Fluxury by Sergio Benvenuto

Xenophobia: Is It Something Morbid? The Sick ReasonsApr/06/2023


Sergio Benvenuto

Xenophobia: Is It Something Morbid?


The Sick Reasons

             Not long ago, on a train, I met an American who had lived in Italy for sixteen years. One of the first things he told me, in an annoyed tone, was that he no longer felt comfortable in Italy and that he was seriously considering returning to the U.S.  I responded: “Perhaps you’re sick of all the Italian corruption, with our perennial economic crisis, the inefficiency of our public administration, mafias infiltrated everywhere…” No, the American replied: “Italy is becoming full of Indians, Arabs, Chinese. This is not the Italy of before.” I laughed, because he was an immigrant to Italy himself. Yet, I had the philosophical naiveté to tell him: “And do you want to go back to America, which hosts far more immigrants than Italy? The United States is a nation made up entirely of immigrants.” The annoyed American was not at all impressed by my remark: “Immigration is okay for America, but only Italians should live in Italy!”

             (Note: I find this idea about Italians as a homogeneous and pure entity quite weird. Since the Middle Ages, Ostrogoths, Lombards, Byzantines, Normans, the Arabs in Sicily, Spaniards, Catalans, French, and Austrians have “migrated” to our country. These invasions are one of the reasons for the colorful variety of the Italian regions.)

             I have had the opportunity to meet others who are, so to speak, complementary to this Yankee who had immigrated to Italy but who detested immigrants. I am referring to many Italians who had emigrated to the U.S. in their youth, fought against the surly U.S. Immigration Office, and eventually succeeded in obtaining American citizenship by marrying an American, usually of Italian origins. Nearly all of these well-off, now elderly people who live satisfactorily in the States repeat to me the same litany: “Every time I go to Italy, I notice more and more immigrants. It’s a real shame!” For them Italy should remain the same hill or hamlet—or piazzetta with the little café of their youth.

Persons with a cosmopolitan culture—perhaps like you, the reader—scarcely conceal their profound contempt for racists and xenophobes. This is why psychoanalysts and psychiatrists describe xenophobia as a sort of mental disorder, why sociologists call it a mere prejudice, and why Marxists characterize it as an “ideology.” In short, they regard xenophobes as mentally or sociologically or ethically sick. But maybe “the healthy” should try to understand “the reasons” for this “sickness,” especially because understanding does not at all mean agreement or forgiveness, but rather dissatisfaction with a too comfortable, too lazy moral repulsion.  Further, while it is true that the arguments of a xenophobic American or Italian immigrant may seem inconsistent to us, any way of thinking ultimately harbors its own “logic.” Our task is to unveil it. The xenophobic heart has its reasons, which Reason does not know. Thus, we should seek to understand why almost all xenophobic Europeans also oppose European Union and would like to abandon the euro currency. They do not want foreigners in their own home, but they also do not want to consider foreigners even as co-citizens in a wider common home. For Britons who voted for “Leave” in the Brexit referendum, rejection of immigrants and refugees was one of the main motivations for their vote. The point is that the poor, those who lack money and education, feel that their territory is the only genuine wealth they still possess, that whereas the rich, who have plenty of money and culture, have treasures elsewhere, they, the poor, have only the treasures around them.

The Rich and the Poor

We have different declinations for xenophobia. The most widespread today is what I would call pauperophobia. Rarely do Italians speak against rich foreigners, against Americans who establish themselves in Milan to work in the fashion industry, or against Germans who buy an ancient stone casale in Tuscany.[1] In Italy, people are against Moroccans, Bangladeshis, Albanians, Moldavians, Romani, and Rumanians because they are the poorest, those who are hired for the humblest jobs. The dullest (and most popular) anti-racism preaches: “Don’t reject somebody simply because the color of their skin is different from yours.” But in Italy if black people are despised, it is not because of the color of their skin, but rather because they come from Africa and are usually poor. The most popular xenophobia today is in fact a feeling of horror of the poor. The violence in April 2015 in South Africa did not hit whites, the wealthy classes, but other black Africans coming from neighboring countries: poor Africans persecuted Africans poorer than themselves.

