Some members of a society's educated class come to repudiate their own inheritance and home culture while showing sympathy for other cultures.
Roger Scruton coined the term in England and the Need for Nations (2004), from the Greek oikos, household, as the counterpart of xenophobia. He applied it to intellectuals whom he described as defining themselves against their own nation's customs and loyalties.
In practice
- A commentator praises the festivals of every culture except the one he grew up in.
- A traveller who admires the local customs of every city she visits finds her home town's embarrassing.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation, Scruton's, is status: repudiating one's own culture signals membership of a cosmopolitan elite. Another is familiarity, since the faults of one's own society are better known and more pressing than those of others.
- In its favour
- Names a pattern that surveys partly reflect, since national attachment tends to be weaker among the highly educated in several Western countries.
- Against it
- Critics argue it pathologises disagreement by treating criticism of one's own society as a phobia, and that self-criticism is often a form of attachment rather than a rejection of it.
- Standing
- Contested as a diagnosis rather than a description. Compare luxury belief.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- How societies hold together, sort people, and change