Oikophilia and The Problem of Plastic | Eric Tippin
Roger Scruton condemns plastic regularly in his work, in part because it abets our greed and selfishness, offering a shortcut to consumable pleasure, bypassing sacrifice and ritual. Plastic is also ‘immortal rubbish’ that destroys ‘the beauty of the countryside’ and by doing so, ‘destroys also the motive to protect it’ (Green Philosophy). The motive he means is oikophilia, the love of home—domestic, municipal, and national—which animates our desire to maintain and pass on the good things we have inherited. Plastic, for Scruton, acts in the service of oikophobia and alienates people from their homes.
The name reveals the trouble. As noun or adjective, ‘plastic’ signifies something shapeless or mouldable. ‘Polymer’, its other name, means literally, ‘consisting of many parts’. By definition, plastic is not one thing but ‘many’, like the demons possessing the Gadarene man. And like demons, plastic has no characteristic form, but only possesses or takes on other forms. It is difficult to picture a lump of raw plastic. What colour is it? What texture? How hard? None of these questions has an answer, because plastic is defined by its ability to take on almost any characteristic. Its shape is characterized by shapelessness, its colour by colourlessness, its texture by texturelessness.
In contrast, it is easy to imagine a piece of unshaped stone, wood, leather, and even glass, because these materials have predictable characteristics. Almost anything can be made of plastic—statues, windows, siding, pillars, paper, dishes, clothing. That is less true of wood or stone or glass. Certain objects seem natural to them. Glass is permanent, delicate, and transparent, so we shape it into delicate, permanent, or transparent things: windows, dolls, vases, ornaments. Wood is durable but impermanent, hard but able to be carved with ease, so we use it to build durable, carved, semi-permanent things: interior walls, ceilings, furniture, domestic and functional buildings. Stone is hard, permanent, and heavy, and we use it to build permanent, imposing things we hope will outlive us: stone fences, altars, and monuments. Unlike these natural materials, plastic can be almost any texture, almost any shape, permanent or impermanent, delicate or durable, transparent or opaque, hard or soft, heavy or light. Like a mirror, it can never be said to look like itself but always like something else: a wine glass, dolls’ hair, metal cutlery, leather chairs. It seems natural to its object only when it shapes unnatural objects, like gadgets, or those we would rather hide, like bins.
This demonic tendency to take on other forms presents a moral problem. Plastic habitually tells lies about itself and asks us to believe them. The plastic Christmas tree asks us to believe that it is as good as wood and not to dwell on the fact that it is not. Good plastic Christmas trees are good insofar as they hide the fact that they are plastic. We cannot say that we like them because they are plastic, but only because they look and act as if they aren’t. If we compliment a neighbour on his plastic Christmas tree, we say, ‘What a convincing tree’ or ‘that tree looks so real’. We say, in other words, ‘That piece of plastic is a believable lie’.
Maybe this is unfair. There is a difference between acting and lying. We do not accuse the lead in a play of lying, because no one really believes his lie. To watch a play is to enter an unspoken agreement to suspend disbelief for a short period of time. Perhaps when we bring a plastic Christmas tree into our home, we are making a similar compact with the object—suspending our disbelief for the time the Christmas tree is up in our home. But the plastic Christmas tree is not acting any more than a theatre backdrop is acting. We are the actors, filling our homes with stage props that only shadow real things. The guilt lies with us.
Our arrangement with plastic in our homes is like the sad state of affairs Shakespeare describes in Sonnet 138, in which two lovers agree to believe one another’s lies:
Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flattered be.
The puns on “lie” and “flattered” show us that these lovers are willing to believe one another’s lies, because they find each other useful for sexual gratification. Our relationship with the plastic objects around us is not so different. Our plastic cups and flooring and light fixtures openly pretend to be something they are not—glass, wood, metal—and we accept their lies, because they endorse the lies we tell ourselves about our homes and the sacrifices required to beautify them.
Consider a middle-class woman who wishes to decorate a renovated bedroom and buys a glossy poster of a landscape in a plastic frame. She intends to beautify her home. Of course, if she could afford it, she would prefer to buy or commission a real painting and find an antique frame, but she knows the process would require her to sacrifice a good deal of time and money, neither of which she is willing to spend for a single, decorative object. So she buys the plastic imitation and four or five other faux objects and decorations, rather than one or two. If she spent the same money on one original or commissioned painting, the nearly empty room would reveal her true means and her true limitations.
In most middle-class homes, plastic and kitsch collude in the lies we tell ourselves about our real economic situation and what home looks like. Only the most well to do have ever been able to beautify their homes completely with items they did not themselves make. But plastic and kitsch, like Shakespeare’s lovers, flatter us into believing in an affluence we don’t actually possess, and we flatter them by treating them as something other than magpie consolations. We know that the poster print of the landscape is a distant hologram of the original, but, we think, better to have a cheap print of a painting on the wall than nothing at all. In this way we guard our illusions, filling our homes with ‘immortal rubbish’ and, ultimately, eroding our affection for them.