Factually! with Adam Conover - What is Xenophobia Exactly? with George Makari

Episode Date: November 10, 2021

Human beings have long been afraid of the "other." But is this fear ingrained in our psyche, or a product of our surroundings? And where does the word even come from? To answer, on the show this week is historian and psychiatrist George Makari. Check out his book Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia, at http://factuallypod.com/books Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. My name is Adam Conover. Thank you once again for joining me as I talk to another amazing expert from around the world of human knowledge about all the amazing shit that they know, that I don't know, that you probably don't know. My mind is going to be blown. Your mind is going to be blown. Our minds are going to be blown together. Today, we are going to talk about xenophobia. See, humankind always seems to have a deep-seated aversion to the other. We have a story that we tell ourselves about where this came from, a folk

understanding of it. It goes something like this. Long ago in the cave person years, we used to live in tribes and those on the outside of our tribe were de facto threats in the world of scarce resources and saber-toothed, you know, everything. It made sense for our ancestors to, you know, pick up a club and bonk first, ask questions later. And, you know, that story continues to the way we talk about ancient civilizations from Rome to China, which often saw people from other places as barbarians that needed to be defeated. But is it really the case that xenophobia, that fear of the other is somehow ingrained? Or is it something that we've learned, that we've taught ourselves culturally? It's a

worthwhile question to ask because, you know, over the last few decades, we've become an ever more global, ever more integrated society. Many of us have now been brought up with the idea that diversity, that being around people who are not like you in various ways, is an objectively positive thing. Beyond just being inherently interesting, other people have histories and knowledge that are useful to us. And also, you know, they are people we've come to understand, people who are worthy of dignity and respect the same as we are. But of course, this kumbaya vision of cosmopolitan acceptance is also pretty new, and it seems like the pendulum is now sadly swinging in the opposite direction. Immigration is now a hot-button issue in practically every country around the world,

seemingly. Huge elections like Brexit and the U.S. presidential election in 2016 have hinged on a heightened xenophobic fervor. So where, we have to ask, does the urge to demonize others come from? How old is it? And is it innate? Well, to answer, our guest today is George McCary. He's a historian and a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. And his most recent book, out now, is Of Fear and Strangers, A History of Xenophobia. Please welcome George McCary. All right, George, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me.

So let's jump right in to the topic of your book. Where does the term xenophobia come from, and what is the history of it? Well, if I could give you a one-sentence answer to that, I wouldn't have written the book. Fair enough. Because, you know, honestly, everyone thought they had a very simple answer. It was supposed to come from antiquity. There are two Greek roots. Everyone thought like, you know, some wise fellow back in fourth century BC Greece, like put Zenos and Phobos together. And they came up with this thing that we know is a very old problem of enemies being strangers, strangers being enemies.

It turned out none of that was true. And so the story I ended up telling is one of a journey where I try to sort out exactly your question. And it takes me on a lot of like false turns. But then finally, it turns out that the term xenophobia is pretty modern. It really comes from this phase of globalization in the late 19th century. So that was really surprising. Wait, so did people not fear, you know, strangers as enemies before that? Is that a relatively new phenomenon as well as a word? No, I think it's probably a very, very old phenomenon. And like, you know, you can do just so stories about cavemen and intruders and stuff like that. I kind of don't get involved in that. I think a lot of that can get pretty silly. But no, I think from the written record of certainly the Western world, the Greeks thought anyone who spoke a different language were barbarians is what they called them. So the idea that strangers were enemies is a really old idea.

The thing about xenophobia that's different is it starts to frame that equation as a problem, as immoral, as maybe pathological. That's why it's a phobia. as maybe pathological. That's why it's a phobia. And so interestingly, that's when we start to say, hey, wait a minute. In a globalizing world, if we treat all the strangers as enemies, we're going to be at war all the time. Maybe this is a really bad problem we have. I see. So it's actually the opposite. It's not that the phenomenon of fearing strangers is new, but our concept of that as a problem, as something that we would want to correct, that's unique to our most recent century or so of globalization. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, that's exactly right. And so I start to argue that the need for an idea that

a moral kind of break on this, a psychological way of thinking about why we might be afraid but shouldn't, becomes really critical as the world gets flatter. And that's a problem we're facing, you know, now in spades. Why is this something that you wanted to focus a whole book on? Like, what is the importance of this topic? Uh, Oh, just cause it's everywhere. I mean, I, I wouldn't, that's a, that's a glib answer, but in 2016, I was just looking for a new book topic and I was in London promoting my last book. Um, and all my friends were talking about this weird thing called Brexit. I really didn't know much about it.

