Roger Scruton: A Defender of Life on a Human Scale

American Thinker.com ^ | January 15, 2020 | Jeffrey Folks

[Kaslin]

Roger Scruton passed away on Sunday, January 12, 2020. Scruton was among the most original and perceptive conservative thinkers of our time. In over forty books and countless articles and posts, he worked to defend the ideas of national sovereignty, individual privacy, religious culture, and human freedom. His death is a great loss to conservatism and to the cause of freedom in general.

Among Scruton's best known books are An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture; The West and the Rest; and Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life. In these and so many other books, he presented a coherent vision of what life ought to be: a modest endeavor to achieve "accommodation," as he called it, with his neighbors and to go about things rewardingly and productively. In Gentle Regrets, perhaps his most appealing book, he reviewed many heartfelt moments in his long struggle on the side of a humane and restrained ideal of life. His religious conversion, for example, occurred after years as a "voyeur of holiness": as a result of "contact with true believers," he realized how "faith transfigures everything it touches, and raises the world to God" (p. 63). His understanding of socialism was equally profound: the "paradox" at the heart of socialism was that "human equality is to be achieved by an elite to whom all is permitted, including the coercion of the rest of us" (p. 200). For anyone unfamiliar with Scruton's writing, Gentle Regrets might be a good place to begin.

In addition to his official online "Roger Scruton" website, Scruton maintained an online site called "Scrutopia," on which he and other contributors carried on a lively discussion of conservative issues. He also held an annual ten-day Scrutopia Summer School near his home in the Cotswolds.

[nwrep]

Thank you for posting this. His death is a setback for an intellectually and morally appealing argument for traditionalism and restraint.