Love of Home and World Loyalty
Two moral orientations shape contemporary political and spiritual discussions:
Conservatives often emphasize love of home, liberals the cosmopolitan mindset. In Whitehead's philosophy they are jointly affirmed. We can be liberally conservative, or conservatively liberal, but the way to the universal is through the particular.
- Oikophilia — love of home, place, inheritance
- Cosmopolitanism — loyalty to humanity (and perhaps the planet) as a whole
Conservatives often emphasize love of home, liberals the cosmopolitan mindset. In Whitehead's philosophy they are jointly affirmed. We can be liberally conservative, or conservatively liberal, but the way to the universal is through the particular.
Oikophilia: The Love of Home
“Human beings, in their settled condition, are animated by 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. It is the stage-set for the first-person plural of politics, the locus, both real and imagined, where ‘it all takes place’. Virtues like thrift and self-sacrifice, the habit of offering and receiving respect, the sense of responsibility – all those aspects of the human condition that shape us as stewards and guardians of our common inheritance – arise through our growth as persons, by creating islands of value in the sea of price. To acquire these virtues we must circumscribe the ‘instrumental reasoning’ that governs the life of Homo oeconomicus. We must vest our love and desire in things to which we assign an intrinsic, rather than an instrumental, value, so that the pursuit of means can come to rest, for us, in a place of ends. That is what we mean by settlement: putting the oikos back in the oikonomia. And that is what conservatism is about.”
― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative
Scruton believed that culture—understood broadly—forms the moral ecology in which political life takes place. By “culture,” he did not mean only opera houses or universities. He meant: shared customs, local traditions, religious practices, family structures, architecture, folk music, literature, everyday manners. These generate what he often called “oikophilia”—the love of home. Without this prior affection for a shared way of life, political institutions become abstract mechanisms without loyalty or trust behind them. Politics, then, rests on pre-political attachments.
Love of Home and World Loyalty
“In its solitariness the spirit asks, What, in the way of value, is the attainment of life? And it can find no such value till it has merged its individual claim with that of the objective universe. Religion is world-loyalty.”
— Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (1926)
“Human beings, in their settled condition, are animated by 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.
- Roger Scruton
World Loyalty
Imagine a “cosmopolitan” who has traveled widely, teaches world literature at a large university, and has come to love the diversity of the world’s cultures. He may have been born in the United States and hold an American passport, yet he thinks of himself primarily as a “citizen of the world,” whose deepest loyalty is not to any one nation but to the world itself. Perhaps he has been awakened to our ecological crises and developed a genuine love of the Earth. He sometimes speaks of the Earth as a single community and describes himself as a member of that Earth community, whose allegiance is to the planet as a whole.
He reads Religion in the Making and is drawn to Whitehead’s claim that the essence of religion is “world-loyalty.” The phrase resonates deeply. It seems to provide philosophical and spiritual grounding for his cosmopolitan outlook. He believes in the God of whom Whitehead speaks—a universal consciousness whose love extends to each and every creature—and he imagines that even God is, in a sense, cosmopolitan: impartial in compassion, without favoritism toward tribe or nation, embracing the whole of the Earth in a single field of care.
He is also a human rights advocate. He supports international efforts to protect refugees, defend political dissidents, and promote gender and racial equality across borders. For him, loyalty to the Earth community is not sentimental rhetoric but a practical moral commitment that demands institutional and legal expression.
Such loyalty is also a way of being faithful to God. If God’s concern is universal, should not human allegiance widen accordingly? He therefore regards world loyalty as more theologically appropriate and morally advanced, and worries that those whose attachments remain primarily local are overly “parochial,” insufficiently expansive, or small-minded—too easily lapsing, in his judgment, into ethnocentrism, patriarchal habits, or culturally regressive forms of life. He has seen this in different parts of the world, how nationalism and localism become idolatrous, and lead to much suffering.
Love of Home
Now imagine someone shaped by what might be called oikophilia—a love of home. She may never have traveled widely, or perhaps she has, but her deepest attachments remain rooted in a particular place: a town, a landscape, a network of familiar faces, inherited customs, and shared stories. She does not deny the value of other cultures, nor does she reject the idea of human dignity everywhere. But she believes that moral responsibility begins close at hand. One learns to care for humanity by first caring for family and neighbors.
She reads Roger Scruton and resonates with his defense of oikophilia as the emotional foundation of civic life. She worries that talk of “world citizenship” can become abstract—too detached from the concrete practices that sustain trust and mutual obligation. She fears that loyalty to the Earth community, if not grounded in lived local bonds, may dissolve into rhetoric without responsibility. For her, love of home is not narrowness but nourishment. It is what gives depth, memory, and texture to moral life.
From her vantage point, it is not local attachment that most risks distortion, but rootlessness. A person who belongs nowhere in particular, she thinks, may float above the very institutions that make justice possible. Without loyalty to home, how are schools sustained? How are traditions transmitted? How are neighborhoods cared for? The universal, she suspects, cannot survive without the particular.
The challenge of our time, I believe, is to recognize the truth of both perspectives: the truth of world loyalty and the true of oikophilia, and find ways of combining them. Here I believe, Whitehead helps. He provides an image of human flourishing that includes local attachments as well as world loyalty.
Whitehead and Local Attachments
It would be a mistake to assume that Alfred North Whitehead’s affirmation of “world-loyalty” entails indifference to local belonging. While he clearly encourages the widening of allegiance beyond tribe and nation, his metaphysics is deeply attentive to the concreteness of finite relationships. Reality, for Whitehead, is not an abstraction called “the world.” It is a web of actual entities—concrescing subjects with feelings of their own—each arising within a specific field of relations. Every act of becoming is local before it is global.