Right. Uh, they were, they, they told me no way it's going to pass. And I told them, don't worry, Donald Trump's not going to win. There's no way, you know. And so we all turned out to be very wrong. And suddenly this word xenophobia is all over the place. And, you know, it sounds a little bit shrinky. I'm a psychiatrist and a historian. So I thought, well, let's look into this word. Yeah. Well, what are the most fascinating things you discovered about it when you were doing this investigation? Well, you know, the first thing was the shock that this was a story that had been missed for so long, that there's no history of xenophobia, because everyone thought it went back to antiquity.

And then, you know, the second was that the first usages, well, first, the first usages were pretty like esoteric. There was one at one short period where it was maybe a diagnosis. That was when psychiatrists were going crazy with phobias and came up with like 100 different kinds. But that died relatively rapidly. They thought you literally could have been diagnosed with xenophobia at one point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, phobophobia is my favorite. That's a fear of being afraid. But there was a litany until people finally said, you know, actually the people who are crazy here are the psychiatrists

because they have 75 different phobias. So that died really quickly. Then there was another one that was about nationalism and ultra-nationalism, also really idiosyncratic. I had to dig hard to find those. But then the really shocking thing was that the way the term went viral was in a xenophobic way. It was a racist term that imperialists used to describe why colonized inferior people would rebel against them, why they wouldn't accept the benefits of the civilization that the Westerners were bringing. irrational fear of strangers that they called xenophobia. And that went viral. All the colonies, all the colonizers suddenly worried about this problem until it kind of does a U-turn and comes back to, you know, the colonies, the colonizers themselves. Wow. So when the when the term was first popularized, it wasn't like, hey, you, you know, rich industrialist in Britain or Europe or

whatever, you shouldn't be so afraid of, you know of people from the Far East who you're frightened of. It was literally like, hey, why are all these people who we're exploiting and enslaving, why do they hate us so much? Oh, it's because they've got a phobia of people who aren't, they're uncivilized, they've got some brute psychological problem that we need to overcome that we in the civilized world don't have. That's it.

That is wild. That was wild. And it was shocking. Like I thought I'm doing this, you know, history of this high-minded concept and like here the get-go, from the get-go, it is used in this brute power. You know, the Chinese boxers were the first ones who were called xenophobic, but then the North Africans, the Arabs, the Africans,

the Latin Americans, the Mexicans, all these different people suddenly were being accused of, it must be irrational that they don't want their land confiscated and their people indentured. It's crazy. Why would they, you know, it shows you how the blinders were so, you know, intense in imperialism. And the irony of this soon became clear to a whole bunch of moralists who said, uh-uh, no way. This isn't just about them. This is about us. Wow. Okay. But that makes me wonder when I use the term, I mean, I don't often use terms xenophobia, but I would know if I was to use it, who I was going to use it about, about, you know, someone who say a Brexiteer, as they say, who says, oh no,

who are all these horrible people coming in? Is that a similar, you know, judgment that I'm making that is not based in, you know, that presupposes a lot as well about, you know, what is natural and what is unnatural and makes me wonder if my own frame for understanding this concept is a little bit convenient to me in the same way that it was convenient to those colonizers. Yeah, look, that's a very thoughtful comment. And I think that that is kind of the lesson of that early start of xenophobia is we have to be careful about how we use these terms. If we're not to hollow them out, if we're not to make them utterly useless and simply finger pointing or name calling, we have to be clear about why we're using

it and what it means. And so I devote a lot of the book to, hey, how do you know it's xenophobia and not your own prejudice? How do you know it's xenophobia and not, you know, economic interests by rational economic actors, right? That's one of the big arguments. Or sane attempts to repel cultural invasion. Again, economic and cultural factors are often the kind of ways that people explain away xenophobia. I say we have to take them seriously. They're frequently not the case. But we have to take those arguments seriously. But once you say, okay, wait, this isn't really an economic threat.

There are 10,000 people that you brought to from Afghanistan. It's not real. So that is they're symbolically a threat. They're not going to overwhelm your culture, those 10,000 people. That's symbolically a threat. Now we feel comfortable. We're in the land of xenophobia, not things that could be, you know, more adequately explained without irrational phobias. I see. So if I was going to talk about like, you know, I having studied, you know, immigration in America a lot, right, specifically immigration over our southwestern border. And, you know, the striking thing is when you learn about it, you learn that people have been crossing that border ever since the industrial revolution in America to work in, you know, that's literally been the basis of a huge swath of American

agriculture and industry. We had the Bracero program at which we invited migrant workers, you know, migrant laborers crossing that border has been happening for hundreds of years. And the framing of, oh, these folks are coming to take our jobs is not true because this is a kind of job that's only ever been done by this sort of person, by people crossing that border. So I get what you're saying. If we eliminate those other things, we can say, OK, maybe that's xenophobia. But that leaves me the question of, do you draw a distinction between xenophobia and racism in your work? Because the more I think about it, the more like, hold on a second, aren't those things extremely tightly linked? Yeah. So, you know, I argue that there are a bunch of different terms that we have to sort through that racism, homophobia, transphobia, that we have anti-Semitism.

