Gentle Regrets: thoughts from a life.

Gentle Regrets Thoughts from a life WRITTEN BY Roger Scruton PUBLISHED BY Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005 ISBN: 0826471315, Hardcover, pp. 248, $36.50 CND 

Dr. Roger Scruton was effectively driven out of British academic life because he is a conservative; in short compass, that is the story of his life.

In Gentle Regrets, Scruton provides glimpses--autobiographical excursions--explaining how and why his exile happened.

"Whatever its defects, my life has enabled me to find comfort in uncomfortable truths. Whether this counts as wisdom, I do not know; but it encourages me to provide some of the personal background from which my worldview arose."

Born in England in 1944, Scruton was educated at the local grammar school in High Wycombe, thence at Cambridge. But his real education began at the age of 13 when he first picked up a copy of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress; "for months afterwards I strode through our suburb side by side with Christian, my inner eye fixed on the Celestial City."

The Bunyan influence intrigued me because a generation before, my father was growing up in the Scottish village of Maybole, and was similarly captivated by Bunyan's masterpiece; blessed with a photographic memory, my father remembered it, and was frequently called upon to recite Pilgrim's Progress over the next eight decades of his long life. For Scruton Bunyan's allegory provided the leitmotif for a life that would know its share of struggle, temptation, ostracism and exclusion.

Scruton's chapter titles give an inkling of the contents of this book: "How I Became a Conservative;" "Stealing from Churches;" "Sleeping Cities;" How I Discovered Culture;" and "Returning Home." Scruton is unsparing about his own shortcomings, describing his failings (and particularly the break-up of his marriage) with the same unflinching eye with which he surveys the irreversible breakdown of Western civilization.

In 1968 Scruton lived in Paris where he witnessed firsthand the student riots convulsing the city. When he returned to teach at London's Birkbeck College, he came back with a healthy distaste for revolutions and Utopias. This put him at odds with his colleagues, the lone conservative on a Faculty whose creed was that Western civilization was the root of all evil--"an institutionalized form of oppressive power."

With the advent of the deconstructionists (particularly Michel Foucault, who later died of AIDS contracted on one of his celebrated lecture tours), and then the postmodernists who deny even the possibility of truth, Scruton was squeezed out; "my failure to conceal my conservative beliefs was noticed and disapproved." The final straw was in 1978, when he wrote The Meaning of Conservatism--which effectively ended his academic career.

For awhile, Scruton farmed. Then he became the editor of the Salisbury Review, which was denounced as "racist," "sexist" and all the other by now familiar epithets that the liberal establishment reserves for those they disagree with. In 1985 the British Association for the Advancement of Science went so far as to stage a "show trial" of the Review, a trial to which they neglected to invite the editor--demonstrating the truth of Malcolm Muggeridge's dictum that there is no orthodoxy so closed as the liberal mind.

During Scruton's editorship, the Salisbury Review had only a small circulation, but it acquired a devoted readership in Communist countries where it circulated underground. "Examples were smuggled out to us on thin wafer-like pages which had the spiritual quality of illuminated manuscripts. They were testimony to a belief in the written word that had been tried and proved through real suffering."

Scruton's spiritual odyssey, the one that began at 13 with Pilgrim's Progress, could be said to have been propelled largely by aesthetics. As a "voyeur of holiness" he sought out churches in order to admire their architecture, their interiors, their statuary and icons; it dawned on him gradually that he was most at home in "the world of God."

With a nudge from one or two Christians, Scruton ceased to be a tourist and became a penitent. Perhaps the decisive moment was when Monsignor Alfred Gilbey, a longtime Catholic University chaplain, said to him: "We are not asked to undo the work of Creation or to rectify the Fall. The duty of the Christian is not to leave this world a better place. His duty is to leave this world a better man."

Despite his struggles, Scruton, now 60, concludes Gentle Regrets on a serene note. His last chapter is entitled "Regaining My Religion." Like his boyhood hero, Christian, Scruton has traveled difficult terrain to arrive where he can now glimpse his final destination--that City which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.