Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition by Roger Scruton

Published in 2017, a little over two years before his death, this I think was Roger Scruton’s last published work devoted to conservatism proper.  He has written other books on music and art, albeit as seen through a conservative lens, but their primary focus were aesthetic and not civic.  Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition summarizes a great career of a man who has lived his life in the public square with a particular philosophy that runs against the current of contemporary ethos.  Roger Scruton (1944-2020) was a conservative in the paleo conservative sense, not some neoconservative rebranding of once Liberal thought.  He is British, though has had a voice in European and American conservative circles, a professor of philosophy, has published over 50 books on a wide range of subjects, and for almost twenty years was chief editor at the conservative quarterly, The Salisbury Review.  Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Scruton helped establish underground academic networks in communist controlled countries.

 

This is an excellent and concise book on the history of modern conservatism by an author who lived through most of the debates of the last fifty years.  When Scruton identifies modern conservatism, he says it is “a product of the Enlightenment,” although acknowledging that conservatism dates back in every era of history.  Conservatism for Scruton is a set of customs, values, and institutions built by a community over time that have proven to sustain, preserve and “ensure [the] community’s long-term survival” and that give it a sense of identity and unity.  Conservatism in the modern sense is a counter to the Liberal emphasis of reshaping society as radical individualism that rose out of the Enlightenment.  “Tradition,” as Scruton observes from Edmund Burke, “is a form of knowledge.”

Scruton walks us through the philosophical ideas that have shaped conservatism going back to Edmund Burke, who argued against a notion of society as a “social contract” (from Jean-Jacques Rousseau) but as a “shared inheritance for the sake of which we learn to circumscribe our demands, to see our own place in things as part of a continuous chain of giving and receiving, and to recognize that the good things we inherit are not ours to spoil but ours to safeguard for our dependents” (p. 45).  Indeed I never signed a social contract but I was certainly born into a shared inheritance.

This is not a book of the ins and outs of political battle over the course of 250 years, but the philosophic developments over that time in Western culture.  Scruton takes us from the Enlightenment, through the British conservative counter-reaction, through the American founding, through continental European developments, and finally as a reaction to socialism in the twentieth century.  Conservatism for Scruton—and for me, since this has been my view too—is not so much a political philosophy or an economic theory or an intellectual construct, but more a desire to preserve one’s culture and traditions in the face of forced change.  Yes, there is intellectual process which ultimately undergirds that inclination, but foremost is that our culture is our home, which we have ordered through love, and to tear down that home is to violate that love.  Perhaps a summary paragraph of the book is stated as Scruton brings the reader into contemporary times:

 

Modern conservatism began as a defense of tradition against the calls of popular sovereignty; it became an appeal on behalf of religion and high culture against the materialist doctrine of progress, before joining forces with the classical liberals in the fight against socialism.  In its most recent attempt to define itself it has become the champion of Western civilization against its enemies, and against two of those enemies in particular: political correctness (notably its constraints on freedom of expression and its emphasis in everything on Western guilt) and religious extremism, especially the militant Islamism promoted by Wahhabi-Salif sects.  In all these transformations something has remained the same, namely the conviction that good things are more easily destroyed than created, and the determination to hold on to those good things in the face of politically engineered changed.  (p. 127)

Scruton brings us through a lot of material and personages in such a short book: Burke, Locke, Hume, Blackstone, Adam Smith (and not just for his economic theories), Samuel Johnson, Jefferson, Madison, Tocqueville, Maistre, Chateaubriand, Coleridge, Arnold, Ruskin, Chesterton, Hayak, even T.S. Eliot, Simone Weil, and D.H. Lawrence.  And of course there is William F. Buckley, Russell Kirk, and Scruton himself.  I can’t name them all, but it is quite a journey.  This is a gem of a book.

