Of Fear and Strangers

The preface begins in 2016. Makari travels to London to promote his new book and, knowing nothing about it, lands in the middle of the Brexit referendum. A few months later Donald Trump is elected in the United States, and an online dictionary names «xenophobia» its word of the year. As a psychiatrist, the author decides to investigate the word. What interests him is not the bloody history itself but another question: who first called such reactions «phobic», that is, irrational and baseless, and when and where did that awakening of conscience happen?

Much of the preface is family history, and these are the book's strongest pages. His grandfather was born in a Lebanese fishing village in 1877 and, at eight, was put on a transatlantic ship to escape Ottoman rule. During the First World War about 200,000 people on Mount Lebanon, a third of the population, died of famine. Though his parents were born in the same coastal village, under the French mandate one was raised by French nuns and the other by British and American schools. His father became Jack instead of Jacob, went to the United States on a Harvard fellowship and often whispered at parties, «I am a stranger among these people».

Makari is honest about his own assimilation. As a child he learns to fight back against those who mock his mother's accent in the playground. He is glad when a form offers an «other» box, and when it doesn't he files himself under a strange American category: «white». At university his mentor, the African American poet Michael S. Harper, asks him: «Makari, where is your history?» That question becomes the book's inner engine.

The preface ends in the summer of 1974. Thirteen-year-old George travels to Beirut with his family; on the way from the airport their taxi turns back from a road blocked by burning tyres and armed young men and detours through an olive grove. Eight months later the Lebanese civil war begins. In fifteen years it kills 100,000 people; an aunt dies of smoke at the hands of militiamen, and two cousins flee to Cyprus with dollars sewn into their jeans. The author writes that people who spoke the same dialect and ate the same food suddenly became one another's killers. That transformation has haunted him all his life as a psychiatrist.

Chapter one tests a simple hypothesis: if the word is ancient Greek, the ancient Greeks must have known xenophobia. Makari shows that «xenos» was a two-faced word, meaning both «stranger» and «guest», protected by the laws of hospitality, «xenia». When Paris breaks that law, the Trojan War begins, and Odysseus sees the Cyclops who eats his guests as «a savage who does not know strangers». The author searches dictionaries, experts and texts and never finds the word «xenophobia», even though the Greeks did act against strangers and Aristotle regarded non-Greeks as slaves by nature.

The chapter's most interesting argument is with biology. Biologists say fear of strangers is found across the animal kingdom, anthropologists find it in many tribes, and babies under two cry when a stranger approaches. For sociobiologists such as Melvin Konner, this is simply an evolutionary advantage. Makari turns to Stephen Jay Gould and Jared Diamond instead: natural selection favoured those who knew when to fight and when not to, and large societies arose precisely when people learned to meet strangers without killing them. As the author puts it, if we are born warriors, we are also born flirts.

• An approach that joins a psychiatrist's eye with a historian's method
• A preface that weaves family history into great historical processes
• A chapter structure that tracks a word's origin like a detective
• Careful, well-argued criticism of biological «it's only natural» explanations