Remembering Roger Scruton on the one year anniversary of his passing

"Manners are of more importance than laws. The law can touch us here and there, now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation like that of the air we breathe in."  - Edmund Burke

Sir Roger Scruton died one year ago today, at age 75, and the world is a lesser place with his absence. A one paragraph press statement on his website announced the death of the writer, philosopher, husband, father, and brother following a six month battle with cancer. Months earlier on September 19, 2019 he received the "Defender of Western Civilization award" from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and spoke about "a thing called civilization." 

Sir Roger was a courageous man who in the midst of the Cold War traveled behind the Iron Curtain into Poland and Czechoslovakia to meet with dissidents, and demonstrate his solidarity with them, while risking prison himself.  He helped create "a pool of light" in which they could converse in freedom. He would continue this kind of work for the rest of his life.

He was a 21st century Burkean. Edmund Burke who was born 292 years ago today is viewed as the founder of the British conservative tradition, and Roger Scruton was a continuation of this tradition. Therefore it is interesting to read his 2018 essay on the current President of the United States titled "What Trump Doesn’t Get About Conservatism" in which the late British conservative concludes:

"Conservative thinkers have on the whole praised the free market, but they do not think that market values are the only values there are. Their primary concern is with the aspects of society in which markets have little or no part to play: education, culture, religion, marriage and the family. Such spheres of social endeavor arise not through buying and selling but through cherishing what cannot be bought and sold: things like love, loyalty, art and knowledge, which are not means to an end but ends in themselves.

About such things it is fair to say that Mr. Trump has at best only a distorted vision. He is a product of the cultural decline that is rapidly consigning our artistic and philosophical inheritance to oblivion. And perhaps the principal reason for doubting Mr. Trump’s conservative credentials is that being a creation of social media, he has lost the sense that there is a civilization out there that stands above his deals and his tweets in a posture of disinterested judgment."

We are in the midst of a political and cultural crisis in America, and now is the time to reflect on what is going on, return to first principles, and in the case of conservatives that means to rediscover and embrace Burkean conservatism applying its lessons for reforming and saving democracy in the United States.

The Conservative counter-revolution and chocolate pastry.

The Austrian Foreign Minister, the chef, the apprentice and the creation of a new dessert

Prince Metternich, Sacher Torte, and Franz Sacher

A few days ago discussed the role of  Prince Klemens von Metternich in securing a conservative order that provided Europe with a century of relative peace and stability. Returning to Austria yesterday came across the story of the origin of the Sacher Torte, a popular chocolate cake, and that Metternich played an important role.

In addition to playing an important role in establishing the Concert of Europe that prevented a major war on the European landmass for 99 years and blocking the revolutionary ambitions of communists and others Prince Metternich was also involved in the development of the Sacher Torte in Vienna in 1832. He had high-ranking guests attending a dinner and wanted the court's kitchen to create a special dessert demanding: Dass er mir aber keine Schand' macht, heut' Abend! ("Let there be no shame on me tonight!"),but his chef was ill and the task of creating the dessert fell to 16-year old Franz Sacher, a second year apprentice at the palace. The new desert, a magnificent chocolate cake, was a success and the Sacher Torte would become famous.

Sacher Torte

It is said in the Bible that by their fruits you shall know them. A century of peace and a delicious desert still enjoyed today across the world speaks volumes about the conservative order established by Metternich in 1815 and the success of the Sacher family, of how an apprentice under the Austrian Prince created great opportunities.

On December 4, 2017 enjoyed a Sacher Torte at one of the restaurants opened by the Sacher family located in Innsbruk, but if you can, visit the original location in Vienna.

"If your heart is weary, you need more sweets." - Anna Sacher

2017 Oslo Freedom Forum: Honoring Vaclav Havel

"Human rights are universal and indivisible. Human freedom is also indivisible: if it is denied to anyone in the world, it is therefore denied, indirectly, to all people. This is why we cannot remain silent in the face of evil or violence; silence merely encourages them." - Vaclav Havel

The ninth edition of the Oslo Freedom Forum has been underway since May 22, 2017 and tomorrow on the last day the organizers will be presenting the 2017 Václav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent at 10:00am CET the Oslo Nye Theater. Be sure to catch it live streamed below:


Human rights have been in retreat around the world over the past two decades and activists from around the globe need  to network, exchange information, and better coordinate joint actions and strategies to turn the tide.

Nevertheless, this requires questioning assumptions and the course taken over the past twenty five years in the human rights community.

Gatherings such as the Oslo Freedom Forum, Forum 2000 in Prague and the Geneva Summit for Human Rights are forums where this important conversation can and should take place.