We have a lot of terms that name the victims and they seem to be maybe often separate spheres. It's not 100% clear how they're all connected. I argue that xenophobia actually is qualitatively different because it focuses on the victimizers. It really redirects us towards these people who, you know, a lot of studies have shown the choice of their object for bias is kind of like whatever the society gives them. And they're happy to be anti-Semitic if they're in Europe and happy to be racist if they're in America. And they might be both. So I argue that there's a that there's a potential risk in seeing all of those as different silos. potential risk in seeing all of those as different silos. There's this really, you know, kind of

observant but sad comment by this guy, Frantz Fanon, who was a black French psychiatrist. He went over to Algeria where he got a job and he said he realized something. The French hate the Jews who hate the Arabs who hate the blacks. And of course, we can just imagine the circle keep going. So I thought there's got to be a unifying way of thinking about these kinds of prejudices. And so, yes, xenophobia points us to the fear of the stranger. Which stranger? That is an important historical question that like different societies and cultures will throw up different scapegoats and different minorities. And race certainly is the, you know, the one of the central one in America, I would argue. Wow. Okay. But that is really interesting because, I mean, racism in America, we often think of as

being like the oor prejudice, the, you know, the thing that motivates all these other things. But you're right. If you talk to somebody, if you think about somebody who's racist, well, that person is probably not that big a fan of trans people. Or at least those things maybe go together, that those would be comorbid as issues. that those would be comorbid as issues. Exactly. Well, you know, by the time the 50s came along, people had done the studies, and they actually, the studies were right after World War II, so they were intent on finding where anti-Semitism lived.

And then the researchers realized, we have to open up the category because the same people who are anti-Semitic are ultra-nationalists, authoritarians, and racists. So the category of anti-Semitismic are ultra-nationalists, authoritarians, and racists. So the category of anti-Semitism actually isn't pure, it doesn't hold. We have to think about these things in a broader bucket, because these people dislike a lot of folks. And so xenophobia is like, if we're trying to look at why does someone feel that way about all these different groups that's

sort of like the underlying in your view the underlying cause or the underlying name that we might give yeah this is ultimately fear of the stranger fear of someone who's not like you that could explain why you know some people are very prejudiced against disabled folks right because i see someone oh this person doesn't, oh, this person doesn't walk like me, this person doesn't move like me. Like it sort of all comes together in one bucket. I see, that's really interesting. Yeah, that's my argument, that xenophobia is not just about immigrants, which I think is the narrow definition. When you look at the history, it's been used to really refer to a lot of different kinds

of strangers. And that if we think of it that way, it really opens us up to thinking about like, what are the commonalities here? What is going on here underneath the hood that makes for this problem? It takes the focus off the victimized group and says, yeah, there may be a whole, you know, grades of problem, like everything from, you know, I argue that they're, you know, simple problems, like everyone is a little nervous with a stranger. Okay, we have dialogue, we have communication, we have ways of figuring out whether they're dangerous or not. That's just part of life. That's just ontological, you know, is the big fancy word. And then we have a little bit more if they don't speak the same language and they don't have the same customs. And we have to figure out ways to manage stereotypes. And that is also kind of in

the middle ground. And then all the way over here, the most extreme are people who are fundamentally committed. Their personality is built around hating a degraded other. Those are the most, you know, committed xenophobes. And those are people who, you know, might look like, you know, virulent anti-Semites in Germany and really deeply racists in America, but they have the same underlying problem. So, man, there's a lot to unpack in that last answer. The first one that I have, let's start with the first thing that you said. Do you feel that xenophobia is something that, you know, we share in common, that's part of the human condition in any way? Because I've certainly experienced, you know, in my life, seeing somebody who was unlike me in a way and having a reaction and then having to reconsider that reaction and say, wait, why did I have a negative reaction to this person to sharing a subway car to pass?

