WE ARE SURROUNDED by phobias. Or, so we’re told. There’s homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia and, of course, xenophobia. It’s a rather sneaky word, “phobia” (derived from the Greek phobos, meaning “fear”). Those who coin such expressions know full well that their use confers a quasi-clinical authority upon the user. After all, genuine phobias such as agoraphobia and mysophobia describe real and often debilitating psychological states. Persons suffering acutely from these conditions are often diagnosed as mentally ill. By attaching “phobia” to an entire religious belief system, such as “Islam”, any persons critical of that faith can be dismissed, like Lord Byron, as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”.
It’s a neat trick. Anyone deemed to be displaying politically “phobic” behaviour instantly forfeits their right to be taken seriously. What’s more, since such people are clearly delusional in their thinking and driven by groundless fears, providing their ideas with a public platform is easily presented as irresponsible. Tainting one’s opponents’ ideas with insinuations of psychological morbidity cleverly relieves their antagonists of the tiresome duty of refuting them with reason, logic and factual evidence.
Perhaps it was this sort of unscrupulous political legerdemain that prompted the renowned English philosopher, Roger Scruton, to conjure up a “phobia” of his own. Generally acknowledged as the most powerful champion of small “c” traditional conservatism of his generation, Scruton took the word oikophobia – from the Greek oikois, meaning your home, the place most familiar to you, the setting in which you feel most comfortable – and politicised it.
Prior to Scruton’s intervention, oikophobia had been used (pretty much exclusively) to describe a morbid fear of one’s house and its contents. Scruton’s redefinition of the term gave conservatives a powerful new verbal weapon in the fight against what was then called “political correctness”. Scruton established oikophobia in opposition to xenophobia. His coinage was in response to what he calls in his book England and the Need for Nations (2006) the “repudiation of the national idea”:
“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.”
New Zealanders have been preyed upon by oikophobes for a very long time. It required decades to bring into existence a New Zealand culture that did not automatically refer everything back to the “Mother Country”. Even today, there are people who regard everything originating in New Zealand as second-rate. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine “Rogernomics” succeeding here in the absence of the oikophobia which cast the society which had grown up since the Great Depression as an abject economic, social, political and moral failure.
What we had proudly thought of as “ours” – a fair and egalitarian nation – was disparaged remorselessly as not a patch on “theirs”. Travellers returning from London and New York sneered at Wellington’s “beige” bureaucrats in their “woolly-pullies”. They told jokes about visitors arriving in Auckland on a Saturday – and finding it closed. Everything, they insisted, was better, brighter and more profitable “overseas”.
Presumably, this explains why we were so keen to sell our publicly-owned assets to foreigners at fire-sale prices. And why, 37 years on, we still appoint our CEOs from the ranks of overseas applicants. Also explained, perhaps, is why such a high percentage of our best and brightest take off like godwits for the northern hemisphere. Why wouldn’t they? After a lifetime of oikophobes demanding to know: “Why in God’s name would you want to stay here?!”
Certainly, neoliberal oikophobia has inflicted a lot of harm, but over the last little while its principal rival, “woke” oikophobia, has been doing its very best to inflict more. Scruton himself clearly hated the left-liberal oikophobes more than any other variety:
“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.”
Scruton would have had little difficulty in predicting the reaction of the New Zealand Left to this country’s most devastating terrorist attack. While the rest of the nation was mourning the 51 victims of the Australian-born Brenton Tarrant, a dangerously deluded fanatic who quite clearly saw himself as a latter-day Crusader, the New Zealand Left – most particularly the Green Party – was touting Tarrant as the poster-boy of New Zealand’s ingrained white supremacism. These left-wing oikophobes found nothing to celebrate in the vast outpourings of sympathy and solidarity that greeted the massacre: seeing only opportunities to sheet home to the country’s “racist” Pakeha majority, its complicity in the still poisonous legacy of “colonisation”.
It was a message taken up with considerable energy by state institutions such as the Human Rights Commission and the public radio broadcaster RNZ. Indeed, the Christchurch mosque shootings seemed to energise woke oikophobia considerably. Without a discernible public mandate it could point to, RNZ began renaming all the familiar furniture in the Pakeha national home. Nor, it advised, should the current property deed be considered the final word – not when the claims of the house’s previous owners were so compelling.
As John Hurley, commenting recently on the Bowalley Road blog, expressed it:
“Cultural symbols are important as an extension of me to us. When the RNZ person reads the weather and replaces each place with a Maori name it is signalling that we are bi-national. No-one wants to live like that, people want their own territory. I have never been able to get a satisfactory answer as to why people who object to RNZ’s compulsory lessons are racist. There is a human need to exist in a coherent moral order.”
But, if the descendants of the British colonists are assailed by oikophobes of both the left and the right, the degree of oikophobia afflicting New Zealand’s indigenous population is negligible. Indeed, if there is one part of the country’s population which retains a deep and abiding affection for its home, it is the Maori part. Were the Pakeha less riven by oikophobic prejudice, and as willing to defend their cultural heritage and historical achievements as their Maori compatriots, then their need for “a coherent moral order” would stand a much greater chance of being fulfilled. Maori New Zealanders have always been ready to fight and die for this land. How many of today’s Pakeha New Zealanders would be willing to do the same? Deduct all those proclaiming how much better everything is “overseas”; then take away all those writhing in the shameful coils of colonisation and white privilege; and the number remaining may not be as substantial as we would like to think.
A nation beset by oikophobia is a nation in trouble. Those unwilling to fight for their home should not expect to keep it.