Unlike French intellectuals, upon whom national honours are copiously lavished, English intellectuals have always been more likely to face public indifference or even, from literary peers, brutal mockery.
Novelist Kingsley Amis characterized a typical intellectual as “some fearful woman who’s going to talk to you about Ezra Pound and hasn’t got large breasts and probably doesn’t wash much.” George Orwell associated intellectuals with complacency, insincerity and pretentiousness; he once called Jean-Paul Sartre a “bag of wind.”
Yet some parts of the Anglosphere are friendlier to intellectuals than others—at least in the case of conservatives. In recent years, harassment from European leftists has propelled some of Britain’s finest minds to the United States—including Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens. Having drifted “across the pond,” they now breathe the friendlier air of the last western redoubt where conservative thought finds a receptive home.
Add to that list English Renaissance man—philosopher, opera composer, aesthetics/social/cultural critic, novelist, journalist, editor, publisher, documentary filmmaker—Roger Scruton. Presently ensconced at Princeton University in New Jersey, he took part last Thursday in a first-rate Ottawa symposium sponsored by the Centre for Cultural Renewal on “Public Morality? Community Standards and the Limits of Harm.”
As the keynote speaker, Scruton took liberals to the metaphorical woodshed, thrashing activists who corrupt basic legal concepts such as “equality” and “harm” as a means to promote gay marriage, protect swingers’ clubs and generally undermine the traditional family.
I attended the symposium having already sampled some of Scruton’s work. My first exposure was an essay he wrote in the National Review last December, in which, himself an avid fox hunter, he lauded the cheerful inclusivity of his class-blind fox-hunting Virginia neighbours in order to highlight the self-righteous hypocrisy of the class-obsessed English Labourites. (England’s Parliament spent 10 hours on the decision to enter the war in Iraq, 252 hours debating the issue of fox hunting.) “Fox hunting is as offensive to the puritan English of today as prostitution was to their 18th century forebears,” Scruton wrote. “Labour members of Parliament, who condone every kind of sexual excess and seem to rejoice in the breakdown of family values, become pale with horror at the thought that someone somewhere might be enjoying ‘the sport of kings.’ “
Intrigued by his style, I read Scruton’s enchanting intellectual memoir, Gentle Regrets. An anthology of essays on political philosophy, urban dynamics, personal influences, opera, travels, pets and, yes, fox hunting, this intellectual autobiography is a lively and eclectic literary adventure.
One chapter, Drinks in Helsinki, a series of diary entries recording impressions Scruton gleaned from an academic trip amongst the pathologically shy Finns, is worth the price of the book alone, occasionally rivaling even Orwell himself for wickedly precise social marksmanship. He describes one Finnish academic’s sense of humour as “a precious commodity here, where laughter occurs rarely, and only as a kind of mad outrush of air, used like the ink of the squid to confuse the enemy.” A Finnish dance is “a sad, speechless knot of people drift[ing] on the dance floor like a clot of rubbish on a pond. They do not dance, but smooch aimlessly about … occasionally burying their heads like hatchets in their partners’ necks.”
There are other funny bits—lunch at the shabby garret home of famous novelist Iris Murdoch and husband John Bayley is the ne plus ultra of revolting English nosh (“cold kidney beans out of a tin, with cold tomato juice poured over them … A crust of cold pasta lies over this concoction, giving it the character of a mushy wound beneath blanched dead skin”)—but most of the book is devoted to Scruton’s more serious purpose: explaining his complex personal trajectory toward “that impossible thing: an original path to conformity.”
If there is someone on your Christmas book shopping list with an appetite for original ideas laid out in beautifully chiseled prose; an eye for mordant satire; a heart for poignant relationships, both human and animal (his dad Jack is a moving character, portraits of his dog and horse, both named Sam, reveal much about Scruton); and if that someone still stubbornly clings to the conviction that marriage is still and always will be a union of one man and one woman, but is too muddled by our rights culture’s theft of objective reasoning to remember why: Gentle Regrets is the book you’re seeking.
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