Oikophobia ( a useful term)

I came across a new term yesterday which I hadn't heard before, but I thought you might be interested in.

This repudiation is the result of a peculiar frame of mind that has arisen throughout the Western world since the second world war, and which is particularly prevalent among the intellectual and political élites. No adequate word exists for this attitude, though its symptoms are instantly recognised: namely, the disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us’, and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours’. Being the opposite of xenophobia I propose to call this state of mind oikophobia, by which I mean (stretching the Greek a little) the repudiation of inheritance and home. Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which some people—intellectuals especially—tend to become arrested. As George Orwell pointed out, intellectuals on the Left are especially prone to it, and this has often made them willing agents of foreign powers.4 The Cambridge spies offer a telling illustration of what oikophobia has meant for our country. And it is interesting to note that a recent BBC ‘docudrama’ constructed around that deplorable episode neither examined the realities of their treason nor addressed the suffering of the millions of their East European victims, but merely endorsed the oikophobia that had caused the spies to act as they did. The resulting OIKOPHOBIA 37 portrait of English society, culture, nationhood and loyalty as both morally reprehensible and politically laughable is standard BBC fare—prolefeed, as Orwell described it in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Nor is oikophobia a specifically English, still less specifically British tendency (although Scots seem relatively immune to it). When Sartre and Foucault draw their picture of the ‘bourgeois’ mentality, the mentality of the Other in his Otherness, they are describing the ordinary decent Frenchman, and expressing their contempt for his national culture. 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. This frame of mind finds a natural home in state institutions, since these offer the power base from which to attack the simple loyalties of ordinary people. Hence European parliaments and bureaucracies contain large numbers of oikophobes whose principal concern in exercising power is to pour scorn on national values and to open the way to their subversion. The domination of our own national parliament by oiks, as we might call them, is partly responsible for the assaults on our constitution, for the acceptance of subsidised immigration, and for the attacks on customs and institutions associated with traditional and native forms of life. The oik repudiates national loyalties and defines his goals and ideals against the nation, promoting transnational institutions over national governments, accepting and endorsing laws that are imposed on us from on high by the EU or the UN, though without troubling to consider Terence’s question, and defining his political vision in terms of universal values that have been purified of all reference to the particular attachments of a real historical community. The oik is, in his own eyes, a defender of enlightened universalism against local chauvinism. And it is the rise of the oik that has led to the growing crisis of legitimacy in the nation states of Europe.

Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which some people—intellectuals especially—tend to become arrested. As George Orwell pointed out, intellectuals on the Left are especially prone to it, and this has often made them willing agents of foreign powers.

The Cambridge spies offer a telling illustration of what oikophobia has meant for our country. And it is interesting to note that a recent BBC ‘docudrama’ constructed around that deplorable episode neither examined the realities of their treason nor addressed the suffering of the millions of their East European victims, but merely endorsed the oikophobia that had caused the spies to act as they did. The resulting portrait of English society, culture, nationhood and loyalty as both morally reprehensible and politically laughable is standard BBC fare—prolefeed, as Orwell described it in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Nor is oikophobia a specifically English, still less specifically British tendency (although Scots seem relatively immune to it). When Sartre and Foucault draw their picture of the ‘bourgeois’ mentality, the mentality of the Other in his Otherness, they are describing the ordinary decent Frenchman, and expressing their contempt for his national culture. 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. This frame of mind finds a natural home in state institutions, since these offer the power base from which to attack the simple loyalties of ordinary people. Hence European parliaments and bureaucracies contain large numbers of oikophobes whose principal concern in exercising power is to pour scorn on national values and to open the way to their subversion.

The domination of our own national parliament by oiks, as we might call them, is partly responsible for the assaults on our constitution, for the acceptance of subsidised immigration, and for the attacks on customs and institutions associated with traditional and native forms of life. The oik repudiates national loyalties and defines his goals and ideals against the nation, promoting transnational institutions over national governments, accepting and endorsing laws that are imposed on us from on high by the EU or the UN, though without troubling to consider Terence’s question, and defining his political vision in terms of universal values that have been purified of all reference to the particular attachments of a real historical community. The oik is, in his own eyes, a defender of enlightened universalism against local chauvinism. And it is the rise of the oik that has led to the growing crisis of legitimacy in the nation states of Europe.

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