The United Kingdom will likely soon have a Labour government. Two decades ago, Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Labour government launched one of the most iconoclastic assaults on the UK’s shared cultural inheritance, and in so doing gravely damaged the country’s rural communities and deleteriously affected British wildlife for years to come: it outlawed hunting with hounds. Six years before Labour’s Hunting Act 2004 (the legislation which banned hunting live quarry with hounds), Roger Scruton wrote what is arguably the best exposition of this mysterious—to quote Iain McGilchrist, “almost mystical”—activity, namely the book On Hunting, published in 1998.
Now Labour is threatening to ban the hunting of artificial trails with hounds when it likely assumes power in Westminster later this year. Yes, you read that right. Labour, in its pathological loathing of heritage and tradition, is threatening to outlaw an activity which comprises people riding horses together through open countryside, following a pack of hounds which is following the scent of aniseed, laid down with the help of a quadbike. This thoroughly absurd and illiberal legislation, however, is not being proposed merely due to bad actors in the Labour Party. Many of those who want to ‘tighten the ban’ are simply ignorant of what foxhunting was and how it has evolved into trail hunting to obey the law whilst preventing the established rural communities that orbit the hunt from disintegrating. There could not have been a better time, then, for Scruton’s On Hunting to be republished.
St. Augustine’s Press’s new republication of On Hunting is marvellous! Opting for the original cover—a stylised image of a mounted, red-coated foxhunter following two foxhounds which are in pursuit of a very red fox—bound in a beautiful hardback, and printed on lovely old-fashioned off-white paper, it really couldn’t be better. Moreover, and this is an important point for any enthusiastic countryman, this volume—like the original—is just the right size to sit comfortably in the pocket of a waxed jacket. The folks at St. Augustine’s Press are clearly dedicated Scrutonians. Over the years, they have published a number of Scruton’s key works—especially his less philosophical, more culturally critical works—such as An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture and his collected essays entitled Philosopher on Dover Beach, but with this recent edition of On Hunting they have really excelled themselves.
On Hunting is part biography, part philosophical reflection on hunting’s role in making us—in Scruton’s opinion—more human, and part a defence of an inherited tradition against political powerholders who seek to destroy it on grounds of ignorance and misdirected sentimentalism—or rather, the kind of confused emotion of which ‘sentimentalism’ is the name.
Scruton begins his account of his relationship with foxhunting by pointing to its redemptive power in his own life: “My life divides into three parts,” he tells us, “In the first I was wretched; in the second ill at ease; in the third hunting.” Scruton had been cursed with a desperately unhappy childhood due to an abusive and overbearing father, whose violence neither Scruton’s mother nor her children escaped. So, he fled that house as early as possible, and went in search of a home. Intuiting from an early age that he was an aristocrat by nature, Scruton pursued the life of a gentleman scholar at various universities, but soon realised that he would never find his true home in the academy. One day, in his forties, he was trotting along on a friend’s pony in the Cotswolds when he accidentally found himself caught up in a foxhunt:
Before I could take stock of the situation, we were in the midst of the herd. Seventeen-hand horses were snorting and heaving to every side, their buttocks rippling with muscle like the seething wakes of ocean liners; a man in a red coat was shouting ‘hold hard’; fierce women in mud-spattered uniforms were cantering past me with intent and angry faces. Dumbo [Scruton’s borrowed pony] meanwhile had suffered a metamorphosis as far-fetched as any in Ovid. His neck was arched, his head down, with the bit held firmly in his teeth; his feet were dancing on the road, and great surges of life rose through his quarters, invading and inflaming me on their way to his heart and his head.
Scruton is describing here a magical event. One minute he was plodding along a country lane on a sleepy pony, and the next he was thrown into the thrill of the wild hunt, to join a ritual that had erupted out of the very earth itself. At that moment, he ceased to be ill at ease, even if not wholly at ease either, and thus he entered the third stage of his life. Thereafter, he retired to the countryside where he kept horses and spent two days per week through the autumn and the Season proper following foxhounds, and perhaps chiefly by this he became the great philosopher of homecoming we know and love.
The effect that foxhunting had on Scruton’s life in general, and on his mind in particular, cannot be exaggerated. In his own words:
I can say that my life was changed by the experience. For once I was not observing from afar. Here was a piece of England which was not yet alien to itself, a community which had yet to be ground into atoms and scattered as dust. I was witnessing innocent and unaffected membership, a corporate smile as spontaneous as the wagging tails of the hounds and the pricked ears of the horses. And I wanted to join.
This passage points to the most paradoxical aspect of Scruton’s relationship with foxhunting. As alluded to above, Scruton was not born into a hunting family. His were working-class origins, and the class-struggle of the unemancipated proletariat—real or imagined—constantly tormented his father Jack, intensifying his bitterness. Nothing of Scruton’s upbringing would have indicated a future life as an Oxbridge scholar, a philosopher of cultural orthodoxy, and a gentleman farmer and foxhunter. So how did he end up being those things? This is where we hit the paradox of Scruton’s life. In a supreme act of post-modern self-authorship, he simultaneously repudiated the whole post-modern enterprise by self-authoring himself into organicism and tradition. As Scruton put it in a 2018 dialogue with Jordan Peterson:
I’m in favour of cultural appropriation; I mean, I’m a product of it. I appropriated the idea of the English gentleman and, you know, I tried to make myself be it. And I know it’s a failure … but I’ve understood the world from the inside in another way.
