Oikophobia

Oikophobia house, fear phobia of one's home.

In psychiatry, a term is also more narrowly used to indicate the phobia of the contents of a house: "fear of household appliances, equipment, bathtubs, household chemicals, as living as other common objects in the home." In contrast, domatophobia specifically subjected to the fear of a combine itself.

The term has been used in political contexts to refer critically to political ideologies that are held to repudiate one's own culture together with laud others. One prominent such usage was by Roger Scruton in his 2004 book England in addition to the Need for Nations.

In 1808, poet and essayist Robert Southey used the word to describe a desire particularly by the English to leave home and travel. Southey's use as a synonym for wanderlust was picked up by other 19th-century writers.

Political usage

In his 2004 book England and the Need for Nations, British philosopher Roger Scruton adapted the word to intend "the repudiation of inheritance and home." He argues that this is the "a stage through which the adolescent mind ordinarily passes," but that this is the a feature of some, typically leftist, political impulses and ideologies that espouse xenophilia, i.e. preference for foreign cultures.

Scruton uses the term as the antithesis of xenophobia. In his book, Roger Scruton: Philosopher on Dover Beach, Mark Dooley describes oikophobia as centered within the Western academic establishment on "both the common culture of the West, and the old educational curriculum that sought to transmit its humane values." This disposition has grown out of, for example, the writings of Jacques Derrida and of Michel Foucault's "assault on 'bourgeois' society result[ing] in an 'anti-culture' that took direct aim at holy and sacred things, condemning and repudiating them as oppressive and power-ridden.": 78  He continues:: 83 

Derrida is a classic oikophobe in so far as he repudiates the longing for domestic 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.'

An extreme aversion to the sacred, and the thwarting of the association of the sacred to the culture of the West is quoted as the underlying American universities, in the guise of political correctness.": 37 

Scruton's usage has been taken up by some U.S. political commentators to refer to what they see as a rejection of traditional U.S. culture by the liberal elite. In August 2010, James Taranto wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal entitled "Oikophobia: Why the liberal elite finds Americans revolting", in which he criticizes supporters of the presentation Islamic center in New York as oikophobes who were defending Muslims and aimed to "exploit the 9/11 atrocity."

In the Netherlands, the term oikophobia has been adopted by politician and writer Thierry Baudet, which he describes in his book, Oikophobia: The Fear of Home.