Hatred (23 page)

In my research for this book, I visited many of the websites of radical reformist groups in an attempt to understand the motivation and means for forming ideological communities. I started with simple causes, usually single-issue groups. Specifically, I wanted to understand how groups that had been formed ostensibly out of compassion, to protect the helpless and abused—animals, children, nature—were so readily converted to a community of haters. How love of the victim became subordinate to hatred of those who do not share one's belief.

Most right-to-lifers, animal rights people, environmental protection groups, while passionately devoted to their causes, would not commit acts of violence or condone such actions by others.
Still, in their “righteous” indignation against the opponents, they set a climate of hatred and create a defined and legitimate community in which the paranoid can enlist. These groups offer the individual hater an outlet for his groundless hatred, a self-justifying rationalization for his frustration, and a group identity that generally eludes the isolated and mistrusting paranoid.

The websites are, I suspect, the domain of the fringe elements of movements, representing a radical minority. It is their personal agendas that preempt the true goals of their cause. In addition, these sites provide justification for the even sicker segment of their constituency—those who are actually prepared to do violence. These people, who are at the periphery of the movement, are not primarily motivated by the specific cause—say, their anxiety for despoilation of the earth—but rather by their need to find relief from perceived persecutions and humiliations. The rhetoric supplied them by the leadership has both a religious fervor and the absolute certitude of revealed truth. This messianic leadership supplies those struggling with personal demons a rational and noble reason to destroy innocent life, at the same time, relieving their internal conflicts.

These websites have become a nucleus for the formation of a community of haters. They are a haven for such paranoid psychotics as Theodore Kaczynski. The movement supplies a rationalizing factor that supports the psychotic's delusional thinking. The rage he feels and the destruction he exercises are now justified as being in the service of some common good. What he is doing may seem evil but is actually “noble” and “proper,” “a service to morality.” This justification is confirmed by his allegiances.

Ted Kaczynski stated in court that he used information from the “Litha 1993”
Earth First Journal
to kill Thomas Mosser by sending a bomb to his home. His conviction that he was saving the entire world was sufficient justification for him to say in a letter to the
New York Times,
dated June 24, 1995, “We have no
regret about the fact that our bomb blew up the wrong man, Gilbert Murray, instead of William Dennison, to whom it was addressed.”

Radical single-issue groups offer justification for personal paranoia by the extreme rhetoric of their publications. But a mass culture of hatred cannot possibly be composed entirely, or preponderantly, of madmen and psychopaths. These websites are capable of attracting and mobilizing hatred, but they are likely to draw into their webs only people previously disposed to hatred.

The antiabortion activists see abortion as infanticide. In their battle to save the innocent, the taking of a few less-innocent lives—doctors and nurses and parents ready to “kill” their own babies—seems to them a reasonable moral trade-off. In their perverse utilitarian thinking, they will have saved more lives than they have taken. Their current campaigns on the web employ the term “the abortion holocaust,” by which they choose to see direct equivalence between abortion and the Holocaust. They argue that while the Holocaust killed 6,000,000 Jews, since
Roe v. Wade
(1973), “28,000,000 unborn babies have been put to death by abortion in this country.”
⁶³
They believe they are fighting the just war, and under that aegis, the use of an atomic weapon to further their cause may be justified. They are free to kill the few to save the many. Incidentally, the Catholic church and the fundamentalist Protestant churches, whose philosophies underlie the right-to-life action groups, were not nearly so outspoken during the Holocaust. The passivity of Christian communities in the face of the Holocaust slaughter continues to be exposed in current studies and stands in sharp contrast to the passion with which they currently defend against abortion and even birth control.

Many animal rights activists perceive helpless animals as akin to innocent babies. Thus the life of a laboratory mouse is fungible with the life of a laboratory technician. To prevent torture to the helpless, the activists are willing to bomb the facilities of the torturers—the research laboratories of major hospitals—and in the process risk the loss of some of the “torturers” or their “enablers.” Equating human life with animal life, even if a ratio of value is applied, opens the door to the kind of utilitarian arguments that justify murder in the defense of animals.

The preservation of the environment is another focus for purely ideological enmity. Until fairly recently, environmental groups eschewed violence. Over the past few years, however, they have moved into active aggression. The Earth Liberation Front has so far specifically targeted only research facilities, offices, and equipment. But the rhetoric level has been rising, and eventually the groups justify the direct targeting of people. Their setting fire to the construction site for the Microbial and Plant Genomics Research Center at the University of Minnesota's St. Paul campus in January 2002 is frighteningly reminiscent of the actions of Ted Kaczynski. After the accidental death that occurred, the activists tried to justify the murder on utilitarian grounds, comparing it to the incidental deaths of civilians in a war zone. Once such a philosophical argument has been made, it stands as an a priori basis for any extreme member to extend the violence intentionally. This is the pattern that has evolved in the pro-life activist community as well.

Despite the occasional abuses of the fanatic fringe elements that accumulate around all protest groups, I would not classify the three ideological communities cited above as cultures of hatred. The vast majority of their memberships clearly are not violent. But all three of them have spawned satellite groups that are classic single-issue radicals, for whom the importance of their cause transcends, and worse, preempts other values and virtues.
In addition, these radicals are prepared to risk the death of others in their passionate pursuits. All three groups lend themselves to the crusader mentality and, wittingly or not, encourage terrorism by utilizing language that is incendiary and apocalyptic. And all three causes have already produced followers who have executed murderous assaults on innocent people. For these reasons, the leaders of these groups have some moral responsibility for the evil done in their name.

