The canon of Western literature is like some storied gold mine, deep and old, and filled with riches. The Bible. The “Iliad” and the “Odyssey.” The “Aeneid.” “The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.” “The Canterbury Tales.” Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” The plays of Molière and William Shakespeare. Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.” Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina.” This short list only skims the surface of the hundreds of notable books from the last 3,000 years. Philosophy, scientific treatises, histories and biographies, poetry—the inventory of writers and their works seems inexhaustible. Philosopher Roger Scruton (1944–2020) spent a lifetime exploring these treasures. “The culture of a civilization,” he once stated, “is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.” Scruton’s declaration is true of all the world’s great civilizations. Even today in Western society, when so many either ignore or attack …