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RIP Sir Roger Scruton — 15 Comments

  1. Doug Purdie:

    If I’m not mistaken, I believe the post-modernist response goes something like this: “There are only competing truths, and power differentials. Because there is no real truth, the important truth – the one we must credit – is the one from those not in power, those who have the most intersectionality.”

  2. Wonderful quotes. I did not recognize the name. Apparently, he is someone I should read.

  3. I’m also so sad that the world has lost Roger Scruton. He is (was) irreplaceable. There could never be a Roger Scruton school of thought. There was only his remarkable, capacious, brilliant mind. And his writing.
    Fifteen years ago (or so) he gave a talk at Rice, where my husband teaches. I got to sit next to him at dinner, and he was as charming and courtly as he could be. For years after that I had such a crush on him!
    I recommend his memoir, Gentle Regrets

  4. the longing to be caught up in a mass movement of solidarity

    To dance in a circle, in other words.

  5. Neo,
    Wish I could remember it better. All I can bring back is that he was concerned about the monkfish I ordered, which was very tough.

  6. Interesting piece on him — “Roger Scruton: Life of a contrary don”; a small bit of it:

    His background always baffled his lefty critics, who lazily assumed that he was some kind of Tory toff.

    Yet Roger Vernon Scruton was born in 1944 in Buslingthorpe, Lincolnshire, and reared in Buckinghamshire with his two sisters in a pebble-dashed semi.

    His grandfather was a labourer and his father, Jack, a socialist primary school teacher and trade unionist who banned his children from reading Beatrix Potter on the grounds that it was bourgeois. Scruton said Jeremy Corbyn reminded him of his father. His mother, Beryl, was fond of romantic fiction and entertaining “blue-rinsed friends”. He described her as “cherishing an ideal of gentlemanly conduct and social distinction that my father set out with considerable relish to destroy”.

  7. “… leaving only a disembodied smile and a faint smell of sulphur.”

    Very nice quote. I just finished watching “Alias Nick Beal” which is a version of “Faust” updated to 1949, with Ray Milland wonderfully playing Satan.

  8. Years ago I frequented a blog where one of the commenters was advocating for the relativity of truth. I asked him if it was absolutely true that the truth was relative or only relatively true that the truth was relative. I forgot his response.

  9. For a long time, I’ve agreed with “left thinks right is evil while right thinks left is wrong”. But I think the right has given the left too much benefit of the doubt. The left may not be all evil but is proving to be significantly so.

  10. PowerLine had some good tributes to Sir Roger, as did many other conservative sites.

    I had not heard of him until the dust-up on the withdrawn appointment to a board for building better buildings in Britain, which demonstrated the fullest depth of craven bending to mob rule over fake cries of raaaaaacisssst.

    https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/apr/10/roger-scruton-calls-for-dismissal-islamophobiad-soros-remarks

    Matthew Continetti’s is good, especially on Scruton’s conversion to conservatism.
    https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/roger-scrutons-inferno/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=third

  11. Sir Roger was a significant positive influence on the anti-commie Samizdat dissident movement in Czechoslovakia. Smuggling books and giving quick lectures. He was briefly arrested in 1985 for this activity.

    The ’91-92 Slovak Prime Minister, Jan Carnogursky, was a friend and in frequent contact with him. It was a pleasure and honor to be at their meeting before Christmas, ’91, at Magdalen College, Oxford where there was discussion of Czech and Slovak relations. (Czech, 4% unemployment; Slovakia 12%).

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