Oikophobia – the BBC’s extended sneer against Western civilisation by Dr Campbell Campbell-Jack, over at The Conservative Woman, is a fine piece and well worth reading.
In it, Dr Campbell-Jack discusses Roger Scruton's adaptation of the term 'oikophobia'. Professor Scruton turned it from a term used in psychiatry to indicate fear of the physical home interior and its contents, and applied it culturally to mean ‘the repudiation of inheritance and home’ as manifested in that now common attitude (especially among academics) which looks with disapproval on Western culture "and the unfashionable educational curriculum that sought to transmit its humane values".
Campbell find the BBC guilty of oikophobia, accusing the corporation of "carrying on the tradition of downplaying Britain and the civilisation it has produced" - hence the resolutely non-Western-civilisation-focused Civilisations on BBC Two and David Cannadine's Radio 4 documentary Civilisation: A Sceptic’s Guide, which had a similar worldview.
That said, BBC Radio 3 is presently commemorating the 100th anniversary of the death of one of Western civilisation's finest, Claude Debussy, so it's not all globalist academic groupthink at the BBC.
I need to get over by Debussyphobia. Charming fluff? Noodling nonsense. Actually that was quite pleasant. :)
ReplyDeleteThere really is nothing to compare with the depth, breadth and reach of Western art and cultural expression. It's just one of those facts, that the BBC are supposed to love so much. It's why Western culture has been adopted to such a great extent across the globe. That's not to say other cultures don't have offerings to make to what you might now call world culture but when you look at the output of art, novels, plays, architecture, music, and of course scientific discovery as well, there is really no comparison. That's what Beard, Schama and the rest cannot admit - not because it isn't true but because they don't want it to be true.
It's all Debussy all day on Radio 3 (even the Jazz Extra programme), all of which I've avoided except this evening's opera Pelleas et Melisande.
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