Roger Scruton and the Love of Home
by Mark Dooley, Public Discourse:
In denying students access to their history; in dumbing down art, music, literature, and even the sacred liturgy; and in celebrating obscenity over beauty, you detach people from their past, their home, and the transcendental dimension of the human experience. You make them strangers to themselves, to the soul, and the soil.
Sir Roger Scruton (1944–2020) was a most uncharacteristic intellectual: a philosopher who spent much of his long career at war with the academy; a prolific author who eschewed the city for life on a farm, who hunted to hounds and wrote movingly on wine as that which comes to us wrapped in a “halo of significance”; a conservative who rejected liberal internationalism, but whose outlook was genuinely cosmopolitan; a courageous activist expelled from Communist Czechoslovakia for daring to speak of hope at a time when none existed; a thinker schooled in the Anglophone tradition of philosophy, yet one who was quintessentially European; someone who “served a full apprenticeship in atheism,” but who, having pondered his loss of faith against the backdrop of advancing secularism, “steadily regained it.” Scruton was a public intellectual who took risks for freedom and who never sought popularity when truth was at stake. Indeed, he spent a lifetime, as he put it, seeking “comfort in uncomfortable truths.”
Those truths were enunciated and defended in a corpus comprising sixty books (including four novels and a book of poetry), hundreds of scholarly articles and scores of newspaper columns on topics as diverse as beauty, architecture, music, sex, politics, animal rights, wine, hunting, farming, religion, and the environment. Unifying all these works is, however, one underlying conviction, which is that we all long for the consolation of home or of membership. We all desire to surmount “natural alienation,” to belong somewhere that we recognize as ours. In a world where nihilism and estrangement are the norm, Scruton, as I have written elsewhere, “shines a light on our failures, not in order to condemn them, but in order to lead us from despair, loneliness, and desecration back home to beauty and its sacred source.” That is why I consider him something of a latter-day Hegel, someone who incorporates the full range of human experience into his thinking, and for whom art, religion, and philosophy serve as “a living endorsement of the human community.”
Scruton was often correctly acclaimed as the greatest conservative philosopher of his generation. However, he said to me in our book Conversations with Roger Scruton: “All that conservatism ultimately means, in my view, is the disposition to hold on to what you know and love.” Politically, therefore, he was a thinker in the mold of Edmund Burke, one for whom the defense of ancestral institutions was vital to the health of a nation. However, when Scruton writes in defense of conservatism, he does so from a philosophical and not merely a political perspective. That is because Scruton’s politics emerge from his deeply held philosophical convictions about the human person and the repeated attempts by science and pseudo-science to undermine it. Communism is one such form of pseudo-science, and one that he spent his life opposing; but so too are naturalism, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, or, indeed, any of those academic disciplines when they go beyond the bounds of their subject and push an ideological agenda while masquerading as a “science.” To a lesser or greater extent, these tear aside all those “features of the world which constitute its personal face—rights and duties, laws and values, institutions of membership and religion.” This leads, as he wrote in Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey, to a “peculiar society, devoid of counsel, in which decisions have the impersonality of a machine.”
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