Scruton for lefties
Roger Scruton's philosophy of 'love' has plenty for left-wingers to appreciate
Graeme Archer, the statistician and now-occasional writer - and one of my favourite Tories – enjoys calling the Conservatives ‘the party of love’.
I’m not sure this is something I will ever sign up to. However the idea isn’t as absurd as you might think, especially if you consider conservatism as a creed or philosophy rather than as an institution called the Conservative Party.
Sir Roger Scruton, the conservative philosopher who died two years ago in 2020, articulated this philosophy of love perhaps better than anyone. In his intellectual memoir Gentle Regrets, Scruton wrote, “Conservatism is founded on love: love of what has been good to you, and forgiveness of what has not.”
At an event with his friend and fellow conservative Douglas Murray featured in the video below, Scruton says, “Resentment is so much easier than love. Love requires you to forgive the faults of the other; to be giving and forgiving, whereas hatred has no cost at all.”
To say that conservativism is founded in love means it is not founded in principle nor even in thought. Rather, it’s a founding of feeling – attachment, commitment, partiality, discrimination and prejudice; things generally treated as untrustworthy, irrational and even illegitimate by those who dominate our public discourse, despite their evident universality. There is no right or wrong to love. It arises of its own accord. This puts it beyond the control of the technocratic mindset. It is therefore suspect.
Love of home, of England
The same goes for the attachment of people to place which we call ‘home’. Scruton was particularly committed to this relation, to “love of the land and the landscape” – and particularly to his and/or our relation, that of the English to the land of England. Progressives typically denounce this sort of commitment as ‘blood and soil’ nationalism. And while Scruton considered any lingering racial definition “untenable now for reasons both scientific and moral”, he certainly believed in the soil bit: that our relation to a particular piece of territory is imbued with significance and prefigures our preferences or prejudices; that this entails exclusion of ‘others’ (not in an absolute way mind you) and that there is nothing wrong with this.
Those who don’t already know Scruton well might start to get a sense here for quite how offensive his musings have been to mainstream liberals, left-wingers, and indeed some big ‘c’ Conservatives.