This blog has served as a platform to discuss the crisis and possible solutions. It has also called on conservatives to recall their own roll in the development of the idea and language of human rights centuries before the French Revolution of 1789, its roots not in the Enlightenment but in the Roman Catholic Church of the Middle Ages, and the first recognition of universal human rights in the 15th century in the Salamanca school.

Let us take the long view back to inform the conversation on the present situation and future prospects.

A conservative conception of universal human rights: Does full human rights protection require an engaged social democratic welfare state?

The dialogue on human rights continues

Gandhi: "The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form."

This is the third part of a dialogue with Joel R. Pruce, a Post Doc in Human Rights Studies at the University of Dayton on the conflicts between a conservative political outlook  and a liberal conception of human rights. In part one offered a conservative conception of human rights rooted in the Catholic Church. In part two explored, although incompletely, Edmund Burke's conception of particular human rights versus abstract human rights.

Now, will address two questions that arise from Joel's observation over twitter that:

"A full version of rights-protection requires an engaged social democratic welfare state, which modern conservatives oppose.  Short of that, certain rights may be protected (civ/pol), but the rest are left up to charity and the will of the market. Certainly many conservatives are caricatures, but even Reagan/Thatcherites had a disdain for the state and for its expansion. Spiritual and moral 'conservatism' as you call it may be very compatible w/ rights, but mainstream political conservatism isn't."   

 First question that arises as a matter of policy would conservatives when given power undo the social democratic welfare state? Both under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher the social democratic welfare state continued to grow, although at a slower pace than Democratic and Labor governments respectively. Also it was under George Herbert Walker Bush, Reagan's successor, that the American Disabilities Act was signed into law. Furthermore, under George W. Bush the Federal Government expanded into both health care with a seniors prescription drug benefit and the expansion of federal government control over education with No Child Left Behind.

It appears that mainstream "modern political conservatives" rhetorically oppose some aspects of "the social democratic welfare state"  but in practice have expanded it when not creating new entitlements and expanding rights categories.

The second question that arises is to the degree that an engaged social democratic welfare state requires an expansive and centralized government does it pose a threat to human rights? Conservatives, not libertarians, do not have a problem with a strong state that is limited to its proper scope. Unfortunately, today in American discourse those voices are few and far between. At the same time you have those who have some conservative instincts but combine them with libertarianism, which is not conservative, as is the case with former Congressman Ron Paul and Senator Rand Paul.

History has demonstrated, in the case of Weimar Germany in the 1920s and 1930s that a powerful social democratic welfare state can become so powerful that when bad actors get into a position of political control it can be transformed into a state that can systematically deny human rights to an extreme never seen before and with horrific consequences. Barry Goldwater's speechwriter Karl Hess summed it up:  "Adolf Hitler as chancellor of Germany is a horror; Adolf Hitler at a town meeting would be an asshole." In a social democratic welfare state the opportunity for the abuse of power is great whereas in a New England town hall meeting it is minimal.

Mohandas Gandhi, a self-described socialist, was not an enthusiastic proponent of an expanded welfare state arguing: 

The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence. Hence I prefer the doctrine of trusteeship. [...] What I would personally prefer would be not centralization of power in the hands of the State, but an extension of the sense of trusteeship, as, in my opinion, the violence of private ownership is less injurious than the violence of the State. However, if it is unavoidable, I would support a minimum of State-ownership.

An aside, when Gandhi was assassinated in 1948 the Soviet press initially attacked him as a "reactionary utopian" due to his rejection of class warfare as violence and his doctrine of trusteeship.

 Finally, returning to Edmund Burke who observed that “Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites." The conservative argument would be translated into modern terms that the more developed and responsive civil society is the less government is needed.  That this depends on the fundamental unit of political life, the family, being in good shape with divorce rates low and high percentages of two parent families. Now with the decline of two parent families over the past two generations in the United States the need for an expanded social welfare state is an unhappy necessity and a failure of civilization. The Catholic Church has a principle of subsidiarity that within in its catechism outlines the danger of extensive state intervention: 

Excessive intervention by the state can threaten personal freedom and initiative. The teaching of the Church has elaborated the principle of subsidiarity, according to which "a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to co- ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good."

In conclusion, full human rights protection requires a fully engaged state but that does not mean that it has to be administered by the government. Now if society at large begins to fail then responsibilities that were handled in the private sphere may have to be picked up by government. The problem is that this raises new problems because the government is not good in doing many of these things and also it can lead to social atrophy which decreases social capital and leads to additional responsibilities being loaded onto the government in a vicious cycle that leads to a crisis of legitimacy for the government when it cannot meet its vastly expanded obligations.