My plans and thoughts, Summer 2010

Comment on Recent Events.

After a six-year spell in the United States, I and my family have returned to England, where we will be resident as before in rural Wiltshire, outside Malmesbury. During the last year I was a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and I have been fortunate in having been offered a visiting position to continue on a part-time basis when I am in the US.   I also have an (unpaid) position as visiting professor in the philosophy department at Oxford, and have been appointed to a part-time paid position as research professor in the department of philosophy at St Andrews, where I shall be for some portion of the second semester of each year.

It is a great privilege to be teaching at St Andrews, in what is surely one of the very best philosophy departments in the English-speaking world, and during my time there earlier this year, when I gave the Gifford Lectures, I came to appreciate the town, the university and the quite special spirit of cooperation between staff and students. Although it lacks a music department, St Andrews is one of the most musical universities in Scotland, with a fine orchestra, an excellent choir, and a variety of chamber ensembles. During my visit in the spring I had the privilege of attending a concert performance of my one act opera, The Minister, performed by Ensemble 2021 and St Andrews opera, and conducted by Michael Downes, the resident director of music. This was a highlight in three weeks of intense musical, theatrical and intellectual experiences, which brought home to me what a jewel among universities St Andrews is. After 15 years working outside  British universities, the thought of a 6-8 week residence each year at such an institution gives me great pleasure.

But not everyone, it seems, is quite so pleased. A campaign has been mounted, apparently, to protest against my appointment, on account of my views on homosexuality. Readers of Sexual Desire, first published in 1986, and still in print with Continuum, will know that I have quite complex views about homosexuality, that I do not regard it as a perversion, and that I make a radical distinction between the male and the female versions, the first tending towards sexual pleasure, the second towards emotional involvement. As far as I can tell, the campaign against me makes no reference to that book, but dwells instead on a short article that I wrote defending the Catholic Church’s position on adoption. Others, writing on this blog, have taken me to task for that article, arguing that homosexual couples have as much right to adopt a child as heterosexual couples, and that to deny this is to adopt a posture of ‘discrimination’ towards homosexuals.

My response is that adoption does not concern the rights of the adopting parents, but the needs of the adopted child, and that the Church’s view, that a child needs a mother and a father in a permanent marital relationship, has a lot to be said for it. Of course, a child can get by in other situations and may have a happy childhood being brought up by two mothers or two fathers. But it is reasonable to believe that such cases are exceptional, and that it would be taking a risk that we are not entitled to take, to put a child in the care of an acknowledged homosexual couple.

Our society made a collective choice during the 1960s, a choice that was embodied in the Sexual Offences Act 1967, to de-criminalise homosexual acts between consenting adults. Most people today welcome that choice, whatever they think about the gay ‘scene’, and the culture that it has engendered. They recognise that it is sometimes right that sexual acts of which this or that section of the community disapprove, should nevertheless be decriminalised. It does not follow that these acts cannot be discussed with an open mind and with a view to making a distinction between what is normal and what is abnormal, what is right and what is wrong, what fulfils our sexual nature and what frustrates it. I may be wrong in thinking that the normalisation of homosexuality, which may bring benefits to some, imposes a large social cost, by downgrading the institution of the nuclear family. This is not the place to argue the point. But it is surely not a crime to think in that way? The fast and loose accusation of ‘homophobia’, which is one of those ‘thought crimes’ for which accusation and guilt are not clearly distinguished, and for which prosecutor and judge are always one and the same, is a serious threat to freedom of speech about an issue that is of pressing public concern.

It is worth pointing out that homosexuals have not always pressed for the normalisation of their way of life. From Oscar Wilde to Quentin Crisp many homosexuals have found self-respect in flamboyant abnormality, and the great homosexual artists of the 20^th century – Marcel Proust, André Gide, W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Michael Tippett, Virginia Woolf, Ethyl Smyth, Duncan Grant, Jean Cocteau among a hundred others – were for the most part at peace with a culture that gave a central place to heterosexual marriage. They upheld in their art the institutions that they defied in their life. And nothing was further from their mind than to normalise their defiance. Of course, not all of them respected the nuclear family or the bourgeois order, and one important homosexual writer – Jean Genet – cherished his homosexuality as continuous with the life of crime (for which Sartre devoted a hagiography to him, entitled Saint Genet). I don’t suppose Genet’s powerful Nôtre Dame des Fleurs is very familiar to those who anticipate an ‘atmosphere of intimidation’ in the lectures that I shall be giving in St Andrews. But I am fairly certain that, if there is intimidation, it is I and not they that will be the target.

