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The Anatomy of Oikophobia
The Anatomy of Oikophobia
The Anatomy of Oikophobia
The concept of oikophobia was first developed by the English philosopher Roger
Scruton, in part to summarise what George Orwell described as a kind of “negative”
or “transferred nationalism” amongst progressive English intellectuals. They were
enthusiastic about the customs and practices of other peoples, but believed such
feelings for their own culture to be embarrassing or even dangerous. According to
Scruton and Orwell, this sort of self-contempt for one’s own society functioned as an
identity marker, a way for intellectuals to distance themselves from that working
class to which several of them once belonged.
To explain this cyclical pattern, Beckeld starts from the assumption of the historian
Thucydides that human nature is fundamentally constant. Human nature and mass
psychology remain the same, and therefore the same symptoms recur: a successful
society enables a societal elite that does not have to work and can educate itself. This
elite becomes aware of other people’s attitudes and over time distances itself from its
own culture. Thus, successful societies bear within them the seeds of self-contempt,
fragmentation and a return to smaller social communities.
Marcuse’s cultural relativism would later become central to the “critical” theories of
the humanities, whose impact on society can be seen today in policies aiming for
diversity, equity and inclusion, or plans to decolonise institutions. Regardless of the
specific nature of oppression (e.g. capitalism, sexism, racism), the responsibility of
relativistic intellectuals is to tear down previous customs so as to level all cultural
values. Through a kind of moral democracy, humans are freed from their own
society’s traditions, beliefs and prejudices.
Where does this progressive belief in universal justice come from? According to
Beckeld, present-day secular beliefs about justice — for example, thinking of human
“rights” as inalienable — are fundamentally derived from the religious idea of free
will. Within the Judeo-Christian tradition, the idea of free will developed as a way to
attribute evil in the world to human actions, rather than to God who created our
world. Plato based his idea of humans having a true nature — a self — on the
Egyptian idea of a soul. It was not until the church fathers, such as St Augustine, that
the self’s free will developed into a moral concept, detached from physical conditions
or limitations. From the German 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant onwards,
human free will has become linked to the responsibility of creating universal justice
in the world.
The progressive view of history thus sees justice as the goal of history, the
responsibility of intellectuals. Because we have free will, it is sinful not to participate
in the establishment of a more just society. I think it is here apt to compare this
Judeo-Christian interpretation with the Greek word for sin (hamartia), which refers
to missing one’s goal due to a lack of balance between vying forces.
Our individual self and responsibility can then be said to exist, but it is a historical
self. To return to the thought experiment we began with: you most likely would not
have fought against Nazism or slavery, because there is no eternal self. To believe
that “me” now would have been “me” then is to claim moral superiority not only over
society, but also over its history and those who lived back then. Instead, Beckeld, like
David Hume and Heraclitus before him, argues that the self be seen as a bundle of
perceptions — both one’s own and that of others’ — about our thoughts and actions.
Thus, the Western idea that individuals can be expected to act rightly works without
belief in an eternal, ahistorical, free will or universal justice. What we have is instead
a historically bound notion of justice, one that demands responsibility even of those
who consider themselves limited from acting rightly due to some sort of structural
oppression.
Beckeld’s solution, like that of the pre-Platonic Greeks, is to ask “what is the just
thing to do now?” rather than “what is justice?” Questions about universal justice
make us into presumptuous people, keen to interfere in others’ lives. By contrast,
questions about what is the just thing to do at this particular moment in time is a
way of cultivating an intuition for how to treat fellow human beings in our vicinity,
with whom we have material ties.
The alternative to the progressive philosophy of history is thus a cyclical and anti-
utopian belief that existence and nature are unjust. Some people have abilities that
others lack. Criminals are rewarded whilst righteous people are punished. To
paraphrase directly from Western cultural canon: Hector dies defending his family,
whilst the selfish Achilles wins eternal glory.
The starting point is that every event can be viewed in two ways: both narrowly and
broadly, both emotionally and logically. The good and the bad can in this sense be
said to mingle in the same phenomenon; a more liberal society comes with the loss
of cultural cohesion. Similarly, it is when we learn to say no to good things, because
of their negative outcomes, that we can take responsibility for the cyclical pattern
that is our civilisation, and accept that tragedies are played out again and again. It
includes letting go of beliefs in a fairer tomorrow, as well as of regrets that we did not
have a nobler past.
https://thecritic.co.uk/the-anatomy-of-oikophobia/