(0556) Probably upandattem now.
5. Inverted and verted snobbery
After having put the boot in, yesterday, to Toby Young’s TDS, today they excel themselves with two accessible articles … one on oikophobia and one on Nigeria’s Christians. This is part one.
Through that article, you can access all the rest, saves me running the screenshot. So … to business:
In his 2004 book England and the Need for Nations, the British philosopher Roger Scruton termed the rising liberal ideology of self-contempt as oikophobia. The Ancient Greek word for home is oikos; and thus oikophobia, Scruton wrote, is “(stretching the Greek a little) the repudiation of inheritance and home. It manifests as a consolidated, wide-spanning offensive against the historical, theological, literary, legal and social inheritance that formed the modern West.“
I call that mid-intellectualism, that paragraph … in other words, accessible to a wider range of people … to those “of the people” down to the insufferably snobby upper middle or left intellectuals. This thing gets quite inverted, with educated pollies being below that, with true oiks such as Rayner and Phillips near the bottom of the heap. And at the top? Well, the Scrutons and Thomas Sowells of course. Plus the C19th working men’s clubs and evening classes:
Despite being useful on a football field, my swottery separated me from my fellow spotty herberts and why did I swot long into the evenings in secondary? Because my parents were working to put me through, not just a grammar or private but through a “public school” I’ll not name, which admittedly has opened certain doors, but my humble beginnings have turned out to be more useful in the long run.
One thing I learnt was that tradesmen were where the money was … those people were never going to starve. Back to the DS article:
As Scruton observed: “Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which some people — the 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.”
Hence, the tedious political activism that was formerly confined to the university campus has now been propagated across Western institutions and corporations. Indeed, the touted ‘grown-ups’ in the West are now largely liberal oikophobes, educated at elite universities that serve, as the conservative historian Niall Ferguson has argued, to transmit civilisational self-contempt in place of the classical Western inheritance.
Nice article. I’ve told the tale before of being on the students’ swotting floor, I thought of it as, on the way to my tutorial room and a girl was struggling with what looked like Bloom’s Taxonomy … I really don’t recall which leftwing “intellectual” tome it was … I asked her about it and she showed me what she was studying … it may as well have been Greek.
Actually … to me, it may as well also have been Greek … it was the worst pseudo-intellectual claptrap, typical of the type, so beloved of curriculum departments. I translated it for her. Can’t recall if she asked … well why can’t they just say that … or maybe it was me, I, they, them its. Either way, it was that thing, starting with “w” in the vernacular, which churchmen in the day would warn a boy against … stop it or you’ll go blind. I mean it really was totally unnecessary and woolly thinking to boot.
So, to return to the article again … what are the four pillars of leftist w***erism?
First, Western history is condemned in an ahistorical, gratuitously unfair, even smirking, manner.
Second, the theological basis of the modern West – Christianity – has been assailed ferociously by the secular Left.
Third, contempt for traditional customs and simple patriotism has become a familiar and undisguised trait of the oikophobic Left. Indeed, George Orwell recognised the roots of this adolescent sentiment in his great 1941 essay, England Your England.
Fourth, as Orwell further noted in England Your England, a chief symptom of the Left’s worldview is its servility to anti-Western foreign regimes.
I’ll leave it there, otherwise this post might go on forever.