‘News from Somewhere’: A Philosopher’s Memoir on Settling
A review of ‘News from Somewhere’, by Sir Roger Scruton.
The concept of ‘Anywheres’ and ‘Somewheres’ is by now a familiar one, particularly in post-liberal and conservative circles. The thrust of the idea — arrived at by David Goodhart — is that there are people who are well-educated and mobile and who value autonomy and fluidity, and there are people who are less well-educated and more rooted, and who care about group attachments and security. The tension between these two groups reached its zenith in the United Kingdom with the referendum on Brexit. Arguably tensions of a similar kind are finding expression if not reconciliation across Europe as I write.
Sir Roger Scruton, now dead, was a Cambridge-educated analytic philosopher and a world authority on aesthetics. But like William F. Buckley, Jr. in the United States before him, he defied those who had become his natural ‘tribe’ — the ‘Anywheres’ — and chose the side of the ‘Somewheres’ instead. Long before Goodhart first arrived at his idea, Scruton moved from London to Malmesbury in Wiltshire (once home, as it happens, to Thomas Hobbes) to live the rooted countryside existence that most English people across the centuries had lived. The book he wrote about his experience of settling is called, fittingly, News From Somewhere.
Before Goodhart first conceived of his idea, Scruton moved from London to Malmesbury in Wiltshire to live a rooted countryside existence.
That title is intended to bring to mind not Goodhart but William Morris, whose News from Nowhere describes a bizarre socialist utopia that Sir Roger thought not just unattractive but silly. The life that he describes in News from Somewhere is one of trials, compromises and duties rather than idle pleasures, but also one charged with meaning. Having moved to Malmesbury, he must convince the locals, whose connection with the land is ancient, that he is not merely an intellectual from the big city who wants to play at being a farmer, but someone with a genuine oikiphilia (‘love of home’) who is willing to take his place on the margins of their community and wait patiently to be accepted into it. And more still: that he rejects the frenetic, impersonal and abstract life of the city and yearns for a real relationship with a place.
Though News from Somewhere reads like a memoir, it is also a polemic: one that asserts that life in the countryside is better than life in the town. For Sir Roger, rural life is a slow and unpretentious business, grounded in concrete realities. It is often difficult. But it is also fulfilling. One knows one’s place in the community and tradition has a real and living presence, binding the present to the past and giving the community’s members a shared story and set of beliefs that bond them tightly together. This manifests itself in farming practices, local festivals and communal pasttimes, some of which will no doubt seem quaint to the city-dweller, but are, in fact, the glue that keeps the community together and brings its members purpose and contentment.
The book is also a rallying cry to conserve the natural world, something of which Sir Roger was a passionate champion. It struck him that the modern connection between conservation and left-wing causes was curious, since the very words conservatism and conservation shared the same prefix, and since the vast bulk of those who tended the land were instinctively right wing. Sir Roger paints the countryside in lovely colours in News from Somewhere; but he also advances an argument he has made elsewhere (notably in Green Philosophy), which is that top-down, one-size-fits-all approaches to conservation are ultimately ineffective and unsustainable, since they disregard the needs and traditions of small communities that have a close relationship with the surrounding land. Moreover, he believes that these top-down approaches put ordinary people under financial pressure, risking a backlash of the kind that we are now witnessing across the continent, and which we have seen with the rise of the agrarian Farmer-Citizen Movement, or BBB, in the Netherlands, and the Gilet Jaunes in France.
Sir Roger depicts the countryside in lovely colours in News from Somewhere; but he also advances the argument that top-down, one-size-fits-all approaches to conservation are ultimately ineffective and unsustainable.
Sir Roger is a lucid and frequently amusing writer who expresses all of this very beautifully. We get the sense reading his earlier work that he is someone who has spent most of his life yearning for an idea of home, and perhaps this is is made more intelligible by the fact that he grew up in a chaotic household with a tyrannical and violent father: Jack Scruton. He invokes, in a Dutch documentary series, Hölderlin’s idea of heimkehr (‘homecoming’), as well as Heidegger’s ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in which the philosopher suggests that being at home is a fundamental aspect of human existence. If it were not for this, and the trials Sir Roger faced trying to settle in Malmesbury, we could be forgiven for dismissing his whole project as an affectation. Instead, we are put in mind of Eliot:
‘We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.’
