Oikophilia

Oikophilia is a term coined by Sir Roger Scruton meaning the love of the familiar: home, hearth, kin, custom, all that is ours and from here. It is the emotional precondition of any sane and durable order, because you will not preserve what you do not love. For most of human history, we did not need a special word for this, because it was just called being normal.

Odysseus is the paradigm of this virtue. He is offered treasure, pleasure, and even immortality, and yet what he wants most is to see the smoke rising from his own hearthfire again, to sacrifice on his own soil to his ancestors, to resume headship of his household and rule his own kingdom. The western soul is thirst to return.

Oikophilia is the psychological complement to immanentism. The man who loves the familiar embraces his obligations to the here and now. What is wrong with the modern west is, in a nutshell, a lack of oikophilia and the presence of its opposite: oikophobia.

Oikophobia is the disposition to denigrate one's own customs, institutions, ancestry, and home, replacing the center with the margin, the familiar with the foreign, until eventually even the human becomes too familiar and must be transcended. Oikophobia is mental illness; oikophilia is sanity, because it is an affection for what actually sustains one's life. A people will only survive if it loves its home enough to defend it, its customs enough to preserve them, and its inheritance enough to pass it on.