If we listen to what these “sick people” say, we realize that for them the poor, especially if foreign, stink. Xenophobia is a political epiphany of vomit. In fact, we throw up not only when we want to expel something disgusting from our stomach, but also when we see, in front of our eyes, something foul. Our eyes “eat” what they see, and then the mere view of what is repulsive becomes an invasion of our inner body that we need to vomit out. Today, we dare not acknowledge that poverty disgusts us. I see a rancorous hatred in many persons when they stumble upon tramps, panhandlers, or tattered immigrants: the visible presence of the needy attacks the heart of our respectability, as if to find ourselves in proximity to the poor or the debased could impoverish and debase us too.

We also have a xenophobia I would call uberophobia (from Latin uber, richness), which is the envious hatred towards someone wealthier than us. As an example, an impressive number of Italians, especially from the North, abhor our Swiss neighbors. I have heard persons who defend Romani and Moroccans in Italy speak about the Swiss with great contempt. “A country made of banks where all the thieves deposit their money.” “All the Swiss can do is make watches and chocolate.” In jokes where they make an appearance, the Swiss are invariably depicted as stupid or dull-witted. And yet, the Swiss from the Ticino speak Italian.[2] I think that this Swiss-phobia has its source in the fact that Switzerland, among all our neighboring countries, is the richest (for decades it has been the richest country in the world) and the most fortunate, as for centuries it has never been involved in wars. Poverty does not actually exist there and corruption is low. Today several international organizations draw up tables of the more or less happy countries, taking into account various factors, from GNP to life expectancy and press freedom. We may trust these rankings or not, but it is a matter of fact that in all such classifications Switzerland always ranks among the top three out of one-hundred-twenty countries in the world. By contrast, Italy usually earns a spot between the forty-fifth and fiftieth position. There is not much one can do: in Switzerland life is a lot better than in Italy. It is what Italy would like to be but is not. Worse still, Swiss-phobia recalls the anti-Semites who denounced “the Jewish plutocracy” (from the Greek pluto, richness, thus power of the richest), as Mussolini called it.

The Gold of the Poor

“Xenophobia-sufferers” claim an elementary right to choose whom they wish to host at home. They do not accept the principle of indiscriminate hospitality. In Scandinavia, one can hear the adage, “Guests are like fresh fish: after two days they stink,” thus adding to the stench of poverty, the stench of being a guest. Passing tourists are welcome, but if they want to stay, they smell. Xenophobes experience the town, region, or nation as their home, their Heim. Personally, as anybody who favors immigration, I do not perceive Rome—the city I live in—as “my home.” I find the Bangladeshis, who opened a little shop by my house where you can find almost everything and who speak about Pakistanis as if they were monsters, quite welcome. By no means do I see them as guests who have imposed themselves on my “home,” but as very useful storekeepers and neighbors, the first to open their shop in the morning and the last to close it at night. From where does this discrepancy of Erlebnisse, of feelings, between “xenophobia sufferers” and me derive?

I believe this discrepancy is a matter of class difference. All sociological inquiries show that the lower one falls on the economic and educational ladder, the more one tends toward xenophobia.  European left-wing parties have long been aware that a large slice of the votes for Le Pen in France, for the League in Italy, for Nigel Farage in UK, and for Golden Dawn in Greece comes from the “working class.” A quick analysis of the latest French departmental elections of March 2015 provides an eloquent demonstration. In the first round of voting (when people voted for the party they felt closest was to them), 49% of workers voted for Marine Le Pen’s National Front and only 23% for the two left-wing parties (The Left Front and Socialist Party). The social layer from which the National Front took the least votes (13%) was what the French call the “liberal professions and upper cadres [executives],” a social group that votes significantly for the left (33%). The National Front also received a large portion of its votes from poorly paid employees (38%). If we now consider levels of education, the figures almost mirror the numbers above: 50% of those with no school-leaving certificate voted for the National Front, while only a meager 13% cast their votes for the left. By contrast, the left parties garnered a far greater number of votes (31%), and the National Front its least number (13%), from those with university or advanced degrees.

This political mutation—the left receives more and more votes from well-to-do and well-read people, while the xenophobic or ultra-conservative parties draw more and more from the poorest and least educated—manifests itself today in different forms throughout Europe. Perhaps this mutation holds a key to understanding the essence of xenophobia, which in Italy and elsewhere, as stated earlier, includes the rejection of the euro currency and the condemnation of European Union as a unified political entity.

