The ideas of patriotism and sovereignty are resurfacing in the West—not as nationalist obsessions, but as a response to artificial attempts to forge identities detached from political philosophy, tradition, and even individual freedom. They are also a reaction against globalism, which many see as an enemy of democracy and national sovereignty. And, not least, they emerge against a new kind of immigration that refuses integration, hardens into cultural ghettos, and fuels anxieties such as the “Great Replacement” theory. The United States has not seriously abandoned its sovereignty, but it is not immune to the dangers of rootlessness, nor to the challenges posed by disorderly immigration—a scourge that is already reshaping Europe.
The great silent ailment of postmodern man is rootlessness. This uprooting arises from both the erosion of identity itself and the clash and dilution of identities that coexist in today’s global, multicultural world. The new cult of mobility floats in a cultural magma that promises personal fulfillment from the ground up, without the need to be anchored in roots, a place, or a culture. What it produces, however, is the loss of belonging, the weakening of blood ties, and a growing ignorance of—or even contempt for—the past.
No political system, no matter how well designed or efficient, can save a society made up of uprooted individuals—unless they are so detached that they become automatons in the hands of a totalitarian regime built on violence. In nature, anything not rooted in place is eventually swept away by the wind. Civilizations are no different. They are, after all, the living present of a continuity, the unfolding of a long journey, and the accumulated sum of affections. Without yesterday, there can be no civilization today.
Organic metaphors, so beloved by sociologists, are dangerous, but I will take the reductionist risk of reminding readers that the individual is not an island but part of a larger organism, integrated into a family, a homeland, or a creed. Perhaps for that reason, when one analyzes a society’s rootedness, it helps to look at the smallest social unit of that organism: the home, not merely the physical space in which we live, but an allegory for something larger and deeper.
The paradox of the home as a social anchor is that it is an anarchist institution. G. K. Chesterton called it the only truly anarchist institution because “it is older than the law and remains outside the State.” It is true that the law sometimes intrudes into our household, often more than we would like. But in normal circumstances, the state does not manage to intervene in the small joys and sorrows of everyday family life. The home, the property we share with those of our own blood, is the great space of liberty, and in the face of the state’s omnipresence in public life, the home often becomes the last bastion of true freedom.
What binds us to the home, or to the institution of the family, is neither a contract nor even the logic of an emotional union. In most cases it is blood, origin, the past. We are where we are and what we are thanks to the inheritance received from those who came before us. We are, in a sense, the fruit of the decisions—good and bad—made by others who lived before us.
Once individual liberties have been emptied of their foundational basis, the state, technology, and disposable ideologies can easily assert control over them.
To renounce the home—to sever our bonds with land, family and country—is to embrace rootlessness, a condition long associated with the decline of peoples. The Belgian philosopher Marcel de Corte wrote one of the most insightful works on the end of civilizations in his Essay on the Death of a Civilization. Devout libertarians may be uncomfortable with some of his conclusions, but the acuity of his diagnosis is hard to fault. He does not see uprootedness as a modern phenomenon; he finds it throughout history as the terminal symptom of a civilization that has cast off its own foundations and lost its reason for being.
He suggests that the rupture with tradition characteristic of our age is less an attack on our ancestors and their history and culture than a chaotic magnification of the self. The modern individual tends to put himself at the center of history and occupy as much space as possible, eclipsing what he has inherited and ultimately breaking with tradition. The result, de Corte says, is cultural and spiritual rootlessness.
According to de Corte, the excessive exaltation of the individual as an absolute ultimately weakens or even destroys natural bonds. In this context, the family becomes a mere bureaucratic entity, the nation an abstract political alliance, and faith is replaced by subjective and mutable beliefs. Once individual liberties have been emptied of their foundational basis, the state, technology, and disposable ideologies can easily assert control over them.
To defend the home is, at the same time, to defend our freedom. In both How to Be a Conservative and England: An Elegy, Roger Scruton stresses the crucial importance of love of home—what he calls “oikophilia,” from the Greek oikos (home) and philia (love). As noted earlier, the home Scruton refers to—and that I invoke here—is more than a physical space. It encompasses places, customs, landscapes, languages, laws, and communities that are ours. It is a moral and emotional realm that allows us to develop a sense of belonging and reaffirm our identity.
Scruton’s concept of home roots us because it isn’t limited to what each individual builds; it includes what he receives from previous generations and feels bound to pass on. Seen this way, when someone loses the inherited cultural tradition, he is not merely surrendering certain beliefs, customs, and values—he is renouncing part of himself. The home, the neighborhood, the city, the nation, and all they imply socially, culturally, and morally explain what we have become. Rather than restricting our freedom, they protect and reinforce it; thanks to them, we make decisions that will affect those who come after us.
Scruton himself puts it well when he argues that home is a condition for liberty. Someone who loves his home—who defends its institutions, values, culture, past, and territory—is harder to subdue and better able to defend and exercise his own freedoms. Freedom without attachment, by contrast, turns us into nomads who only appear free but are always vulnerable to impersonal external forces. Without that rootedness, we lose our identity and personality, becoming depersonalized and dehumanized.
In other words, the traditions and institutions that ground us—from our homes to the values inherited from our elders—should not be seen as obstacles to our individuality, constraining our freedoms or determining us in a fatalistic way. Rather, they are precisely the conditions that make individuality possible and enrich it, imbuing it with greater depth and substance. By engaging with this legacy and cultural background, we develop our identity and personality more profoundly and fundamentally. Reducing the pursuit of freedom to pure individualism, detached from these foundations, is ultimately self-defeating: it leaves us unanchored, vulnerable to those who possess rooted identities and heritages, and stripped of the traits that define us most deeply.