 

Notable quotes from the book:

“We human beings live naturally in communities, bound together by mutual trust.  We have a need for a shared home, a place of safety where our claim to occupancy is undisputed and where we can call on others to assist us in times of threat.  We need peace with our neighbors and the procedures for securing it.  And we need the love and protection afforded by family life.  To revise the human condition in any of those respects is to violate imperatives rooted in biology and in the needs of social reproduction.  But to conduct a political argument as though these factors are too far from the realm of ideas to deserve a mention is to ignore all the limits that must be borne in mind, if our political philosophy is to be remotely believable.  It is precisely the character of modern utopias to ignore these limits – to imagine societies without law (Marx and Engels), without families (Laing), without borders or defenses (Sartre).”  (p. 10)

"The most important input into conservative thinking is the desire to sustain the networks of familiarity and trust on which a community depends for its longevity. Conservatism is what the name says it is: the attempt to conserve the community that we have - not in every particular since as Edmund Burke put it, 'we must reform in order to conserve,' but in all matters that ensure our community's long-term survival."  (12)

“What [Samuel] Johnson believed he also exemplified, which was a firm moral sense combined with a robust eccentricity of manner and a deep respect for aesthetic values.  For Johnson, the established church, which brought people together in a shared recognition of God’s presence in their daily lives, was the heart of political order.  Tolerance should be extended to dissenters and unbelievers, but not at the expense of orthodoxy.” (30)

“Liberals saw political order as issuing from individual liberty; conservatives saw individual liberty as issuing from political order.  What makes a political order legitimate, in the conservative view, is not the free choice that create it, but the free choices that it creates, The question of which comes first, liberty or order, was to divide liberals from conservatives for the next two hundred years.”  (31)

“Conservatism is about freedom, yes.  But it is also about the institutions and attitudes that shape the responsible citizen, and ensure that freedom is a benefit to all.  Conservatism is therefore also about the limits to freedom.  And here, in the potential conflict with the extreme liberal view that values freedom above all other things and refuses to set limits to its exercise, we encounter one of the principal political issues of our times.”  (39)

 "For Maistre, obligation to the sovereign can have no basis in contract or consent, but only piety towards established things.  The true object of political obligation is not the state, but God, and it is in religious duty that the obligation towards all human institutions must ultimately be founded. Moreover, it is God, not man, who is the maker of constitutions, and the ultimate legislator, all French revolutionary thought on this subject being nothing but blasphemy designed to fortify human incompetence." (69)

"Thus in a celebrated essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919)…[T.S.] Eliot argued that the originality and sincerity demanded of the artist cannot be reached in isolation, that each new work acquires its expressive power through the tradition that makes room for it, and that in every sphere tradition is a process of continuous adaptation of the old to the new and the new to the old. Without tradition, originality is neither significant nor truly perceivable, and this evolutionary view of tradition is clearly applicable to civil society as a whole.  This essay left a profound mark on literary criticism and also on the practice of poetry.  But its lesson has been learned and repeated by political philosophers too." (93)

“But by the end of the nineteenth century the political philosophy of conservatism had turned in another direction.  In its original form, as described in the first two chapters, conservatism was a response to classical liberalism, a kind of ‘yes, but…’ in answer to the ‘yes’ of popular sovereignty.  It was a defense of inheritance against radical innovation, an institution that the liberation of the individual could not be achieved without the maintenance of customs and institutions that were threatened by a single minded emphasis on freedom and equality.  By the end of the nineteenth century conservatism had begun to define itself in another way, as a response to the gargantuan schemes for a ‘just’ society, to be promoted by a new kind of managerial state.  In this battle conservatism became, to a great measure, the true defender of liberty, against what was at best a rising system of bureaucratic government, at worst, as in the Soviet Union, a tyranny yet more murderous than that of the Jacobins in revolutionary France.” (104)

"Throughout its growth as a modern nation America has been built from below, through the free association of its citizens - a point noted and praised by Tocqueville in Democracy in America.  This has offered scope for conservatism as a philosophy of civil society - a philosophy that outlines and justifies the intrinsic form of civil order, against the attempt to control and amend them through the institutions of the state."  (137)

“This led [Samuel Huntington] to raise, in Who Are We? (2002), the question of American identity.  Written in the wake of the atrocities of 11 September 2001 (the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington DC), the book argues that it will be impossible to respond in a coherent way to the Islamist threat without regaining confidence in our own identity.  This means confidence not in our political institutions only, but in the spiritual inheritance on which they ultimately rest.  The correct response to Islamist belligerence is, therefore, not simply the reaffirmation of the liberal order and the secular state.  It is the rediscovery of ourselves, in a systemic policy of cultural conservatism.”  (149-50)

This is a great interview shortly after this book was published.

