Hatred of One’s Own and Love for the Other: a Guide to Oikophobia and Xenophilia

 Roger Scruton was the first to coin the word ‘oikophobia’ to describe fear of home (Greek oikos) in a political context. He used it  to refer to disdain for one’s country, culture or majority population. He was not the first to use its sister word ‘xenophilia’, meaning love of stranger or foreigner (Greek xenos), but showed how the words were two sides of one coin. For Scruton, Jean-Paul Sartre was the archetypal oikophobe, a man contemptuous of the bourgeois culture that had enabled him to become France’s most famous philosopher but a xenophilic apologist for Mao’s Cultural Revolution in which Chinese intellectuals like himself were publicly humiliated and put to work in the paddy fields.

Scruton first wrote about oikophobia in 1993, at a time of concern both in Britain and the USA at the spread of a form of multiculturalism based on negative stereotypes of the majority and positive ones of minorities, and of a ‘political correctness’ designed to police the speech of those unhappy about these trends. Elite disdain for the majority was not new. John Carey’s study of the English intelligentsia over the period 1880-1939, published the year before Scruton coined ‘oikophobia’, illustrates the contempt that so many of our great intellectuals had for the masses among whom they felt they had the misfortune of living. Showing that this was by no means a Right-Left split, the socialist George Orwell in 1941 similarly summed up his fellow intellectuals as people who “took their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow”, were ashamed of their country and sniggered at British institutions.

The oikophobia and xenophilia of large parts of our current elites are thus nothing new. It is just much more in the public’s face because of the extent and speed of current communications. Hardly a day passes without a new example.

What drove the recent deal with Mauritius over the Chagos Islands? The interests of the Chagossians, many of whom are British subjects? Concern for British security? The wish to reduce financial burdens on British taxpayers? No, a wish to be seen in the international community as compliant with international law, even when there was no obligation to do so. As a result, the Chagossians are left high and dry, British taxpayers over the next century look set to fund a £30 billion-plus payment to Mauritius and we hand over ownership of the islands to a power in league with a potential enemy (China).

What drove the recent trade deal with the EU, with its granting of free access to our waters to EU fishermen until 2038, subject to major penalties if we break the agreement? Concern for our coastal and fishing communities, many of them in a depressed state? A wish to honour the Brexit promise to re-establish rights previously granted to our former EU partners?...<<<Read More>>>....