Somehow, I’ve failed to regularly keep up with Lesley Chamberlain’s blog in the last couple of years, which is why I’m tardy in bringing her appreciation of the late Roger Scruton to your attention. I trust you won’t hold it against me.
Somehow, I’ve failed to regularly keep up with Lesley Chamberlain’s blog in the last couple of years, which is why I’m tardy in bringing her appreciation of the late Roger Scruton to your attention. I trust you won’t hold it against me.
April 20, 2020 @ 3:15 pm
I’m not sure if I learned about Roger Scruton through reading your blog, or through reading Patrick Kurp’s, but, whoever’s responsible, I am grateful, having finally tracked down a copy of Scruton’s ENGLAND: AN ELEGY. So engagingly written. I’m one of the left-leaning liberals who Scuton would probably have despised, but I enjoy his amazingly erudite prose nonetheless.
April 20, 2020 @ 4:09 pm
I haven’t read that one myself, but “engagingly written” seems apt based on the ones I have read.
My sense is that he was combative and polemical in the intellectual arena, but gracious in person. He wrote movingly about how gratitude was at the heart of what he called conservatism, and how his own understanding of himself as a conservative was rooted in his experience as a student in Paris during 1968, where he saw his peers engaged in a nihilistic frenzy of destruction. I think he aimed his attacks at those in the intellectual class who he felt had betrayed their duty to instill a sense of gratitude in the younger generations by teaching them to settle for the low-hanging fruit of resentment and grievance-mongering. His book Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, which is a demolition job on all the leading left-wing academic theorists and philosophers, was laugh-out-loud funny to me. (I probably violated fair use by posting all my favorite excerpts from the book, but it was a crime of passion, so I hope I can be excused.) It was savagely funny in a way that can only spring from that sense of righteous anger at betrayal.
My point being, I would guess that he would have been happy to talk to you about books, music and gardening regardless of your politics. I learned several years after the fact that he actually spent some time living in rural central Virginia, not far from me. Would I have had the nerve to try to meet him had I known it? I probably would have felt too shy, but it’s fun to imagine.