Roger Scruton is one of my idols. 

In Memoriam, Rush Limbaugh

On February 17^th, which happened to be Ash Wednesday, the great radio talk show host, Rush Limbaugh passed away.  I don’t usually let politics enter this blog, but Rush meant a lot to me.  I’m going to make an exception here, but I’ll minimize the politics.

Here is an obituary from FoxNews, “Rush Limbaugh, conservative talk radio pioneer, dead at 70.”  

 

Rush Limbaugh, the monumentally influential media icon who transformed talk radio and politics in his decades behind the microphone, helping shape the modern-day Republican Party, died Wednesday morning at the age of 70 after a battle with lung cancer, his family announced.

 

Limbaugh's wife, Kathryn, made the announcement on his radio show. "Losing a loved one is terribly difficult, even more so when that loved one is larger than life," she said. "Rush will forever be the greatest of all time."

 

The radio icon learned he had Stage IV lung cancer in January 2020 and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by then-President Trump at the State of the Union address days later. First lady Melania Trump then presented America’s highest civilian honor to Limbaugh in an emotional moment on the heels of his devastating cancer diagnosis.

Seventy is just too young.  Oh gosh, I was choked up the minute I heard. He was just a comforting voice for over thirty years.  Rush was the King of Conservative Commentary!  It was not unexpected but goodness it’s still heartbreaking.  The Fox News article goes on to put it into perspective.

 

Limbaugh is considered one of the most influential media figures in American history and has played a consequential role in conservative politics since "The Rush Limbaugh Show" began in 1988. Perched behind his Golden EIB (Excellence in Broadcasting) Microphone, Limbaugh spent over three decades as arguably both the most beloved and polarizing person in American media.

 

The program that began 33 years ago on national syndication with only 56 radio stations grew to be the most listened-to radio show in the United States, airing on more than 600 stations, according to the show’s website. Up to 27 million people tuned in on a weekly basis and Limbaugh has lovingly referred to his passionate fan base as "Dittoheads," as they would often say "ditto" when agreeing with the iconic radio host.

 

In his final radio broadcast of 2020, Limbaugh thanked his listeners and supporters, revealing at the time that he had outlived his prognosis.

 

"I wasn't expected to be alive today," he said. "I wasn't expected to make it to October, and then to November, and then to December. And yet, here I am, and today, got some problems, but I'm feeling pretty good today."

He meant so much to the conservative movement. Not just for his influence but for his brilliance at articulating our positions, for his good cheer, and indeed for his good heart. I’m convinced he loved us all. He was one of a kind. I will be forever blessed for having listened to him.

Here is a video nice retrospective, again from Fox News.

There are so many remembrances, it’s hard to choose one to quote, but let’s go with Mark Steyn’s.  Mark frequently guest hosted for Rush.  On his website, Steynonline he called Rush “The IndispensableMan.” 

Usually, in this line of work, if you're lucky, you get a moment - a year or two when you're the in-thing - and you hope to hold enough of that moment as it slowly fades away to keep you going till retirement. Rush did something unprecedented in the history of TV and radio. Commercial broadcasting began in the United States in 1920: The Rush Limbaugh Show came along two-thirds of a century later, became the Number One program very quickly, and has stayed at the top all the way to today - for a third of the entire history of the medium. And throughout all those decades Rush and his show stayed exactly the same: a forensic breakdown of the day's news, punctuated by musical parodies, satirical sketches, and Rush's own optimism and good humor, even through this last terrible year.

Think about that.  For one third of the history of radio, Rush Limbaugh was the number one broadcaster.  I found this interview on 60 Minutes from 1991, just when he had become established as the giant of radio.  It’s great, despite the 60 Minutes’ bias.

Well she was wrong.  He lasted on top all the way through his career.  1991 is just around the time I started listening.  I had not realized how overweight he was back then.  When I first listened, I was hooked and in time he shaped my thinking.  He wasn’t bitter as some conservative radio talk show hosts, especially back then.  He was cheerful and positive and fun.

I want to close with Rush’s opening monologue from his end of the year 2020 program.  It wasn’t his last program, but it was the one he offered gratitude for everything.  It’s sixteen minutes long, but it’s a masterpiece of radio broadcasting, well deserving of the Excellence In Broadcasting (EIB) moniker he gave his radio show.  It’s well worth watching all sixteen minutes.

