Oikophobia
Also known as: Oikophobe, Cultural self-loathing, Home-hatred, Repudiation of inheritance
Formulated by
Roger Scruton
(2004)
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From
England and the Need for Nations
Definition
Coined by British philosopher Roger Scruton in England and the Need for Nations (2004), oikophobia (from Greek oikos, home, and phobia, aversion) denotes the repudiation of one's own home, culture, nation, or civilization: the systematic disdain for the familiar and inherited. It is the direct antithesis of xenophobia: while the xenophobe fears the foreign, the oikophobe fears the domestic. Scruton identified oikophobia as a defining pathology of Western intellectual elites: a habitual contempt for inherited institutions, national identity, and traditional values, combined with a reflexive deference to foreign and transnational alternatives. The oikophobe does not merely criticise his culture; he is embarrassed by it, considers its defence intellectually disreputable, and typically attributes its influence to bigotry or ignorance. Scruton traced this disposition in the post-war European intelligentsia, where it manifested as support for supranational institutions (the EU, the UN) over democratic nation-states, contempt for patriotism as provincialism, and the adoption of a default cosmopolitan stance that exempts all foreign cultures from the critical scrutiny applied to one's own. The concept has significant analytical value for the critique of double standards: the oikophobic tendency reliably produces asymmetric moral judgment: severity toward one's own civilization, charity toward its adversaries. This asymmetry, Scruton argued, is not neutral or scholarly; it is a form of self-hatred that weakens the cultural immune system of a civilization and disarms it in the face of threats it refuses to name.