruton could only add that the desacralization of British life had proceeded apace over the ensuing eighty years since Orwell wrote his powerful account and defense of “Englishness.”

Openness to the Light of the Soul

But as a philosopher and human being, Scruton could not rest content with political belonging shorn of even residual respect for the longing for the transcendent, the sacred, and the eternal that defines man as man and is so crucial to his dignity and fulfillment. Readers of Gentle Regrets know that Scruton had long left behind his self-described “atheistic apprenticeship,” whatever insistent (and unteachable) contemporary critics might say. Scruton had come to see in such disparate phenomena as the culture of repudiation, degrading pornography, and the totalitarian assault on the bodies and souls of human beings, acts of “desecration,” nihilistic assaults on the face of God because assaults on the human soul that bears the spark of the divine in it (on these themes, see his 2012 book The Face of God: The Gifford Lectures). Writing at the intersection of political philosophy, theology, and philosophical anthropology, always with impressive care, elegance, and lucidity, Scruton embarked on a great act of anthropological recovery, an act of recovery diffused through his later work. He came to believe that free and responsible human beings cannot escape “their consciousness of consciousness,” “their awareness of the light shining in the centre of their being.” “The mutual accountability of persons”—of the “I” to “I”—points to a more fundamental relationship between ensouled persons and “the ‘I’ of God, in which we all stand judged and from which love and freedom flow,” to quote a 2008 text on “The Return of Religion” from The Roger Scruton Reader edited by Mark Dooley.

In this return to rational faith, philosophy could only take one so far. But it could remain open to the soul’s encounter with the sacred, and to those mysterious meeting points between the sacred and the profane, illumined in art, literature, music, and sacred texts, where time meets eternity and the soul encounters the True, the Good, and Beautiful in ways that can only be seen “as through a glass darkly.” As a philosopher sensitive to what he called “Intimations of Infinity,” Scruton did everything within his powers to show that scientism, like totalitarianism, deprived human beings of those experiences that flow from the initial recognition of the light of self-consciousness within the soul. All the “nothing buttery” in the world, the various reductionisms that so dogmatically explain away the high in light of the low (such as reducing the mind to the workings of the brain), only serve to strip human beings of our dignity as morally accountable persons.

If religion is to recover its rightful place in human life, then the light at the center of the soul (a light that points outside and above itself) must again inform the “We” of social and political life, a “We” constituted by free and mutually accountable persons, and not playthings of various deterministic forces posited by fashionable ideologies. In rediscovering and drawing attention to this light, Roger Scruton went a long way to recovering the metaphysical foundations of conservatism. In his own inimitable way, he recovered the perennial connection between the city and the soul, the “care of the soul” at the heart of any authentic polis. Grateful to the model of his life, we must continue the work of philosophical and anthropological recovery that Scruton so impressively began.

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