Indeed, Roger was the leading philosophical defender of love of home and one’s own, what he called “oikophilia.” Of course, as a humanist and Christian he recognized duties to all of humanity — even duties of love (understood as being less about feeling than about willing): All are brothers and sisters under the fatherhood of God, who made us all in his own image. But Roger also held that one naturally and rightly has a special love for, and duties toward, members of one’s family, tradition of faith, local community and region, and fellow citizens.

Roger’s oikophilia, and his rejection of “multiculturalism” (which he considered anti-cultural in that it melted the different cultures into a monoculture of contemporary upscale progressive ideology), provoked ignorant and excitable people to accuse him of xenophobia and racism. In fact, Roger respected other cultures a great deal more than most progressives of my acquaintance do. He learned Arabic in order to read the Quran, and he admired the tradition-transcending contributions of the great medieval Islamic philosophers. He made careful, in-depth studies of Hindu and other Eastern traditions of faith precisely in search of the wisdom he regarded them as possessing.

Roger often explained his conservatism with a sound bite, which, naturally, oversimplified matters. He told the story of watching protesters in the streets from the window of his apartment in Paris in May 1968, and realizing that building things of value (communities, societies, nations, legal and economic systems, institutions of civil society) is hard and takes time, while destroying them is easy and often accomplished in a flash. It was then, he said, that he became, or realized that he was, a conservative.

Moreover, he recognized that the most important things people build, even more important than the cathedrals and great works of art and music he so loved, are not primarily the result of planning. They develop organically over time, with trial and error, as the work of many hands (an example is the common law of England). Recognizing this, conservatives should, he argued, seek to protect these things against those who would tear them down out of a misguided zeal for what they saw as the demands of liberty, equality, social justice or even the free market.

The conservative can cheer moderate reforms (organic things do grow and therefore change), but the conservative’s fundamental goal is to conserve. That spirit, by the way, made Roger an ardent, but old-fashioned and therefore moderate, conservationist — a kind of Green Tory who believed responsible stewardship of the natural order crucial. He thought that good stewardship begins with regard for the local landscape and architecture.

Left-wing philosophers — heirs, in a sense, to 1789 — believe that philosophy’s point is to chart how the world should be remade. In Marx’s words, “The philosophers have thus far merely interpreted the world; the point is to change it.” As if to play the role of Marx’s straight men for one of his pithiest lines, some conservative philosophers have sought to explain that the social world is as it is (or was what it was until the left somehow changed it) because it had to be that way and cannot be substantially changed.

Roger was a different kind of conservative philosopher. True, he did not think philosophy, or anything else, could usefully plan or radically reform the world. He was not a Marxist even in that limited sense. There was none of the spirit of 1789, or 1968, in him. But he believed that philosophy can help us see the value of good, if imperfect, things — communities, institutions — that have grown up organically, and that it can show us why we should fight to preserve them and how we can make our own contribution to their development, sometimes even by way of moderate reforms.

Robert P. George is a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University.

Now in print: “Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments,” and “The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments,” with essays from the series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.

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