….to expand on my “antipathy”:

Scruton – very much like Giles – had a remarkably detailed prescription for precisely the kind of individual that he regarded as socially acceptable and desirable, compared with all the kinds that he regarded as untermenschen.

I say “very much like Giles”, for that is all that Fraser’s contributions to any kind of debate usually amount to – condemnations of people who are not like Giles, and love poems to all the little Giles’s out there, especially those who defer to his “spiritual authority” as the Giles-in-chief.

Read Scruton’s works and you get a finely honed view of exactly what characteristics he admires in a man, woman, boy or girl, and if those elements aren’t there, they should be rejected from society pretty much entirely. And this was a critter who laughably “deplored” the communists and other totalitarians for their intolerance and anti-individualism.

In truth, Scruton cashed in on an era when being aggressively “conservative” was eccentric enough to be regarded as individualist, when in fact all the doctrines he promoted were stridently collectivist and conformist. Giles, a champion of collectivism and conformism, especially under the yoke of supernaturalist autocracy, is very much his soul-mate.

I too see myself as, if not anything as grandiose as a champion, at least as a servant of rational philosophy. I even have a PhD in it, just like Sir Roger, albeit his was in aesthetics whereas mine was in modality. So quite where you get the idea that Sir Roger rejects rational philosophy, I’m not sure. I’ve read some of his works, in particular Conservatism. From memory, what he rejects is pure rationalism, espousing something close to the Humean dictum that reason is the servant of the passions, although I think that a word better serving the Scrutonian outlook would be ‘values’. To me this sounds right, but I will listen politely to reasoned arguments against Hume’s insight. However I really don’t understand why you should be so angry with Sir Roger for being Humean about the relationship between reason and values.

I’m also very much in favour of science. Moreover, I’m broadly in favour of secular humanism, although
(i) as a conservative, and
(ii) despite my personal atheism,
I defend a continuing role for religion in public life.

I even as a conservative support many aspects of liberalism; I tend to be sympathetic to the classical liberal advocacy of personal freedom, and am as keen as anyone to defend liberalism from the encroachments of wokeness.

As to your accusations of Sir Roger, I presume you are referring to the disgraceful treatment meted out to him at the instigation of George Eaton. I won’t dignify your accusations with an answer, as Sir Roger’s exoneration is a matter of public record. Suffice to say that you have disgraced yourself. This is no way to talk a man who is no longer alive to defend himself, but who as well as being a distinguished philosopher, also at great personal risk distributed samizdat literature behind the Iron Curtain. I can only suggest that you have a long hard think about things.