Roger Scruton passed away on Sunday, January 12, 2020.  Scruton was among the most original and perceptive conservative thinkers of our time.  In over forty books and countless articles and posts, he worked to defend the ideas of national sovereignty, individual privacy, religious culture, and human freedom.  His death is a great loss to conservatism and to the cause of freedom in general.

Among Scruton's best known books are An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture; The West and the Rest; and Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life.  In these and so many other books, he presented a coherent vision of what life ought to be: a modest endeavor to achieve "accommodation," as he called it, with his neighbors and to go about things rewardingly and productively.  In Gentle Regrets, perhaps his most appealing book, he reviewed many heartfelt moments in his long struggle on the side of a humane and restrained ideal of life.  His religious conversion, for example, occurred after years as a "voyeur of holiness": as a result of "contact with true believers," he realized how "faith transfigures everything it touches, and raises the world to God" (p. 63).  His understanding of socialism was equally profound: the "paradox" at the heart of socialism was that "human equality is to be achieved by an elite to whom all is permitted, including the coercion of the rest of us" (p. 200).  For anyone unfamiliar with Scruton's writing, Gentle Regrets might be a good place to begin.

In addition to his official online "Roger Scruton" website, Scruton maintained an online site called "Scrutopia," on which he and other contributors carried on a lively discussion of conservative issues.  He also held an annual ten-day Scrutopia Summer School near his home in the Cotswolds.  Online and at his many appearances, Scruton was unfailingly generous to others and receptive to their opinions.  His discourse was civil and intelligent, never partisan or confrontational.  He believed in gently leading others by way of calm and intelligent argument.  He represented the best of what conservatism could be.

Scruton was among the first to analyze the failings of globalism.  Throughout Europe and Britain he witnessed the decline of genuine art and architecture and the destruction of life on the human scale, as had once existed in the British village.  He fought a long intellectual battle to reform modern architecture and to revitalize the institutions that humanized existence — foremost among these the connection to the nation and local region rather than to impersonal and distant bureaucracies.  It is a shame that Sir Roger did not live to see the finalizing of Britain's withdrawal from the E.U., that nation-destroying abstraction ruled by that remote and unelected "government" in Brussels that he so despised.

Along with his interest in architecture, Scruton was a strong defender of what might be called the "human scale" in all things.  He looked askance at the great global cities and the global internet culture that arose during his lifetime.  Better to live in the countryside or the village and to converse with others one on one, in a personal manner.  Even the American suburb with its comfortable homes and well maintained lawns was an improvement over the glass-and-steel towers of the world's new mega-cities.  There is a danger, Scruton believed, in urban placelessness — not just the effect on individual health as a result of anomie and detachment, but the loss of civic virtue and political involvement in its true sense.  How can a society of persons with no real attachment to place or nation vote their best interest in the political sphere?  In reality, those persons have no "interest" to defend — only their abstract connection to ideas such as political correctness.

Scruton was a master at articulating and analyzing the failings of modern culture and at defending the declining Judeo-Christian civilization of the West against attacks on all sides.  He understood, for instance, the extent to which intellectuals in the West had turned against democracy and freedom.  This betrayal of Western civilization he called "the culture of repudiation," and he was perhaps the most thoughtful of recent writers on this subject.  One does not have to go far to discover this antagonistic culture in the media, the universities, and the leftist politics of our time.

Scruton's conservatism was of an independent but always thoughtful sort.  For example, he argued that the rise of support for "family values" was not, in fact, a hopeful sign since it marked what was actually a decline and narrowing of the broad Christian civilization that preceded it.  "Religious societies generate families automatically as the by-product of faith," he wrote in The West and the Rest (p. 69).  There would be no need to defend "family values" in a society in which religious faith was accepted as a matter of course.  

As an induvial, Sir Roger, as he became, was a modest person who recognized the limits of his powers as a writer, a thinker, and a human being.  All human beings are limited in their powers, and the great and dangerous temptation is to suppose that they are not.  That recognition of man's limited nature must have been especially acute in the last year of his life as he battled cancer.

Part of that modesty was Scruton's attitude toward tradition.  His argument was simple and elegant.  Is it likely that we, as 21st-century humans, have a monopoly on all that has ever been thought or felt or understood?  Isn't it more likely that our knowledge and understanding are small in relation to all that has ever been experienced and thought?  That being the case, how can we afford to ignore those who came before and the beauty and value that they have discovered?

Roger Scruton was one of the most selfless and authentic conservatives of our time.  He was not a careerist, a self-promoter, or one who made his way by proclaiming the end of the world.  His message was humble and circumscribed: we must return to a human scale of living, and we must return personal existence and humanity to the center of things where they belong.  Scruton did much to promote this wisdom, and his voice in the defense of human freedom will be much missed.

Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).

Image: Elekes Andor via Wikimedia Commons.