Oikophobia

Oikophobia, coined by the British philosopher Roger Scruton, is here used as a non-clinical description of an 'anti-culture' prevalent among Western artists and intellectuals. It is a combination of:

oikos - from the Greek meaning a “house,” “family,” “people,” or “nation” – Encyclopaedia Britannica

and

-phobia
(combining form) extreme or irrational fear or dislike of a specified thing or group -Webster's Dictionary

The term also occasionally appears in psychology with the more literal sense of a fear of home.

Scruton defines it as "the repudiation of inheritance and home," and refers to it as "a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes."

An extreme and immoderate aversion to the sacred and the thwarting of the connection of the sacred to the culture of the West appears to be the underlying motif of oikophobia; and not the substitution of Judeo-Christianity by another coherent system of belief. The paradox of the oikophobe seems to be that any opposition directed at the theological and cultural tradition of the West is to be encouraged even if it is "significantly more parochial, exclusivist, patriarchal, and ethnocentric".

Background

According to Scruton, culture is the ethical transmission "how to feel" passed down from one generation to the next. Virtue is taught through imitation of the heroes, gods and ancestors not by mere copying but through the imagination and "moving with them" which high culture provides. The repudiation of a common tradition blocks the individual's path to membership in the "original experience of the community". Instead of apprehending spiritual and intellectual received wisdom as an epiphany the 'anti-culture' of repudiation produces mere nihilism, irony and false gods. Of the Biblical Abraham, Hegel wrote:

He was a stranger on earth, a stranger to the soil and to men alike. Among men he always was and remained a foreigner, yet not so far removed from them and independent of them that he needed to know nothing of them whatever, to have nothing whatever to do with them. The country was populated beforehand that in his travels he continually stumbled on men already previously united in small tribes. He entered into no such ties . . . He steadily persisted in cutting himself off from others, and he made this conspicuous by a physical peculiarity imposed on himself and his posterity.

The idea of family, home, ancestors and the sacred as inter-connected and essential to the individual's path to membership in his culture may well be universal. In his autobiography and testimonial to spiritual awakening, Russell Means wrote about his experience as a young Native American who rediscovered his "home" in his traditions as an Indian and not as a member of the white man's tribe: "In that humiliating moment, I came to realize how white people look upon us: We're not real human beings, we don't exist, we have no care, no rights, no sensibilities. We're tourist attractions."

Russell Means's rejection of the dominant culture resulted in his acceptance of the sacredness of his own ancestors rituals. A far different response emerges from Karl Marx towards Western Judeo-Christian culture. Marx describes alienation, or at least that of the "workers," as even more estranged than Abraham and Means: "Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates independently of the individual–that is, operates on him as an alien, divine or diabolical activity—so is the worker's activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self."

. . . the object produced by labour, its product, now stands opposed to it as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour which has been embodied in an object and turned into a physical thing; this product is an objectification of labour. ... So much does the performance of work appear as devaluation that the worker is devalued to the point of starvation.

It would appear 165 years later that the workers are no longer so alienated. Curiously, the failure of communism in no way halted the underlying estrangement of Western intellectuals and artists. Their fellow citizens take on the aspect of somewhat repellent tourist attractions. The idea of the sacred home is absent. A cold gaze in a godless world does not help lead the individual to the ancestors, and the sacred makes no divine appearance. The visible world can now only exist by the operation of "objectification" through the intellect:

There is nothing real outside ourselves; there is nothing real except the coincidence of a sensation and an individual mental tendency. Be it far from us to throw any doubts upon the existence of the objects which impress our senses; but, rationally speaking, we can only experience certitude in respect of the images which they produce in the mind.

In his book, Roger Scruton: Philosopher on Dover Beach, Mark Dooley describes oikophobia as centered within the Western academic establishment on "both the common culture of the West, and the old educational curriculum that sought to transmit its humane values." This disposition has grown out of, for example, the writings of Jacques Derrida and of Michel Foucault's "assault on 'bourgeois' society result[ing] in an 'anti-culture' that took direct aim at holy and sacred things, condemning and repudiating them as oppressive and power-ridden."

Derrida is a classic oikophobe in so far as he repudiates the longing for home that the Western theological, legal, and literary traditions satisfy. . . . Derrida's deconstruction seeks to block the path to this 'core experience' of membership, preferring instead a rootless existence founded 'upon nothing.'

Usage

James Taranto, Oikophobia, Why the liberal elite finds Americans revolting, Wall Street Journal, August 27, 2010:

If you think it's offensive for a Muslim group to exploit the 9/11 atrocity, you're an anti-Muslim bigot and un-American to boot. It is a claim so bizarre, so twisted, so utterly at odds with common sense that it's hard to believe anyone would assert it except as some sort of dark joke. Yet for the past few weeks, it has been put forward, apparently in all seriousness, by those who fancy themselves America's best and brightest, from the mayor of New York all the way down to Peter Beinart.

Kuro5hin: technology and culture from the trenches, Oikophobia; antonym: Xenophobia, By anaesthetica in anaesthetica's Diary, Thu Feb 05, 2009 at 04:41:05 AM EST:

A chronic form of oikophobia has spread through the American universities, in the guise of political correctness, and loudly surfaced in the aftermath of September 11th, to pour scorn on the culture that allegedly provoked the attacks, and to side by implication with the terrorists.

Eunomia: Clearing the East of Christianity: Ignorance, Oikophobia or Alienation from Christianity?, July 1, 2006

. . . so we are either seeing an outpouring of oikophobia with respect to our Christian brethren, a startling demonstration of American ignorance, or a widespread admission that “we” are not really like the Christians of the Near East but apparently have more in common with their persecutors with whom we unwittingly or knowingly align ourselves.

2 Blowhards, Roger Scruton and Oikophobia:

Scruton also invents a nifty new word -- "oikophobia" -- to fight back against those who use terms like "racism" and "xenophobia" to stifle legitimate discussion of important matters.

Muck and Mystery: I'm Late, I'm Late: June 24, 2006:

The recent exposure of U.S. anti-terrorist methods by journalists - though not illegal, immoral or fattening - seems an example of U.S. quasi-leftist, pseudo-intellectual oikophobia. The intellectual neoteny of oikophobics is striking."

See also

• List of phobias

References

• Roger Scruton, A Political Philosophy, pp.23-25: