Our inaugural issue of
The Christian News-Letter was dedicated to the memory of Sir Roger Scruton. In addition to a cursory presentation of his life and his view of conservatism, I introduced his concept of
oikophobia, which he defines as an “educated derision that has been directed towards historical loyalties by our intellectual elites, who have tended to dismiss all ordinary forms of patriotism and local attachment as forms of racism, imperialism or xenophobia of which it accuses the world.” He goes on to say that he means more than mere fear (Gk.
phobia) of home (Gk.
oikos), but repudiation of home. I suggested that instead of calling it
oikophobia, we should call it
oikomachia: not just fear of home but fighting (Gk.
machia) home. We don’t just live in a secular age, one in which Christianity is just one option among many (and often the most difficult option), but also in an age of
oikomachia, one that is fighting against the local home, family, and nation in favor instead of transnational institutions and “enlightened universalism against local chauvinism.”
There are a number of responses that can be offered against
oikomachia. The most obvious one is the very opposite:
oikophilia, love of home. And as Scruton’s biographer Mark Dooley has suggested, the huge diversity of subjects on which Scruton has written in his hundreds of scholarly articles, scores of magazine and newspaper columns, two operas, two novels, a book of poetry, and at least 50 other books are unified by one theme. Whether he’s writing on philosophy, religion, architecture, aesthetics, opera, the environment, globalization, animals, fox hunting, sex, dance, poetry, culture, West civilization, England, politics, the human body, wine, literature, psychology, history, Islam, Lebanon, terrorism, screens, death, music, or beauty, you’ll find some element of
oikophilia in all of them.
So what is
oikophilia? Let’s see how Sir Roger explains it. He offers the most explicit and thorough explanation in his book
How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism. Here’s one of his many descriptions:
Human beings, in their settled condition, are animated by an attitude of
oikophilia: the love of the
oikos, which means not only the home but the people contained in it, and the surrounding settlements that endow that home with lasting contours and an enduring smile. The
oikos is the place that is not just mine and yours but ours (227).
Here’s another longer Scrutonian description of
oikophilia, a little later in the same book:
Oikophilia leans naturally in the direction of history and the conservation of the past: not from nostalgia, but from a desire to live as an enduring consciousness among things that endure. The true spirit of conservation sees the past not as a commercialized “heritage,” but as a living inheritance, something that lasts because it lives in me. To exist fully in time is to be aware of loss and to be working always to repair it. It is to listen as “Footfalls echo in the memory / Down the passage which we did not take / Towards the door we never opened / Into the rose garden.” The past lives in us as a place of untaken pathways, of decisions and commitments, and it is by experiencing the world thus that we acquire the sense of stewardship. We come to see that this present moment is also past, but the past of someone else, who has yet to be (234-235).
Home. The people in our home. The surrounding settlement. History. Conservation of the past. The past as a living inheritance. These are themes dear to the work and mission of Eighth Day Institute. They also remind me of Scruton’s encapsulation of conservative thinking, which he borrows from Edmund Burke: respect for the dead, the “little platoon,” and the voice of tradition. Scruton’s elaboration of these three principles, which I’ve labeled oikophilic conservatism, is so good I’ve included it next in this issue of the
Eighth Day Moot. I hope you’ll read it. But first, one last Scrutonian description of
oikophilia, again from
How to Think Seriously About the Planet:
Oikophilia originates in our need for nurture and safety, but it spreads out across our surroundings in more mysterious and less self-serving ways. It is a call to responsibility, and a rebuke to calculation. It tells us to love, and not to use; to respect, and not to exploit. It invites us to look on things in our “homescape” as we look on persons, not as means only, but as ends in themselves. It absorbs and transforms many subsidiary motives, two of which deserve our attention, since they have inspired almost all the major conservation movements of recent times: love of beauty and respect for the sacred. Since the Enlightenment, aesthetic taste and natural piety have stood vigil over our surroundings, and held back the hand that was raised to destroy them. […] for thinkers like Burke, Kant, Rousseau, Schiller and Wordsworth, the beautiful and the sacred were connected, to be rescued together from the human urge to exploit and destroy (253).
