“The default position of the human psyche”, says Roger Scruton, includes “fear, resentment … anger”. Like Matthew Arnold on Dover Beach, he has heard the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of things he holds dear, things that bind us together and make life in common possible. This is a pessimistic ending to his magisterial book, How to be a Conservative—though as the author of The Uses of Pessimism, Scruton may not be troubled by this label. Instead, he may retort, it is only by appreciating what we have lost that we can recover what we value. But to achieve this we must prise the art and the act of recovery from pessimism’s dead embrace—and this appreciation, this hope, retrieved from Scruton’s melancholy, is the final gift his book has to offer us.
In “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, But Admitting Loss” and “Practical Matters,” Scruton dwells on three particular losses. These are the final chapters of his book, which we’ve been reading through in the hope of learning and reclaiming the meaning of conservatism. Scruton’s sense of loss is sharpened by his belief that the human condition is not idyllic, that beneath the “frail crust of civilisation” lies violence and anarchy. Our inherited habits and institutions can protect us from falling into this void; their loss imperils us.
The first loss is the loss of tolerance and compromise, signified by the erosion of free speech. Scruton points out that respecting free speech is not our natural state. Rather, “orthodoxy, conformity and the hounding of the dissident” are what come naturally to us. The stakes are high, because “in criticising orthodoxy you are not just questioning a belief; you are threatening the social order that has been built on it.” So the freedom to say what we think, and the obligation to hear what we do not want to hear, must be constantly and carefully protected. This tolerance is the foundation of compromise, in politics and elsewhere. Just as toleration means accepting “opinions that you intensely dislike,” political compromise “means consenting to be governed by people whom you intensely dislike” which is only likely if you trust that those people will also show respect for those with whom they disagree. That is why free speech, and the attitude of humility it creates and promotes, is fundamental to a shared and peaceful political order.
The second loss is the loss of faith, the “long, withdrawing roar” that Arnold could hear in the mid-nineteenth century. Faith, to Scruton, is “a transforming state of mind” and a “social fact” involving membership in a community bound together by doctrine, ritual and belief. So the ebbing tide of faith is the loss of “comfort, membership and home”, not just the loss of belief. And where those beliefs have made the world that we inhabit, we shouldn’t take it for granted that that world will endure. The pre-Christian world did not share our belief in the dignity and equal worth of all people, for example. Can we expect a post-Christian world to remain committed to this belief when everything that freighted it with moral urgency and obligation is eroding?
The third loss is the loss of historical memory and, with it, our inheritance. History is neither an abstraction nor a monument to a disembodied past, but a lived reality. The history of Britain’s faith, for example, is seen in “the web of pinnacles, spires and finials that stitched the townscape to the sky”. History is dynamic, “an aspect of the present, a living thing, influencing our projects and also changing under their influence … not a book to be read, but a book to be written in.” History makes sense of what is now and what is yet to come; our laws, institutions and culture came from somewhere for some reason, and we can understand them, or understand ourselves, without first recognising this fact. The loss of historical memory therefore breaks the chain of inheritance from past to present to future, leaving our descendants without the understanding we should have bequeathed them.
Scruton acknowledges these losses “the better to bear them” but that acknowledgement also marks the turning point from ebb to advance. We can’t recover something unless we know we have lost it; we can’t renew it unless we know the life is draining out of it. So we can finish our tour of his book with gratitude for what he has revealed to us, and with hope—that by admitting our losses we can see more clearly what is at stake, and that the ebbing of the tide can turn to advance—and we can bend to the task of conservation and restoration with renewed dedication.