Scrutopia
Shortly after the 10th annual Eighth Day Symposium in 2019, a Symposium attendee and Eighth Day member strongly encouraged me to apply to Scrutopia, a ten-day immersion experience in the philosophy and outlook of Sir Roger Scruton in and around Sir Roger’s home in the British Cotswolds near historic Malmesbury. The kicker was the Eighth Day member wanted to cover all my expenses. So I applied, was accepted, and a few months later was off to England for a once-in-a-lifetime educational experience.
The aim of Scrutopia is to “assemble a group of around 25 committed people, with a shared interest in culture and all that is involved in passing it on.” I was one of 18 of those committed people who came from all over the world (Australia, Austria, Canada, England, Netherlands, Poland, Singapore, Sweden, and five of us from the U.S.A.). Most afternoons we visited historic ancient and medieval sites such as Stone Henge, Old Sarum (iron age hillfort), Salisbury Cathedral where we saw the Magna Carta, Abbey House Gardens in Malmesbury, and the Chedworth Roman Villa. On two different occasions we visited (and toured) Sunday Hill Farm where Sir Roger and his wife Sophie live and work. We met their horses, sat in their library for a classical concert, visited one of the farm’s mossy ponds that is famed for Iris Murdoch diving in for a swim, and feasted on local produce from Fernhill Farm and Brinkworth Dairy. And in good Eighth Day style, each evening concluded with lots of wine and conversation; one of those evenings included a gala dinner with a talk by James Gray MP. (Scruton has written a book on wine—I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher’s Guide to Wine—in which he uses the ancient symposium for the following argument: “A good wine should always be accompanied by a good topic, and the topic should be pursued around the table with the wine. As the Greeks recognized, this is the best way to consider truly serious questions.”)
Until this trip I had barely heard of Scruton and hadn’t read a single thing by him. Now he’s one of my great heroes. And that’s why this inaugural issue of the annual
Christian News-Letter is dedicated to the memory of Sir Roger Scruton. So who is this 21st century knight?
Roger Scruton the Man
The life and career of Sir Roger Scruton (1944-2020) was truly remarkable. His bibliography is massive which includes books, essays, and editorials, covering topics as wildly diverse as philosophy (what he was formally trained in), wine, politics, farming, conservatism, fox-hunting, architecture, music, sex, the environment, his beloved England, Lebanon, and many more. He founded and edited
The Salisbury Review from 1982-2001. He has also written three novels, a book of poetry, and two operas. The honors and honorary doctorates he received are too numerous to list. He helped organize underground seminars for persecuted intellectuals in Prague through the Jan Hus Educational Foundation, which he helped establish. He also founded the Jagiellonian Trust in 1982 to do similar work in Poland and Hungary. His opposition to communism in the 1980s landed him in jail in 1985 in Czechoslovakia. According to Mark Dooley, in his excellent book
Conversations with Roger Scruton,
Roger Scruton gives concrete substance to his convictions and has often suffered as a result. This was most apparent in his work on behalf of the dissidents of Eastern Europe during the communist enslavement—work acknowledged by Václav Havel when in 1998, as president of the Czech Republic, he awarded Scruton the Medal for Merit (First Class) for his services to the Czech people, and also by the jury of the Lech Kaczyński Award, when they honored Scruton in 2015 for his intellectual courage and friendship to Poland during the 1980s.
He was proclaimed an “undesirable person” by European communists who, after jailing him, expelled him altogether from the Eastern Bloc. The Pet Shop Boys sued him for libel in the 1990s. In 2005 the Guildhall School of Music and Drama performed his full opera “Violet.” In 2016 he was knighted by Queen Elisabeth. Two years later, in 2018, he was appointed chair of the British government’s new Building Better, Building Beautiful commission. But the following year, based on a tweet that took a few of his words out of context from an interview, he was accused of homophobia and Islamaphobia, fell victim to cancel culture, and was fired from the position; threats were even made to remove his knighthood. But then tragedy struck in 2019 when he was diagnosed with cancer (just weeks before my trip to Scrutopia) that took his life within six months (d. 12 January 2020). Dooley concludes in his biographical study of Scruton,
Roger Scruton: The Philosopher on Dover Beach (I highly recommend you read this, along with
The Roger Scruton Reader, also edited by Dooley), “In short, Roger Scruton is one of the most accomplished public intellectuals to have emerged in the latter half of the seventeenth century. And yet he has at best been ignored, and at worst reviled.” Sir Roger Scruton is a man after my own heart.