We now have five characteristics of
oikophilia: respect for the dead, little platoons, the voice of tradition, aesthetic taste (i.e. beauty), and natural piety (i.e. respect for the sacred). And all five of them are key ingredients in the Scrutonian antidote we desperately need to overcome the
oikomachia of our secular age which is creating a widespread delusion of the self.
Let me come to an end with one last passage from Sir Roger Scruton, one that more explicitly relates to part of the focus of our Symposium theme, the self:
The final end of every rational being is the building of the self—of a recognizable personal entity, which flourishes according to its own autonomous nature, in a world which it partly creates. The means to this end is labor, in the widest sense of that term: the transformation of the raw materials of reality into the living symbols of human intercourse. By engaging in this activity, man imprints on the world, in language and culture as well as in material products, the marks of his own will, and so comes to see himself reflected in the world, an object of contemplation, and not merely a subject whose existence is obscure to everyone including himself. Only in this process of “imprinting” can man achieve self-consciousness. For only in becoming a publicly recognizable object (an object for others) does a man become an object of knowledge for himself. Only then can he begin to see his own existence as a source of value, for which he takes responsibility in his actions, and which creates the terms upon which he deals with others who are free like himself (Philosopher on Dover Beach, 46).
Commenting on this passage, Scruton’s biographer Mark Dooley ponders: “how else can a person become conscious of who he is and where he belongs, except through building, making and decorating that small patch of earth he calls ‘home’?”
At the most fundamental level, then, building our own “home” is synonymous with building our self. And the construction of a holy self inevitably leads to the construction of a good and beautiful community, to little platoons like the Eighth Day community. That’s also essentially what St. Seraphim of Sarov said: Save your own soul and thousands will follow.
And it reminds me of two passages with which I’ll conclude. First, Alisdair MacIntyre’s famous conclusion to his book
After Virtue, which was part of the inspiration of Rod Dreher’s earlier book
The Benedict Option. And second, a passage by Fr. Georges Florovsky on the creative vocation of man and his task of re-orienting the cultural process, or in EDI-speak, cultural renewal.
Alisdair MacIntyre on constructing local forms of community: It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman Empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognizing fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds of hope. This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict. (After Virtue, 2nd ed., p. 263)
Fr. Georges Florovsky on the creative vocation of man and the task of cultural renewal: The “Modern Man” fails to appreciate and to assess the conviction of early Christians, derived from the Scripture, that Man was created by God for a creative purpose and was to act in the world as its king, priest, and prophet. The fall or failure of man did not abolish this purpose or design, and man was redeemed in order to be re-instated in his original rank and to resume his role and function in the Creation. And only by doing this can he become what he was designed to be, not only in the sense that he should display obedience, but also in order to accomplish the task which was appointed by God in his creative design precisely as the task of man. As much as “History” is but a poor anticipation of the “Age to come,” it is nevertheless its actual anticipation, and the cultural process in history is related to the ultimate consummation, if in a manner and in a sense which we cannot adequately decipher now. One must be careful not to exaggerate “the human achievement,” but one should also be careful not to minimize the creative vocation of man. The destiny of human culture is not irrelevant to the ultimate destiny of man. […] Christianity accepted the challenge of the Hellenistic and Roman culture, and ultimately a Christian Civilization emerged. […] [W]e have to face the age-long accumulation of genuine human values in the cultural process, undertaken and carried in the spirit of Christian obedience and dedication to the truth of God. What is important in this case is that the Ancient Culture proved to be plastic enough to admit of an inner “transfiguration.” Or, in other words, Christians proved that it was possible to re-orient the cultural process, without lapsing into a pre-cultural state, to re-shape the cultural fabric in a new spirit. (“Faith and Culture” in
Christianity and Culture, Collected Works II, pp. 20-21, 24-25)
Cheers to MacIntyre and Florovsky, to the task of forming holy selves in the 21st century, and to constructing new forms of community within which the moral life can be sustained so that morality and civility might survive our current barbaric and dark age of
oikomachia so that we might re-orient the current cultural process, that we might fulfill our mission of renewing culture through faith and learning.
