Farewell, Sir Roger Scruton

Sir Roger Scruton died last Sunday after a six-month battle with cancer. His death is a terrible, grievous loss and a huge blow to the cultural life of the Western world. His intellectual and spiritual legacy ranges far beyond the limits of political philosophy to include both the elevated realms of religion, aesthetics, and history of art and architecture and the more concrete concerns of social justice, economic growth, environmentalism, etc. As a matter of fact, Scruton’s conservatism was a vision of modern Western life as a condition of profound spiritual alienation. For example, as Michael Severance recalled a couple of days ago on the Acton Institute blog, he thought that contemporary Western civilization had virtually foregone its dedication to true forms of beauty... In fact, unlike in previous centuries, in these days art follows disturbing patterns inspired by the artists’ own navel-gazing proclivities for randomness, egoism, superficiality or mere practicality. This was the very source of ugliness that repulsed Sir Roger, since “such bad art—if one could even call it art—did not reflect the depth and breadth of the human spirit. True art forms should and could attempt to imitate God’s creative genius with man’s highest aesthetic expressions.” In his famous and wonderful BBC documentary Why Beauty Matters, he spoke bluntly about “the uglification of man’s own natural artistic ecosystem,” that is, neighborhoods and workplaces being erected and maintained by those who he vilified as vandals of the arts. “Everywhere you turn,” he explained, “there is ugliness and mutilation. The offices and bus station have been abandoned; the only things at home here are the pigeons fouling the pavements. Everything has been vandalized but we shouldn’t blame the vandals. [They were] built by vandals and those who added the graffiti merely finished the job.”

Roger Scruton also saw the decline of faith and morals as the regrettable consequence of modernity, the result of the Enlightenment privileging of scientific knowledge over religious and moral truth. As he once wrote (“The Sacred and the Secular”), ‘I am not an advocate of Enlightenment. On the contrary, I see it as a form of light pollution, which prevents us from seeing the stars.’ Not by chance, perhaps none, in modern times, has done more to defend a vision of the West as a Christian civilization—which of course, along with other factors, brought him powerful enemies and some troubles, especially in the final phase of his life. And that’s exactly what I want to talk about here: how his enemies tried to get rid of him (without success, or with partial success). This is my way to pay a humble tribute to an extraordinary man of intellect and a great warrior of the spirit who was never afraid to be unapologetically himself and to pay the price for his convictions.

In November 2018 his fiercest opponents tried and failed to remove him from his role as the chairman of the UK Government’s Building Better Building Beautiful Commission. But they succeeded a few months later, in April 2019, under false pretenses. What happened can be summarized as follow. Sir Roger gave an interview to the New Statesman. George Eaton, the left-wing magazine’s deputy editor, who personally conducted the interview, included this summary paragraph: ‘His sacking was unsuccessfully demanded by Labour MPs and others on account of his past remarks on Hungarian Jews (part of a “Soros empire”), Islamophobia (a “propaganda word”) and homosexuality (“not normal”).’ Eaton also summarized another part of his interview this way: ‘Perhaps most remarkably, he commented of the rise of China: “They’re creating robots out of their own people… each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one and that is a very frightening thing.”’ In addition, he thought it best to tweet this: ‘In an NS interview, the government adviser and philosopher Roger Scruton has made a series of outrageous remarks. On Hungarian Jews: “Anybody who doesn’t think that there’s a Soros empire in Hungary has not observed the facts.”’ And soon after the interviewee was sacked as a Tory government adviser, Eaton posted to his Instagram account a picture of himself swigging from a bottle of champagne, to celebrate the fate of ‘the right-wing racist and homophobe Roger Scruton’.

As a matter of fact, however, if Scruton said that Islamophobia is ‘a propaganda word invented by the Muslim Brotherhood in order to stop discussion of a major issue’, he was perfectly right. And if he also said that ‘Anybody who doesn’t think that there’s a Soros empire in Hungary has not observed the facts’, he told the plain truth. Furthermore, please note that in the interview, he didn’t mention that Soros was a Jew: he referred merely to Soros’s activities in Hungary. In this regard, it’s worth noting that in, a 2013 lecture, ‘The Need for Nations’, Scruton specifically criticized Hungarian anti-Semitism, and noted that ‘indigenous anti-Semitism still plays a part in Hungarian society and politics, and presents an obstacle to the emergence of a shared national loyalty among ethnic Hungarian and Jews’. Yet Eaton falsely presented Scruton’s words as an anti-Semitic comment.

