Roger Scruton: Subversion Incarnate

The 6th anniversary of Roger Scruton’s death has just passed. Scruton supervised both my M.A. and Ph.D.; I was in the final year of doctoral research when he died. I think of him every day, and when I am working through some challenging academic or political issue, I often imagine him opining on the topic at hand and criticising my assumptions or testing the strength of my conclusions.

I have noticed since Scruton’s death a willingness among many to appropriate his contribution to the West’s intellectual life in such a way as to disfigure his legacy. Some want to present him as a supporter rather than a critic of liberalism; others seek to co-opt him as a rapacious market worshipper; and still others as someone with merely a sentimental attachment to tradition and culture, but with nothing of depth to say about human conduct and the moral life in general. 

Those who thus remember Scruton forget what was at the heart of his social philosophy, what he described as “the situated character of the moral agent, bound by unchosen moral requirements.” He explained this ethical point of departure in the following way:

The concept anciently used in articulating these requirements was that of piety—pietas—which, for many Roman thinkers, identified the true core of religious practice and of the religious frame of mind. Piety is a posture of submission and obedience towards authorities that you have never chosen. The obligations of piety, unlike the obligations of contract, do not arise from the consent to be bound by them. They arise from the ontological predicament of the individual.

In one fell swoop Scruton tramples the assumptions on which the liberal theory of freedom and individualism is contingent. Nonetheless, it is striking that Scruton always seems to end up posthumously supporting his appropriators’ positions, and all the while his actual gargantuan philosophical bequest is replaced in people’s minds with a soft, liberal, conciliatory counterfeit in place of the real thing. Already in the minds of many, Scruton was no more than a progressive with a peculiar penchant for tweed jackets.

In reality, he was a far more subversive figure than people seem to realise. To understand why, it is important to remember that for the last few centuries the United Kingdom has been in the grips of two pervasive institutions, the Conservative Party and the Anglican Church. Almost no one seems to have understood the purpose of these two institutions in the history of these isles, and that includes most of their genuinely committed members.

As a people, the British—especially the English—are both profoundly conservative and profoundly religious. Looking at the widespread progressivism and irreligion of the indigenous population today, such a claim may seem risible, but hear me out. 

The very raison d’être of the Conservative Party has been that of advancing the cause of revolution under the guise of conservatism. A people with as many agrestic attachments, as much rich history, as many folk traditions and settled ways of living as the peoples of Britain would never have accepted a French-style revolution. Among such a temperamentally conservative people as the British, revolution had to take centuries, not months. That has been the purpose of the Conservative Party, and to its credit it has accomplished its purpose with astonishing success.

When the Conservative Party incrementally deconstructs the family, wrecks the countryside, establishes an open border policy that undermines the native way of life, one can only look on in mystification unless one understands the real mission of the Conservative Party. So too, when the Church of England’s most senior cleric refers to so-called ‘trans-realignment surgery’ (read the mutilation of children and venerable adults) as a “sacred journey,” when the institution celebrates homosexuality, organises Muslim calls to prayer within its churches, and contradicts elementary biblical teaching in myriad ways, its notion of ministry seems confusing unless the point of its existence is understood.

For just as the mission of the Conservative Party has been that of advancing revolution under the guise of tradition, so too the purpose of the Church of England has been that of advancing apostasy under the guise of Christianity. The rapid demise of these two institutions is largely indicative of their success. Without the unrelenting effort of these two co-dependent organisations, peoples as deeply conservative and religious as those of Britain would never have become so modernist and nihilistic.

Now, back to Scruton. He embodied all that those two organisations sought to destroy. He was an avatar of an old England which was being unremittingly trampled. He had sought and found that old England against all odds and had made it present again in his very being. It was indeed his anamnestic presence that attracted so many of us during his lifetime.

Everything he loved and defended—the primacy of marriage and family; fieldsports and farming; the received legal tradition of his country as impartial and unabusive; the monarchy as an object of loyalty that transcended fads and celebrity hysteria; the role of Christianity as providing a sacred membership of moral relations rendered honest and redemptive before God; and all the unexamined respect for tradition, custom, and hierarchy that had served this land so well—all this was what needed to be deconstructed by the Conservative Party and the CofE. And Scruton denounced their respective stances whilst appearing to speak for them.