 

That voice.  I will so miss that voice.  It feels like I lost an old friend.  He is irreplaceable. I don’t know what we’re going to do without him.  He really did have talent on loan from God.  God has taken him back.  Eternal rest in peace for a good and decent man.

In Memoriam: Sir Roger Scruton

A few days ago (January 12^th) the notable British philosopher and conservative intellectual, Sir Roger Scruton passed away from cancer at the age of seventy-five.  It was certainly a sad moment, especially for those of us who consider themselves conservative, who have embraced and engaged in the intellectual progress of conservatism, and revere conservatives living and through the ages.  Sir Roger Scruton was a giant of modern day conservatism.  He was the William F. Buckley of Britain.  That is to say using the Buckley adage, “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” Sir Roger Scruton yelled stop against the mindless progressivism that is probably even more dominant in Britain than in the United States. 

I’m not going to list his intellectual accomplishments.  I can’t.  I’m not schooled enough in his books, but you can get a cursory overview in his Wikipedia entry.  While I compared Scruton to William F. Buckley above, that comparison was in terms of stature and public persona, not in philosophic unanimity.  Buckley over the years became more and more a Libertarian.  Roger Scruton was not a Libertarian and I believe was suspicious of Libertarians.  While conservatives may have some economic agreement with Libertarians, there is much we disagree.  Closer to Roger Scruton in philosophic outlook I believe was Russell Kirk, the person at the root of 20^th century American conservatism. 

That said, let me highlight a number of tributes put out for Sir Roger on his passing.  First from an obituary in the British Daily Mail, subtitled “'Greatest conservative of our time.”  

Sir Roger Scruton, a revered conservative philosopher who cleared his name after being sacked as a government advisor over false anti-Semitism claims, has died after a six-month battle with cancer.

The Cambridge graduate - author of some 50 books on morals, politics, architecture and aesthetics - died on Sunday, with his family saying they are 'hugely proud of him and of all his achievements'.

Tory MEP Daniel Hannan tweeted: 'Very sad news. Professor Sir Roger Scruton, the greatest conservative of our age, has died. The country has lost a towering intellect. I have lost a wonderful friend.'

The conservative magazine the Spectator USA highlighted possibly his greatest achievement, setting up an underground university in communist held Europe despite the intellectual sympathies to the communists that came out of British universities: 

During the Cold War he faced an academic and cultural establishment that was either neutral or actively anti-Western on the big question of the day. Roger not only thought right, but acted right. Not many philosophers become men of action. But with the ‘underground university’ that he and others set up, he did just that. During the Seventies and Eighties at considerable risk to himself he would go behind the Iron Curtain and teach philosophy to groups of knowledge-starved students. If Roger and his colleagues had been largely leftist thinkers infiltrating far-right regimes to teach Plato and Aristotle there have been multiple Hollywood movies about them by now. But none of that mattered. Public notice didn’t matter. All that mattered was to do the right thing and to keep the flame of philosophical truth burning in societies where officialdom was busily trying to snuff it out.

Paul Krause at the online conservative magazine, The Imaginative Conservative, probably summarized the core of Scruton’s thought: 

Sir Roger had risen to some fame with the publication of The Meaning of Conservatism in 1980, a philosophical exposition of the political tradition free from the negativity and pejoratives of those who have often controlled the meaning and understanding of conservatism. In this work, Sir Roger decisively showed how conservatism is, properly, independent of the classical liberal economic dogmas that largely usurped the older, communitarian, traditional, and aesthetic spirit of conservatism, which Sir Roger saw deriving from the thought of Aristotle through that of Burke and Eliot. In his defense and exposition of conservatism, Sir Roger explained that conservatism was an organic outgrowth of unique inheritances including Common Law, property rights, and institutional justice, producing the liberty that conservatives enjoy and in which they are allied in preserving. In American parlance, Sir Roger’s conservatism is what we now call paleo-conservatism.

