Giles Fraser writes:
This coming Monday, 19 September, is the feast day of
Saint Theodore of Tarsus (602-690), one of my political heroes.
Born in
modern-day Turkey,
he fled the approaching Muslim army and ended up as archbishop of Canterbury,
where, among other things, he invented the parish system.
If localism has a
patron saint, he is a Turkish immigrant.
For the parish system became not just
the basic unit of ecclesiastical government, but also, for centuries, our basic
unit of social togetherness.
The whole idea of a priest and a parish was the
very infrastructure of local community. With the shop and the pub, it came to
define what we meant by the local.
This was where roots were set, where
generations were born and died, where the British values of social togetherness
were nurtured.
It was perhaps the single most important moral contribution of
the church to British society. It’s where the “we” has precedence over the “I”.
But localism is now much derided.
On a plane back from Israel last week, passing the time with in-flight
entertainment, I am subjected to the most excruciating advertisement
for Pullman hotels.
The music pulsates. A young man is going for a run
in Shanghai, off to some high-powered meeting, then returning to his hotel. The
narrator sounds sexy and enticing.
“No frontiers, no borders, no limits. You
are the beautiful nomads. And our world is your playground.”
I shuddered. What
morally vacuous sentiments.
I thought of all the people I might be literally flying
over, risking everything, desperate to escape the misery of Syrian barrel
bombs.
No frontiers? No borders? Beautiful nomads? The contrast was offensive,
sick.
For millions, born with the wrong sort of passport, the world is a vale
of tears, a daily struggle for survival and the survival of their children.
These people squeeze themselves through razor wire and face the daily rejection
of strangers.
How they must loathe the easy entitlement of the beautiful nomad,
ugly with self-worth, for whom “our world is your playground”.
And, yes, I feel
convicted by that description too.
The philosophy of the beautiful
nomad is often called liberalism.
It’s the philosophy of the unfettered self,
free from restraint, free from the tiresome constraints of place and the local.
Indeed, from the perspective of this liberal cosmopolitanism, the local
community is a place to escape from, to grow out of, a place of narrow-minded
sameness, a place to go back to at Christmas, but nothing more.
Asked where he
came from, the philosopher Diogenes replied that he was “a citizen of the
world”.
The beautiful nomad would think it an outrage that they’d
have to pay for a visa to travel to Europe, for instance.
Michael Oakeshott, another
philosopher, shows us how beautiful nomads are made.
He argues that it is
precisely the job of liberal education to sever people from their attachments
to the local: “Each of us is born in a corner of the earth,” he writes.
“But
school and university are where a learner is emancipated from the limitations
of his local circumstances.
“They are sheltered places where excellence may be
heard because the din of local partialities is no more than a distant rumble.”
The values of the beautiful nomad
are the opposite of those of Theodore and his community-orientated parishes.
Here in the parish, what we mean by “social mobility” is helping the elderly
get to the shops.
And about clever youngsters moving onwards and upwards,
cutting themselves off from their roots and their background, rarely to return.
Most of them would prefer to have stayed put. But they need safety. And
we should welcome them. They are not hopping around. They want to settle.
No,
it is the beautiful nomad that is the dangerous creature.
Having little respect
for roots or for locality, s/he is the digital übermensch, the epitome of
capitalist entitlement that believes only in the things that s/he has made,
bought or chosen.
And like a locust, the rapacious consumption of the beautiful
nomad turns the world into a desert. “It’s not about where you are,” advises
the Pullman advert.
Place is unimportant. Just consume and move on.
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