The poor, the poorly educated, who live far away from urban centers, distrust those who live at a distance from them—who are different, foreign—because the former’s world is so much more restricted compared to the worlds of the well read and wealthy. The latter are conversant in English or other languages; they travel, perhaps as Erasmus[1] students; they are informed about other countries or about worlds far away in space or time, from ancient Assyrians to present-day Indonesians.[3] Their “world” spans the entire planet. The poor, on the other hand, the ignorant and the non-urban, generally do not speak a foreign language; the political activity that fascinates and involves them is showing support for their sports teams; and they have not travelled much, except perhaps on a cruise holiday in one of those monstrous, towering, block ships. When persons in this social class enjoy some prestige, such honor is tied to their local environment: they can be “heroes” in their own neighborhood, in the small town’s city council, in the local pub or café. Intellectuals concerned, in my case, with Rome’s business tend to focus on the city as a political and cultural power, while humbler people view Rome chiefly through the lens of neighborhoods and neighbors, the public transportation that takes them to their workplace, their local garbage collection. For those with little money or education, their city district, region, and country form their real polis or polity, which they conceive as a limited extension of what the ancient Greeks referred to as oíkos, the world of house, household, and kinship. This important distinction, conveyed through the theology of the ancient Greeks, might in our own time help us toward better understanding of the so-called “mentally sick” or “mental sufferers,” that is, the poor.

The Hearth and the Angel

The Greeks worshipped two particular divinities as opposite but mutually linked: Hermes and Hestia, the Latin Mercury and Vesta, or as we would say today, the Angel and the Hearth. The ancients, in fact, often portrayed them as a couple.

Hestia was a common name for the hearth, used both for the home and for the polis.[4] She was the circular hearth fixed in the ground, the navel of the house that rooted the home in the land. As Jean-Pierre Vernant (1978) remarked, she was also symbol and pledge of fixity, immutability, and permanence (see p. 149). The firm center around which human space was oriented and organized, Hestia never changed. She remained chaste. Hestia is a virgin.

 

 

 

Hermes too lived close to the mortals. But he lived among them as ággelos, the messenger, always ready to depart, as Vernant described:

Nothing in him is fixed, stable, permanent, finite or closed. He represents, in human space and in the world, the movement, the passage, the change of state, transitions, the contact between alien elements. In the house…it protects the threshold, he pushes away the thieves because he is himself The Thief…for whom locks, enclosure and boundaries exist not. (p. 150, author’s translation)

 

Hermes was present wherever men, outside their private homes, entered into conflict because of exchanges in discussion, debate, or trade, or in direct competition, as in the stadium. Hermes was elusive, ubiquitous.  In Athens, every important street crossing had a statue of Hermes, an ithyphallic one, because Hermes also represented the erect penis, insofar far as it “alienated itself” in sexual intercourse.

 

 

 

It is paradoxical that the word hermes generated the word “hermetic,” which, contrary to the nature of the ancient Greek god, means something closed or oriented inward, like Hestia.

For several centuries, as the modern world became increasingly capitalist and industrialized, society seemed to convert completely to Hermes: to free exchange, free market, free sexual intercourse. So-called globalization—the latest stage of this transformation—could, with much justification, be called the “hermetization” of global existence. What happened to Hestia in this process? She was relegated to the so-called “reactionary” social strata: as ethnic fidelity to old customs, as pettiness, as opposition to the world’s traffics, as a nostalgia for the Old Times or desire for their perpetuation, as the refusal to use computers and the Internet. Hestia is partially what Ferdinand Tönnies called Gemeinschaft, “community,” in contrast to the hermetic Gesellschaft, “society.”

Are then xenophobia, racism, and anti-Europeanism the modern figures of a worship of Hestia, goddess of the hearth? Indeed, it seems as if we have shifted from the class struggle to the struggle between Hermes versus Hestia, between a social class (wealthy, well-read, mobile) that interacts easily with and through the world system and a social class (poorer, not well read, localistic) that remains confined to the margins of the system or excluded from it altogether. Today, the struggle even in politics seems centered on “Hermeticists” and “Hestiacs.” The sharp split between those who readily accept immigration and those who reject it in horror expresses this bitter conflict.

