Discursive prose by itself can get you a long way—or else the academic towers would have fallen ages ago. But the most memorable writing usually employs a device, a trick which focuses the attention precisely by diverting it. Thus there is more truth in stories than you find in all the textbooks. In this vivid confessional, Scruton incarnates ideas in autobiographical events. Thus, when he tells us about the sheer nastiness of the now-vanished Eastern European communist regimes—and about the greater nastiness of the Left Wing Establishment in England—his description of these horrors is intensified by personal experience.
I played a bit part in these events. I wasn’t there with him in Czechoslovakia or Poland, where Scruton conducted clandestine seminars among dissident academics and workers, but I was in the room when he was nearly murdered in York in 1985. He writes,
On the whole, the communist secret police treated one rather better than the reception parties organized by the British Socialist Workers’ Party. There might be a slight roughing up and maybe a night in jail, but this would be relieved by intellectual discussion at a much higher level than could be obtained in our provincial universities. I remember a particularly frightening experience giving a lecture on ‘toleration’ at the University of York.
“Frightening” is certainly the word for it. The venue for the lecture had been changed at the last minute by the authorities on account of the threats to Scruton’s safety. Even so, a huge mob crammed into the physics lecture theater to shout down his talk on—yes, you’ve guessed—freedom of speech. The lumpen intelligentsia were so vile and violent that Scruton was fortunate to escape with his life. Next day I wrote to the Vice Chancellor, Professor Berrick Saul, and asked how he intended to discipline the perpetrators. He wrote back, “There’s nothing I can do.”
Not even calling the police, which he ought to have done? Or expelling the thugs from the university? The degree of penetration into mainstream national and even local institutions which these gauleiters of the Left were able to achieve is shown by the postscript to this story. I wrote a weekly column in those days for The Yorkshire Evening Press and when I used it to report these events and the pathetic response of the Vice Chancellor—likening the university authorities to totalitarian apparatchiks—my column was withdrawn by the Editor on the grounds that it was impolite to Professor Saul. But if I was impolite, what words are there left to describe the treatment received by Roger Scruton, first by the tax-funded yobs and subsequently by the man who held final responsibility for their behavior?
I mention this episode so that no one forgets just how nastily arrogant the politically correct Establishment can be. Saul and thousands of his colleagues nationwide simply would not see the viciousness and intolerance in the institutions they commanded. They operated in our universities totalitarianism-lite, accomplished, as Scruton says, “by the peaceful self-censorship natural to the academic mind.”
It is astonishing how the Left manages to present itself against all the evidence as the guardian of freedom. They have managed —through the indolence and ineptitude of any opposition—to have all their prejudices enshrined in law in the guise of antiracism, antisexism, environmentalism, health and safety, and various other machinations of the apparatus of “inclusion” and “compliance.” By these things they are able to exclude the best and most competent people from influential positions in public life.
As an example Scruton cites “Ray Honeyford, the Bradford headmaster who argued for a policy of integration in our schools as the only way of averting ethnic conflict. But he was branded a racist, horribly pilloried by some of my academic colleagues in the University, and eventually sacked for saying what everyone now admits to be true.” Except, Roger, you’re wrong: Today’s policy makers will still not, out of ideological prejudice, accept the truth that’s staring them in the face: that to acquiesce in segregation and to use the word “community” to mean “ghetto” is the prescription for a new holocaust after 9/11 and 7/7.
Scruton himself is a victim of the totalitarian establishment. One of the most brilliant men of our times who has distinguished himself as a metaphysician, a philosopher of ethics and aesthetics, a political commentator of the first rank, a musicologist, novelist, and composer, he has consistently been denied academic preferment and so has effectively retired into the bucolic obscurity of Wiltshire and rural Virginia, in much the same way as General de Gaulle slunk off to Colombey-les-deux-Eglises. Unlike the General, he is not sanguine about his imminent recall.
From his farm he writes amusingly and movingly about his horse, Sam, and his son, also called Sam. He writes tenderly about his wife Sophie and about how she and the horse and the boy have helped him grow up. There is the confessional tone here again: “To grow up aged 54 is not a great achievement. But it is better than not growing up at all.”
