Roger Scruton: Hegel on horseback

My life has been dominated by horses. My grandmother was one of the first Irish women to compete in the Main Arena at the Dublin Horse Show. Her father owned a stable yard and it was there that she and her siblings spent their childhood.

In time, my mother acquired a love of the horse which helped her find my father. They met through show jumping and still compete to this day. Eventually, I too found my way into the saddle, competing on the pony show jumping circuit before becoming a commentator at equestrian events countrywide.

All of this coincided with my becoming a philosopher. The life of the mind drew me away from my equestrian pursuits and from life as I had known it. Philosophy taught me to think through the “crust of convention”, to dispense with my inherited baggage and to opt for enlightenment over settlement.

Horses had bound me to somewhere – to time, place, family and community. In liberating me from my traditional attachments, philosophy duped me into thinking that I could view the world as if from nowhere. I was rootless and homeless, a kind of intellectual cyborg.

It was then that I discovered Hegel on horseback. I first encountered Roger Scruton when he came to deliver the Agnes Cuming Lectures at UCD in the early 1990s. Dressed in a tweed waistcoat with silver pocket watch, he struck me as someone from a bygone century. Here was a man of letters who intellectually defended a conservative worldview so opposed to the prevailing liberal climate.

For Scruton, the universities were the vanguard of what he termed the “culture of repudiation” – a culture that actively sought to deconstruct Western culture, art, religion and politics. Here, however, was someone who celebrated the glories of classical music, architecture and the politics of the Western nation state. He was, moreover, a composer of opera, a controversial journalist for the the Times, and a man who had been arrested and expelled from Communist Czechoslovakia for the crime of giving hope to the hopeless.

What I did not know during our first encounter was that Scruton was also a horseman. He had recently found hunting and was on the verge of giving up academic life to become a freelance writer and farmer. As he subsequently wrote: “My life divided into three parts. In the first I was wretched; in the second ill at ease; in the third hunting.”

As a fully paid-up member of the culture of repudiation, I was astonished at some of the things Scruton said on his visit to UCD. He unashamedly defended aspects of existence which I had long since left behind. However, something in what he said resonated with me at a deep and profound level. It was that “faced with the ruin of folkways, traditions, conventions, customs and dogmas”, philosophy must set the new task of “thoughtfully restoring what has been thoughtlessly damaged: the ordinary human world”.

The years passed, I got married and had a family. I had also become a journalist, and it was in writing about topical issues that I began to understand why we discard our inheritance at our peril. I began to see that the things I had spent my career repudiating were, in fact, the only things that could give true sense and meaning to our lives.

Life had led me to see the world as Roger Scruton sees it, and it was to him that I now looked for guidance. I read through his astonishing range of writings on everything from architecture and farming, to music, hunting and sex. What I found was that this much-maligned man was, in fact, a philosopher of extraordinary insight and sensitivity.

What I also discovered, much to my delight, was that his philosophy reflected his love of horses. As he tells me in our new book, Conversations with Roger Scruton, hunting “is the experience of reconnection: I am being connected to something bigger than myself… I am no longer maintaining my position in the world simply through intellectual work, but I am being maintained by my membership of something else”.

In writing on Scruton, I found my way back home. I too had this experience of reconnection in which the ordinary joys of human life are discovered as if for the very first time. Here was Hegel on horseback beckoning me to listen again to the wisdom of absent generations.

Scruton was someone who came to hunting relatively late in life. His farm in Wiltshire, which he shares with his wife Sophie and two children, is also home to many horses. That is why, whenever I visit Sunday Hill Farm, I too feel very much at home.

On horseback, you are attached to the animal world, to the land, soil and settlement. You belong to the surrounding world and to the ghosts of those who have shaped it. Horses tie you to somewhere and expose the futility of nowhere. They teach you to respect and love this small piece of earth which you call “home”.

In an extraordinary story recounted for the first time in our new book, Scruton tells how in the midst of “making life difficult for Communists” in the 1980s, he saved a Romanian family. Iolanda Stranescu was a leading member of the Romanian resistance who knew Scruton kept horses and had spoken to her children about it. During a meeting in London, Stranescu’s eight-year-old daughter Christina “came in and, without saying anything, stood silently in the doorway dressed for horse riding in boots and cap”.

Scruton took Christina down to his farm that weekend and, “within a few weeks she had adopted me, and included her sisters too in the deal”. He subsequently saw the girls “through their education, and Sophie and the children now regard them as part of our family”. Through horses, Scruton rescued a family from what was, perhaps, the most benighted country in Eastern Europe and gave them a lasting experience of home.

Scruton is, in other words, a philosopher who practices every word of what he preaches. He rescues people from their intellectual and earthly exile and reunites them to their past, to their ancestry and to their sacred bequest. That he does so while galloping through the Wiltshire dales, is the reason why I finally gave up nowhere for somewhere.

That somewhere is our country. It is my home and a place I have grown again to love thanks to this advice from one very English horseman: “Be proud of yourself as a member of something greater than yourself”.

Conversations with Roger Scruton by Mark Dooley and Roger Scruton is published by Bloomsbury. Roger Scruton and Mark Dooley will both appear at the Edmund Burke International Summer School in Mullingar from June 19th-25th. For details see www.drmarkdooley.com