by Mike Gray

One of the more irritating developments in recent years has been the tendency to misapply pop psychology to public policy disputes. A prime example is the all too common practice of inappropriately affixing the combining form “-phobia” to some base word which would normally have little or nothing to do with overwhelming fear.

In Greek, “phobia” means an irrational, intense, and persistent fear of someone or something. An individual with a “phobia” would be for all intents and purposes disabled by his/her fear, being reduced to what is colloquially termed “a basket case” in given situations. Someone with a “phobia” of open spaces would make a poor candidate for airline pilot, for example.

The National Institute of Mental Health did a study and determined that between 9 and 18 percent of all Americans are crippled by “phobias.” If these figures are correct, then anywhere from 1 out of 11 to 1 out of 5 Americans are clinically “phobic”; but, while 1 in 5 is no doubt a considerable percentage, that means the other 4 people aren’t anywhere near to being basket cases.

Which brings us to the Wikipedia article on ‘Phobias.’ In the section “Terms for prejudice or discrimination,” just how far junk science has penetrated into all the scientific disciplines becomes readily apparent:

A number of terms with the suffix -phobia are primarily understood as negative attitudes towards certain categories of people or other things, used in an analogy with the medical usage of the term. Usually these kinds of “phobias” are described as fear, dislike, disapproval, prejudice, hatred, discrimination, or hostility towards the object of the “phobia.” Often this attitude is based on prejudices and is a particular case of general xenophobia.

Class discrimination is not a phobia in the clinical sense. Unlike clinical phobias, which are usually qualified with disabling fear, class discrimination usually has roots in social relations. Below are some examples:

Chemophobia – prejudice against artificial substances in favour of “natural” substances.
Ephebiphobia – fear or dislike of youth or adolescents.
Homophobia – fear or dislike of homosexuals or homosexuality.
Xenophobia – fear or dislike of strangers or the unknown, sometimes used to describe nationalistic political beliefs and movements. It is also used in fictional work to describe the fear or dislike of space aliens.

Rather than the specificity that science demands, terms such as “homophobia” are “used in an analogy with the medical usage of the term.” But analogies aren’t science or even remotely scientific; analogies are little stories that may point to similarities among disparate entitities but do not define, much less rigorously describe, them. Junk science depends on slippery analogies to gain footing in public policy debates. That might be why propaganda terms like “Islamophobia” and “homophobia” persist despite the fact that their existence has never been scientifically demonstrated, and probably never will.

Labeling someone as “phobic” seems to give a scientific justification for a difference of opinion. When one person does or says something that affronts another person’s logic or sensibilities, you’ll often hear them say “Are you crazy?”—when they mean “That just doesn’t make sense!” Thanks to the disreputable practice of hanging “-phobia” on just about anything, the general public gradually comes to regard a different viewpoint as a mental condition, making it all too easy to dismiss another’s opinion and saving them the effort—and it is work—of analyzing the intricacies of policy debates.

In such cases, logic and good sense suffer while irrationality triumphs.