You know what I mean? Why did I clench up or, or look away or whatever my reaction was? And that's something that I feel that I've, you know, unlearned or, or, you know, taught, taught myself not to do, especially the more that I, you know, started to live around other folks. Um, and that made me think, okay, is that a, is that an innate reaction in people, um, of, of the other, of, of the person who's different than your identity or folks you grew up around. Is that something that you feel is universal? I do. I think that, you know, children have stranger anxiety that they grow out of when they learn language. I think we all have a modicum of anxiety around, you know, someone whose mind we can't read what's going on in his head. And if I don't understand his customs, if I can't assume that

he or she is like me, I get a little bit more nervous. I think that's part of the human condition. I think we have a lot of, you know, customs and ways of trying to manage it, but it's part of the human condition. And that, you know, you could say is the lowest grade of trying to manage it but it's part of the human condition and that you know you could say is the lowest grade of i call it other anxiety because i said you know what maybe we shouldn't use the word xenophobia for that that's kind of other anxiety and that even includes having implicit biases that are that are due to you know cultural stereotypes that you know if i'm not deeply committed to that stereotype i just happen to live in a culture that taught me that and And if you ask me to rethink it, I'm like, sure, why would I rethink it? And you tell me why. That's not the same thing as being deeply committed to hating a, you know,

a different group and degrading them. But these are all like, you could say, grades of xenophobia from, you know, zero to 10. And, you know, I think it's really important to make these distinctions because they're different remedies for these different problems. And some of them are like humans. So we shouldn't mix up what's human with what is very, very difficult and pathological and hard to manage, which are these, you know, deeply, deeply committed, hard to manage, which are these, you know, deeply, deeply committed, hardcore haters. Yeah. So even if this is something that, you know, we individually, you know, carry with us to some degree or are born with and can unlearn that sort of, I heard a good term, actually, in relation to animals, neophobia. Have you heard of that?

This is something that describes horses. And then also I would say my dog, where if there's something new, they are frightened of it. So my girlfriend has a horse. If there's something new in her stall, the horse just doesn't like it no matter what it is. And that's just very basically imprinted in these animals. I can sort of think of something similar in humans. We've got a little thing we got to get over about new things or different things, especially as it relates to people. But there are also folks who, as you say, are committed to that point of view, who are,

or who embrace it, who live in that world. And so let's talk about, let's talk about those folks. Like why, I think we all know that such people exist and we've probably all known some people, people who are gleefully, you know, hateful or frightened of others and embrace that. Why do people embrace it? Is it something that is, you know, born into certain people? Is it something that is, you know, born into certain people? Is it something that is taught? Is it learned? This is very deep questions on this podcast right now. So let's go back to your dog. Let's start with your dog, because that's one model. And that

model is basically Pavlov. And it is a model for xenophobia and for racism and you could think about how people get startled by novel threats uh and uh make a have a little bit of a fight or flight reaction which then locks in so uh watson uh was the the guy who put this on the map of the behaviorist model and you know like for instance he that you you talk to a subject who said a Caucasian woman, a Chinese man chased me through the woods when I was a little girl. I was terrified ever since then. I've hated the Chinese. OK, that's one model for what happens with your dog and your horse. Right. And the good news is we know how to fix that.

We know how to fix that. It's called desegregation, right? It's in the behaviorists have terms for it, habituation and exposure. But it means like put the dog with the horse again and again and again and again and again. And after a while, they're going to realize like this isn't such a novel threat. The dog doesn't bother me. The horse doesn't bother me. Actually,

we might be friends. That works. That's desegregation. You put people, this woman with Chinese, a whole bunch of Chinese folks working and playing and loving with those people. And you know what? She's going to stop hating Chinese people. She's going to stop being so fearful of them. So that's one model that is, if we distinguish that, we know what to do about it. Now, the second group you talked about, they don't operate like that. You can put them together with the group that they hate, and it doesn't go away. And so it really begs the question of why. And for the answer to that, you know, we have to go to psychoanalysis, because Freud and his followers started to say, hey, there are these folks, and you use the word, you know, that they're giddy with hatred, that they're ecstatic with it, that there's something

that's a great relief about hating this degraded other. And the answer in the simplest way to put it is the concept of projection, that these people have shame and guilt that they cannot tolerate internally, and they project it onto some minority that their culture throws up for them and feel so relieved, so serene, so stabilized by the fact that all of that is out there and not in here. That's the upside of projection. That's the upside of hatred. It's actually, it's much more easy to live with yourself. And so those folks, they can go to, you know, those bias training at work.

They can watch movies where that upends stereotypes. They won't watch the movie. They won't listen to the anti-bias training. They are committed. They have a great upside in hating. So that's a tougher problem about what we do with subcultures of shame that then start to try to relieve themselves with racist solutions or white superiority and things of that sort. Well, now, why do people, why do some people do that and some people don't? You know, like I remember right around Trump's election, I think there's a lot of

talk about the, you probably will know it better than I, but the idea of there being, for instance, an authoritarian mindset or personality that some people, and I don't, I never really knew how to took this if I, if I agreed with it or not, but that some people have sort of innate gravity towards authoritarian leaders, authoritarian ways of thinking. And that had some resonance for me. You know, I think about like, you know, some people like to be told what to do and they like to say, I like a strong leader and they want to see, you know, the villains punished. And, you know, there's a, that had some resonance.

