Green Philosophy by Roger Scruton

Author:Roger Scruton [Scruton, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd
Published: 2015-05-09T10:19:01.276056+00:00

NINE

Getting Nowhere

Not all people who identify themselves as on the left are oikophobes. In America a kind of liberal patriotism has arisen, centred around journals like The New Republic, and writers like John Schaar, who, while claiming left-liberal credentials, writes thus in defence of patriotism:

At its core, patriotism means love of one’s homeplace, and of the familiar things and scenes associated with the home-place. In this sense, patriotism is one of the basic human sentiments. If not a natural tendency in the species, it is at least a proclivity produced by realities basic to human life, for territoriality, along with family, has always been a primary associative bond. We become devoted to the people, places and ways that nurture us, and what is familiar and nurturing seems also natural and right. This is the root of patriotism. Furthermore, we are all subject to the immense power of habit, and patriotism has habit in its service.286

There is a kind of left patriotism that brands itself as the true spirit of the American settlement, and the defender of the Constitution against its reactionary foes. The influence of this left patriotism can be felt in some of the defenders of the ‘civic environmentalism’ that I discuss in the next chapter.

It was George Orwell’s wish that a British patriotic left would displace the traitors whose principal loyalty was to the Communist International, a wish that some think was granted in the post-war Attlee government.287 Those defenders of the ‘unofficial countryside’, the plotlands and settlement by ‘mutual aid’ are left-wing oikophiles, people who strive to reconcile a deep love of history and rootedness with a belief that history and home are created as much by the common labourer as by the aristocrat and the industrial magnate. From Richard Jefferies and George Sturt to Ken Worpole and Paul Kingsnorth, left-wing oikophilia has profoundly influenced the environmental movement in Britain, defending the local, the rooted and the characterful against the global, the uprooted and the bland, and affirming the real attachments on which communities depend for their duration.288

My father was such a left-wing oikophile. He identified entirely with the Labour Party, was a class warrior in politics and had little time for the Monarchy, the established church, or the House of Lords. But he loved England, loved the countryside, and loved the old settlements of the Home Counties. He subscribed to The Countryman, read the works of Hugh Massingham and Richard Jefferies, established a centre for the study of the environment in the primary school where he was a teacher, and founded the High Wycombe Protection Society in order to save his town and its public spaces from tower blocks and through-ways. He was an avid guardian of protected species, a vigilant opponent of all who laid waste and polluted. He belonged to clubs and societies devoted to local history, nature study and the conservation of woodlands, and at the sight of food in plastic, he would utter a heartfelt groan of despair.

Left-wing oikophiles today tend to

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