The Diffused Hearth

But must we necessarily have a fight between Hermes and Hestia? The ancients, in a very perspicuous way, considered the two not as opposite but as complementary. We cannot have Hermes without Hestia, and we cannot have Hestia without Hermes. Vernant argued that Hestia and Hermes represented two moments or instances of the same, double-faced divinity—a divinity who looked towards closure within a hearth, but who simultaneously envisioned a departure from the hearth, perhaps to find a new one. 

Consider my example. I am perhaps quite a common exemplar of my readers. I consider myself a cosmopolitan “citizen of the world,” and I am deeply anti-nationalist, because I do not singularly admire my country, all the flaws of which I cannot overlook. Unlike most of Italians, I do not dream of dying in a bed in the town where I was born, Naples. I would be quite happy to die even in New Zealand. Does this mean I am totally hermetic?

In fact, I too have my hearth, an oíkos, to which I belong, but mine is a diasporic hearth. My best friends do not necessarily live in my neighborhood; they may live in London, San Francisco, or Kiev. The intense hermetical exchanges through emails and Internet links constitute the cozy village to which I belong. Today, expressions such as “the scientific community” or “the philosophical community” have entered into common usage, and we can see the community, Gemeinschaft, dispersed in the world as the centralizing Hestia of those who do science or philosophy. I am not overly concerned with what the lady who lives in my building or the local baker think of me, but I could be very interested in what a colleague in Helsinki or another in Buenos Aires thinks about my latest published text. The most foreign xénos for us, the cosmopolitan intellectuals, are the xenophobic, and thus, in the field of these transversal communities, even we are xenophobes. We cosmopolitans are xenophobe-phobes.

A few years ago a beautiful, well-read Ukrainian friend, who knows Italy well, was speaking to me about the Chinese “slaves” working in the Italian textile industry and she let slip the words “the Chinese should stay in China, they shouldn’t come to Europe!” Even though I did not want to repudiate her as a friend, is it pure coincidence that after this statement we never saw each other again? I discovered what a xenophobe-phobe I am too.

For me, other xenoi are those who do not think at all like me in my scientific field, in politics, in psychology, in art. For example, when an Italian says to me that he or she is “Berlusconian”—an admirer of our former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi—this declaration pushes me strongly toward feeling aversion for them. Once, a worthy woman, somewhat in love with Berlusconi, told me astonished and wounded: “But why do you all have such great contempt for those of us who side with Berlusconi?” It was true, I cannot help it, I despise them, even though I behave as if there is nothing wrong and try to be kind and civilized. Matteo Renzi, the current prime minister, has understood this point, and actually won the elections when he stopped attacking Berlusconi as a person. That is, when he stopped saying to those who voted Berlusconi: “You’re just deficient!” Personally, I do not have any problems working with a black person or a Muslim, but I would never work with a certain type of philosopher, politician, or psychiatrist who are xenoi for me. Some philosophers smell the kitsch in me. In this octopus stretching across the planet that is my hearth—my Hestia—there is little or no room for many kinds of persons. It is hardly likely, for example, that I would ever invite a “leghista,” a supporter of the Italian Northern League (a xenophobic party), to dinner.

It would then be a mistake to identify leftist positions as only “hermetical” and rightist positions as only “hearth-oriented.” It would be more accurate to say that the political left and right—as far as the opposition still holds together—apply their Hermes-dimension and hearth-orientation in different ways. The left seems to radicalize cosmopolitism, it calls for international solidarity and overcoming the concept of nations, it supports mass migrations towards Europe and the U.S. But at the same time it deeply distrusts free exchange, the free market, and in fact applauds a maternal, protective State. For the left, the State is a Hestia that must save us from inequalities, which the left sees as an effect of the hermetic mobility of wild money and trade. The left’s hermetism is completely contained within the huge, potentially universal World State, and its Hestia is correspondingly worldwide: a hearth with a center and no periphery.