Is it something like that? Or, you know, when you're born, do they roll the dice and say, well, here's how susceptible you are to that sort of hardcore xenophobic thinking? Or is it something that is, I know we're not gonna solve nature versus nurture right here on this show, but I'm curious about your, about your view as to that. Why, why are some people that way and some are not? You know, look, it's a great question. It's an empirical question. So I don't

think we can answer it as you say today. But I would say that there's a lot of indicators that, you know, temperament by itself, which is what you get genetically, doesn't dictate whether you're prone to authoritarianism or not. There are shy temperaments, there are more assertive temperaments. There might be a little bit of a contributing factor there, possibly. But folks really have looked at, you know, authoritarian families. So, you know, the authoritarian personalities coined by Adorno. And that's a look at why kids living in authoritarian households become both attracted to authoritarians later in life and very attracted to hating minorities who are weak, pathetic losers, i.e. they've projected that from their own childhood onto someone else and are attracted to authoritarians. kind of sophisticated model. A lot of people just throw around the term and, as you say, suggest that there's a thing called the authoritarian personality that just is there. I don't think there's any evidence that it's there from the get-go, but there is a lot of

evidence that more authoritarian cultures create more authoritarians, and more authoritarians at home and at the kitchen table create kids who are attracted to and shamed by their experience with authoritarians. This is also fascinating, but we got to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more George McCary. I don't know Okay, we're back with George McCary. Before we jump in and talk about xenophobia more, I'm just curious about one thing, because I've heard you mention a couple times your sources and the material

that you're drawing from for this work. You've mentioned both psychiatry, you've mentioned Freud, you know, the material that you're drawing from for this work. You've mentioned both, you know, psychiatry, you've mentioned Freud, you've mentioned Adorno, right? And then you've also mentioned studies, evidence, that sort of thing. And I'm just curious about, you know, this is frankly my first time having on the show someone coming from that sort of tradition of thought. And I'm curious, you know, what you, you know, why, why, why psychiatry specifically as a background? Well, I guess that's what you do. But But what do you think it brings to the study of this phenomenon that say, you know, someone from a cognitive psych background or

something might not have? Yeah, look, I wear two hats. I'm a historian, mostly a historian of ideas and a psychiatrist, and I've always kind of done both. The psychiatrist part of me, I think, allows me to, you know, really have a sense of what is an important and a less important idea vis-a-vis psychological explanations. Those things I've studied in depth, and I think I have a sense of what counts as a major theory and what doesn't. That was really helpful because there are a million different ideas out there, and to write a book, you have to be pretty strict about what you include and what you don't include, and you have to have a rationale for it. So I think, you know, I was able to write a book that's not 900 pages and encyclopedic, but rather more directed and kind of tries to really edit out things that are secondary from things that are primary, in part because as a psychiatrist,

I was, had a sense of those things from both working with patients, teaching students, studying these different things myself. Cool. Okay, well, let's jump back into talking about xenophobia. As you said, it's become very much a hot button word over the last couple years in some circles. Do you feel that anything has changed about xenophobia itself over the last few decades, or is it really just our reaction to it? Right. Are people just, you know, are people clutching their pearls a little bit more and

saying, look at all this xenophobia because it's suddenly more apparent? Or is there actually a change in the prevalence of this phenomenon? Yeah, I think there's a change in the prevalence. And, you know, I think it's not simply the last couple of years. So if you look at Google Ngram and track the word, you see that there is this explosive growth that happens after 1989. So the word kind of isn't as important after 1945 as genocide, as the Holocaust, as anti-Semitism, and xenophobia, if it's not the same as anti-Semitism, kind of as a second tier problem, or it seems that way. After 1989, it goes through the roof, and so there's this, you know, graph that looks like it suddenly just takes to the skies and hasn't stopped.

And European scholars were talking about what they called the new xenophobia in the 90s. And so I really try to think about what happened. It's not 2008. It's happened before that. It's not 2016. It happened before that. What happened? that has created a lot of anxiety about identity, about nationalist identities, about tribal identities, and that these supernatural national identities, some people thought of them as supernatural, but they're mostly supernatural identities of I'm a red or I'm part of the red, white and blue, you know, collapsed with the end of the Cold War. And that as much as that was a great victory for America, it's caused trouble for us and for Europe. You know, Yugoslavia was the great tragedy. But there could have been 20 more Yugoslavias, I argue, if it wasn't for the EU emerging and bringing people in to a more European identity and a globalist identity. I think that saved a lot of civil wars and nationalist wars. I can't prove it, but I think

it did. But xenophobia really still kicked up and has been kicking up in the United States, I think, more and more so that now without a common enemy, the Soviet Union, you know, the right and the left have started to look at each other as enemies. Okay, I have a million questions about this. So my first one is, why would the end of the Cold War result in more xenophobia? Wait, I think what I'm piecing together from what you just said is that it's, well, once the big external enemy is gone and you can no longer do the, you know, Orwellian five minutes of hate against a big imaginary enemy that's far away, you start looking closer to home. Is that it? That's partially it, that a common enemy, external enemy, everyone knows,

