Downton Abbey and the Love of Place

The English philosopher Roger Scruton was fond of talking about what he called “oikophilia,” a term he invented using the Greek word oikos, meaning “home,” and philia, meaning “love,” to describe the love of place. Scruton juxtaposed oikophilia with “oikophobia” or fear of home, his term for the tendency among people in the West to look down on their place of origin while adoring that which is faraway and unfamiliar. We Americans are particularly prone to this oikophobia; we constantly move from place to place and seek financial gain along the way. Curiously, for the past fourteen-odd years, Americans have embodied both oikophilia and oikophobia with our love for a fictional, faraway place that remains rooted in tradition and bound to the land: the Yorkshire estate of Downton Abbey, and its aristocratic stewards, the Earl and Countess of Grantham, their children, and their servants.