In the closing sentence of his article for the 2019 Christmas issue of The Spectator, Sir Roger Scruton wrote, “Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.” He wrote these words as a dying man who believed he was on the road to recovery from cancer. Alas, it was not to be. As Daniel J. Mahoney writes, in his lead essay, “Sir Roger Scruton died just shy of his 76th birthday on January 12, 2020, after a short but valiant struggle with cancer.” Reading this last sentence of Sir Roger’s, two things leapt into my mind. One was an essay by G. K. Chesterton, and the second was a book titled The Politics of Gratitude by Mark T. Mitchell. I thought of Chesterton’s observation that “the way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost,” and Mitchell’s argument that we must root politics and culture in gratitude. I remember talking to Roger about Mitchell’s book in 2017, five years after it was published—I see Scruton’s conservativism as an embodiment of that rootedness.
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