In 2013, in the height of the Tory ascendency succeeding Labour Prime Ministers Blair and Brown, Scruton wrote the following about what he beheld:

Abstract ideas and utopian schemas threaten to displace practical wisdom from the political process. Instead of the common law of England we have the abstract idea of human rights, slapped on us by European courts whose judges care nothing for our unique social fabric. Instead of our inherited freedoms we have laws forbidding ‘hate speech’ and discrimination that can be used to control what we say and what we do in ever more intrusive ways. The primary institutions of civil society—marriage and the family—have no clear endorsement from our new political class. Most importantly, our parliament has, without consulting the people, handed over sovereignty to Europe, thereby losing control of our borders and our collective assets, the welfare state included.

It wasn’t Labour Scruton was criticising here, but the party he claimed to defend. Indeed, the Blair government’s position on immigration, for example, was by then the stuff of right-wingers’ dreams. Our current Labour government’s relentless attack on Britain and its culture would never have been possible were it not for the decades of civilisational and national erosion that preceded it by those who postured as the nation’s conservers. 

But Scruton, very subversively, did his own posturing. Scruton appeared as the Conservative Party’s foremost advocate as well as the CofE’s foremost defender whilst simultaneously undermining the entire trajectory to which they were together committed. Thus, he was, quite unwittingly, these two institutions’ most disruptive dissident. I say ‘unwittingly’ because his deep-felt affection for both the Conservative Party and the established Church was real, but it was an affection for a party and a church that the present manifestations had entirely betrayed and had no interest in retrieving.

It is because Roger Scruton was such a subversive figure, devastatingly undermining the two institutions he appeared to uphold, that it has not only been necessary to conjure up innumerable counterfeits of the man since his death, but both the CofE and the Conservative Party have striven to bury him in an unmarked grave as quickly as possible. 

This, though, does not overly bother me. As it happens, I think Scruton’s time has not yet come. There are generations before us who will discover him, pick up his books and listen to his online lectures, and his contributions will appear as laments over a once great but since decayed civilisation. Amid the rebuilding, what he bequeathed will be essential for carving out a path ahead.

The key challenge of our age is that of uprootedness. We are all uprooted from our religious inheritance, from our cultures, from the normalities of family life and intergenerational reliance. Through individualism, we’re uprooted from the kind of interdependence that makes us morally accountable to each other and hence moral at all, and we’re uprooted from our own ancestral wisdom tradition, our history, and thus from anything our antecedents might have bestowed upon us as a roadmap for times to come. To quote Archduke Otto von Habsburg, “Someone who doesn’t know where he’s from, doesn’t know where he’s going, because he doesn’t know where he stands.”

Deracination—uprootedness—is the fundamental condition, or rather ailment, of modern man. The antidote to deracination is initiation. And initiation into our own civilisational inheritance and birthright is precisely what Scruton sought repeatedly to provide. Indeed, that is what he continues to offer to his readership, and what he will give to those who turn to him in generations to come. 

Scruton was recurrently able to describe our moral bankruptcy in a way that was utterly shattering precisely because it was so true. In presenting the widespread way in which children are raised today, he wrote the following:

You will find … a kind of Satanic attempt to catch last glimpses of the sacred, in the actions that wipe it away. It is this, I believe, that explains the extraordinary rise of child pornography—a practice that is not confined to the images that are available on the Internet, but to the most ordinary ways that people have adopted of dressing and addressing their children. The 8-year-old girl in G-string and ear-rings is simultaneously childlike and knowing, a creature torn between worlds, and on the verge of desecration. By dressing their children in this way, and encouraging them to copy the lubricious dances and sensual throes of their parents, people are conjuring out of the sewer of desecration a last, sad image of the human form in its innocence, as the currents of pollution bear it away.

Scruton saw in that sexualised prepubescent—now such a ubiquitous creature on our streets—a concentrated example of our collapsing society, the weakness of which new arrivals have fully exposed by directing their appetites at such children. In turn, many now realise that an entirely revisionist approach will be required to resuscitate the United Kingdom following its suicide, a fatality that the current Labour government is accelerating in order to ensure. And precisely because Roger Scruton was so subversive, his legacy will play an important if indirect role in that resuscitation.