Sir Roger Scruton, R.I.P.

A true warrior for Western culture has passed from this world.
Seeing culture as "a vessel in which intrinsic values are captured
and handed on to future generations," Sir Roger Scruton thus saw
the accumulations of traditions, lessons, and habits necessary for
a good life and a just society go into that vessel; these all being more
beautiful and real than anything made by the most brilliant
planners and intellectuals, especially the intellectuals on the left.
He thought the latter were contemptuous of the wisdom of the past,
always trying to replace it with ideologies which either were untried
or have been tried but failed miserably, i.e. socialism.

Sir Roger subscribed to a worldview based largely on the philosophy
of Edmund Burke, an 18th century Irish-born statesman who served
in the British Parliament and is a forefather of modern conservatism.
As a young man in Paris in the 1960s, Scruton witnessed the 1968
unrest which turned him away from the radicalism of the socialists
and communists and toward conservatism. He was vindicated upon
seeing the mass privations and suffering perpetrated upon other
parts of the world, and took a principled, if lonely stand, in the realm
of academics as a university professor; a conservative prof in a
crowd of far left-wing sorts is not at all a comfortable situation.
Scruton often told the story of how he watched protesters in the
streets outside his window in his Paris apartment, during which he
came to realize that building things of value, i.e. communities,
societies, nations, legal and economic systems, educational systems,
and other institutions of civil society is difficult and requires much
time, while it is so easy and quick to destroy them. This realization
thus triggered another, that Scruton was a conservative, or was on
the way to becoming one.

Scruton was by and large known as a "conservative philosopher",
and there was more than a little truth to that. But always a loyalist
to the truth, he wanted always to honor the truth in full. So Sir
Roger would show the sense in which a particular opinion of his
was conservative. As with conservatives of all kinds, Scruton
despised communism and all forms of socialism, regarding these
ideologies were soul-eroding abominations as well as failures
at delivering economic prosperity. Consequently, he had little use
for his native Britain's Labor Party, even during its more moderate
era when Tony Blair was their leader, later becoming Prime Minister.
He also viewed with equal disdain the Democratic Party of the
United States, even before its leftward land-rocket ride in the past
twenty years.

However, Sir Roger was not copacetic with the economic philosophy
of the British Tories (conservatives) or the American Republican
Party. Although he believed in market mechanisms and was strongly
opposed to central planning and what he recognized as a dependency-
inducing welfare state, Scruton denied that the outcomes of free
exchanges in the marketplace are automatically just. Liberty, in his
mind, was but one important value among community and solidarity,
order and decency, honor and faith. As a result, Scruton believed that
some amount of regulation was just and necessary for the purpose
of protecting persons and institutions of civil society --- drawing upon
his hero Edmund Burke, who called these the "little platoons" which
should play the lead role in promoting health, education and welfare,
and ensuring that new generations would receive and utilize the
virtues which people need to thrive and to contribute to society.

Although Scruton would ally himself with classical liberals, even with
Austrian-school liberals in the struggle against communism (Sir Roger
held seminars and built underground institutions behind the Iron
Curtain), he rejected "individualism" in any serious sense. Most funda-
mental to his moral and political thought was the dignity of the human
person. He did, it must be noted, acknowledge that in order to flourish
persons need relationships, beginning with the family. It followed,
then, that Scruton believed that one naturally and quite rightly had
a special and unique love for, and a duty toward, members of one's
own family, tradition of faith, local community and region, and one's
own fellow citizens.

Scruton categorically rejected "multiculturalism" which he regarded
as anti-cultural in that it lumped and melded all the different cultures
into a monoculture of contemporary upscale progressive ideology.
Sir Roger was then shrilly accused of racism, xenophobia, and other
crimes against "political correctness" when in fact he respected cultures
much more than those who hurled their emotionally-based epithets
at him. Scruton learned Arabic in order to read and study the Quran.
He also made in-depth studies and analysis of Hindu and other Eastern
Traditions of faith to discover for himself the wisdom he thought them
to possess.

Leftist philospophers, such as Karl Marx, believe that the point of
philosophy is to illustrate how the world should be remade, quote:
"The philosophers have thus far merely interpreted the world; the point
is to change it." Sir Roger did not think that philosophy, or really any-
thing else, could usefully plan or radically reform the world, nor did
he want to see it happen in the first place. But he did believe that philo-
sophy could help us see the value of good things, things which should
be preserved by doing small repairs via moderate reforms, so as not to
throw the baby out with the bath water.

Sir Roger Scruton passed away, aged 75. We could sure use a lot more
people like Sir Roger in our topsy-turvy world. Rest well, Sir Roger.


MEM