Roger Scruton speaks on what is means to be a Conservative at the George Washington Forum in Galbreath Chapel on Monday.
Since the start of Ohio University's George Washington Forum, professor Robert Ingram has wanted Roger Scruton to be a part of it.
“When I started the forum five or six years ago, I wanted to invite him, but he just couldn’t come,” Ingram, the founding director of the George Washington Forum, said. “We’re a university; we need the full course and range of voices in society to be represented."
Scruton, professor of philosophy at the University of St. Andrews and a fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, spoke on “Being a Conservative Today,” in Galbreath Chapel on Monday night.
The event was sponsored by OU's George Washington Forum.
Scruton has written more than thirty books, according to the Washington Forum's website, with most recent titles including How To Be a Conservative and The Soul of the World.
Scruton spoke of the political atmosphere he grew up in in England — one that resulted in the changes that followed the World War II.
“What people wanted was an equal society where people were protected by the state,” Scruton said during the lecture.
Industries in Great Britain were brought under control of the state and major ways of creating wealth were nationalized. In that atmosphere, Scruton said, conservatives came off as out of place or “clinging to a dead order of society.”
However, a succession of economic crises in Britain led to electing conservatives, Scruton said. He added that Conservatism in the UK does not have quite the same reputation as it does in America.
“It is obviously very difficult on an American campus to come out as a conservative,” Scruton said during the lecture.
Scruton said the real source of conservatism is love of tradition and institution and a desire to avoid unnecessary change. He used the argument about gay marriage as an example. The conservative view might describe marriage as an institution that is fundamental to society, and therefore should be kept as is, Scruton said.
Attachment is the root of civil society and should be what conservatism is trying to preserve, Scruton said. Humans begin in the family with an attachment to their parents, which ends up being an essential part of character formation. He added that it is how people come to know and interact with others.
Scruton modified philosopher Jean-Jacques Rosseau’s version of the social contract — a contract between the government and the consenting governed — because it only concerns the living. Scruton spoke of the need for a social contract to exist between the unborn, the living and the dead.
Environmentalists, for example, seek to conserve resources and prevent their squandering, which is why they ought to be conservatives, Scruton said.
Ingram said it was interesting hear someone talk about conservatism as a philosophy as opposed to a political movement.
"The politicalization of everything gets old," Ingram said.
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