That's partially it, that a common enemy, external enemy, everyone knows, unites a populace and gives them a kind of sense of purpose. But I just started really with the empirical fact. If you do research about the usage of the term xenophobia, it goes through the roof after 1989. So I started with that. And then I had to try to explain why. Well, when you look at it, the end of the Soviet Union means that there are now 30 different new nations who are struggling for identity between, usually, there are two forces, ultranationalists who want to go back to like old traumas, and we're not like the little one next to us that we used to all be part of the Soviet Union. But we're not them because of some old trauma or some

exaggerated difference versus those who said, you know what, we want to be part of the EU. There are a lot of goodies if we create democracy and we don't go down that ultra-nationalist road that you're talking about, which would have been xenophobic. The ultra-nationalists need an enemy. That's how they define what's inside and outside, what's us and what's them. The pro-European groups in these countries mostly won because there was so much economic upside to joining the EU that being part of that broader identity, which did not require an enemy, which did not require an enemy, you know, after 1990, in a lot of places, was very, very compelling.

So that is part of what happened in Europe with the collapse of the Soviet Union. I think what happened in the United States is a slightly different story. What you had here was a world where it's now the New World Order. There's one great superpower. It's us. We don't have a common enemy. You know, there's one historian who's argued the collapse of the Roman Empire happened after they defeated their arch rival who they had been at war with for three decades. And this militaristic culture that had been built around an enemy started to collapse because it turned into a country filled with civil war. It's a disturbing analogy, and it's, you know, it's one that I don't think is exact, but you can look at the way the tribal hatred inside America and the lack of compromise and the vilification of, you know, people who are on the other end of the political spectrum, the polarization, and look and see parallels. You know, if you're a Cold Warrior at the end of the Cold War, what the hell do you do? That was your identity.

That was your political axe to grind. You're screwed. You got to find someone else. They found someone else. polarization, political polarization in America that, you know, we had this, you know, in the in the 40s and 50s and maybe even a little bit of the 60s, we had, you know, a lot of bipartisan work done by, you know, in Congress. We had Democrats and Republicans of ideological. They're ideological, ideologically heterogeneous. And, you know, they would get together and work on things that Republican liberals are going to get their Democratic liberals, et cetera. And, you know, the story is, well, that's because they were keeping black Americans down the entire time they had a common enemy in that regard. And that after the civil rights movement, you know, that's that was like the beginning of like the splintering of these

groups. I don't know if that tracks for you, but it's certainly what it makes me think of that, you know, there was a racial hegemony that was upheld and that once it started to break down, there was no longer a common person to hate for, you know, our white lawmakers as well. Yeah, no, I think that's a very good point. And, you know, I tread lightly on this, these notions of what happened after 1989. It's one chapter in my book, and I don't pretend that it is conclusive. So I did feel like it was incumbent upon me to try to say something about what was happening to us now, even though it's tentative and even though surely it's multifactorial.

But yeah, I think that's a very good point. The civil rights movement and the way that the Democratic and Republican parties kind of sorted after that, I think is compelling, given the argument you just made. The only thing I have to push back on, though, the argument that you made, if you don't mind, is that, um, I, I still notice that even when there is that common enemy or that coming together, you still have, you know, my industry here in the entertainment industry, you know, as much as anywhere else with the blacklist and, you know, the the, you know, the fight against the labor unions being, quote, infested with communists or whatever. And then, you know, in in in Europe, the rise of the EU. Well, I mean, that also led to Brexit, right? Like there wouldn't have been a Brexit if there hadn't been an EU to a certain extent.

