Obituaries

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A conservative thinker with some brains:

Sir Roger Vernon Scruton FBA FRSL (/ˈskruːtən/; 27 February 1944 – 12 January 2020) was an English philosopher and writer who specialised in aesthetics and political philosophy, particularly in the furtherance of traditionalist conservative views.[2][3]
Editor from 1982 to 2001 of The Salisbury Review, a conservative political journal, Scruton wrote over 50 books on philosophy, art, music, politics, literature, culture, sexuality, and religion; he also wrote novels and two operas. His most notable publications include The Meaning of Conservatism (1980), Sexual Desire (1986), The Aesthetics of Music (1997), and How to Be a Conservative (2014).[4] He was a regular contributor to the popular media, including The Times, The Spectator, and the New Statesman.

Scruton embraced conservatism after witnessing the May 1968 student protests in France. From 1971 to 1992 he was a lecturer and professor of aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London, after which he held several part-time academic positions, including in the United States.[5] In the 1980s he helped to establish underground academic networks in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe, for which he was awarded the Czech Republic's Medal of Merit (First Class) by President Václav Havel in 1998.[6] Scruton was knighted in the 2016 Birthday Honours for "services to philosophy, teaching and public education".

From 1979 to 1989, Scruton was an active supporter of dissidents in Czechoslovakia under Communist Party rule, forging links between the country's dissident academics and their counterparts in Western universities. As part of the Jan Hus Educational Foundation,[50] he and other academics visited Prague and Brno, now in the Czech Republic, in support of an underground education network started by the Czech dissident Julius Tomin, smuggling in books, organizing lectures, and eventually arranging for students to study for a Cambridge external degree in theology (the only faculty that responded to the request for help). There were structured courses and samizdat translations, books were printed, and people sat exams in a cellar with papers smuggled out through the diplomatic bag.[51][52]


Scruton was detained in 1985 in Brno before being expelled from the country. The Czech dissident Bronislava Müllerová watched him walk across the border with Austria: "There was this broad empty space between the two border posts, absolutely empty, not a single human being in sight except for one soldier, and across that broad empty space trudged an English philosopher, Roger Scruton, with his little bag into Austria."[53] On 17 June that year, he was placed on the Index of Undesirable Persons. He wrote that he had also been followed during visits to Poland and Hungary.[54]

For his work in supporting dissidents, Scruton was awarded the First of June Prize in 1993 by the Czech city of Plzeň, and in 1998 he was awarded the Czech Republic's Medal of Merit (First Class) by President Václav Havel.[54] In 2019 the Polish government awarded him the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland.[55] Scruton was strongly critical of figures in the West—in particular Eric Hobsbawm—who "chose to exonerate" the crimes and atrocities of former communist regimes.[56] His experience of dissident intellectual life in 1980s Communist Prague is recorded in fictional form in his novel Notes from Underground (2014).[57] He wrote in 2019 that "despite the appeal of the Poles, Hungarians, Romanians and many more, it is the shy, cynical Czechs to whom I lost my heart and from whom I have never retrieved it".

From 2001 to 2009 Scruton wrote a wine column for the New Statesman, and contributed to The World of Fine Wine and Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine (2007), with his essay "The Philosophy of Wine". His book I Drink Therefore I am: A Philosopher's Guide to Wine (2009) in part comprises material from his New Statesman column.[85][86] Scruton also wrote three libretti, two set to music. The first is a one-act chamber piece, The Minister (1994),[87] and the second a two-act opera, Violet (2005). The latter, based on the life of the British harpsichordist Violet Gordon-Woodhouse, was performed twice at the Guildhall School of Music in London in 2005.

Scruton specialised in aesthetics throughout his career. From 1971 to 1992 he taught aesthetics at Birkbeck College. His PhD thesis formed the basis of his first book, Art and Imagination (1974), in which he argued that "what demarcates aesthetic interest from other sorts is that it involves the appreciation of something for its own sake".[111] He subsequently published The Aesthetics of Architecture (1979), The Aesthetic Understanding (1983 and 1997), The Aesthetics of Music (1997), and Beauty (2010). In 2008 a two-day conference was held at Durham University to assess his impact in the field, and in 2012 a collection of essays, Scruton's Aesthetics, was published by Palgrave Macmillan.[112]

In an Intelligence Squared debate in March 2009, Scruton (seconding historian David Starkey) proposed the motion: "Britain has become indifferent to beauty", and held an image of Botticelli's The Birth of Venus next to one of the supermodel Kate Moss.[113] Later that year he wrote and presented a BBC Two documentary, Why Beauty Matters, in which he argued that beauty should be restored to its traditional position in art, architecture and music.[114] He wrote that he had received "more than 500 e-mails from viewers, all but one saying, 'Thank Heavens someone is saying what needs to be said.'"[115] In 2018 he argued that a belief in God makes for more beautiful architecture: "Who can doubt, on visiting Venice, that this abundant flower of aesthetic endeavor was rooted in faith and watered by penitential tears? Surely, if we want to build settlements today we should heed the lesson of Venice. We should begin always with an act of consecration, since we thereby put down the real roots of a community."[116][117]


Arguments for conservatism[



Scruton was best known for his writing in support of conservatism.[118] His intellectual heroes, according to Mark Dooley, are Edmund Burke, Coleridge, Dostoevsky, Hegel, Ruskin, and T. S. Eliot.[119] Scruton's second book, The Meaning of Conservatism (1980)—which he called "a somewhat Hegelian defence of Tory values in the face of their betrayal by the free marketeers"[120]—was responsible, he said, for blighting his academic career.[20][121] He supported Margaret Thatcher, while sceptical of her view of the market as a solution to everything, but after the Falklands War, he realized that she "recognised that the self-identity of the country was at stake, and that its revival was a political task".[122]


