SCRUTON, Roger

Oikophobia

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Those disinherited savages owe their condition to the fact that their mentors and guardians have repudiated the national idea. This repudiation is the result of a peculiar frame of mind that has arisen throughout the Western world since the second world war, and which is particularly prevalent among the intellectual and political élites. No adequate word exists for this attitude, though its symptoms are instantly recognised: namely, the disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us’, and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours’. Being the opposite of xenophobia I propose to call this state of mind oikophobia, by which I mean (stretching the Greek a little) the repudiation of inheritance and home. Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which some people—intellectuals especially—tend to become arrested.

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Beauty

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Beauty comes, from setting human life, sex included, at the distance from which it can be viewed without disgust or prurience. When distance is lost, and imagination swallowed up in fantasy, then beauty may remain, but it is a spoiled beauty, one that has been prised from the individuality of the person who possesses it. It has lost its value and gained a price.

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The Soul of the World.

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Original Sin and the value of every human person:

The doctrine of original sin, which is contained in the story of Genesis – one of the most beautiful concentrated metaphors in existence – is about the way we human beings fall from treating each other as subjects to treating each other as objects. Love, respect and forgiveness come from that. When we treat each other as objects, then we get the concentration camps.

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(Acton Institute’s “Crisis of Liberty in the West”, conference in London. December 1, 2016.)

On national sovereignty:

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This law-governed society is made possible because we know who we are and define our identity – not by our religion, our tribe, or our race – but by our country, the place where our man-made law prevails, the sovereign territory in which we have built the free form of life that we share.

This sovereign territory is our home, and it is in terms of it that our public duties are defined. We may have religious and family duties too, but they are private duties, not incumbent on the citizenry as a whole. Our public duties are defined by the secular law, and by the customs and institutions that have grown alongside it. … It seems to me that the national identity that I, as an Englishman, have inherited – the identity of a nation joined in a union of like-minded nations in a single sovereign territory – is far more robust than its detractors assume, and that it has, like the American identity, a remarkable capacity to absorb incomers and to integrate them by a process of mutual adaptation. But we can adapt to the effects of inward migration only if migration is controlled, and only if we are allowed to affirm our identity in the face of it, so as to renew our obedience to the institutions and customs that define us.

In other words, the global processes that challenge us now are reasons to affirm national sovereignty and not to repudiate it. For national sovereignty defines what we are.

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