I was going to say that each of the chapters of this vigorous book illustrates autobiographically an aspect of Scruton’s intellectual, political, and cultural interests. But the book does more than that: By completely integrating the ideas into the personal narrative, the author creates a new and vital form which is beyond both scholarly dissertation and personal memoir. I keep coming back to the word incarnation.
Scruton knows about opera and its philosophical possibilities, as readers of his wonderful book on Tristan und Isolde know very well. And he is also a practitioner in that art: His own opera Violet is to receive its world premiere later this year at The Guildhall School of Music in the City of London. Anyone who has had the misfortune to tune into a televised performance such as Peter Sellars’s production of Don Giovanni, featuring characters in leatherwear and set in a New York apartment block, will warm to Scruton’s vehemence when he says: “The mutilation of the operatic stage has been one of the most significant triumphs of ‘the culture of repudiation’: the culture of Mephistopheles, which finds its meaning in denial.”
He accounts for this cultural vandalism: “They are in the business of destroying consolation, not because they have anything to put in its place, but because the consolations of other people are a reproach to their own moral emptiness.”
“Meaning in denial”—isn’t that just the phrase to define the whole anti-cultural, anti-civilization, nihilistic obsession with despair, with doing dirt on life which has plagued us from Dada and Beckett (who pulled off the great trick of disbelieving in God and hating God at the same time) to vandalized classics and Deconstruction?
There is more than information and scholarship in this book. There is practical wisdom: “Virtues are acquired by habit.” Scruton understands St. Augustine, who despised abstract ideals and declared that you become good first by becoming a hypocrite—an actor. You play at being good until you start to become good. Our vices likewise are privatio boni, “ways of intending things—intending against reason and planning to thwart our better plans.” The nihilistic modern world needs to be taught again the reality of positive good and that there are absolute values.
In an age when sex is widely and shiftily regarded as just one of the consumables going under the heading of “fun,” Scruton reminds us that it is in reality something quite different, that sex presents us with the epitome of moral choice: “Sex is either consecration or desecration with no neutral territory between.” It is a means of soul-making for “the soul is what one person elicits in another when he sees the other as a free, self-conscious, self-governed and answerable being.” It might be Immanuel Kant talking. But it’s more incarnated than that.
I love the way he says he sees in himself “those traces of an Urverdunkelung, of an obstinate resistance to enlightenment.” And it is encouraging to be told that amid the thickening darkness of all our modernity and progress, there is yet hope for our civilization: “Eliot saved me from Spengler. Four Quartets told me that our culture contains the seeds of its own renewal, and that it is a source of meaning and value and that, even at the eleventh hour, it can be received and passed on.”
Gentle Regrets, Scruton’s “thoughts from a Life,” is a spiritual book and, here and there, but especially in the last chapter, “Regaining My Religion,” explicitly so.[1] Many have long wondered whether Scruton is indeed among the believers or one of those non-worshipping conservatives who offer broad support to the Church as something that promotes personal and public morality. Someone said to me last year, rather unkindly perhaps, “You can’t count on Scruton, you know. He goes in and out of the Christian faith as if it were a revolving door.”
But, speaking of Kant, here he is surely unequivocal: “There can be no motive for pursuing truth in abstract empty praise of it: Truth must be incarnate in a person, and that person is Christ, who calls us to obedience through love.” And: “Only those who give thanks are able to rejoice, for only they are conscious that life, freedom and well-being are not rights but gifts.”
It is possible to ask ultimate questions about purpose and meaning: “Evolution tells us how the world is spread out in time. The story of creation tells us why.” Richard Dawkins and all the other obsessional reductionists, please note. “For the chains of nature are those that God created. They are called reason, freedom, morality and choice”—all those things that make life worth living, and therefore the things which the ragbag of nihilists, deconstructionists, and totalitarian rights-mongers relentlessly denies.
A mark of a true Christian is one who is persecuted. And so Scruton identifies the means by which believing members of the Judeo-Christian tradition are slandered and despised:
Those who confess to their Christianity are ‘Christian fundamentalists’; those who express concern over national identity are ‘far-right extremists’; who question whether it is right to advocate homosexuality to children are ‘homophobic’; defenders of the family are ‘right-wing authoritarians’; while a teacher who defends chastity rather than free contraception is not merely ‘out of touch’ but ‘offensive’ …
It is as though our society is seeking to define itself as a religious community, whose very lack of faith has become a kind of orthodoxy.