Whitehead’s philosophy begins not with universal generalities but with felt connections. Each actual entity—each concrescing subject—comes into being by prehending, by feeling, its concrete environment. These environments are always particular: this landscape, this community, these inherited patterns of meaning. Relationality, in his account, is not thin or abstract. It is thick, embodied, and situated.
Moreover, Whitehead’s aesthetic vision reinforces this concreteness. He defines beauty as the production of intensity harmonized by contrast. Intensity does not arise from vague generality but from richly textured contrasts within bounded settings. A satisfying harmony requires differentiation and integration within a finite field. Local attachments—shared language, memory, ritual, landscape—can generate precisely this kind of aesthetic richness. They create patterns of contrast and continuity that deepen experience.
Even his concept of peace does not imply detachment from place. Peace, in Adventures of Ideas, involves a release from self-preoccupation, not a release from situated existence. It is a widening of concern that grows out of concrete bonds rather than bypassing them. One might say that, for Whitehead, world loyalty is not the abandonment of the local but its enlargement. The path to the universal runs through the particular.
In this sense, a healthy Whiteheadian vision would resist both distortions: a rootless universalism that forgets the intensity of place, and a closed parochialism that refuses wider affection. Breadth without intensity becomes thin; intensity without breadth becomes brittle. Beauty requires both.
Oikophilia and Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke and the “Little Platoons”
The intellectual lineage of oikophilia reaches back to Edmund Burke (1729–1797), the Anglo-Irish statesman and political thinker best known for his critique of the French Revolution in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
Burke did not reject reform, but he rejected revolutionary abstraction. He believed that political reasoning detached from inherited custom and practical experience becomes dangerous. Society, in his view, is not a machine to be redesigned according to theory; it is an organic inheritance shaped over generations.
It is in this context that Burke introduced the idea of “little platoons.” He wrote that to love the small group to which one belongs—family, parish, local association—is “the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections.” Larger loyalties, including loyalty to the nation, grow outward from these smaller attachments. Civic virtue is learned locally before it is extended universally.
Several themes in Burke are crucial here:
For many conservatives, oikophilia is the contemporary expression of this Burkean insight: healthy societies are built from the bottom up, beginning with affection for concrete communities.
The Deeper Disagreement
At stake is not merely policy but anthropology:
The conservative fears that cosmopolitan abstraction, if severed from rooted affection, dissolves the moral ecology that makes freedom sustainable. The liberal fears that excessive attachment to home can become exclusionary or parochial.
The debate, therefore, is not between love and justice, but over which kind of love—and which level of loyalty—should ground public life.
Burke did not reject reform, but he rejected revolutionary abstraction. He believed that political reasoning detached from inherited custom and practical experience becomes dangerous. Society, in his view, is not a machine to be redesigned according to theory; it is an organic inheritance shaped over generations.
It is in this context that Burke introduced the idea of “little platoons.” He wrote that to love the small group to which one belongs—family, parish, local association—is “the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections.” Larger loyalties, including loyalty to the nation, grow outward from these smaller attachments. Civic virtue is learned locally before it is extended universally.
Several themes in Burke are crucial here:
- Society as Partnership Across Generations
Burke described society as a partnership “not only between those who are living, but between those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” This emphasizes continuity, gratitude, and stewardship. - Prejudice as Moral Inheritance
By “prejudice,” Burke meant inherited moral habits and dispositions that guide conduct prior to explicit reasoning. These are not irrational biases but accumulated wisdom embedded in custom. - Mediating Institutions
Burke believed that freedom is preserved not by isolated individuals confronting the state, but by strong intermediate institutions—churches, guilds, local governments—that mediate power and cultivate responsibility. - Skepticism Toward Abstract Rights Detached from Context
He worried that appeals to universal “rights of man,” when detached from historically developed institutions, would destabilize social order and lead to tyranny.
For many conservatives, oikophilia is the contemporary expression of this Burkean insight: healthy societies are built from the bottom up, beginning with affection for concrete communities.
The Deeper Disagreement
At stake is not merely policy but anthropology:
- Liberalism (in this portrayal) begins with autonomy and universal principle.
- Conservatism begins with belonging and inherited obligation.
The conservative fears that cosmopolitan abstraction, if severed from rooted affection, dissolves the moral ecology that makes freedom sustainable. The liberal fears that excessive attachment to home can become exclusionary or parochial.
The debate, therefore, is not between love and justice, but over which kind of love—and which level of loyalty—should ground public life.
Tables
Oikophilia and Cosmopolitanism
Two Moral Starting Points in Political Philosophy
| Oikophilia (Conservative) | Cosmopolitanism (Liberal) |
|---|---|
| Loyalty begins locally | Loyalty begins universally |
| Identity largely inherited | Identity chosen and revisable |
| Emphasis on duties and belonging | Emphasis on rights and autonomy |
| Continuity and tradition valued | Reform and universal principle valued |
| Culture as a moral ecology | Law and universal justice as framework |
Mutual Anxieties: Liberal and Conservative Concerns
Each side fears what the other may neglect.
| What Troubles Liberals about Oikophilia | What Troubles Conservatives about Cosmopolitanism |
|---|---|
| Parochialism | Eroding cultural continuity |
| Exclusion of outsiders | Weakening social trust |
| Ethnic nationalism | Producing atomized individuals |
| Resistance to reform | Expanding centralized power to replace local bonds |
Rootedness and Universality
An Integrated Political Vision
| Rootedness (Oikophilia) | Universality (Cosmopolitan Concern) |
|---|---|
| Moral formation begins locally | Moral concern extends globally |
| Culture transmits accumulated wisdom | Human dignity transcends culture |
| Loyalty grows outward from home | Justice constrains and refines loyalty |
| Identity shaped by inherited bonds | Identity open to revision and encounter |
| Local institutions cultivate virtue | Global principles protect against exclusion |