Still, political differences reflect not only an opposition between Hermes and Hestia, between the angel’s phallic mobility and the virgin’s chaste immobility, but they depend also on where we have fixed our hearth, and for what and towards what we move. For even anti-Europe xenophobes have their hermetic side. Not by chance do most of them want less Hestia-State and more free market. Because they are certain that they know to where and what they belong—their hamlet, town, region, religion—xenophobes can be eager to compete with others, to evade taxes, to buy a faster car. Those Italian immigrants to America who cannot bear immigrants coming to Italy, because they have changed language and continent, still bring with them a hermetic dimension. They crossed the ocean to find a new hearth.

I do not think it is chance that Hestia is female and virginal and Hermes male and phallic. Hestia reminds us of Mary, who is a mother as well (I wonder if the Catholic cult of Mary has not been a Christian transposition of the cult of Hestia), a maternal closure that excludes sexual intercourse. Yet, Hermes is not paternal, even if he is manly. Rather, his phallic nature should be recognized as mobility and alienation, even if for the ancients Hestia and Hermes undoubtedly formed an oxymoronic couple.

To Claim the Error

Xenophobia certainly includes a hermetic element. Something considered “evil” by the moral establishment becomes attractive, especially to the young.  Some young Europeans have converted to jihad and set off to fight with ISIS because they know that this is precisely what they should not do. This happened also with our generations of young intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s: most of us became communists in an epoch when the Soviet regime was the enemy of Westerners. Of course, we affirmed that communism was a better system than capitalism, that our ethical choice was the right one; but now I think that this was only a surface affirmation. We knew about the gulags and Stalin’s purges, about Soviet repression in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, and about the lack of free expression; we knew perfectly well that something poisonous was encysted in the sweet cake of socialism. But precisely this ambiguity seduced us. In order to legitimize our destructive drives, in order to justify our being “evil,” we built up a theory of the Good, a theory that allowed us to enjoy our being among those who were “wrong.”

It is useless then to strive to demonstrate to xenophobes that our Western economies need immigrants in order to function, that our societies grow older and older while immigrants bring a rejuvenating demographic tide, that long ago we Italians emigrated to the Americas as refugees now emigrate to Italy, that only fringes of immigrants practice criminal activities. All these speeches do not convince xenophobes in the least, because they know that they are the “right words” and they reject them for that very reason. They experience a sort of Hermetic enjoyment in being on the reprobates’ side: “to be wrong” becomes a way to claim one’s own eccentric individuality against submission to the Universal Reason. They feel excluded from Reason because universality, ultimately, excludes someone from its embrace, and nothing excludes more completely than universal Reason. Xenophobes see the practice of the universal as a privilege that they, because of their lower social background, are denied. They know that the speeches of leftist intellectuals are correctly universalist, and it is precisely the stubborn claim to their own closed and definite idea that provides them the strongest way to oppose this Universal Reason of the “rich.” Reason and kindness are goods that many who are poor cannot afford and do not want to afford. They dissent from the universal values of the higher classes, and so perform the hermetic act of leaving the hearth of Good Causes.

 

 

Temple of Vesta, Rome

 

 

 

References

Benvenuto, S. (1993). Hermes/Hestia: The hearth and the angel as a philosophical paradigm. Telos:

             A Quarterly Journal of Critical Thought, 96, pp. 101-118.

Vegetti, M. (1987). Acropolis/Hestia: Sul senso di una metafora aristotelica. Aut Aut, 220?221, pp. 35-

46.

Vernant, J.-P. (1978). Hestia?Hermes: Sull'espressione religiosa dello spazio e del movimento presso i

Greci. In Mito e pensiero presso i Greci (pp. 147?200). Turin: Einaudi.

 

Notes



[1] This is the exchange program of students of the European Union, who can spend months studying in a university abroad.



[1] Italian casali are ancient country houses, former farmers’ houses built with stones. In central Italy they are quite expensive to buy and generally need expensive restoration work.

[2] It is strange that our Austrian neighbors are not the targets of the same hostility, even though Switzerland and Austria are two very similar Alpine countries: strange, because from 1848 to 1918, and then from 1943 to 1945, Italians fought five wars against Austria. One reason could be that Austria is perceived as a defeated and collapsed empire, while Switzerland is viewed as a triumphant economic empire.

[3] Erasmus is a student exchange project within the European Union allowing students of each country to spend months living and studying in another European country.

 [4] See, for example, Mario Vegetti (1987) and Sergio Benvenuto (1993).

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