Yeah, I think you could say that, but I think that would miss the point of, you know, 20 years of the EU and what it was able to accomplish. Like, you know, the fact that that many years later it's in trouble, I think is indicative of what's happening now, not what was happening back then. Back then, you know, there was a way that I think it really diminished the possibility of nationalist wars in the former Soviet Union states. But look, I don't, this is a 50,000 foot view in one chapter of my book that really does, you know, I'm trying to engage people in conversation about this and create more dialogue, more nuanced insight. This isn't a book that, you know, ends up with a final period and says, ta-da, that's it. You know, fixing these problems

are really deviously difficult. Some of them will never go away. And it's a matter of managing them, diminishing them. Healthy societies diminish these kinds of hatreds. They don't eliminate them. And, you know, really unhealthy ones do terrible, terrible, terrible things. So I think, you know, ones do terrible, terrible, terrible things. So I think, you know, I'm trying to think about this in a way that allows for more nuance, but there's so much more work to be done. Yeah. Well, let's move to somewhere else in the world quickly, because I've been studying the history of China over the last year or so. I know you wrote about the Boxer Rebellion and events like that in China. How did xenophobia express itself in that nation? Well, you know, that was a period of time around 1900 where the Chinese empire was really collapsing.

The Qing dynasty was failing, and the way that manifested itself was that a whole bunch of European powers were gobbling up its properties, its domains. There were Germans and French and British and, of course, the Japanese. And, you know, so they're kind of shaky. And what happens in northwest province of Shandong is the boxers emerge, and their motto is really to kill all these strangers. They want to get rid of them all. So this, you know, elicits a war where all these global powers get together and crush them. But it also elicits a sense that there is discontent in the populace in China. And interestingly, you know, the Boxers become kind of rehabilitated by the Chinese communists later on as a kind of peasant revolution. And so their fate after they were crushed

for the history of China becomes a very important story. It's not one I wrote about, but it is fascinating to track. Got it. Okay. When we're talking about this term, where, in fact, does it come from? What is the source of the term itself? Yeah, so as I said, I found some really esoteric ways that it was used, ways that were surely headed for the historical dustbin. And then it takes off. 1900 in France, in one newspaper, and then suddenly all the newspapers, the Chinese boxers are referred to as les xenophobes. are referred to as les xenophobes. And again and again and again, it goes. So I found this. I was sure it was right. No one else talked about it. So I was a little bit worried about that.

And then I was like, but who coined the term? How did actually this term get coined? It seems to be a neologism. It's a Neo-Grecian term. Someone came up with it. And, you know, at that point, what I knew was articles in French newspapers like this were not signed. A dispatch, it said, had come in from Shanghai. So a dispatch had come in to someone who sat perhaps at the Reuters desk or something like that, a stenographer or someone who then translated it and sent it out in French to first the French newspapers and then the world. So I'm thinking, OK, there's a guy right at the center of this web. I don't know who the heck he is, but I'll never find it. There's just no way. I mean, how do you find a needle in a haystack? And then I found the needle. And that really,

that blew my mind. You know, I found this letter to an editor in the Globe in London, cranky guy, kind of like narcissistic and the kind of guy who loves to correct other people's grammar. And he wrote them a letter saying they had used this term incorrectly. It was a French derogatory term about Germans. And oh, they didn't know the roots of it. And the roots were this. And it went back to the Latin. And you're thinking, oh my God, this guy's insufferable. And then he says in the next paragraph, as an aside, the way words get adopted into languages is quite a fascinating thing. A few years ago in France, I coined the term xenophobe, and now it's in all the encyclopedias. And I went, what? So this guy, Jean-Martin de Saint-Ouir, was the stenographer for Reuters. I could place him in Paris when these things were coming in over the wire. And, you know, it's this fascinating story about technological change because, you know, they've now got wires and even telephones that are communicating globally. that are communicating globally.

He then sends it out through that same communications network, and he's right at the center of it. So I dug up a lot, as much as I could, on him. But it was a really interesting story because one of the things that's so parallel to us right now is globalization was happening because of novel communication technologies, as well as capacity to move ideas and troops and products across the world. And the world was getting smaller. And this was, in a way, such a beautiful microcosm for how the world getting smaller creates fear and creates

conflict, as well as a more unified, you know, human community. Yeah, wow. I mean, okay, when you find something like that, as a historian, I mean, does that feel like that? It's probably like what a zoologist feels like when they discover a new species of bird or something. You're like, oh, my God, I found the I found the guy who coined the thing. Yeah, and no one knows. No one knows except for me. It's a very weird feeling. Like, no one knows this. I just found it. No one knows who this guy is. And this is such a weird, you know, you feel kind of lonely at that moment. You're like, wait, this is weird. I should be the only person who knows this. Yeah. And if he had written this weird letter, you know, kind of

slightly bragging about himself, no one would know it. But is your next thought like, well, no one's going to believe me? Well, precisely. My thought first is I don't believe me. And now that's where this that's where, you know, your scholarly chops come in and you do every possible thing you can to batten down the hatches. Like, where was this guy when that first wire went out? Oh, he has an ad in a newspaper advertising for his services that say he's in Paris at this street at this time. What was Reuters really the place where these people got their information from? What newspapers got it from? You know, I did the best I could. I would say that I convinced myself and I laid out the evidence for others. The other thing I thought was like, why would anyone lie about something no one cares about except for, you know, George McCary, like 140 years later?