He looked with his mind’s eye upon that thing he wanted to be, and in a puzzling post-modernist achievement, became that thing that no post-modernist could have anticipated self-authorship leading to, namely a pre-modern. And having arrived at it, Scruton found in his new life an extraordinarily rich realm of meaning and purpose.
Throughout On Hunting, there are remarkable meditations on how hunting with hounds re-roots one in an established community; how it connects one with one’s hunter-ancestors; how it transcends the void that ordinarily exists between different species, uniting human, horse, and hound—omnivore, herbivore, and carnivore—in a shared activity in which they all become most fully what they are; and how the hunt is at bottom a ritual of natural religion that renews a covenant with the landscape, centred on what Scruton calls the “totemic” figure of the fox. It is so typically and wonderfully Scrutonian that in this, a book about his love of foxhunting, we also at times encounter Scruton at his most mystical.
There is a particularly deep and demanding chapter, which is also mercifully short, in the middle of the book entitled ‘Intermezzo—The Philosophy of Hunting.’ And it is here that Scruton most explicitly develops how hunting provided for him an escape route out of the ‘tyranny of grey’ that is modernity (a phrase I once used in conversation with Scruton, to which he nodded in agreement). “Hunting lifts me out of my modernist solitude,” Scruton observes, “and throws me down in a pre-modern herd.” To me, the following passage is perhaps the best summary of the case Scruton carefully develops throughout the whole book:
The ancient and venerable character of hunting is essential to its atmosphere. For millions of years we were at one with the animals, hunting and hunted by turns. The tribe lifted itself from the natural world, to become civilized, law-governed and political. In retrospect, this was sheer madness. But the tribal divinities authorised our reckless gesture. Hunting became a ceremony, an act of worship, in which the old forces, embodied in the totem, were pursued and captured and their forgiveness implored. As he hunted with his fellows, the tribesman felt absolution in the blood. Exposed to collective danger, he showed to the animals that he still belonged with them, that his civilized apart-ness was earned through courage and skill. And the more civilised man became, the more necessary was this act of penitence. That is why ‘field sports’ have been the recreation of aristocrats. Those with the highest civilization are most in need of forgiveness for it. Today we are all civilized—which is to say that we have all left the fold of nature and live from the funds of human artifice. But, unlike the old aristocracy, we lack culture, and therefore lack the ready awareness of our condition. We live in a virtual world. TV, computer screens and the simmering background of comforts create an illusion of well-being with the bare minimum of physical and spiritual exertion. Our remoteness from the natural order is ever increasing. And our awareness of what this means is ever less.
Hunting, claims Scruton, was an original necessity that transformed into a received ritual with the emergence of civilization, a ritual that stood at the heart of our shared culture until the alienation of modernity. Hunting was transformed into a cultural exercise, rather than merely disappearing, precisely because we needed hunting to remain fully human. And Scruton argues that hunting is still a key antidote to modernity’s many maladies:
In those centaur hours, however, real life returns to you. For a brief ecstatic moment the blood of another species flows through your veins, stirring the old deposits of collective life, releasing pockets of energy that a million generations laboriously harvested from the crop of human suffering. And this intimate union between species transfers to our human mind not the excitement of the animals only, but also the innocent concreteness of their thoughts.
Here we find that in hunting Scruton found not only a remedy to the general unrest of the modern world, but to the particular epistemic ailment that afflicts the philosopher. For the philosopher is unavoidably steered by his discipline towards the error of rationalism—that is, the error of privileging the abstract over the concrete, and treating the former as more real than the latter—which if given into, will corrupt the very foundations of an otherwise conservative mind. As Scruton puts it:
Abstract thinkers must renew their awareness of the really real. They should hunger for the sight and the smell and touch of things, and nothing brings the sensuous reality into focus more clearly than hunting
Perhaps by moderns, it may be deemed somewhat peculiar to write a book on the topic of foxhunting, especially one that intermittently attempts philosophical analyses of this English eccentricity. And maybe Scruton’s On Hunting is a peculiar book, but it is not a silly or funny book. Rather, it is a superbly written and very serious book, even if its content is at times entertainingly delivered. And whilst this book offers an astonishingly robust and sophisticated defence of an unfashionable activity, it is about a lot more than riding to hounds.
This is a book about culture, tradition, and induction into a settled and noble way of life. It is a book about how to relate to animals and the natural world of which—though we often forget it—we are a part. It is also a book about how to live a fully human life in a world that often thwarts this modest aspiration. But above all, this book, probably more than any other by Roger Scruton, vulnerably and movingly displays the heart of its author. St. Augustine’s Press could not have done a better job on their republication of this great text, one that couldn’t have been issued again at a better time.