Followers of this site will be interested to know that, while a resident scholar at AEI during the past year I finished a book on the environment, provisionally entitled Green Philosophy, in which I attempt to wrestle some sense out of current confusions. I defend a position that I call oikophilia – the love of the oikos or settlement – and believe that the current emphasis on economic solutions makes sense only when we have learned to put the oikos back in oikonomia. For your interest here is an extract from the preface:

The problems of the environment seem so far beyond our reach that we lurch from opinion to opinion and policy to policy with nothing to cling to, save the thread of our shared concern. We believe the scaremongers, since no one can be as gloomy as that without a reason. We believe the sceptics, since they offer hope, and remind us that the scaremongers have made an emotional investment in their gloom. And we watch as governments, NGOs and pressure groups both exploit our anxieties and offer to assuage them.

Without the resources of government it is hard to address such problems as climate change, oil spills, plastic pollution, and the loss of bio-diversity. But history tells us that large-scale projects in the hands of bureaucrats soon cease to be accountable, and that regulations imposed by the state have side effects that often worsen what they aim to cure. Moreover, the same people who promise vast schemes for clean energy and reduced pollution, also promise vast schemes to expand airports, build roads, and subsidize the motor industry. The fact is that, when problems pass to governments, they pass out of our hands. Our own understanding was shaped by local needs, not global uncertainties: it is the product of day-to-day emergencies, and its wisdom is the wisdom of survival.

But there is a lesson in this for the environmentalists. No large-scale project will succeed if it is not rooted in our small-scale practical reasoning. For it is we in the end who have to act, who have to accept and cooperate with the decisions made in our name, and who have to make whatever sacrifices will be required for the sake of future generations. It seems to me that current environmental movements, many of which demand far-reaching and even unimaginable government projects, as well as fundamental changes in our way of life, have failed to learn this lesson. Their schemes, like their cries of alarm, frighten the ordinary citizen without recruiting him, and he stands in the midst of a thousand warnings hoping to get through to the end of his life without going insane from the noise.

In this book I develop another way of looking at environmental problems, one that is, I hope, in keeping with human nature and also with the conservative philosophy that springs from the routines of everyday life. I do not offer detailed solutions to particular problems. Instead I propose a perspective on those problems that will make them seem like our problems, which we can start to solve, using our given moral equipment. That, it seems to me, is the enduring message of conservatism. And if it is greeted with hostility by those who cannot encounter a problem without advocating radical solutions with themselves in charge, then that is only further proof of its validity.

My intention in this book is to present the environmental question as a whole and in all its ramifications. Hence I have drawn on philosophy, psychology and economics, as well as on the writings of ecologists and historians. I argue that environmental problems must be addressed by all of us in our everyday circumstances, and should not be confiscated by the state. Their solution is possible only if people are motivated to confront them, and the task of government is to create the conditions in which the right kind of motive can emerge and solidify. I describe this motive (or rather, family of motives) as oikophilia, the love and feeling for home, and I set out the conditions in which oikophilia arises and the task of the state in making room for it. I defend local initiatives against global schemes, civil association against political activism, and small-scale institutions of friendship against large-scale and purpose-driven campaigns. Hence my argument runs counter to much of the environmental literature today, and may be greeted with scepticism by readers who nevertheless share my central concerns. For this reason I have explored the first principles of practical reasoning, and the ways in which rational beings can reach cooperative solutions to problems that cannot be addressed either by the individual or by the centralised state. I am critical equally of top-down regulations and goal-directed movements, and see the environmental problem as arising from the loss of equilibrium that ensues, when people cease to understand their surroundings as a home. This loss has many causes; but not the least among them is the wrong use of legislation, and the fragmentation of society that comes about, when the bureaucrats take charge of it.

The book will be published in the spring by Grove Atlantic. The argument is more philosophical than practical, but the conclusions coincide with many of those offered by Zac Goldsmith in The Constant Economy, also published by Grove Atlantic. The election of Goldsmith to Parliament is one of the pleasing results of the recent election.

My time in America also involved teaching at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Arlington – a Catholic graduate school, preparing students for the Masters degree and for the doctorate in Psychology. I was greatly stimulated by this close contact with dedicated students for whom faith and healing are two aspects of a single life-path. At one point, because we were studying the effect of the internet on human relations, I made the mistake of joining Facebook. At first I was intrigued by the ease with which strangers would approach me and ask to be my friend. After a while, however, the whole thing became alarming and a trifle insane. At the point when I had 230 unanswered friend requests or requests to join or follow this or that, I finally discovered how to get off Facebook and lead a normal life. It was like discovering White Burgundy all over again.