Cultural inheritance is not an old book we can keep on a special shelf. It is not an instruction manual that remains unchanged over the centuries. In his cultural essays, T. S. Eliot reminds us that rootedness does not make us mere heirs; it makes us participants in a living tradition that evolves over time, that puts down roots while forging new paths, that is always under construction—even when it peers into the abyss of its destruction.
Russell Kirk also attached great importance to this idea of roots. In The Conservative Mind, he explains that free institutions depend on inherited habits, cultures, and beliefs. Though not strictly traditionalist, Kirk attacks the obsession with obsolete ideas and customs and the notion of compulsory progress, as if civilization were in a mad dash to destroy the memory of what we were. He supports preserving the continuity of that heritage as a counterweight to social‑engineering projects. In a sense, social engineering is the opposite of tradition. Tradition is grounded in accumulated wisdom and real experience; social engineering sketches a theoretical framework that should work. Both socialism and communism are colossal social‑engineering projects that may read well in manuals but crash stubbornly into reality when put into practice. History has taught us this, though some seem intent on trying again.
In our strange postmodern moment, it is almost reactionary to state the obvious: Western civilization is the product of Greece, Rome, and Christianity. Any attempt to eradicate that Greco‑Roman and Judeo‑Christian legacy is self‑destructive. Without it, we would not regard every human being as endowed with special dignity, nor would we have the rights and obligations of communal life, the justice we know today, or constitutions that underscore the inalienable right to individual liberty, to property, and—even, as in the Declaration of Independence—to the pursuit of happiness.
Wars have often been fought for territory, resources, or other material interests. Tribes and so-called “barbarian” civilizations typically fought for territory and resources. Beyond these material aims, however, Western civilization has at times distinguished itself by engaging in wars with moral or ideological purposes—fighting to defend its values, to liberate other peoples from tyranny, or, in legitimate self-defense, to ensure its own survival. Such endeavors were possible because citizens—both soldiers and civilians—shared the unifying force of a common culture, customs, and values.
When people talk of a cultural war, many conservatives imagine a purely dialectical conflict. They forget that in the past, many men died for the ideas, philosophical concepts, freedoms, and beliefs that made the West great and prosperous. The confusion is understandable; a look at history shows we are not accustomed to having the worst enemy within.
When integration fails, the resulting disconnection affects both host and newcomer, deepening the dislocation of roots.
Pope Benedict XVI—one of the last century’s most important intellectuals—repeatedly denounced the “dictatorship of relativism” and warned Europe of the danger of severing itself from its Judeo‑Christian heritage. He knew what he was doing. By abandoning objective truths, the West risked becoming, however innocently, an ideological jungle—a ship adrift. That is what has happened. The greatest offspring of relativism was not atheism or any other private‑sphere current but multiculturalism, understood as the anthropologically absurd claim that all cultures are equal and therefore equally deserving of respect. Relativism tells us all ideas are equally valid because there is no objective truth; multiculturalism insists that all cultures are equally valid for the same reason.
Of course, not all are equal. Not all customs or ideas are equal, nor do they merit equal respect. There is nothing respectable about Nazism, any more than there is about cannibalism or about tribes that sacrificed infants on altars to appease nature gods. The mixing of cultures can certainly be enriching, but it can also be devastating. Progressives have insisted that multiculturalism is always a virtue, yet a glance at Europe today reveals two facts: multiculturalism is often a nonexistent chimera, and it often proves terribly harmful to a society.
The immigration that enriches the West is the kind that accepts the norms, customs, and values of its new host. Europe, the great laboratory for the twenty‑first century’s multicultural experiment, is failing—not so much because Islamic immigrants refuse to integrate as because Europeans themselves—and more specifically their Brussels elites—have long been uprooting their own laws, customs, and values. In the contest between the rooted—the Islamic immigrant—and the rootless—the Westerner who has forgotten his past, his history, and his reason for being—the former always wins.
Europe is to some extent a sociological laboratory, and its circumstances are not the same as those of the United States. On the Old Continent, the ideas of patriotism and sovereignty are being reborn—not as nationalist obsessions but as a counterpoint to artificial efforts to create a new European identity detached from any political philosophy, from tradition, and, indeed, from individual freedom. The United States has not retreated from its sovereignty, yet it is not immune to the danger of rootlessness—a plague afflicting the West from end to end.
Although, as we have seen, the consequences of the uprooted man are ultimately sociological and political, rootlessness is first and foremost an individual problem. Simone Weil understood that. She left us one of the best explanations of the importance of putting down roots, calling it a natural human need: “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul,” she wrote. “It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active, and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and particular expectations for the future.”
In this context, the challenge of immigration takes on particular significance. Immigration is a positive and necessary feature of modern societies, but it becomes problematic when poorly managed or when host societies fail to uphold their own identity, traditions, and norms. Societies that have lost touch with their cultural roots struggle to integrate newcomers in a way that preserves social cohesion. When immigrants arrive seeking to embrace the norms, values, and customs of their new home, they enrich it; when integration fails, the resulting disconnection affects both host and newcomer, deepening the dislocation of roots across the community. It is no coincidence that the political groups most eager to promote mass immigration—by any means and at any cost—are often the same ones pursuing sweeping political, cultural, and social transformations in the nation.