Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia (W.W. Norton), by George Makari

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Of Fear and Strangers by George Makari

Psychiatrist George Makari comes to the subject of xenophobia from experience. He was an adolescent when he traveled to Lebanon with his parents, spending the summer with extended family. Back in the states a year later, he was horrified by news reports of the Lebanese civil war pitting that nation’s numerous religious groups against each other. And in the U.S., where exactly did he fit on an application form as the child of Greek Orthodox immigrants from Lebanon? Reluctantly, he checked white, which didn’t exactly seem to fit.

Makari’s Of Fear and Strangeness: A History of Xenophobia is a rambling but instructive account of a vast, always morphing subject. He shrugs off unverifiable claims by evolutionary biologists as projections of contemporary attitudes onto the past.

The word xenophobia is Greek but was coined in 19th century Europe (the ancient Greeks looked down on “barbarians,” meaning non-Greek speakers). Xenos means “stranger” and xenia refers the Greek code of hospitality. Homer is permeated by the code of xenia. Pouring over ancient writings, Makari found xenophilia (love of strangers) but never its antonym. Perhaps tellingly, xenophobia turns up in late 19th century psychiatric writings amidst a plethora of phobias (such as agoraphobia, claustrophobia) as the “morbid dread of meeting strangers.”

When applied to the Chinese nationalists who rose up against foreign domination in the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901), xenophobia became part of the racist vocabulary. Irrational fear of foreigners was deemed a common characteristic of lesser races. Any effort to resist Western encroachment was dubbed xenophobic, symptomatic of the world’s children acting up against the grown-up civilization. Most Westerners were blind to their own xenophobia, expressed in unreflecting prejudice against non-Europeans—the Others of the world. Xenophobia found its logical limit in genocide.

One of the best parts from Of Fear and Strangers is Makari’s exegesis of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899). True, as Makari points out, Conrad wasn’t entirely free of the endemic, nearly unchallenged racism of that era—yet he along with Mark Twain, Tolstoy and a few other writers were well in advance of their time in recognizing the moral evil of colonial policy and the hypocrisy employed in its defense. Makari also summarizes Teodor Adorno’s 1940s research into authoritarian personalities, culminating with the conclusion: “Stubbornly conventional, they filled themselves up with stereotypes and eagerly found groups to disdain.”

Inevitably, a book as millennia-leaping as Makari’s gets a bit fuzzy at the edges. Benito Mussolini can’t be called “Italy’s Republican Fascist leader”—he was appointed prime minister by the Italian king—and he wasn’t a veteran of Italy’s first assault on Ethiopia (but ordered the second invasion years later). Calling Philippe Petain “a Nazi apologist” simplifies the dilemma faced by France as it fell to Germany in 1940.

However, minor faux pas don’t distract from Of Fear and Strangers as a lucid compendium of ideas, suppositions and facts about a problem that has grown urgent (or at least unmistakable) once again. Xenophobia was one of the fears martialed by our previous president and he’s at it again. Makari brings a measure of historical clarity to the psychology of hatred.