Scruton was the greatest thinker of our age
Over the past 18 months, all the men who had the greatest influence on me at the beginning of my adulthood have died. First, my old Oxford tutor, Jeremy Catto. Then Michael Spicer, who showed me that you can achieve anything in politics provided you give others the credit. Then that restless, romantic genius Norman Stone. Now Roger Scruton.
I had dinner with Scruton a couple of days after we learnt of Stone’s death. I confessed that, rather to my surprise, I was feeling almost orphaned. We prepare for deaths in our families, I said. We see them coming. We expect to outlive our parents. But this sense of intellectual bereavement had caught me completely off guard.
“Don’t you even think of leaving, Roger,” I told him, with a levity that makes me wince in recollection. “There are too many things I still need to ask you.” A hint of melancholy stole across his mild, patient features. “Daniel, there’s something I ought to tell you. I have been diagnosed with cancer.”
It felt as if the floorboards had given way under me. What? Roger Scruton? But he was so full of life. He was still speaking to rapt audiences around the world, still writing his lyrical books. He was sitting right there, for heaven’s sake, handsomer than a 75-year-old philosopher had any right to be, his red hair faded, but still moplike. How could such an inexhaustible thinker, such a complete intellect, simply cease?
Of those four early mentors, I had known Scruton the longest. He caught me at an impressionable age, speaking to my school’s philosophy society when I was 16. His talk was – as most of his talks were, though you wouldn’t guess it from the obituaries – unpolitical. As I recall, he mainly spoke about Wittgenstein and the nature of language. By the end, our heads were swimming, and no one wanted to ask the first question. So, more to break an awkward silence than anything else, I stuck my hand up and asked him what he saw as the role of a conservative thinker in the modern world.
His answer was an almost perfect encapsulation of his approach to politics. “The role of a conservative thinker,” he replied, in his charmingly hesitant manner, “is to reassure the people that their prejudices are true”.
That brilliant, Burkean adage animated the whole of my subsequent career in politics, up to and through the Brexit referendum. These days, of course, “prejudice” has come to mean something like “being nasty to minorities”. But Scruton was using the word in its literal sense, to mean prejudging new events on the basis of past experience. He understood that life would be impossible if we approached each new situation from first principles, ignoring what Burke had called “the wisdom of our ancestors”.
Scruton thought that intellectuals were unusually prone to prefer theory to practice. He liked to quote Thomas Masaryk, the Czech statesman, on the dangers of “half-education”. The upper echelons of government, he believed, were top-heavy with men and women who had received just enough schooling to fill their heads with faddish ideologies, but not enough to give them wisdom. These sentiments, of course, made him a Eurosceptic Long Marcher – one of the few conservatives to criticise the EEC before Margaret Thatcher’s Bruges speech in 1988.
Scruton was a conservative in the truest sense. He put his faith in the natural, the evolved, the organic. He preferred the tried to the abstract. He understood that we are curators of a vast and growing work, far more complex than any single generation could create on its own.
As he was to put it many years later: “Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created. This is especially true of the good things that come to us as collective assets: peace, freedom, law, civility, public spirit, the security of property and family life, in all of which we depend on the cooperation of others while having no means single-handedly to obtain it. In respect of such things, the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation slow, laborious and dull.”
These views were, naturally, open to caricature. Defending established practice means lining up with all sorts of causes that progressives consider deplorable. Scruton’s belief in the family was portrayed as homophobia, his belief in the nation-state as xenophobia, his belief in parliamentary supremacy as an assault on judicial independence. To Professor Ted Honderich, Scruton was “the unthinking man’s thinking man”. (Scruton replied that Honderich was “the thinking man’s unthinking man”).
In truth, though, Scruton’s conservatism had no place for hatred. He was, as he would often say, motivated not by indignation, but by love: love for our institutions, our laws, our nation. His belief in national self-determination led him to undertake heroic work behind the Iron Curtain, where he organised “underground universities”. Students would meet in private houses, attend lectures, hand in essays, even celebrate degree ceremonies – all outside the purview of the Communist authorities. It allowed them to keep alive the study of high culture in an age of barbarism – which, now I think of it, is as neat a summary as you could ask of Scruton’s life work. He was eventually arrested, of course, but maintained his contacts in the Warsaw Pact states. I met several of them during my gap year, when he sent me to carry various materials to them. I got a ringside seat during the anti-communist revolutions, and saw them in Scrutonian terms – not as a yearning for European integration, as is now sometimes claimed, but as a mass movement for the end of foreign occupation and the restoration of national sovereignty.
Unusually for a conservative, Scruton was no Unionist. He saw England and Scotland as authentic, but Britishness as a legal and political construct. Nor was he much of a Thatcherite, though the lady used to attend meetings of his Conservative Philosophy Group, convinced that he was the man to give the Right the kind of written ideological manifesto that the Left took for granted.
Scruton supplied such a manifesto in gorgeous prose, though he was keenly aware of the paradox. Conservatism, as he saw it, was attitudinal rather than doctrinal. It resided in a series of instincts and manners, not in documents. Yet no one – and I mean no one – wrote those documents more beautifully than he did.
My first thought when he died was, “But we haven’t finished talking yet”. My second was, “You have left us a complete corpus: books on every subject from Spinoza to fox-hunting, from Anglicanism to wine. They’ll sustain me for the rest of my life”.
A hundred years from now, those books will still be read. And – this is the true measure of influence – millions of people who haven’t read them and couldn’t name their author will still be unwittingly quoting them at third or fourth hand. An apt tribute for the greatest conservative of our age.
‘The role of a conservative thinker,’ he said, ‘is to reassure the people that their prejudices are true’
He was motivated not by indignation, but by love: love for our institutions, our laws, our nation