Roger Scruton the Conservative
By training Sir Roger Scruton is a philosopher. But he is probably better known as a champion of conservatism. While watching protesters from his apartment window in the streets of Paris in May 1968 he says he realized he was a conservative. But what does he mean by that word conservative? He’s written numerous books explaining it but here I’ll just offer two of his definitions from his book
How to Be a Conservative. He says the kind of conservatism that he defends
tells us that we have collectively inherited good things that we must strive to keep. In the situation in which we, the inheritors of both of Western civilization and of the English-speaking part of it, find ourselves, we are well aware what those good things are. The opportunity to live our lives as we will; the security of impartial law, through which our grievances are answered and our hurts restored; the protection of our environment as a shared asset, which cannot be seized or destroyed at the whim of powerful interests; the open and enquiring culture that has shaped our schools and universities; the democratic procedures that enable us to elect our representatives and to pass our own laws—these and many other things are familiar to us and taken for granted. All are under threat. And conservatism is the rational response to that threat. […]
Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created. This is especially true of the good things that come to us as collective assets: peace, freedom, law, civility, public spirit, the security of property and family life, in all of which we depend on the cooperation of others while having no means singlehandedly to obtain it. In respect of such things, the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation slow, laborious and dull. (viii-ix)
He concludes that conservatism “is not about what we have lost, but about what we have retained, and how to hold on to it” (ix).
Retaining and holding on to it. That’s the hard part. It takes a long time, a great deal of work, and usually much difficulty and suffering to build things of value like communities, nations, civilizations, civil and religious institutions, legal and economic systems. The sad reality is that such things of value that take so long to build up under great difficulty can be destroyed so easily, and often times at lightning pace. Regrettably, many of the values of Western Civilization are currently under attack and being destroyed all too quickly. And Sir Roger had a term for such destruction.
Oikophobia or the Triumph of Oikomachia
Rod Dreher recently reported the “queering” of Santa Claus in a Norwegian postal service commercial. It shows Santa Claus and a full-grown man embracing and kissing, followed by the message: “In 2022, Norway marks 50 years of being able to love whoever we want.” Dreher asks why the children of Norway need a queer Santa. He continues:
What’s the point of bringing the culture war to children’s Christmas traditions? It’s because they—LGBTs and their straight allies—cannot allow any territory to go uncontested. There can be no neutral ground. All things must be infused with revolutionary order. This is a manifestation of soft totalitarianism.
Dreher concludes, “We in the West are ruled by people who hate its traditions, hate its ancestral religion, hate its history, and hate many of the people who live within it.”
This is exactly what Sir Roger Scruton tirelessly opposed. He even coined a term for it:
oikophobia. He’s written about it in many places but writes extensively about it in his book
Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet. Here are several short excerpts:
[Oikophobia is an] educated derision that has been directed towards historical loyalties by our intellectual elites, who have tended to dismiss all the ordinary forms of patriotism and local attachment as forms of racism, imperialism or xenophobia of which it accuses the world. I do not mean fear of home, however, but the repudiation of home—the turning away from the claims and attachments that identify an inherited first-person plural. (247)
Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes […] But
oikophobia is also a stage to which some people—intellectuals especially— tend to become arrested. (247)
What is normally meant by “political correctness” is the repudiation of rooted American values, and a pronounced tendency to blame America and its success for all that is wrong with the world. In all its versions
oikophobia gives rise to what I call a “culture of repudiation,” which spreads through school and academy all but unresisted by the guardians of traditional knowledge. (248)
Oikophobes define their goals and ideals against some cherished form of membership—against the home, the family, the nation. In the political arena, therefore, they are apt to promote transnational institutions over national governments, accepting and endorsing laws and regulations that are imposed on us from on high by the EU or by the institutions of the UN, and defining their political vision in terms of universal values that have been purged of all reference to the particular attachments of real historical communities. In their own eyes, oikophobes are defenders of enlightened universalism against local chauvinism. And it is the rise of the oikophobe that has led to the growing crisis of legitimacy in the nation states of Europe. Oikophobes seek a fulcrum outside their society by which all its foundations might be overturned. (249)
Since the Greek word phobia merely indicates fear, I would adapt Scruton’s term and say that
oikomachia has triumphed. The Greek word
machia means a fight or battle. We live in an age that is fighting against all the values that have been built up over the last three thousand years. So while Charles Taylor has described our era as a secular age, by which he means an age in which Christianity is only one option among many (and also one of the most difficult options), following Scruton I would add that we also live in an oikomachic age.
Oikophilia & Eternal Rest
What is to be done? What would Sir Roger Scruton say? The short answer is
oikophilia. You can learn more about it by reading the rest of this
Christian News-Letter. The longer answer will be in the Director’s Desk in the next issue of the
Eighth Day Moot (Symposium 2022). In the meantime, following my tradition of ending my Director’s Desk pieces with a patristic passage, I’ll leave you with a prayer by St. Basil that is appropriate for the new year of 2022 and also reminds us where our true home is:
O Master, Lord Jesus Christ our God, You have led us to the present hour, in which, as You hung upon the life-giving Tree, You made a way into Paradise for the penitent thief, and by death destroyed death. […] Help us lay aside our old ways so that we may be clothed with new resolve and may dedicate our lives to You, the Master and Benefactor, so that by following Your commandments, we may come to the eternal rest which is the abode of all those who rejoice. For You are the true joy and exultation of those who love You, O Christ our God, and to You we ascribe glory, together with the Father who is without beginning, and Your all-holy, good and life-giving Spirit, now and ever and unto ages of ages. Amen. ~Ninth hour prayer of St Basil the Great
