Scruton on Scotland
The importance of culture, history and national identity.
The following is something of a jeu d’esprit: what might Roger Scruton, conservative, Anglican and English, have thought if he had been conservative, Catholic and Scottish?
There is a serious purpose behind such a fantasy which is to try and sketch out what a Scrutonian conservatism might look like in Scotland, and how that might relate to Scottish Catholicism. That might strike some readers as scarcely less ridiculous than the original question. Even those sympathetic to explorations of Scottish politics and culture might regard Scruton’s version of conservatism as woefully unsuited to Scotland (or perhaps anywhere else), and especially unsuited to the rather progressive nature of both Scottish Catholicism in particular and Catholicism in general. So this article is going to have two parts. First, I’ll argue for the general interest of Scruton’s actual views, not necessarily because they are correct, but because they do contain a thoughtful account of a conservative approach to life and religion that really ought to be a voice in any deep discussion of humanity, and particularly in a Scotland which too often has indulged itself in simplistic slogans about opposing Tory Scum and being progressive. Second, having argued for the importance of Scruton’s conservative vision, at least as one element in a dialogue around politics and culture, I’ll start to imagine what the key elements of such a general vision might be like if applied to modern Scotland.
So what are the main elements of Scruton’s philosophy and why do they deserve serious consideration? First, a warning: if the second part of this article is in danger of descending into fantasy, the first part runs the risk of a descent into under-evidenced assertion. Part of the difficulty in trying to summarise Scruton’s views is that they have been expressed in a variety of forms over the years -fiction, academic publications, journalism - and also in ways that became increasingly conversational and occasional over his life. Trying to extract and summarise an overall vision from such a maelstrom of thoughts is difficult and one that would, in order to be fully adequate, require careful evidence from his writings. Instead, I’m going simply to state what I take to be the main elements of his approach, and hope that they will be recognisable enough to be accepted as at least a possible interpretation of them. With that warning in mind, let’s try and summarise his views and then argue that they deserve serious consideration.
Scruton strikes me as having three aspects to his work. There is a coherent, philosophical approach to society and culture that focuses on the creation of an imaginative Lebenswelt (life world) by each national culture and the importance of those worlds to human flourishing. Then there is the identification and exploration of Englishness as a particular Lebenswelt with an increasing emphasis on the Common Law and the Church of England as essential elements of that structure. Finally, there is a reflection on the way the transcendent appears in human life, particularly in beauty and the sacred. I’ll take each of these three aspects in turn, starting with the Lebenswelt.
For a philosopher who often seemed to be trying to turn himself into an English country squire, Scruton had a distinct interest in and sympathy for some rather continental approaches, particularly that of German Idealism. Kant is often mentioned by Scruton as a key source of his ideas especially regarding a broad distinction between the world of science and objects and the world of human creativity and freedom. For Scruton, that world of freedom is at least in part culturally constructed and hence fragile: what it is to live well as a free, intelligent human being will vary from culture to culture, will be constructed by the laws and arts and religions of those cultures, and, as a construction, is liable to damage unless it is understood and maintained. Architecture, in which Scruton had a continuous interest throughout his career, serves as a key element in human flourishing both literally and metaphorically: we in fact spend much of our lives surrounded by architecture and it’s therefore going to be a key element in how we live and feel; metaphorically, we live in a constructed cultural Lebenswelt which shelters us and is liable to collapse unless repaired.
Turning from the Lebenswelt to the exploration of a specific cultural form, that of Englishness, Scruton is usually very careful to distinguish Englishness from Britishness. This led him, quite predictably, to favour Scottish independence in the 2014 referendum:
I would vote for English independence, as a step towards strengthening the friendship between our countries. It was thanks to independence that the Americans were able at last to confess to their attachment to the old country, and to come to our aid in two world wars. Independence is what real friendship requires. And the same is true for those, like the Scots and the English, who live side by side.
The sense of an organic form of a culture which needs to be respected and worked with rather than overturned in favour of some universalised understanding of justice is an approach familiar from German Idealists such as Hegel, but also from the more familiar conservative thinker, Edmund Burke. For Scruton, key institutions which maintained this English form of life were the English Common Law and the Church of England.
Finally, there is the direct exploration of how the transcendent qualities of beauty and the sacred enter our lives. One of the ways in which Scruton explores these qualities is through the work of Wagner:
In other words, [for Wagner] religion contains deep truths about the human psyche; but these truths become conscious only in art, which captures them in symbols. Through art, therefore, we decipher the mystery that religion conceals, which is the mystery of sacred thing […] Art shows the believable moral realities behind the unbelievable myths.
Having laid out the essentials of Scruton’s views, what might emerge if we imagine them applied to Scotland? Certainly, there would be the existence of a certain Scottish Lebenswelt, a way of imagining and constructing the world from a Scottish perspective. And I think that this is the most important suggestion to be drawn from the current exercise: that there are national cultures which need to be reflected on and from within, and that this is something that needs to be done whatever one’s political views about independence. If key elements of English culture are the legal system and the Church of England according to Scruton, then Scottish culture is necessarily different from English culture and this needs to be faced up to whatever judgments you come to about the institutions that might best politically reflect those differences. Certainly, the separate existence of Scots Law as an important element in Scottish society has been a standing claim since the Act of Union, but what precisely that might mean is something less predictable. Finally, there is the Church of Scotland. While Catholics can hardly be exactly happy about the religious situation since 1560, and the Church of Scotland currently seems to be in some sort of death spiral, Presbyterian Christianity has been a major part of Scottish culture since the sixteenth century. A mature engagement with this fact rather than the dismissal of our religious institutions as best forgotten with no place in a progressive, very secular Scotland would be welcome.
There are elements of Scruton’s views which, even for a conservative Catholic, should be indigestible: his understanding of religion, which at times seems to suggest it is nothing more than a useful fiction, is clearly inadequate. But even for more progressive Catholics, his challenge as a thoughtful proponent of the importance of culture, history and national identity ought to be welcome, not because his views are necessarily correct, but because, amongst much else, they take seriously aspects such as beauty and the sacred which, though fundamental to a Catholic understanding of the world, are nowadays rarely mentioned in polite Scottish conversation.
By Stephen Watt