As for the Chinese thing, did Scruton actually refer to the Chinese people as a whole? It seems unlikely. The full Scruton quote is: ‘They’re creating robots out of their own people by so constraining what can be done. Each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one and that is a very frightening thing’. He was clearly talking about the tyrannical Chinese government. Therefore, the only thing “outrageous” about this quote is the way it was edited. Of course, Eaton claims that he merely edited the quote ‘for reasons of space in print edition’…

As concerns Scruton’s alleged homophobia here is how he himself put it the day after the sacking in an article for The Spectator, in which he defended himself against ‘an unscrupulous collection of out of context remarks, some of them merely words designed to accuse me of thought-crimes’: ‘Apparently, I once wrote that homosexuality is “not normal,” but nobody has told me where, or why that is a particularly offensive thing to say. Red hair too is not normal, nor is decency among left-wing journalists. In Sexual Desire (1986), I argued that homosexuality is different from heterosexuality, but not in itself a perversion. And I tried to explain the negative response that many people have towards homosexual relations in other terms.’ In any case, however, according to Britain’s most prominent living philosopher, the term homophobia itself, as much as Islamophobia, is a word ‘designed to close all debate about a matter in which only one view is now deemed permissible.’

Be it as it may, in that spring of our discontent, such intellectual dishonesty reached its goal. In fact, a few hours after Eaton’s misquoting and misrepresenting a lifelong defender of free speech who was risking his life behind the Iron Curtain before Eaton was even born, the Government announced Roger Scruton’s sacking—later on, Scruton obtained an apology from the New Statesman and was reappointed to the government commission from which he had been sacked, but the damage was done.

In Roger Scruton’s words, this whole thing taught us that Britain was entering ‘a dangerous social condition in which the direct expression of opinions that conflict – or merely seem to conflict – with a narrow set of orthodoxies is instantly punished by a band of self-appointed vigilantes. We are being cowed into abject conformity around a dubious set of official doctrines and told to adopt a world view that we cannot examine for fear of being publicly humiliated by the censors.’ As a result, he concluded, ‘This world view might lead to a new and liberated social order; or it might lead to the social and spiritual destruction of our country. How shall we know, if we are too afraid to discuss it?’

Melanie Phillips was definitely right when she wrote that the attempt to make Scruton into a social pariah encapsulates the ‘vicious and socially suicidal ignorance and cultural sectarianism currently rampant in British society’. His demonization, she said, ‘has displayed ignorance and malice in equal measure along with a chilling totalitarianism directed at anyone who expresses true conservative values – decent, traditional western values shared by millions.’ The only way to respond to such vicious behavior, she concluded, ‘is to treat it with contempt and support Scruton to the hilt. And yet here is a Conservative government actually joining the witch-hunt. This contemptible party, unwilling to defend either the independence of the country or its bedrock values of truthfulness, fairness and moral decency, really, really doesn’t deserve ever to hold office again.’

Thank God, unlike the UK Conservative Party, Sir Roger never gave up. As Niall Ferguson recently recalled, back in the days of the Cold War a small but courageous group of Western academics did what they could to expose the wickedness of communism and to support political and religious dissidents in the Soviet sphere of influence. Well, a member of that group was Roger Scruton:

During the 1980s he travelled to communist-controlled Czechoslovakia to assist an underground education network run by the Czech dissident Julius Tomin. In 1985, during a trip to Brno, Scruton was arrested and expelled.
A philosopher of international renown, a prolific author, a composer and a polymath, Scruton has one of the most powerful minds I have encountered. But he is one of those rare thinkers who seek to change the world as well as to understand and explain it. There was a time when those qualities were venerated. In 1998 he was awarded the Czech Republic’s Medal of Merit by its then president Vaclav Havel, himself a former dissident. A knighthood came in 2016. And last year he was appointed chairman of the government’s commission on buildings.

Yet, almost immediately after that, the attacks from the left began: The campaign against Sir Roger culminated in the publication of the above mentioned cynical hit-piece in the New Statesman. Thus, Ferguson goes on,

a direct descendant of the illiberal, egalitarian ideology that once suppressed free speech in eastern Europe is now shutting down debate in the West. For those, like Scruton, who once helped Czech dissidents to get degrees in theology from Cambridge, the irony is bitter indeed.

But Sir Roger never gave up in the face of adversity. He was more than a scholar and a philosopher, he was also a fighter and a gentleman. Summing up his 2019 in The Spectator, he wrote:

During this year much was taken from me — my reputation, my standing as a public intellectual, my position in the Conservative movement, my peace of mind, my health. But much more was given back: by Douglas Murray’s generous defence, by the friends who rallied behind him, by the rheumatologist who saved my life and by the doctor to whose care I am now entrusted. Falling to the bottom in my own country, I have been raised to the top elsewhere, and looking back over the sequence of events I can only be glad that I have lived long enough to see this happen. Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.

Farewell, Sir Roger Scruton. We will miss you terribly.

Part of this note is drawn from an article I wrote for Atlantico magazine. It appeared in the April 15, 2019 issue under the title “The Spring of Our Discontent: The Case for Scruton.”