Secular Scruton
After Roger Scruton died last year, I resolved to read back through some of his most important writing on culture, philosophy, and politics. Two things in particular—beyond the usual, and correct, comments on his erudition, intelligence, and lucid prose style—struck me in doing so. The first is his temperament, or rather his temper. At times Scruton is excruciatingly just in both his tone and his treatment of those with whom he disagrees. This restraint approaches a kind of intellectual chastity: one senses this deep disgust with what I can only call a prurience of the mind, a prurience he resents in thinkers he despises and repudiates in the nations and cultures he loves. This reticence is of a piece with the sort of conservatism he represents and recommends to others.
At the same time, Scruton can also give vent to his hatreds and engage in passionate, even bitter, polemic. Polemic is a venerable rhetorical and argumentative mode, so I don’t mean this observation as a critique per se. Often the ideas and writers he aims his words at very much deserve it. But polemic is not a stable vehicle for fine-grained analysis and charitable understanding, and in Scruton’s work one sees where the polemic has worn down the patience and generosity and sheer mental calm that characterizes so much of his other writing.
The second thing that struck me in reading back through Scruton—and this one surprised me—is how profoundly secular a thinker he is. I was surprised not because I thought Scruton an orthodox Christian but because, given his identity as a conservative and as a happy inheritor of Christian civilization, I anticipated an overall positive posture toward religious faith, practice, and thought. And to be sure, when Scruton is meditating on religious questions, he is eager to take seriously the claims of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim revelation as well as their traditions of reflection. But in his ordinary cultural and political writing, Scruton can be rather harsh toward both faith and theology. In fact, “theology” for him functions as an epithet with which to tarnish his enemies: twentieth-century leftist thinkers (like those in the Frankfurt School) embody an inscrutable and irrefutable “theology” by contrast to rational proposals subject to Enlightenment norms of disputation and argument. Elsewhere he heaps scorn on the concept of original sin, whether in its traditional form or in updated political mutations. Like a Rorty or a Scialabba or any other reputable philosopher from the last two centuries, he can refer offhandedly, presuming the reader’s nodding head, to how the great lights of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rendered faith in the supernatural moribund, or at least problematic, for reasonable and educated people. And he follows Kant et al in both rationalizing religion and reducing it to ethics, thereby explicitly making it a matter of private piety rather than public politics. At times there is—to this believer’s eyes—a vaguely sinister noble lie lingering on the edges of Scruton’s account of politics and religion: a Straussian (or Haidtian!) appreciation of religion for the masses while cordoning off its ostensibly inadjudicable and therefore strictly private implications from the rational public deliberations of the liberal nation-state. This streak of (Platonist? Hobbesian? Burkean? Oakeshottian?) toleration or even encouragement (by the few) of widespread false consciousness (in the many) is unbecoming, in my view, though it is native to a certain slice of secular or post-religious intellectual conservatism. Instead of keeping the kernel and tossing the shell, its adherents reverse the operation: keep the forms, they suggest, preserve the outward forms and traditions; but forget the faith at the center. Surely we have seen by now that that move does not work in actual practice. Form and content belong together. Remove one and the other withers and dies.
In any case, reading Scruton was a reminder of this crucial divide within the theory and among the philosophers of conservatism. Scruton has much to teach us on a range of matters, but for Christians, at least, his instruction comes with a certain proviso attached. Irreligiosity is usually associated with the left, but it is all too present on the right, too, only usually less openly hostile and thus more difficult to discern. Finding friends and forming alliances is harder than it seems.
