I still recall how Roger Scruton poignantly smiled at me as I left his fabled Sunday Hill Farm a few weeks before he died. We often met there but, on that occasion, I had a particular mission in traveling to Wiltshire. As his literary executor, we were to discuss his legacy in light of his illness. Even then, so close to death, Roger had no idea that the curtain was about to descend on his extraordinary life. In that parting smile, however, I glimpsed a soul already hovering on the threshold. He said to me: “My work has been nothing if not spiritual,” and he seemed relieved when I gave him all the reasons why he could be confident in that assessment. Five years on, and I am still consumed by that precious smile. Similarly, I cannot quite let go of his words regarding the spiritual nature of his work. Indeed, when I last stood at his graveside in September last year, a glorious ray of evening sunshine pierced the gloom and smiled down upon his mortal remains. I smiled back content that my dear friend was at peace. 

Roger Scruton’s philosophical vision could be entirely explained by focussing on the meaning of a smile. For him, a smile was not a mechanical response to some external stimuli, but a revelation of the human person mingled with their flesh. It was a revelation of the subject shining from the veil of sense experience. It was an intimation of the spirit that transcends all biological and material constraints. Indeed, if you were to ask me what unites Scruton’s politics, his theories of architecture, religion, sexuality, animal rights, or even his critique of the “new left,” I would say it is the concept of smiling. That is because his entire vocation was one of rejecting the mentality that would seek to expunge the smiling human face from the very fabric of our natural world, our institutions, our homes, and from free societies. Indeed, societies are only free when they permit you to smile, and when they themselves offer a smiling countenance to those who would settle there. Where there is no smile, there is no face but simply, what Scruton called, “the skull beneath the skin.” This results in “a peculiar society, devoid of counsel, in which decisions have the impersonality of a machine.”

If Roger had immense respect for Daniel Mahoney, it was because he, too, identifies what is most important in Scruton’s writings. Unlike so many who come to Scruton, Dan understands that you cannot appreciate what he is up to unless you first acknowledge the spiritual dimension of his vast vision. What, indeed, is Scrutonian conservatism if not a way of life that seeks to preserve the personality of the world from those who would repudiate, denounce, or reject it? What is his philosophy of home if not an acknowledgment of the fact that, if we gaze upon it with a kind and gentle countenance, the world smiles back at us with a purely human face? Smiling is uniquely human because it reveals something that only humans possess—freedom, love, and a deep desire for the divine. It is for this reason that appearances matter. In dragging the human subject down into the world of objects, in reducing it to mere matter or pure flesh, we plunder the personality that reveals itself through smiles, blushes, prayer, and those uniquely human characteristics that set us apart from the rest of creation. Likewise, when we deny beauty, we deface the world, thus rendering us spiritually homeless.

What Mahoney consistently describes in his writings on Scruton—and again at the end of “Scrutonian Conservatism Reconsidered”—is a vision of the world, not as a place, but as a home—one that cannot be conserved or sustained without “keeping up appearances.” The appearances, for Scruton, constitute “the skin of significance” through which we relate to each other and the world. For example, you can have a street of identically built houses, but each will appear vastly different because they smile at the world with the unique style of their owners. That is why a world without beauty—without the appearances—is a world of alienation, detachment, and estrangement. It is why when we peel away the personality of institutions, homes, and even of people themselves, we do not experience liberation, but the bondage of separation and isolation. We become disconnected from the past, from our common home, and from each other. 

This explains why, in everything that he wrote, Scruton was primarily concerned with conserving the transcendental, or those intimations of infinity that bring you across the threshold that separates the timeless from time. This is “spiritual” work, but it is also political because there can be no humane politics without being able to identify with the personality of institutions. This is what Hegel meant when he described the great drama that leads from slavery to citizenship. When subject to tyranny, people cannot identify with institutions but rather see them as threatening or oppressive. In such a world, there is no sense of home but only that of alienation. When the rule of law trumps tyranny, however, we no longer perceive institutions as a threat. Now, we can identify with them because they, being no less subject to the law, uphold the rights and freedoms of all those who belong to the ancestral home. They now possess “corporate personality,” and it is because of this that we can call institutions to account when they cease to smile. 

Scruton did not deny the usefulness of market mechanisms and parliamentary politics to help in the work of conservation. However, none of those can properly function unless the face of the world remains intact. Unless beauty and belonging can triumph over banality and alienation, we are condemned to a world of objects devoid of those “portals to the transcendental” through which we can savour the fresh air of real freedom. We saw it with Soviet communism, which is why, during the dark era of the 1980s, Scruton put himself in such peril to visit those benighted lands with his message of hope. But that message was not about practical politics per se, but rather about how the Soviets could never entirely expunge the flame of freedom because they could never entirely suppress subjectivity. The Czechs and the Poles knew they had been evicted from their common home; its smiling face having been desecrated in an act of cultural, spiritual, and political vandalism. In listening to Scruton, they came to understand, as he wrote, that you do not have to “live only—or even at all—in the present.” You have the freedom to despise the world that surrounds you and to live in another way. The art, literature, and music of your long-buried civilisation must remind you of this and thus point to the path that lies always before you: “the path out of desecration towards the sacred and the sacrificial.”

There is nothing abstract in what is sacred and sacrificial. Without the sense that personality permeates the fabric of our world, thus safeguarding it against desecration, we are at the mercy of those who would tear away the thin topsoil in which freedom, love, value, and home are nurtured and conserved. If our world has ceased to smile, it is because we no longer recognise the transcendental dimension of art, culture, education, sexuality, politics, and even religion. That is why alienation has become the new norm, and why so many simply cannot identify with the society in which they live. Indeed, it is why so many, as Scruton oftentimes observed, repudiate it in wanton fits of oikophobia, or hatred of home.

Nothing can fix that sad dilemma except the type of solutions that Roger Scruton offered when he pondered the meaning of a smile. That, of course, was the great lesson he learned from Hegel, who taught that the process of surmounting alienation would come to completion in “the union of subject and object.” By this he meant the point at which the world smiles back at us, all alienation having been overcome. That is what it means to be at home in the world and to discover that you belong somewhere rather than nowhere. It is what it means to look upon your patrimony and to hear in it those ancestral voices whispering in the void. It is what it means to gaze at the natural world and to see in it, not something to exploit, but a source of beauty and consolation. It is what it means to stare at the smiling eyes of another person, and to know that you are beheld in love. 

I walked towards the door. I stopped and slowly turned to find him smiling. As the door closed behind me, I realised that, beyond all the books, Roger Scruton had just summed up for me his life’s work. And, in that moment, I knew there was no doubting that he was right: it was nothing if not spiritual.