OF FEAR AND STRANGERS

Historical investigation of how the hatred of others blights society.

Makari, a psychiatrist whose previous books probed the concept of mind and the origins of psychoanalysis, now turns to the vexed notion of xenophobia, “a word filled with sea-tossed exiles, dreams of welcome, and the flashing specter of violence.” Tied to debates over “nationalism, globalization, race, and immigration,” in 2016, with the ascent of Trump and his followers, an online dictionary cited xenophobia as the word of the year. Makari acknowledges that fear of strangers may be an innate response to encountering anyone outside of one’s familiar group, although some evolutionary biologists argue that such a response would have prevented smaller bands of humans from merging to create diverse, cooperative societies. In this illuminating, significant historical study, the author focuses less on its origins than on when the concept was labeled “phobic”—that is, when it became widely condemned. He examines xenophobic behavior in 15th-century Spain, when the Catholic monarchs expelled Muslims and Jews; in European expansion into the Americas, when Native peoples were killed or enslaved; as central to the eugenics movement in the 19th century; during the influx of immigration in the early 20th century; and in the perpetration of genocides later in the century and into the next. After 1945, the term became taboo, but even earlier, Makari found, it caused disquiet. In 1923, the New York Times called xenophobia “a disease more dangerous to a free people than a physical plague.” Influential journalist Walter Lippmann noted that xenophobia was inherent in stereotypes, “commonly held distortions of ethnic and national kinds.” Makari sees xenophobia erupting in the U.S. and across Europe, which “economic competition and cultural invasion” are unable to explain. The grandson and child of immigrants, the author is not a detached academic. He clearly demonstrates his emotional connection to the material: How extreme will xenophobia become, and “who will stand to oppose it?”

A timely and thorough investigation of a cultural plague.