Roger Scruton coined a word whose meaning that perfectly describes where most of our present political sorrows derive from, and he's spent a professional lifetime presenting complex, subtle, and beautiful arguments to support his theory.
He thus equipped us with the Swiss Army Knife for conservative commentary about the social world and how that world it is being knowingly and maliciously attacked and ruined.
I'd like to see the word in more common currency.
I'd like to see it packed in thousands in the intellectual ammunition belts worldwide for the culture wars that we must fight and win.
Read it and weep.
I give you Oikophobia.
8 comments:
Thank you for this NNW,
This wonderful word has really made my day!
I shall henceforth use it liberally when dealing with Red's or other malcontent's LOL. Priceless.
"the oikophobes of the UAF"
LOL!
It's a classic!
I like these two quotes:-
"Derrida is a classic oikophobe in so far as he repudiates the longing for home that the Western theological, legal, and literary traditions satisfy. . . . Derrida's deconstruction seeks to block the path to this 'core experience' of membership, preferring instead a rootless existence founded 'upon nothing.'
"Blowhards, Roger Scruton and Oikophobia: "Scruton also invents a nifty new word -- "oikophobia" -- to fight back against those who use terms like "racism" and "xenophobia" to stifle legitimate discussion of important matters."
I will be laughing all day about this :-)
The inevitable association with the word "oik" isn't going to help. Call one of the Righteous an oikophobe and he will simply reply that of course he doesn't like oiks, ie members of the uncouth racist white working class.
Sometimes the excellent Scruton can be too damned clever for his own good.
Hi RS, and welcome back - I was beginning to think my nailing my colours to the UKIP mast had put you off. ;-).
Glad to have made you smile and it really is a coinage we need to trade in as the Gramscian Marxists and their jihadist war-dogs call down hatred and destruction of all that is ours. But at last we have our very own ideological club to belt the Left with.
Hello again EG.
I think, but I'm not sure, that it would be pronounced EEK-ophobia, as oikos comes from a word meaning household or estate whose management, 'oikonomia', gives us the root word of economics.
Still, I'm sure that many of our toffee-nosed cultural relativist masters will glory in the oik-as-yobbo connotation since so many of them are in fact renegade upper middle class drones who are betraying the very culture that generated their inherited position and that shelters their wealth from rude strangers.
Perhaps it might be safer to promote the alternative spelling, oecophobia.
Your post illustrates a broader principle, that the very existence of a generally accepted word for a concept not only facilitates its expression but also imparts a legitimacy to it — sometimes undeservedly.
Thus the negative term islamophobia has become a useful sink into which any disquiet, however well-argued, about Islam can be conveniently shunted, thus demonizing and neutralizing it. If the all too readily resorted-to shame-word antisemite could be met with a compact counter-canard like, say, antigentile, how would that affect discussion of Zionism? Would it be easier to squash the bizarre rantings of Laurie Penny if the word misandrist were more widely known?
(In this context, the now unfashionable but not entirely discredited Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is also interesting.)
You're right. We do need to equp ourselves with the linguistic tools to counter the relativists and the righteous, and oikophobia or possibly oecophobia is one such tool.
Ah, now I understand.
Edwin, yes 'oecophobia' is a better bet, though I have to say as my blood sugar level falls as the evening wears on, 'treason' becomes more tempting, for that is what it leads to. However, precision had better be our chosen path since vagueness (and indeed deliberate ambiguity) is the doctrinaire Left's, and the punters will need some way other than personal hygiene to distinguish us from them.
You're damned right too on vocabulary. My university linguistic studies were patchy and ended early in my degree course; me being a plays-and-rhymes sort of a chap - at least when the bars were shut and the Student Union wasn't debating. You'll notice I never paid much heed to proper punctuation. However, vocabulary for sure can be an imprisoning or am inspiring thing.
Look at the Left's coinage 'divisive.' Implicit in the word is a sense of wrongness, and explicit is the notion that being apart, that diverging from some agreed norm which can only be defined by the routine users of 'divisive' exemplifies that wrongness. Now I'm all for norms, it kind of goes with the whole conservatism thing, but they have to be old norms, evolved norms; morals and manners and habits and sayings and 'it's just not done old boy,' and there's little or no room amongst them for contrived and a priori rights. You and I might disagree on the latter, probably do, but divisive is every bit of a trap as 'racist' and 'sexist', because the very accusation of either is a verdict and a sentence in itself, and it automatically qualifies the accusers not only judges, juries, and executioners, but also as unimpeachable judges, juries, and executioners.
So you and I Edwin, and perhaps Red Squirrel and James to can go into the cultural relativist darkness armed with Professor Scruton's Excalibur as Britain's newes Oeco-freaks.
Hi James. What do you suppose I would suppose you didn't understand.
Ahh normality, it has a nice sound and a positive meaning. It reminds me of my childhood when there were no bogey-men in the forest and I could run free...
NNW, there a lot of good people in UKIP, but the leadership concern me. I would never be deterred by your choices though, after all this is supposed to be a 'democracy'.:-)
About oikophobia.
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