The ideological enemy is conceived as doing evil and, thus, lends an element of righteousness to our hatred; the territorial enemy offers a past reality, if not a present threat, which can be used to justify hatred. The scapegoat, on the other hand, is an enemy manufactured out of whole cloth. Most cultures of hatred combine all three elements in their scenarios of hatred. To the chagrin of devout and decent believers, the forces that have seemed best capable of fusing all the elements into a culture of hatred have been the orthodoxies represented by organized religions.

To summarize: To forge a hate-driven group like Al Qaeda, there must be present a dynamic internal
need
for an enemy. Then the enemy must be located. The enemy will not be chosen at random. Proximity is important, but not essential. Ideological differences also serve the purpose. The choice of the “enemy” will be dictated by fear, rage, guilt, or envy. With fear, guilt, and rage, some grievance, real or perceived, directs the hatred. With envy, the victim may have no presence in the life of the hater. The victim is purely a scapegoat. These dynamics are brought together most clearly in the context of a culture of hatred, which we must now examine.

T
here are two distinctly different types of communities dominated by hate. These communities are equally malevolent, but the difference in their structures point to differing means to prevent or confront them.

The first I have labeled a “culture of hatred”; the second, a “culture of haters.” A culture of hatred is a natural community that breeds and encourages hatred. This is a group with a shared history and usually a shared locale, a country or its subculture. The leadership, the educational institutions, the dominant religious forces—individually or in concert—indoctrinate the members of the community with their venomous attitudes toward the designated enemy. Nazi Germany was a full-fledged culture of hatred. The Palestinians are an emerging one.

A culture of haters is an artificial community created when individuals who share a common hatred join forces in alliance against their enemy. They do not require a shared culture,
history, language, or locality. The culture is an artificial one, formed of people with different backgrounds and disparate values. The members of these groups need not be indoctrinated. They come together only because of the shared enemy, with the hatred often being the only shared value. Al Qaeda and the various neo-Nazi movements across the world are examples of cultures of haters.

When considering the special qualities and natures that define different cultures, one is forced to make generalizations. That is dangerous, as one runs the risk of committing the same stereotyping that we condemn in bigotry. Yet in order to do justice to the profound influence cultures have on individuals, one must generalize.

We are not programmed insects. The way we are treated as we grow up will determine the nature of our character and, through that, our conduct. We cannot even determine whether a person is behaving irrationally or “normally” without considering the widely diverse demands of varying cultures. Our environment sets the values that define good and evil behavior. Thus, honorable and virtuous members of differing cultures will behave in ways that will be deemed shameful and immoral by contrasting cultures.

The Americans viewed the Japanese suicide bombers who were so effective and terrifying against the U.S. fleet at the end of World War II as madmen. The Japanese viewed these same suicide bombers as martyrs. Ritual suicide is a respectable tradition in Japan. In America suicide is almost invariably viewed as a sign of mental illness. So, although we Americans will honor the occasional soldier who throws himself on a grenade, we do not actually view this act as suicide, but rather a noble sacrifice of the treasured self to save the lives of comrades.

Americans have volunteered in every war for high-risk duties, but America could never have recruited a specific group of suicide
bombers to hurl themselves at the enemy. Such volunteers would not have been at hand. More significant, the American public would never have understood or condoned their sacrifice. The waves of Americans who stormed the beaches in Normandy or hacked their way to the heights of Iwo Jima may have seemed to be involved in the same kind of suicidal assaults as the Japanese suicide bombers, but they were not. The intentions of the Japanese were to die in the service of their emperor, their country, and their religion. The Americans were prepared to die while hoping that they would survive. These contrary motivations reveal that the two seemingly similar activities are almost diametrically antithetical actions.

In making this comparison, I am not attributing a higher moral standing to one value over the other. Obviously, I have my values, but they have no relevance here. This analogy is not for the purposes of ascribing moral superiority or inferiority; I am not prepared here to call one behavior sick and the other healthy. The juxtaposition is presented to demonstrate that individual actions can be completely understood only within the culture from which they emerge. Nonetheless, I will make the case that some cultures are morally corrupt.

As a practicing psychiatrist, I am always aware of the specific culture in which a person is raised. Family values (in themselves influenced by culture) and the larger culture acting together shape the emerging conscience of the growing child. I obviously must attend to environmental influences in treating patients. When I do, I have to take into account the degree to which certain types of behavior are aberrant only by the standards of the society at large. Certain beliefs and conduct that are perfectly normal in one culture are signs of neurosis in another. This is equally true for subcultures in a diverse community like the United States. The psychiatrist who does not recognize these differences does a disservice to his patient. He may unfairly view
something as neurotic that is perfectly normal in the subculture in which the patient was raised. Certainly a committed Mormon boy from a small town in Utah who practiced sexual abstinence until marriage should be viewed differently from the thirty-two-year-old virgin raised by bohemian parents in Greenwich Village. I respect the validity of such cultural differences. Like differences as to sexual conduct, subcultures nurture diverse attitudes toward aggression and paranoia. In order to understand the actions of an individual—to ascribe meaning, to appreciate motive, even to place proper value judgment on behavior—one must take into account the differing cultural directives that influenced it.

Cultural observation and generalization are risky but legitimate and necessary tools in sociological and psychological investigations. Here, rather than attempting my own defense of cultural generalizations, I will quote Primo Levi, who was himself profoundly victimized by such generalizations, yet became a penetrating student of them.