On the Importance of Oikophilia

Oikophilia, the love of home. "To love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. ~ Edmund Burke

From The European Conservative

By Benedict Beckeld, PhD

Oikophilia allows us to bring across the threshold things and institutions that endure even as civilization crumbles.

In order to understand why oikophilia, the love of home, is so important, we must understand the severity of current oikophobia, the hatred of home.

Lest one think that oikophobia, the cultural self-hatred we are experiencing throughout the West these days, is something new, something so absurd or bizarre that it defies explanation—which would then also render any potential solution all the more difficult to understand—it should be pointed out that cultural self-loathing is an entirely ‘natural’ phenomenon. I have explained elsewhere in considerable detail, primarily in Western Self-Contempt, how this type of self-hatred develops. 

Suffice it to say here that it is a phenomenon, a social malady, that befalls successful Western societies as they begin to decline, and that it is, though deplorable, in this sense a normal part of the Western cultural fabric through the ages, a natural tendency that has come and gone within the West since antiquity. Some conservatives resist this notion, because it seems to blunt their attacks on cultural self-hatred as something absurd and bizarre. They desire only foot soldiers rather than thinkers, a posture that does conservatism no favors, for if we wish to combat oikophobia, we must understand what it genuinely is.

If we do not understand what it is, we might be tempted to restrict our reaction precisely to such attacks, believing that what is absurd and bizarre will eventually crumble under our withering fire. But this would be to misunderstand the historical moment in which we find ourselves, and thereby to some degree to fail to see what countermeasures are necessary in order to slow the social decline we are currently witnessing.

One such countermeasure is the embrace of positive visions, including oikophobia’s opposite, oikophilia, the love of home. It is because oikophobia has become so rampant as an ingrained part of our historical era that its counterweight, oikophilia, has grown into an even greater imperative. Oikophilia entails the love of a home, its accompanying friendships and rituals, and the importance of religion. In political terms, it is the care of home through private associations and local charity rather than through top-down governmental control.

But note that a moment ago I said slow, not stop, the decline—because I do not think that it can be stopped. That is to say, we must face the fact that a particular social paradigm is coming to an end, the fact that there is little future left for the postwar liberal order that most people of my generation and the one before had come to take for granted. It will still subsist, grow stronger and weaker in fits and starts, but overall will continue to decline. It is here that I remember others in history who have lived at similar historical moments, moments that may properly be called liminal: I think of Plato, who witnessed the collapse of Athenian power and the rise of moral relativism; I think of Juvenal and Tacitus who witnessed the influx of Eastern religions into the Roman Empire and the collapse of traditional religious belief; I think of Augustine, who had to come to terms with not only a declining moral world but a collapsing physical one as well; and I think of Joseph de Maistre and his counter-revolutionary work as everything around him changed.

I think of these gentlemen because they help us understand that we are not simply facing a warped view of the world, but the end of an era, the slow collapse of a social paradigm. We therefore do not only fight the oikophobia and the wokeism (oikophobia’s latest iteration) we see all around us—although, to be sure, we do that as well—but we also devote ourselves to building anew and to shepherding the old, that which can be saved, across the threshold of our liminal moment. It is here that I am more optimistic about my own country, the United States, than about Western Europe, in part because our conservative oikophilia is still broad-based enough to win allies in high places, as seen in our fresh electoral victory, and because it has a stronger religious foundation. But the oikophobes and the woke will carry on the battle—important to point out lest we exult too much in our victory and grow complacent—and Europe especially must be ready to form alternative sources of meaning.

Oikophilia is not atavistic, even if it sometimes contains a touch of nostalgia, but is rather a question of bringing across the threshold things and institutions that endure, and of gaining permanence and rootedness by being part of something permanent, while relinquishing those things, such as many educational institutions, that will not survive beyond the threshold. Those permanent things live on by continuing through us and our children, and so there is a symbiotic relationship that exists within oikophilia in that the individual and the institution ensure each other’s existence. Oikophilia means that, through the commonality of local institutions, we turn away from the hyper-individualism that characterizes all declining Western eras.

