Sir Roger Scruton was a warrior for Western
culture. Culture was, for him, everything: ‘a vessel in which intrinsic values
are captured and handed on to future generations.’
We meet by chance
and find in chance necessity:
what seems an accident
in retrospect is fate.
and find in chance necessity:
what seems an accident
in retrospect is fate.
These were the opening words of a poem that British
philosopher Sir Roger Scruton wrote seven years ago to celebrate my marriage to
Anna. We are among that fortunate group of people who knew the “Aged Professor”
as a dear friend and mentor—his life’s true work, as he called it. It’s a life
that sadly ended this Sunday at the age of 75.
Sir Roger was a warrior for Western culture. Culture was, for him,
everything: “a vessel in which intrinsic values are captured and handed on
to future generations.” He saw the slow and steady accumulation of
traditions, teachings, and habits as the necessary ingredient for the good life
and the just society, containing more truth and beauty than anything built by
the most brilliant planners and intellectuals. Intellectuals of the left, he
thought, were all too willing to discard the wisdom of the past for untried—or
failed—ideologies, a risky endeavor because “good things are easily destroyed,
but not easily created.”
Sir Roger gladly held a worldview he traced back to the great
18th-century English statesman Edmund Burke and beyond. Burke made his name
opposing the ideological terror of the French Revolution. For Scruton, it was a
near-French revolution in Paris in 1968 that caused his younger self to reject
the radicalism of 20th century socialists and communists. He recounted to us
many times how he marveled from the window of his mansard room in Paris at
the mayhem the ‘68-ers caused, and at the global slaughters and starvations
perpetrated by their fellow ideologues in power, which they ignored.
The cultural
and intellectual elite never forgave his principled stand. After he started his
career as a university professor in the 1970s, his peers shunned him, even
despised him. They sought to drive him from the academy and polite society. In
one of his final speeches, given before the Polish Parliament last year,
he described his
fellow academics as “nice colleagues” who taught him “how nasty niceness can
be.”
He hardly fared better from his erstwhile allies in politics. The
Conservative Party had a love-hate relationship with the United Kingdom’s most
famous conservative intellectual for the simple reason that he sought to conserve
things.
He admired von Mises and Hayek and defended free markets (calling
them “a necessary part of any stable community”) yet saw certain issues as
beyond the market’s bounds, from city planning to sexual morality. When he
thought the Conservative Party undermined his country’s culture, he said so.
Whether as a professor or in politics, Scruton was proof of the biblical adage,
“a prophet has no honor in his own country.”
His rejection at home led him abroad. The 1970s and ‘80s saw him
frequently travel behind the Iron Curtain in support of those who sought to
reclaim their countries and cultures from Soviet domination. He taught at
underground universities and wrote for samizdat publications, even smuggling in
printing materials at great personal risk.
Sir Roger hated communism because it rejected the inherited
wisdoms of the people it enslaved. He later opposed the post-modernist
direction of the European Union on similar grounds. Like communist
internationalism before it, the EU’s progressive transnational project ran
roughshod over distinct nations and cultures. He cheered the recent surge of
national sentiment in Eastern Europe, while urging it to be grounded in
something deeper and higher than mere national feeling. He supported a vibrant,
sophisticated nationalism, instead of a reactionary, short-sighted one.
Whether it was politics, philosophy, or any other endeavor,
Scruton excelled and elevated our minds by reminding us of our inheritance and
celebrating the beauty of the natural world and the human capacity to create.
He was the most brilliant and celebrated philosopher of aesthetics in modern
times and authored dozens of books.
He wanted buildings that made us feel at home; art that inspired
thinking of the sublime; and institutions that help all people flourish. His
philosophical investigations and pursuit of the truth were always grounded in
human experience. Sir Roger should be remembered as the patron saint of Common
Sense.
Given his ideals, Scruton was often painted as a dark and dour
man, wistfully mourning society’s slide away from the tried and true. Those who
met him knew otherwise.
My wife, Anna, and I first met him as students more than a decade
ago. He was to us the great encourager in an age of alienation. We and many
others felt “at home” with him whether it was in a Schloss in Vienna, a country
house in Virginia, a downtown café in Budapest, or the bright green fields
of the Cotswolds.
Sir Roger’s generosity of spirit will reverberate on in the
thousands of lives he personally touched and in our great civilization that he
conveyed into a new century.
Marion Smith
is the executive director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in
Washington, D.C. and president of the Common Sense Society, an educational
foundation active in Europe and the United States.
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