Roger Scruton as I knew him
Cartoon by Crid.
The below featured in our 25th – November 2021 – print issue. We republish it today to mark the third anniversary of Sir Roger’s death.
Professor Sir Roger Scruton was much more than a 'conservative thinker' as some obituaries narrowly labelled him. He was surely our greatest contemporary philosopher whose massive oeuvre transcended politics, and some of his 'pure' philosophical books were nothing less than masterpieces.
He was an erudite, cultured, elegant and original thinker who distinguished himself from those who trivialise philosophy with their pettifogging technicalities by writing inspiringly about the human condition. His works speak directly to the soul.
Against the modern tendency for analytical philosophy to lean towards a 'scientific' approach to explaining human experience, Sir Roger gave weight to the importance of highlighting how such experience can only be properly understood by reference to how such understanding, without loss to its reality, is necessarily conditioned by the kind of beings we are.
In this he had something in common with the 'later' Ludwig Wittgenstein. To this extent he (re)humanised our understanding of such matters as architecture, sexual desire, music, and many more.
I am sure he would have shared with F R Leavis (and no doubt Wittgenstein) the sense of repulsion against, for instance, the philistine claim that a computer could write a poem – or indeed compose music. Such activities, resting upon tradition, are only possible for beings such as we who have the capacity for joy and sorrow, delight, happiness, love, sadness and grief.
Moreover, he sought to clarify and restore the importance of integrity in feeling and judgement, which has been threatened both by sentimentality and by reductive pseudo-science.
I would like to share with readers what it was like to know him, for I knew him for many years, first as one of his students then as a colleague in a think tank he formed in the 1980s to fight damaging trends in education.
I first encountered Roger when I was a mature undergraduate at London University in the early 1970s and he was a new, young lecturer. A quiet, unassuming man, he gave no visible sign of his future greatness.
He did not fit the hackneyed image of the genius with breathtaking colourful flamboyance. Instead, his lectures at that time were just workmanlike and methodical.
The only philosophical piece he had published at that time was an essay entitled "Attitudes, Beliefs and Reasons", which was a rather dry defence of Emotivism in ethics and showed nothing of the flame and brilliance of his subsequent work.
The first hint of something unusual, signifying eccentricity (apart from his fondness for wearing mature tweeds, including yellow waistcoat complete with pocket watch) was when I was reading my tutorial essay to him. He kept leaning out of the window of his study. I asked him if that was a reaction to my work, but he explained that he was checking a lobster wrapped in newspaper on the window ledge to make sure it was kept at the right temperature for a dinner party that evening.
The college organised periodic residential philosophy weekends at a mansion in the countryside, and during some free time Roger, dressed for the occasion, used to go horse riding with a couple of students. On one such occasion he was heard to exclaim "horses are such stupid creatures" (which belied his fondness for these beasts).
As these weekends permitted a break on Saturday afternoons, it was traditional to have informal musical recitals, and, being a keen amateur musician myself, Roger accompanied me on the piano while I performed pieces on the clarinet and also sang some operatic tenor arias. He was modest about his playing, but his accompaniment was highly competent, sensitive and giving. That was in keeping with his quiet, sensitive nature, despite a remorseless intellect that was averse to and eschewed waffle.
Over the years, especially after he founded and edited the conservative magazine The Salisbury Review (such heresy!) his enemies on the left portrayed Roger as a hard-hearted, bigoted man, lacking compassion. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
His generosity, compassion and kindness soon showed itself. He befriended and supported a student who had a sex change operation and was experiencing social difficulty. In my own case, halfway through my BA course I rang to cancel a tutorial because I was experiencing a period of depression and lack of confidence in my philosophical ability. He offered to borrow a colleague's car and drive 15 miles to my home since, as he explained, he once had a spell of depression and knew how debilitating it could be. Not wanting to put him out I went to see him instead. With his help my confidence returned.
He later became my PhD supervisor. His talent at that was to act as a midwife to my own creative originality by not imposing his own ideas on my project (as some academic supervisors are wont to do). He just guided me in the direction I was already taking. He was so far from being egotistical.
In the Birkbeck College refectory, he chatted with students in the manner of an equal. He had a wonderful dry wit and entertained us with contrarian quips slightly reminiscent of Oscar Wilde, though they represented his true well-considered opinions.
On the subject of repression, he said that his schooling and his later education no doubt left him "as repressed as hell", which (unfashionably) he regarded as a good thing, adding: "People who are not repressed are unbearable. They go around expressing themselves all over the place."
Another example – on what he regarded as an uncritical and woolly adulation of 'creativity' in educational thinking, he said: "I think school pupils should actually be prevented from creating things, at least until they have been given the tools to express themselves properly."
Find a hallowed platitude of our times and Roger would reverse it, though not just for the sake of being contrary (which is sometimes the case with Wilde).
It was refreshing, as was the humour (a quality he considered so often missing from humourless lefty activists).
One of the reasons I joined his think tank in the 1980s was that we shared the same view of education, that it should consist in the transmission of knowledge and culture, a non-utilitarian view that such an enterprise is good in itself – a view not shared by the influence of left-wing activists who saw it merely as an opportunity for social(ist) engineering and indoctrination or indeed by Margaret Thatcher's Government whose education minister Kenneth Baker only saw it in instrumentalist terms of providing 'vocational skills'. We were fighting against these philistine influences. As we can now see, it is a battle we did not win.
When he was an undergraduate Roger entered Cambridge as a science student but changed his subject to philosophy. I am not sure that the scientific approach to things ever left Roger Vernon Scruton completely, despite the humane focus in his work.
