Oikophobia
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
"Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes, and a partial explanation of this can be gleaned from the theories of attachment that I referred to earlier. But oikophobia is also 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." --How to Think Seriously About the Planet (2011) by Roger Scruton "England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God save the King than of stealing from a poor box." --"England Your England", George Orwell, first published in The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941) "With some humour, he descants on the oikophobia, as he calls the English rage for leaving home and going to watering-places, and for picturesque travelling. We give a specimen or his ridicule of the former : • The English migrate as regularly ..." --Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, Letters from England (1807) "We are bound to Enlightenment values — the universality of moral principles, the sanctity of individual volition, a detestation of wanton cruelty — and yet we have no choice but to indict the very civilization that begat those values as it goes careening through time leaving pain, death, bewilderment, the wreckage of aboriginal tribes and of rain forests in its wake. But again, the terms of that indictment can be spelled out only in the language of those values. This, and not the mincing word games of the deconstructionists, is the true aporia. The criminal is also accuser and judge."--Higher Superstition (1994) by Gross and Levitt |
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
In psychiatry, oikophobia (synonymous with domatophobia and ecophobia) is an aversion to home surroundings. It can also be used more generally to mean an abnormal fear (a phobia) of the home, or of the contents of a house ("fear of household appliances, equipment, bathtubs, household chemicals, and other common objects in the home"). The term derives from the Greek words oikos, meaning household, house, or family, and phobia, meaning "fear".
In 1808 the poet and essayist Robert Southey used the word to describe a desire (particularly by the English) to leave home and travel. Southey's usage as a synonym for wanderlust was picked up by other nineteenth century writers.
The term has also been used in political contexts to refer critically to political ideologies that repudiate one's own culture and laud others. The first such usage was by Roger Scruton in a 2004 book.
Contents |
Psychiatric usage
In psychiatric usage oikophobia typically refers to fear of the physical space of the home interior, and is especially linked to fear of household appliances, baths, electrical equipment and other aspects of the home perceived to be potentially dangerous. The term is properly applied only to fear of objects within the house. Fear of the house itself is referred to as domatophobia. In the post-World War II era some commentators used the term to refer to a supposed "fear and loathing of housework" experienced by women who worked outside the home and who were attracted to a consumerist lifestyle.
Southey's usage
Southey used the term in Letters from England (1808), stating that it is a product of "a certain state of civilisation or luxury", referring to habit of wealthy people to visit spa towns and seaside resorts in the summer months. He also mentions the fashion for picturesque travel to wild landscapes, such as the highlands of Scotland. Southey's link of oikophobia to wealth and the search for new experiences was taken up by other writers, and cited in dictionaries. A writer in 1829 published an essay about his experience witnessing the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo, saying "the love of locomotion is so natural to an Englishman that nothing can chain him home, but the absolute impossibility of living abroad. No such imperious necessity acting upon me, I gave away to my oiko-phobia and the summer of 1815 found me in Brussels." In 1959 the Anglo-Egyptian author Bothaina Abd el-Hamid Mohamed used Southey's concept in his book Oikophobia: or, A literary craze for education through travel.
Political usage
In his 2004 book England and the Need for Nations, British conservative philosopher Roger Scruton adapted the word to mean "the repudiation of inheritance and home." He argued that it is "a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes", but that it is a feature of some, typically leftist, political impulses and ideologies which espouse xenophilia, i.e. preference for alien cultures.
Scruton uses the term as the antithesis of xenophobia. 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.'
An extreme aversion to the sacred and the thwarting of the connection of the sacred to the culture of the West is described as 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." Scruton described "a chronic form of oikophobia [which] has spread through the American universities, in the guise of political correctness."
Scruton's usage has been taken up by some American political commentators to refer to what they see as a rejection of traditional American culture by the liberal elite. In August 2010 James Taranto wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal entitled "Oikophobia: Why the liberal elite finds Americans revolting", in which he criticized supporters of the proposed Islamic center in New York as oikophobes who were defending Muslims who aimed, in his words, to "exploit the 9/11 atrocity".
See also
- Nostophobia – fear of returning home
- List of phobias
- Wanderlust
- Allophilia
- Xenophily
- Xenocentrism
- Clientitis
- Western self-hatred
