Phobic Language
This research anatomizes phobic language and offers a critique of it, especially in regard to the term “Islamophobia.” Phobic terms draw their plausibility from a therapeutic culture that defines almost all problems of modern people as ones of maladjustment and dysfunction. Note that with the exception of the term anti-Semitism, the “phobia” suffix possesses a far stronger condemnatory force than the “anti” prefix. This is because the imputation of a phobia extrapolates a clinical condition, typically studied by abnormal psychology, to the sphere of social-political relations: it thereby medicalizes the latter. Many people happily describe themselves as anti-fascists or anti-globalists. Anti-Americanism has been de rigueur for decades among French intellectuals. But phobias are always things ascribed to others rather than affirmed and conceded by persons themselves, and for a plain reason: to admit to a social phobia is to acknowledge not simply a viewpoint, a political stance, or even a straightforward prejudice, but an illness. It is to recognize an impairment of the faculties that produces, or is produced by, vilification and bigotry.
The previous argument does not contradict the obvious: bigotry and prejudice are alive and kicking in the modern world and they come from all shades of the spectrum. But “phobic,” my research argues, is a word, abbreviating an idea, which is itself deeply prejudicial: it impedes or prohibits principled disagreements on many matters of legitimate and widespread public concern. The identification of dissent with illness, the latter understood either as mental impairment or as phobia, entails extreme anathematization. It also encourages “preference falsification” or fuels outright rage among those so painted because it treats fellow citizens as bad people outside the pale of civilized discussion. Their expulsion from respectable political discourse has a predictable terminus: attraction to more extreme and iconoclastic political alternatives in which they are offered a voice. In a liberal society, it should not be scandalous, proof positive of Islamophobia or xenophobia, for people to say that they are troubled by the impact immigration can have, and in some instances does have, on the traditions, ways of life and security of their communities.
References:
The previous argument does not contradict the obvious: bigotry and prejudice are alive and kicking in the modern world and they come from all shades of the spectrum. But “phobic,” my research argues, is a word, abbreviating an idea, which is itself deeply prejudicial: it impedes or prohibits principled disagreements on many matters of legitimate and widespread public concern. The identification of dissent with illness, the latter understood either as mental impairment or as phobia, entails extreme anathematization. It also encourages “preference falsification” or fuels outright rage among those so painted because it treats fellow citizens as bad people outside the pale of civilized discussion. Their expulsion from respectable political discourse has a predictable terminus: attraction to more extreme and iconoclastic political alternatives in which they are offered a voice. In a liberal society, it should not be scandalous, proof positive of Islamophobia or xenophobia, for people to say that they are troubled by the impact immigration can have, and in some instances does have, on the traditions, ways of life and security of their communities.
References:
- What Use Are Europe’s Heritages in Looking to the Future?," in HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities at Bard College (forthcoming, 2014)
- Entry on “Phobic Social Language” in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, 2nd Edition (ed. George Ritzer). Oxford: Wiley (forthcoming 2015).
- "Marxism and Islamism. Intellectual Conformity in Raymond Aron's Time and Our Own," Journal of Classical Sociology(11:2), 2011, pp. 173-190.