Hatred (3 page)

Still in this amalgam of malignancy and horror that permeated the Holocaust and the current terrorist attacks, there are common elements of hatred that
are
understandable. A suicide bomb directed at a school bus is composed of the everyday elements of nails, wires, and a cheap radio. It is equally composed of anger, despair, self-justification, cynical manipulation, promise, and perversity. It is time to deconstruct the hater the way we deconstruct his weapons.

“What do they want from us?” is the common question of the day. It is a question that invites socioeconomic and political explanations. But they are insufficient. The question presumes a rational basis for hatred and suggests a direct link between the hater's needs and the selection of his victims. It will not explain the kind of perversity we are today experiencing, any more than it could explain the massacre of the Jews in the Holocaust. It denies the pathological core of hatred. To understand hatred we must do what Euripides and Shakespeare did. We must get into the head of the hater. We now have a psychological framework for doing this. We must apply modern psychological understanding of perception, motivation, and behavior to discover what hatred is. Only when we have identified the nature of the beast can we properly address the environmental conditions that support it.

Hatred is severe psychological disorder. The pathological
haters, whether Al Qaeda today or the Nazis under Hitler, claim to be fighting in defense of an ideology. In truth, the ideology is a convenient rationalization. They are externalizing their internal frustrations and conflicts on a hapless scapegoat population. They are “deluded,” and their self-serving and distorted perceptions allow them to justify their acts of hatred against the enemy they have created.

We must start our investigation, therefore, with an examination of the hater's mind rather than his milieu. What is he thinking and feeling? What motivates him? What, if anything, will satisfy him? Does he even know? These are questions that I deal with daily in trying to understand and treat the havoc that the neurotic patient wreaks on himself and those around him. An application of such psychological knowledge is essential if we are to confront the organized terror that now threatens the entire civilized world. To date there has been little call for such information, and little volunteered from the psychological community.

The 9/11 bombings brought home to Americans, in particular, the awareness that understanding hatred is no longer a theoretical problem. We have been treated to pictures of jubilant Arab crowds cavorting in the streets and shouting their delight at the tragic deaths in the United States as a consequence of the World Trade Center massacres. Their palpable hatred of us leaps off the screen, affronting our senses.

There is nothing new about such hatred. What is new is provided by our modern world of technology—the extraordinary reach of the haters and the frightening potential for destruction of the available tools. These innovations add an imperative to the need for containing the emerging cultures of hatred. We must investigate and understand hatred now, before it seeps into our civilized world and destroys our way of life. It is a matter of survival.

E
arly attempts to define the problem of hatred have not been encouraging. I have already rejected as simplistic (and just plain wrong) the assumption that hatred is normal to the huplain wrong) the assumption that hatred is normal to the human condition. Even given the opportunity—freedom to do it and go unpunished—we would not all enjoy torturing and killing our neighbors, or even our enemies.

I equally reject the economic and sociological explanations for acts driven by hatred. The desperation in the Palestinian camps does not justify, or explain, the acts of terrorism Palestinians commit. It is not that poverty is irrelevant but that it is not a sufficient condition for hatred; not all poor communities harbor such hatred, nor do they commit terrorist acts. The poverty in America during the Great Depression is incomprehensible to Americans who try to understand it by extrapolation from the “hard times” and recessionary phases of the last thirty years of the twentieth century. The Great Depression was a monumental burden on the American people during the 1930s. Yet there was a remarkable absence of malice toward authority or government. Indeed, the most powerful man in the land, Franklin D.
Roosevelt, was adored by the deprived populations of the country, just as he was abhorred by the privileged classes, who lived in a state of luxury facilitated by the cheap labor of the time.

Nor is poverty a necessary condition for a culture of hatred; not all communities of hatred are poor. The skinheads in America did not arise from any despised and deprived minority. They emerged from the white Protestant community, which constitutes the majority in this country. The lynch mobs in the southern states were culled from the oppressor, not the oppressed, albeit still not the privileged classes in that hierarchical time. The poorest countries of Europe did not sponsor Hitler and the Holocaust. The Germans were hardly the most primitive and uneducated people.

When we began to identify specific terrorists instead of terrorist societies, they confound us by revealing the advantaged nature of their early lives. The Baader Meinhof Gang, which terrorized Germany from 1968 to 1977; Carlos, “the Jackal”; and Kathy Boudin as well as most of her colleagues in the Weather Underground were privileged members of the bourgeoisie. The leaders of Al Qaeda seemed to have emerged largely from the advantaged classes of Saudi Arabia and Egypt. I allow that economic factors are not incidental. They are relevant, but they are not central, as they have been assumed to be. When we do not have answers for social problems, we are likely to assume poverty to be the cause and money the solution. Confessing ignorance, abandoning clichéd and faulty answers, is an essential first step to understanding.

Looking for causes by rounding up the usual suspects, poverty and inequity, will not work here. Worse, it adds two harmful dimensions to the discourse: First, it draws our attention away from a study of the pathological nature of the terrorist. Second, it suggests that if only the victim population had been more charitable, the slaughter would not have occurred—blurring once again the
crucial moral distinction between the murderer and the victim, a pervasive tendency in modern liberal cultures. We have behaved like the well-meaning narcissists that we are. We have asked why
they
did this to
us.
We have been searching our souls, when we should have been examining theirs.

The ultimate flaw in the analyses that draw on the history of terrorist populations is that they attempt to locate the root causes of something before defining or even knowing what that something is. To discover the cause of, and thus a cure for, erythroblastosis, one must start with the knowledge that it is a fetal blood disease, not an adolescent skin rash. We must ask what hatred is before we assay the nature of its causes.

