Posts Tagged ‘Roger Scruton’

His last chance to “chat about the future.” (Photo: Pete Helme)

My post on Sir Roger Scruton‘s death on January 12 tapped into an unexpected amount of interest. I didn’t know the writer and philosopher’s work before his death, so it’s odd I find myself writing the third post in less than two months, but here we are. (The other earlier post  was here.)

The new occasion: over at The Critic, his Irish biographer Mark Dooley recounts his last visits with his friend and subject. The piece might serve as an introduction to those who are as new to his thought as I am.

He begins:

“It was just before Christmas last year when I travelled to Sunday Hill Farm in Wiltshire, the fabled home of my dear friend Sir Roger Scruton. I was there to chat about his health and some future collaborations that we had planned.  When he was diagnosed with cancer at the end of last summer, he had written asking me to visit so that we could, as he put it, ‘chat about the future’.

As I entered the farmhouse – what he liked to call ‘Scrutopia’ – Roger sat alone in the evening gloom tapping away on his laptop.  Even in his weakened state, he felt compelled to write.  Back in 2015, when we recorded the discussions for my book Conversations with Roger Scruton, he told me that, ‘I wrote from the moment I had the calling to be a writer, which I got when I was sixteen.  I didn’t know how to do it, but I wrote every day and I always have done’.  This was a truth I discovered first-hand whenever I visited him at home, or when he came to Ireland, or even when we were at conferences elsewhere.  The first thing he did each morning was go to his desk and write.  For him, it was a daily vocation that simply had to answered.  That day was no different.  ‘What are you writing?’ I asked.  ‘The Scrutopia newsletter,’ he replied without taking his eyes off the screen.  He then proceeded to tell me how he had just finished a condensed summary of the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission’s report.  The furore surrounding his sacking and subsequent reinstatement as chair of that body, had done nothing to diminish his passion for it.  ‘I wrote a synopsis of the full report in 500 words.  But they are good words,’ he added with pride.

Roger could barely walk and was in great discomfort, and yet, as his beloved wife Sophie told me, ‘He hasn’t spent a single day in bed’.  When not writing, he was reading, amongst others, a book on Irish poet Seamus Heaney.  ‘For whatever reason, I always ignored him.  But now I see that he was a truly great poet.’

A few excerpts:

England, he once wrote, is an ‘imagined community’, by which he meant that it derives its personality from its customs, institutions, literature, music and religion. It, too, has a personality and character that invites love, respect and loyalty. But, as with all persons, it is no less susceptible to desecration. Love, morality, culture and sacred values are all fragile things that take many generations to build up, but only a day to tear down. If our common home consists of such things, it is because it is also a thing of intrinsic value. For Scruton, England was less a place than a matrix of meaning from which people could ‘stand, as it were, at the window of our empirical world and gaze out towards the transcendental’. Radicals of all stripes attempt to smash that window, but, in the way that he lives and loves, the conservationist shows that we human beings ‘have an innate need to conceptualise our world in terms of the transcendental’, and, in so doing, ‘to live out the distinction between the sacred and the profane’.

***

In a poignant essay from 2005, entitled ‘Dying Quietly’, Scruton wrote that ‘My death is not simply, for me, the death of RS, the event about which you might read in an obituary. It is a vast crisis, standing athwart my life and commanding me to prepare for it…Every death prompts the search for meaning – especially the death of someone loved. But my death challenges me in another way; its inevitability is like a command – namely, live your life so that this will be part of it and not just an end to it. St. Paul reminds us that “in the midst of life we are in death” meaning that our normal ways of living forbid us to plan either the time or the manner of our extinction. Yet we need to live in such a way that death, when it comes, is not a catastrophe but (if possible) a culmination – a conclusion to our actions that can be read back into all that preceded it and show it to be worthwhile’.

In the quiet and dignified way in which he died Roger Scruton testified to the truth of his own words. For many people, his death was, indeed, a catastrophe – the loss of someone who had given them hope in dark times. And yet, as I glanced at him for the last time, I saw a smiling man whose end was the conclusion he had always hoped for and richly deserved. It was a fitting conclusion that rendered his brave and beautiful life profoundly worthwhile.

Read the whole thing here.

Timothy Garton Ash  (Photo:Christine Baker-Parrish)

Over at The Spectator, a lifelong liberal mourns a cheerfully pessimistic conservative. (We’ve written about Stanford’s (and Oxford’s) Timothy Garton Ash here and here and here.)  His remarks are one of a dozen recollections of the late Roger Scruton, who died last week:

“There’s this very interesting Hungarian called, er, I think, Soros,” said Roger, sitting in the bohemian book- and music-strewn thicket of his Notting Hill flat. This was sometime in the mid-1980s, and our shared desire to support dissidents in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary had brought us together. Incredible though it may sound, no one had then heard of George Soros.

