What true conservatism looks like

Jan 20, 2022 by

by Giles Fraser, UnHerd:

“Love is a relationship between dying things,” said Roger Scruton just months before he was to succumb to lung cancer. We hold on to the ones we love, and hold them ever closer, precisely because they are mortal and will pass away.

This could be a statement of the philosopher’s conservatism, as much as an explanation for the outpouring of love that has followed his death, two years ago last week. And the publication of a new collection of his old essays and columns, Against the Tide, along with the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation, could be seen as a part of a canonisation process.

[…]  This is what I learnt from Roger Scruton. Conservatism is much more attuned to the spiritual and the emotional in human life than the socialism I spent most of my life subscribing to. As a socialist, I always wanted the world in general to be a better place, to improve. The future was always the place where the world would be better. I would happily ignore the past and the present, even jettison them, in the pursuit of this yet-to-be dream. It was a cold philosophy, despite its genuine desire for universal betterment. The not yet was always preferred to the present. And love in general was always preferred to love in particular. Scruton disabused me of these dangerous abstractions. Love is specific and tragic, a relationship between dying things.

“At the heart of every conservative endeavour is the effort to conserve a historically given community,” wrote Scruton in the Wall Street Journal, in 2002. “In any conflict, the conservative is the one who sides with ‘us’ against ‘them’ — not knowing but trusting. He is the one who looks for the good in the institutions, customs and habits that he has inherited. He is the one who seeks to defend and perpetuate an instinctive sense of loyalty, and who is, therefore, suspicious of experiments and innovations that put loyalty at risk.”

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