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.