Concretely, this means that we nurture those private associations that can survive the liminal moment, preserve the best of art and architecture while not being closed off to innovation, build up new elites in place of the old—for every society will require elites, but we need better ones than those today that celebrate mediocrity because they themselves are mediocre—raise lots of children, with religious and spiritual ways of life.

It also means that we ruthlessly turn away those immigrants who are hostile to the West. Every love, including the philia in oikophilia, has a negative side, because it seeks to destroy or remove anything that is a threat to the object of love. In fact, not only should our oikophilia turn away individual immigrants who are hostile to the West, but should exclude the Islamic parts of the world from immigration to the West altogether, because what often happens—although of course there are exceptions—is that even those immigrants who appear to embrace the West are plagued by real or perceived cultural memories, which come to the fore whenever civilizational relationships take a turn for the worse, as invariably happens. Just as in the United States people will move to Republican states from Democrat states because the former are better managed, but they nonetheless continue to vote Democrat because this constitutes their unquestioned cultural memory—”my father was a Clinton Democrat, my grandfather was a JFK Democrat”—so too a remarkable number of seemingly well-adjusted and Westernized Islamic immigrants will turn on their adopted civilization when the Middle East flares up or when someone dares to raise the cross above the crescent. (I have explained elsewhere in some detail why Islam is incompatible with the West.) Important to note is that, counterintuitive though it may seem to us, all this is a part of love. And for those who think I speak out of bigotry, just wait.

To return to the positive side of philia, among the aforementioned gentlemen in history I think in particular of Augustine, who was confronted with the idea that the civilization in which he had lived his whole life was crumbling around him, especially with the shocking sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410. He does not always appear to have fully realized that an era was coming to an end, but his City of God was in part the response to and an attempted way out of that predicament. He sought to find a new source of comfort, a different morality, a source of salvation other than Rome. One of his efforts was to build local meaning in a morally declining Empire; something similar could also have been said of some of the Hellenistic schools about seven centuries earlier, in particular Epicureanism and Stoicism.

And I think there should be something of this imperative in our modern oikophilia, because the latter is something local, away from the depredations of empire, away from the overreach of our current elites. And it is here that, once again, not only the oikos but the philia must be emphasized. Many—academics in particular—are afraid to use words like love, beauty, and truth, for using them indicates a commitment, which would be a thorn in the side of their usual moral and cultural relativism. They find it unscientific or unscholarly to use these words, not realizing that if a commitment to use them is unscientific, a commitment not to use them is just as unscientific, because to be scientific is to go where the evidence leads, and one must not exclude the possibility that the evidence could lead anywhere, including to love and to commitment. 

In fact, oikophobes and relativists tend to define themselves by what they hate, oikophiles and the religiously inspired by what they love. Oikophobes feel the patriotic philia only insofar as they have radically changed the oikos—deluding themselves that to be genuinely and authentically German is to welcome foreign migrants, or that to be genuinely and authentically British is to prefer tandoori chicken. Similarly, the Left in the United States has co-opted typical patriotic language through having distorted the oikos, claiming, for instance, that criticizing Islam or wanting to restrict immigration is ‘unamerican,’ even though many of our Founding Fathers were vociferous in their critique of Islam and even though there have been many restrictive measures regarding immigration in American history, not least at the birth of the country itself.

Indeed, as I look at the precious old institutions that still exist, at the literature, art, and architecture that still can be found all around us, how can I not self-define primarily by love? How can we not be oikophiles, and how can we not want to carry across the threshold the object of our love? And so as we resist oikophobia and social decline, and as the foot soldiers are sent out, let us not forget the constructive side of such resistance, for this is what oikophilia means, or should mean: the search for permanence, the ability to fall in love again.

Pictured: The Homecoming by  Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901)