Roger Scruton: Your Moments Are Yours Forever
I find it both consoling and inspiring. I hope you do too.
The video at the end of this post contains many different nuggets of wisdom the late great Roger Scruton. Scruton was a classical traditionalist conservative and prolific author who wrote brilliantly on a wide variety of subjects.
The whole ten minutes is worth watching, but I specifically want to draw your attention to the moment when he exhorts us to remember that each moment we live is not a fleeting thing—here and then gone. Rather, every moment is one’s own, forever, and each of us should live every moment with that in mind. In Scruton’s view, we should feel consoled by this knowledge. One’s time is completely one’s own, sub specie aeternitatis—that is, universally, fundamentally, and forever.
One could certainly look at this from a punitive religious standpoint: Your actions are written into the fabric of reality forever, and can be reviewed by a higher power at any point…so make your moments something of which you will not embarrassed. But we can also take a more positive outlook: Your actions are written into the fabric of reality forever…so make your moments something of which you can forever be proud.
Even without a belief in the Eternal, Scruton’s notion ought to be both a consolation and a call to a better life. Your moments really are yours forever. Only you can live them. They can never be repeated. Your thoughts. Your choices. Your experiences. Your actions. They are all yours, forever and always. It is a call to goodness, to greatness, to joy.
I find it both consoling and inspiring. I hope you do too.
One more thought…
Modern libertarians and conservatives are often enough at odds—focusing on their small differences rather than their many sames. Those who have followed my work know how frustrated this makes me. Libertarianism and anglophone conservatism are both subsets of classical liberalism and we ought to behave as such!
Scruton is case-in-point. He was profoundly an individualist, in the classical liberal sense. He believed every individual is of infinite worth and an end unto himself, and ought to be treated as such. Individuals are ends, and must never be treated as means.
That same conclusion lies at the heart of natural-rights libertarianism. The average libertarian might arrive there through abstract reasoning, while a Scrutonian-type conservative might follow a path of introspection about organic, accumulated human wisdom, but the conclusion is the same.
The redistributionism and collectivism (which lie at the heart of leftism) see the individual as a means, and as a sub-cell of the group. Conservatives and libertarians should be opposing that, not each other.
Very inspiring
I love Scruton and I love your synopsis of his thought