Krause, who had studied under him, characterized him summarily: 

Contrary to the leftwing media’s portrait of him, the Roger Scruton that we all came to know was a gentle and humorous man, a man who wouldn’t harm a fly and who was open to all people. Like moths attracted to the flame, students from all continents came together to discuss everything from music and aesthetics to politics and metaphysics with Sir Roger, who seemed to be the incarnate flame of wisdom. His encyclopedic knowledge allowed him to help all in our respective pilgrimages. He was our Virgil through hell and purgatory, and he left us at the top of the mountain, pointing to the light that lay beyond. Befitting a man of such humility, he once revealed to us that instead of being remembered as the world-class philosopher he was, he wished to be remembered as the organist for the small Anglican parish of which he was a member.

The Imaginative Conservative also published Sir Roger’s final speech titled, “A Thing Called Civilization.” A couple of quotes: 

Now, I myself have obviously got into an awful lot of trouble through defending Western civilization. It seems a strange feature of our times that the more you’re disposed to defend it, the more you are regarded as some kind of narrow-minded bigot. But the people who make that accusation are the real ones with the narrow mind. They’re people who do not see exactly how large and comprehensive our civilization has been and still is.

And

And I feel that now is the time, through institutions like ISI especially, to bring courage and conviction again to young people who know that there’s something wrong with this activist witch hunting of the old curriculum. The time has come, it seems to me, for people like me and the older generation of teachers to give courage to young people, to say: Look, you have a civilization and inheritance which helps you to understand these things. Giving way to activism of this kind, activism which excludes whole realms of human knowledge, is not doing yourself a favor. It’s not bringing to you the things that you actually need in the world into which you’re going to progress.

And

Let’s leave aside the idea of Western civilization. After all, it depends which way you’re going around the globe whether it’s West or East. Look instead at the idea of civilization. What is it? What is a civilization? It is surely a form of connection between people, not just a way in which people understand their languages, their customs, their forms of behavior, but also the way in which they connect to each other, eye to eye, face to face, in the day-to-day life which they share.

This is something which has ordinary dimensions in the workplace and in the community, in our day to day. But also it has a high culture built upon it, works of art, literature, music, architecture, and so on. These are our ways of changing the world so as to be more at home in it.

I think that is the distinctive feature of Western civilization, that it is a comprehensive civilization constantly giving us new ways of being at home, ways of being in relation to each other, which bring peace and interest as the primary bonds between our neighbors.

As a philosopher, Sir Roger was known for his philosophy of aestheticism, that is, what makes beauty. His contribution I think was answering the question as to why beauty is even needed.  Here is a BBC documentary, titled “Why Beauty Matters,” that he wrote and produced explaining why beauty in the modern world matters even more so than in the past.  It’s almost an hour long, but it will be worth your while to watch it in its entirety.

Finally I wish to include in this In Memoriam a quote from Sir Roger that I think captures the core of what his conservatism was all about. 

"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 singlehandedly 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. That is one of the lessons of the twentieth century. It is also one reason why conservatives suffer such a disadvantage when it comes to public opinion. Their position is true but boring, that of their opponents exciting but false."

-Sir Roger Scruton

That my friends is the essence of conservatism, that "collective assets," by which he means cultural touchstones, are derived from a historical past and cannot be replicated without generations of experience.  They should be nearly sacrosanct in value and handled with loving care.

May the Lord grant Sir Roger Scruton eternal rest in peace with God’s beautiful light shining on him in eternity.

Notable Quote: On Ordered Liberty by Edmund Burke

I ran across this quote at The Imaginative Conservative, one of my favorite internet sites.    It’s worth quoting here because so much of it is at the core of conservative governing principles. 

So much of the contemporary right-of-center governing coalition is made up of a coming together of traditional conservatives with libertarians.  The coalition is based on agreement on the general scope of government (less is better) and on macroeconomics (free markets are a good thing).  There is even a book out by Charles C. W. Cooke titled The Conservatarian Manifesto, which draws out what this overlapping nature of these two different philosophies.  I haven’t read it, but you can read a review of it here.  

But this quote I think draws the dividing line between conservatives and libertarians.  Ordered liberty requires the power of government to maintain order and a citizenry filled with virtue, of which can be only truly obtained by the values of the Judeo-Christian religions.  That last one might be a bit controversial.  I’m not going to expand on it here.   

“The only liberty that is valuable is a liberty connected with order; that not only exists along with order and virtue, but which cannot exist at all without them. It inheres in good and steady government, as in its substance and vital principle.”

- Edmund Burke