In his autobiographical writing (Gentle Regrets) he reveals that his mother's influence made him use his second Christian name, Vernon, when he was a young schoolboy, though he came to feel that it would be more macho to be known by his first name, Roger, and that he made his schoolmates (and his family) adapt to that usage. He put it out to his friends that he had hitherto been called Vernon "for secret service purposes".
Vernon represented the sensitive and aesthetic side of his nature, which he felt was not tough enough to deal with his masculine peers.
It seems to me that "Vernon" is the (large) part of him that is responsible for the incredibly elegant and emotionally sensitive faculty that inspires and permeates much of his later writing – and "Roger" the opposite driving force behind his forays into highly technical matters.
I think one can see that, for instance, in his wonderful book The Aesthetics of Music where his uplifting account of the moral and spiritual effects of good music lies uneasily with a slight temptation to set this off against a scientific account of the properties of sound – as though some sort of scientific conscience were tugging at his elbow. It is at times as though Roger is at war with Vernon.
I have sometimes wondered whether this might explain his slight ambivalence about religion. During the 1980s during an after dinner discussion after our think tank meeting someone said that without God the world would be meaningless. Roger countered that God probably does not exist but that doesn't mean the world is meaningless.
Over the years that followed however he leaned more and more towards a religious view of the world and even played the organ during church services. But it almost seemed to be a defence of Christianity without an unequivocal belief in God.
There is a slight evasiveness about his metaphysical commitments in that regard. He didn't believe in the possibility of life after death, for instance, because of the philosophical problems of personal identity. It was as though Vernon was trying to reach God and Roger was saying "hang on, don't be too hasty, there are some logical problems here".
But Roger and Vernon were at least united in the view that our moral and aesthetic experience points towards something transcendent, particularly in our experience of beauty (which he felt was fading from this world).
If he was not fully religious in the usual sense of that word, his view of human life became more and more spiritual.
The more one got to know Roger the more obvious it became that he was a unique, gifted and remarkable man, and not only in his published work which was, and is, magnificent.
That is not to say that I agreed with all of his views. I thought he swallowed too readily the propaganda about 'climate change' which is based on 'modelling', as opposed to true science which, as Karl Popper convincingly argued, should present hypotheses which are in principle falsifiable (modelling tends to be circular). And I was not in sympathy with his ideological opposition to cars (he favoured more and more cycle lanes).
His principles and moral values were not mere theoretical constructs but informed and reflected the way he actually lived his life, not least in his courage in adversity, particularly in the teeth of opposition from the establishment.
Yet he rose above the maliciousness so often directed at him for many years. His criticisms of opposing views were scrupulously fair, and he showed a respect for his opponents that so many of them did not reciprocate.
It seemed towards the end of his life that at last he was being given the true recognition he deserved, both by his knighthood and by his appointment to the unpaid role of adviser to the Government on beautiful building.
Yet after he was stitched up and misrepresented by the Deputy Editor of the New Statesman he was peremptorily sacked by James Brokenshire who, like his equally hasty colleague Johnny Mercer (who called for his sacking) never bothered to check the facts of what Roger actually said in his interview with the shameless George Eaton who published a photo of himself swigging from a champagne bottle and gloating that he had brought Scruton down.
A shallow Mrs May endorsed the sacking. The fact that he was reinstated after Douglas Murray revealed the truth does not mitigate the shallowness of those so-called conservative ministers, in particular the mealy-mouthed half 'apology' given by Mercer.
As I had witnessed the persecution of Roger for many years I knew instinctively what impact this must have had upon him and wrote him the following email, which I should now like to share.
Dear Roger,
My soul will not rest without communicating the following to you.
I remain so appalled by the way you have been treated, and of course there are even more serious wider implications about the way we live now which trouble me just as much. The life you have lived and the books you have written have been for me a source of inspiration. You have lived courageously and have written courageously, as anyone must do if they wish to communicate and stand up for what is true and good, which is becoming increasingly rare in our times.
For many years now I have found nothing less than delight in your writings, so beautifully expressed and profound to the extent that there is wisdom on almost every page. Unlike some philosophers you do not focus on abstruse technicalities but concentrate on the most important features of the human condition. It takes intelligence and sensitivity to respond to your work, and not only do your enemies lack such qualities, I doubt whether they have even bothered to read you, but instead have mindlessly parroted second or third-hand sound-bites derived from your malicious detractors. But even if they did have more grasp they would probably still be repulsed, as "wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile". Ironic, when one reflects that in your works you treat opposing views with respect and do not deliberately misrepresent them.
I would guess that the way you have just been treated (and of course this is not the first time you have been victimised) both by that shabby journalist and by the shallow cowardly so-called Conservatives must be hurtful, especially as you had such an important contribution to make to the built environment. But at least it will have enlightened those with eyes to see the sad state of left wing journalism and the appalling political culture of our rotten parliament. They have all damaged themselves far more than they have damaged you ("A good man cannot be harmed").
But it must also be just a little consoling that there are many good and intelligent men on your side, and I am sure many people in our general population share many of your political views.
It is perhaps no accident that I am dwelling so intensely on these things on a Good Friday, with the reverberation that anyone who stands up to real evil in this world is almost bound to experience suffering and rejection. But your historical knowledge of that pattern is likely to be much greater than mine!
All my best wishes,
Frank.
Roger's reply to this was that he was greatly moved by my message and grateful for the continuing support I had given him over the years.
His health declined rapidly after all this and his death the following January was to me a terrible blow. We lost a truly great man. I am glad I managed to send him the above message while he was still alive. However his work, and the inspiration he gave, lives on.