You know, no one actually, he's not getting any money for this. He's not getting any prestige. So it would be a very odd thing to brag about if it was a lie. Yeah. Wow. Well, congratulations to you. And I hope your discovery stands the test of time. I do too. Maybe at the next conference, a whole bunch of historians will wag their fingers at you, but it sounds like you did your due diligence. So that's incredible. And it's also fascinating to me, like you say, that the term came from, yeah, these communication networks becoming, you know, prevalent so that we could communicate faster. And it came from a European looking at the Boxer Rebellion, which the Boxer Rebellion was certainly an example of xenophobia. I think

we have to call it that. But that it, you know, it came from someone looking at strangers, right? Exactly. And strangers coming into connection with each other. That is really fascinating. Right, exactly. And so it does beg your first question, which is, you know, the ethical responsibility before you use the word xenophobic is to recognize that the people that you're looking at as strangers, probably looking at you as a stranger, too. And who gets to call whom a stranger might be a matter of power, not just, you know, moral or psychologically sound reasoning. or psychologically sound reasoning. And that's why I think that there's a kind of responsibility that goes along with these terms to not misuse them,

because they're really important. You know, the tradition that I found of people who established xenophobia, you know, prehistory of it, going back to Bartholomew de las Casas, who called out his own brothers and sisters and what the Spanish were doing in the New World, to Lemkin, who coins the term genocide. And Lemkin says, like, we stand in a tradition that starts with las casas, and he marches it out. This is a hugely important part of our inheritance. Our inheritance is not just racism and stranger hatred. It's also these folks who stood up against it and tried to create an ethic that said, this is wrong.

This is evil. This will destroy societies. And so I try to really lay out this, you know, kind of string of folks who are very bravely pointed the finger at their own people, you know, Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, Roger Casement, you know, there is a litany of people, a list of people, they're not a litany, they're a list that, you know, we want to think of the challenges they face because we face the same challenges. Wow. So what do we, that's an inspiring vision. What do we then do if we fear that we live in an age where there's more xenophobia or more fear of the other in our own society?

What do we do other than wagging our finger at it, right? And just saying, oh, people shouldn't be that way, which we've been doing for at least a century now with, you know, mixed results. Yeah, how do we affect it in our daily lives? Yeah, I think that that depends on the kind of scale and level of the problem. The simplest problem is, you know, with strangers to, you know,

the word that is commonly used is recognition. You don't turn them into a thing. You allow their subjectivity to be alongside your subjectivity. And that allows for the possibility of mutual recognition, not one, you know, group turning the other group into categories and things. The second is we know that we live with categories in our heads of groups of people. Those are called stereotypes. We all have them. and often torn between emancipatory and, you know, quite opposite discriminatory impulses. So those called our culture in our inheritance is to have stereotypes that are racially biased, that are ethnically biased. It is part of our inheritance in the same way our inheritance gives us, you know, all men are created equal. And so we have to own that and work on that and be honest about that and think of that as a work in progress, you know, as stereotypes are things that if you're open about them, you shouldn't be shamed. You should be applauded for learning and trying to change. We all have them. You know, and then the really difficult problem is the folks who really don't want to change their stereotypes are deeply committed

to them, whose personalities are built around them. And that becomes a problem that I argue we need a lot more study of. We need a lot more research on. If we are more clear about those folks and their problems, perhaps we'll come up with better solutions rather than, you know, putting them all in the same pot and getting super confused. Well, George, this has been fascinating. Thank you so much for being here. The title of the book is where can people get it? It's of fear and strangers, a history of xenophobia. And I suppose it's at the fine bookstore near you. Yeah. You can also get it at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. And when you get it there, you'll be supporting not just this show, but your local bookstore, too.

Or walk down to your local bookstore and just buy it. George, thank you so much for being here. Can't thank you enough. Adam, thanks. It was a lot of fun. Well, thank you once again to George McCarron for coming on the show. I hope you found that conversation as fascinating as I did. If you did, why don't you shoot me an email to tell me about it?

My email address is factually at adamconover.net. If you shoot me an email, I might read it. I might reply. No promises, but I do always enjoy hearing from you. I want to thank our producers, Chelsea Jacobson and Sam Roudman, our engineer, Ryan Connor, the fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building me the incredible custom gaming PC that I'm recording this very episode for you on,

and your WK4, our theme song. You can find me online at Adam Conover wherever you get your social media or at adamconover.net via your web browser. And until next week, we will see you next time on Factually. Thank you so much for listening. that was a hate gun podcast