Hatred is, if nothing else, a feeling, an emotion. One would logically have expected much of the commentary in response to the 9/11 nightmare in the United States to have focused on human feelings. Instead, the psychology of hatred has barely been mentioned. Having started in the middle of the problem, we are in danger of going off half-cocked. Since the shock of the 9/11 attacks, all sorts of experts have weighed in to explain why this happened. So far no one has called in the doctors.

Because the actions of the terrorists arose in the context of political events, we have concentrated our attentions almost exclusively on historic causes. But before we ask what historic or political factors cause hatred, we ought to ask, “What is hatred?” And that requires a different kind of exploration with a different set of investigative tools. The difference between exploring the causes of an entity and defining its essence leads to a different kind of argument, a different expertise, and is articulated with a different “story line.”

The story that emerges with any investigation of human motivation will always vary with the investigative tools employed as well as with the biases of the investigator. A physiologist looking at migraine headache will offer explanations different from those
of a psychiatrist. Both will contribute accurate but incomplete knowledge. Each specialist finds answers consonant with her discipline; when your only instrument is a hammer, everything looks like a tack. Looking for the roots, the conditions that created something, directs one inevitably to a historic and political narrative. When, instead of a purely historic event—for example, the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s—we are examining a psychological and emotional state like hatred, we had better define the condition before calling in the experts in causation.

Take the example of stress. What causes stress? Where can one locate its roots? Start by defining what one means by stress. There are six distinct and different definitions in my dictionary. If you mean stress as: “an applied force . . . that tends to strain or deform a body,”
¹⁰
and the “body” is a bridge, then one needs to consult an engineer or a metallurgist. On the other hand, if you mean: “a mentally or emotionally disruptive or upsetting condition . . . capable of affecting physical health,” you had better call in the doctors. Whether you prefer a psychiatrist or an internist is dependent on your bias. Both would have much to contribute.

Let me make it clear. I am not disparaging historic, sociological, or economic analyses of the roots of hatred. I have learned immeasurably from such sources, but they will not be the focus of this book. They are an essential part of the armamentarium in our battle against the disease of hatred, but they are not alternatives to exploring the nature of hatred. That requires using philosophical and psychological tools. The few great works written in modern times on the nature of hatred have been created by philosophers and psychologists, such as Max Scheler, Gordon Allport, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

The most evident aspect of hatred is the intense emotion that supports it. Therefore, hatred historically was first studied by those interested in human nature and human conduct. In the days before a field of inquiry called psychology existed, human emotion was the purview of philosophy. To understand the influence of emotions on human conduct one turned to the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Pascal, Hume, Rousseau, and William James. They were the ones who dissected and examined the complex nature of emotions.

William James was a major transitional figure. With James we see the fusion of the traditional philosophical approach and the burgeoning new field of psychology, in which he was a pioneer. From its earliest days with Freud and Pavlov, psychology has brought a new illumination, a new emphasis, to the analysis of emotions by focusing on the internal psychology, the underlying physiology, and the interpersonal dynamics of the emotions. The emotions are of particular importance when dealing with hatred.

To the average person, hatred is an intense feeling indistinguishable from rage, which it is, if one thinks of hatred only as an emotion. But to leave it at that is to disregard the peculiar complexity of hatred. Hatred is more than an emotion. The
Oxford English Dictionary
gets it exactly right: “Hatred: The condition or state of relations in which one person hates another; the emotion or feeling of hate; active dislike, detestation; enmity, ill-will, malevolence.”

This definition places a relationship at the heart of hatred. In this sense, the most precise comparison to hatred would be love. Here, too, the underlying feeling is profound, but it is only part of a unique engagement with another person. We need an object for our hatred or our love. Furthermore, as it would be inappropriate to define an hour or a daylong affinity as “love.” It would be equally inaccurate to label an ephemeral feeling of anger toward another as an example of hatred. Both hatred and love
must be sustained over a significant period of time to fit the special definitions of these particular relationships. With love, at least, we can use the word “infatuation” to distinguish the rush of the feeling, that instant but fleeting passion, from the complexity of the relationship of love.

We may say we “love” Häagen Dazs ice cream, Louis Arm-strong, or gardening, but we do not “love” them, any more than we “hate” brussels sprouts, rap music, or body piercing. The use of love and hate in these situations trivializes the complexities of the hating (and loving) experience. Even when we colloquially use hatred with respect to more-profound ideas, people, or conditions—fascism, drug dealers, child porn—even when we direct hatred toward something that is in itself a serious problem—like bigotry or injustice—these usages of hatred still fall short of the complex definition of hatred I have offered.

Common usages of clinical terms establish a false community. Whenever a woman in the throes of a postpartum depression is tried for the murder of her child, the sympathy and understanding that might be offered her is mitigated by false comparisons. The understanding of her psychosis is adulterated by the fact that everybody in the jury has felt “depressed” at one time or another and they confuse their feelings of depression with the clinical experience. They all know they would not murder their child under the duress of feeling depressed. But like hatred, depression is more than a feeling. As a clinical entity, it bears no relationship to that which we all normally feel when we are blue and “feel depressed.” This common usage of the term “depression” diminishes the importance and the unique quality of the pathologic condition. The same is true of hatred. When we assume that at times we feel like a terrorist, we grant the terrorists a normalcy that trivializes a condition that threatens the civilized world.

Because of such usage, most readers will assume that they have experienced hatred, but I know they have not. We are not one
with the terrorists. We do not experience that which they feel, nor are we likely to do that which they do. The hatred that requires a defined enemy—the hatred that seeks the humiliation and destruction of that enemy and takes joy in it—is blessedly a rare phenomenon. We must know that we are different from terrorists. In this respect it is imperative to distinguish between the more common feelings of prejudice and bigotry, and that of hatred.