Scruton wrote in Gentle Regrets (2005) that he found several of Burke's arguments in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) persuasive. Although Burke was writing about revolution, not socialism, Scruton was persuaded that, as he put it, the utopian promises of socialism are accompanied by an abstract vision of the mind that bears little relation to the way most people think. Burke also convinced him that there is no direction to history, no moral or spiritual progress; that people think collectively toward a common goal only during crises such as war, and that trying to organize society this way requires a real or imagined enemy; hence, Scruton wrote, the strident tone of socialist literature.[123]


Scruton further argued, following Burke, that society is held together by authority and the rule of law, in the sense of the right to obedience, not by the imagined rights of citizens. Obedience, he wrote, is "the prime virtue of political beings, the disposition that makes it possible to govern them, and without which societies crumble into 'the dust and powder of individuality'". Real freedom, Scruton wrote, does not stand in conflict with obedience, but is its other side.[123] He was also persuaded by Burke's arguments about the social contract, including that most parties to the contract are either dead or not yet born. To forget this, he wrote—to throw away customs and institutions—is to "place the present members of society in a dictatorial dominance over those who went before, and those who came after them".[124]


Scruton argued that beliefs that appear to be examples of prejudice may be useful and important: "our most necessary beliefs may be both unjustified and unjustifiable, from our own perspective, and the attempt to justify them will merely lead to their loss." A prejudice in favour of modesty in women and chivalry in men, for example, may aid the stability of sexual relationships and the raising of children, although these are not offered as reasons in support of the prejudice. It may therefore be easy to show the prejudice as irrational, but there will be a loss nonetheless if it is discarded.[125] Scruton was critical of the contemporary feminist movement, while reserving praise for suffragists such as Mary Wollstonecraft.[20] However, he praised Germaine Greer in 2016, saying that she had "cast an awful lot of light on our literary tradition" by showing the male as the dominant figure, and defended her against criticism for having used the word "sex" to describe the difference between men and women, rather than "gender", which Scruton called "politically correct".[126]

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[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nexus_Masterclass_Roger_Scruton,_November_2015.webm]
Scruton discussing the European Union and the nation state, November 2015

In Arguments for Conservatism (2006), Scruton marked out the areas in which philosophical thinking is required if conservatism is to be intellectually persuasive. He argued that human beings are creatures of limited and local affections. Territorial loyalty is at the root of all forms of government where law and liberty reign supreme; every expansion of jurisdiction beyond the frontiers of the nation state leads to a decline in accountability.[127]

He opposed elevating the "nation" above its people, which would threaten rather than facilitate citizenship and peace. "Conservatism and conservation" are two aspects of a single policy, that of husbanding resources, including the social capital embodied in laws, customs and institutions, and the material capital contained in the environment. He argued further that the law should not be used as a weapon to advance special interests. People impatient for reform—for example in the areas of euthanasia or abortion—are reluctant to accept what may be "glaringly obvious to others—that the law exists precisely to impede their ambitions".[128]

The book defines post-modernism as the claim that there are no grounds for truth, objectivity, and meaning, and that conflicts between views are therefore nothing more than contests of power. Scruton argued that, while the West is required to judge other cultures in their own terms, Western culture is adversely judged as ethnocentric and racist. He wrote: "The very reasoning which sets out to destroy the ideas of objective truth and absolute value imposes political correctness as absolutely binding, and cultural relativism as objectively true."[129]

Totalitarianism


Scruton defined totalitarianism as the absence of any constraint on central authority, with every aspect of life the concern of government. Advocates of totalitarianism feed on resentment, Scruton argues, and having seized power they proceed to abolish institutions—such as the law, property, and religion—that create authorities: "To the resentful it is these institutions that are the cause of inequality, and therefore the cause of their humiliations and failures." He argues that revolutions are not conducted from below by the people, but from above, in the name of the people, by an aspiring elite.[131] The importance of Newspeak in totalitarian societies, he writes, is that the power of language to describe reality is replaced by language whose purpose is to avoid encounters with realities. He agrees with Alain Besançon that the totalitarian society envisaged by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) can be only understood in theological terms, as a society founded on a transcendental negation. In accordance with T. S. Eliot, Scruton believes that true originality is only possible within a tradition, and that it is precisely in modern conditions—conditions of fragmentation, heresy, and unbelief—that the conservative project acquires its sense.[136]



Sex



The philosopher of religion Christopher Hamilton described Scruton's Sexual Desire (1986) as "the most interesting and insightful philosophical account of sexual desire" produced within analytic philosophy.[137] The book influenced subsequent discussions of sexual ethics.[138][139][140] Martha Nussbaum credited Scruton in 1997 with having provided "the most interesting philosophical attempt as yet to work through the moral issues involved in our treatment of persons as sex partners".[141]

According to Jonathan Dollimore, Scruton based a conservative sexual ethic on the Hegelian proposition that "the final end of every rational being is the building of the self", which involves recognizing the other as an end in itself. Scruton argues that the major feature of perversion is "sexual release that avoids or abolishes the other", which he sees as narcissistic and solipsistic.[142] Nussbaum countered that Scruton did not apply his principle of otherness equally—for example, to sexual relationships between adults and children or between Protestants and Catholics.[143] In an essay, "Sexual morality and the liberal consensus" (1990), Scruton wrote that homosexuality is a perversion because the body of the homosexual's lover belongs to the same category as his own.[144] He further argued that gay people have no children and consequently no interest in creating a socially stable future. He therefore considered it justified to "instil in our children feelings of revulsion" towards homosexuality,[133] and in 2007 he challenged the idea that gay people should have the right to adopt.[145] Scruton told The Guardian in 2010 that he would no longer defend the view that revulsion against homosexuality can be justified.[20]