Oikophobia

Oikophobia (pronounced oick-oh-foh-bee-uh)

(1) In political science, an aversion to or rejection of one’s own culture, and traditions; a dislike of one's own compatriots.

(2) In psychiatry, one of a number of phobias related to (1) one’s home (either as a building or as place of abode), (2) returning to one’s home or (3) some or all of the contents of one’s home.

From the Ancient Greek οἶκος (oîkos) (house; household; a basic societal unit in Ancient Greece; a household or family line) +‎ -phobia from phóbos (fear).  The suffix -phobia (fear of a specific thing; hate, dislike, or repression of a specific thing) was from the New Latin, from the Classical Latin, from the Ancient Greek -φοβία (-phobía) and was used to form nouns meaning fear of a specific thing (the idea of a hatred came later).  Oikophobia & oikophobe are nouns, oikophobic is a noun and adjective and oikophobically is an adverb; the noun plural is oikophobes.

Roger Scruton in his study.  Although a staunch conservative tied to earlier traditions, even The Guardian granted a deservedly generous obituary.

The political sense where oikophobia (literally the antonym of xenophobia (hatred, fear or strong antipathy towards strangers or foreigners)) dates only from 2004 when it was used by English philosopher Roger Scruton (1944-2020) as part of the culture wars which swirl still around the critiques and defenses of Western civilization, the Enlightenment and the implications of post-modernism.  Scruton’s slim volume England and the Need for Nations (2004, Civitas, 64 pp ISBN-10-1903386497) argued that empirically, based on the last two-hundred years odd, it was the nation state which best created the conditions necessary for peace, prosperity, and the defense of human rights.  There are obviously not a few examples of nation states which have proven not to be exemplars of the values Scruton values but his agreement was essentially structural: Where there have been attempts to replace the nation-state with some kind of transnational political order, such things have tended to descend to totalitarian dictatorships like the old Soviet Union or evolve into bloated unaccountable bureaucracies like the post Maastricht European Union (EU).  It surprised nobody that enthusiastically he supported the UK’s exit (Brexit) from the EU:

 “I believe we are on the brink of decisions that could prove disastrous for Europe and for the world and that we have only a few years in which to take stock of our inheritance and to reassume it.  Now more than ever do those lines from Goethe’s Faust ring true for us: "Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen" (What you have inherited from your forefathers, earn it, that you might own it).  We in the nation states of Europe need to earn again the sovereignty that previous generations so laboriously shaped from the inheritance of Christianity, imperial government and Roman law. Earning it, we will own it, and owning it, we will be at peace within our borders.”

Portrait of Theodor Herzl (circa 1890), oil on canvas by Leopold Pilichowski (1869-1933), Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, London.

Scruton of course rejected the notion he was in any way xenophobic but did reference that as oikophobia’s antonym when he described the latter as a “…need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ours” and ominously implicit in his critique was the observation it was a cultural malaise which tended to befalls civilizations in the days of decline before their fall.  Plenty have documented the mechanisms by which the faith in Western civilization was undermined, their phrases famous landmarks in the development of post-modernism including “cultural relativism”, “march through the institutions” & “deconstructionism” et al.  However, in a political context the idea of oikophobia wasn’t then entirely new, the idea of the “self-hating Jew” documented in 1896 by Austro-Hungarian Jewish lawyer Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) in his book 1896 book The Jewish State.  Regarded as “the father of modern political Zionism”, Herzl denounced those who opposed his model of a Jewish state in Palestine, calling them “disguised anti-Semites of Jewish origin”.  Essentially, Herzl saw being Jewish as not only compulsory for Jews but defined the only “true” Judaism as his Zionist vision but despite that, among European Jews, especially the educated and assimilated, Zionism was by no means universally supported and both sides weaponized their vocabularies.  In 1930, German Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing (1872–1933) published Juedischer Selbsthass (Jewish Self-Hatred) and from then onwards the “self-hating Jew” came to be slung at those (often intellectuals) opposed to Zionism.  In 1933, Lessing (who had fled to Czechoslovakia) was murdered at the instigation of the Nazis.  In the post war years “self-hating Jew” has come to be used by Israeli politicians against any Jew who opposes their policies, often with as little basis as “fascist” came to be deployed in post-Franco Spain.

Before it was picked up in political science and purloined for the culture wars, oikophobia had been a technical term in psychiatry to refer to a patient’s aversion to a home environment, or an abnormal fear (phobia) of being in their own home, the companion terms being (1) ecophobia (fear of a home environment) the construct being eco- (from the French eco-, from the Latin oeco, from the Ancient Greek οἶκος (oîkos) (house, household) + -phobia & (2) nostophobia (a fear of, or aversion to, returning to one's home), the construct being the Ancient Greek νόστος (nóstos) (a return home) +‎ -phobia.  It was the idea of the “unwillingness to return home” that was later absorbed by the deconstructionists and other post-modernists in the sense of “an aversion to the past, the antithesis of nostalgia” because in their assault on Western society, it was the political and social relics they attacked, condemning them as symbols (indeed tools) of oppression and mechanisms by which the power elite maintained their hegemony.  Thus, Western legal & theological traditions and the artistic & literary canon were just one of many constructs and, because of their oppressive history, needed to be overthrown.

In psychiatry, oikophobia, ecophobia & nostophobia cold also be used of patients exhibiting the symptoms of phobia relating to all or some of the contents of a house: electrical appliances, the plumbing, the cupboards, the furniture, the light fittings etc.  So specific were some of these cases (an there were some not unjustified such as a fear of certain allergy-inducing substances such as chemicals) that the profession added domatophobia (a specific fear of a house as opposed to its contents), the construct being domato- (from the Middle French domestique, from the Latin domesticus, from domus (house, home) + -phobia.  In the years after World War II (1939—1945), the word domatophobia came to be used by journalists to described what was emerging as a mass phenomenon: women attracted to careers outside the home, this explained by (usually male) journalists as “a fear of or aversion to housework”, presumably their proper role.