Cheerful pessimist

Our conspiratorial missions behind the Iron Curtain were, let’s be honest, also huge fun, but what needs to be remembered is the amount of hard, thankless charitable administration that Roger undertook, between writing his 50 or so books. Yet the boring agenda of those charitable trusts would be enlivened by Roger’s outrageous overstatements about the western intellectual and political establishment, slipping from his lips with a kind of silent chuckle.

The last time we sat down together at any length was when he invited me to talk about free speech at the Inner Temple, an ur-Burkean institution he visibly adored. Afterwards he wrote an email commenting on how one rather forceful, blind Iraqi refugee questioner “had mastered the snobbery of disadvantage so effectively and so much to his own advantage” — characteristically provocative, probably unfair, and yet what a thought-provoking phrase “the snobbery of disadvantage” is. He went on “we are beginning to learn, what of course we should have known from our experience with totalitarian communism, just how malleable human nature is, and how unlikely it is that truth will prevail. But after discussions such as yesterday’s one always feels a little more cheerful.” As a lifelong liberal I shall miss this cheerfully pessimistic conservative.

Read the rest of the recollections here.

“By joining the mob, you make yourself safe.” (Photo: Pete Helme)

Sir Roger Vernon Scruton died on Sunday. I knew nothing, really, about the British philosopher of politics and culture, but on his death, his name began appearing in my Facebook newsfeed.

The most intriguing reference was from my friend George Dunn, who posted Scruton’s review of Douglas Murray’s recent book  called The Madness of Crowds, “which addresses scapegoating and crowd derangement within our current political environment. As one might expect, Murray invokes René Girard along the way. Scruton summarizes the unseemly state of affairs to which Murray’s book is a response in language redolent of Girardian insights.”

He cites this passage from Scruton’s essay: “You are accused by the mob, examined by the mob and condemned by the mob, and if you have brought this on yourself, then you have only yourself to blame. For the mob is by nature innocent: it washes its own conscience in a flow of collective indignation, and by joining it you make yourself safe.”

George continues: “Murray’s proposed antidote to this madness is also quite Girardian—a rediscovery of the power of forgiveness. But Scruton wonders whether we are still capable of this gesture in an era when religious faith has receded into the cultural twilight: ‘Can we adopt the posture of forgiveness that Murray is so keen to advocate, without turning to the supreme example that was once given to us?'”

“We might be reminded of what Girard has said about political correctness as a faux super-Christianity, which mimics the Christian concern for victims, while turning it into an instrument for gaining political, social, or spiritual power. When the concern for victims becomes an ideology of ‘victimism’ divorced from such traditional virtues as charity, forgiveness, and humility, Girard believes it becomes something diabolical.”

René Girard on “victimism” divorced from charity

In the article, Scruton writes, “The archive of your crimes is stored in cyberspace, and however much you may have confessed to them and sworn to change, they will pursue you for the rest of your life, just as long as someone has an interest in drawing attention to them. And when the mob turns on you, it is with a pitiless intensity that bears no relation to the objective seriousness of your fault. A word out of place, a hasty judgment, a slip of the tongue — whatever the fault might be, it is sufficient, once picked upon, to put you beyond the pale of human sympathy.”

Another passage:

The crimes for which we are judged are existential crimes: through speaking in the wrong way you display one of the phobias or isms that show you to be beyond acceptable humanity. You are a homophobe, an Islamophobe, a white supremacist or a racist, and no argument can refute these accusations once they have been made.

Book under review

You might, in your private life, have worked for the integration and acceptance of your local Muslim community, or for a wider understanding of the roots of Islamic philosophy. This will be irrelevant when it comes to rebutting a charge of Islamophobia, just as your record in promoting minorities in the workplace will do nothing to clear you of the charge of racism, once the crucial words are out.

For your accusers are not interested in your deeds; they are interested in you, and in the crucial fact about you, which is whether or not you are “one of us”. Your faults cannot be overcome by voluntary action, since they adhere to the kind of thing that you are. And you reveal what you are in the words that define you.

Read the entire article here. Scruton concludes: “My own solution — which is to ignore social media and to address, in my writings, only the interest in the true and the false, rather than in the permitted and the offensive — confines me within a circle that is considerably narrower than the Twittersphere. But here and there in this circle, there are people who do not merely see the point of truthful discourse, but who are also eager to engage with it. And I cling to the view that that is enough, as it was for the Irish monks who kept the lamp of learning alight during the Dark Ages. They may have thought they were losing, but they won in the end.”