Hatred Read online

  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.

  Prejudice and Bigotry

  Since many of us are all too aware of signs of prejudice within ourselves, we are often more “understanding” of hate crimes than we ought to be. We equate our prejudices with the hatred of those who commit such crimes. And although prejudice is a way station on the road to hatred, most of us will not travel to the bitter end of that road. What is more, before we can even consider mass hatred—group against group—these various terms must be distinguished, one from the other.

  Prejudice is defined in the dictionary as “an adverse judgment or opinion formed beforehand or without knowledge or examination.” It means prejudging, not necessarily in a pejorative way. One might have a positive bias. Tell a daughter how beautiful she is or, worse, that she was the prettiest girl at the prom, and her response will be, “Oh, Dad, you’re so prejudiced.” And she is right. The power of love distorts perception to idealize the subject of our affections. I have a bias—“a preference or inclination that inhibits impartial judgment” in relation to those I love.

  These days, the term “prejudice” is more often used when the negative attributes ascribed to a person by virtue of his or her being a member of a disdained or despised group are highlighted, or when we voice our feelings toward the pariah group itself. We are always prepared to judge members of such a group severely, and to assume negative behavior or characteristics prior to any evidence. For the purposes of this book, that will be the usage.

  It may well be that prejudice against some group, any group—Jews and blacks being historically the most common—is an inevitable consequence of the need to identify with one specific group. I sense this to be true, since almost everyone I encounter exhibits some evidence of prejudice, although I am not yet convinced that in distinguishing “us” from “them” we need to demean “them.” The ubiquity of prejudice may be a natural consequence of idealizing one’s own. Since the idealization stops at the border of one’s family or group, the cold, objective eye reserved for the other perceives his inadequacy in contrast to the idealized version of one’s own.

  Prejudice actually works toward it. We are likely to expend little emotion on the prejudiced group. We have eliminated those people from our universe of concern. Prejudice often results in a cool indifference—indifference to the sensibilities and even the suffering of those who do not count. Still, the most profound modern statement of the result of racial prejudice in the United States is the Ralph Ellison novel published in 1952 and appropriately titled The Invisible Man. Here the protagonist struggles to be seen, to become part of the community that seems always oblivious to his needs or his pain.

  It should be clear that by distinguishing prejudice from hatred, I am not defining prejudice as less destructive than hatred. Less evil, perhaps, but not less dangerous. The lack of passion and hatred in typical prejudice may contribute to equally great affronts to human dignity. Whereas the hater must demonize the object of its hatred, the prejudiced individual is more likely to dehumanize the object. Slavery, the most iniquitous of human institutions, is a result of such dehumanizing. The slave for the most part was neither loved nor hated. He was chattel at worst. At best, he was treated like a domesticated animal that could be loved as a pet and often more easily disposed of. Slavery demands a violation of that central moral condition, the Kantian imperative never to treat any human being as a means rather than an end. The end result of slavery is as indecent and evil as the cruelty that hatred would produce in the madness of the Holocaust.

  Compounding the evil, slavery was accepted by the good citizens in some cultures without shame or apology. Because of this ability to detach the population of the oppressed from membership in the human race, even the most extreme cruelty often went unrecognized. Prejudice turned to hatred in the United States with the liberation of the slaves; when their humanity was reclaimed; when the slaves become a human force; when the fear, if not the guilt, of the white populations was triggered.

  For the quintessential statement on how prejudice plays out without hatred one must turn to America’s great moral master-piece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In a scene so brief as to invite being passed over, Mark Twain captured the essence of prejudice.

  In a confusing event of mistaken identity that resists replication here, Huck attempts to flimflam kindly and maternal Aunt Sally by passing himself off as Tom Sawyer. In order to explain his delayed arrival he confabulates an explosion aboard a steamboat:“We blowed out a cylinder head.”

  “Good gracious! Anybody hurt?”

  “No’m. Killed a Nigger.”

  “Well it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”11

  Readers of the novel know that Huck has been on an adventure in which he has risked imprisonment for aiding the runaway sl
ave, Jim, to gain his freedom. Worse, since Jim is clearly property, Huck believes that in abetting Jim’s escape to freedom he is stealing. According to all the grown-ups of his community, Huck’s behavior is immoral and un-Christian—a sin as well as a crime. But his love and compassion for Jim overcome his “conscience.” Huck shares the prejudices of his day, but in his capacity to love a slave, he demonstrates that he is certainly no bigot.

  When one moves from prejudice to “bigotry,” one enters the world of the bigot: “one who is strongly partial to one’s own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ.” Intolerance suggests an unwillingness to accept the right of the other to be different or to live differently. The bigot will support legislation and social conditions that deprive the minority of its autonomy and its right to be respected. The bigot is prepared to defend a discriminatory environment as extreme as existed in the American South before the civil rights movement or as the apartheid of South Africa until recently. Still, even among members of the Ku Klux Klan, only a minority could participate in burning black children or lynching black men.

  Racism may be endemic in white populations, but most whites who embrace it do so with prejudice or bigotry—still short of active hatred. Most racists would not take joy in dragging a chained black man behind the wheels of a truck. They would be appalled. In order to enter into an engagement of hatred, a feeling of being threatened or humiliated by the very presence of the black man as a free member of one’s society is essential. The white man must fear the black, must perceive him as a danger. The skinheads among us are such a hating population. They are “attached” to their victims; they are obsessed with them. In saying this, I am not exonerating those who are “only” bigots, for there may be significant slippage between the two groups, that is, those who are bigots and those who are consumed by hatred. Bigotry is a transition point to hatred. Prejudice and bigotry also facilitate the agendas of a hating population. They take advantage of the passivity of the larger community of bigots, a passivity that is essential for that minority who truly hate to carry out their malicious destruction. Even among haters, there will be degrees. There will be those who can torture and kill and those who can only passively approve such actions.

  Raul Hilberg, in one of his admirable studies of the Holocaust, drew a distinction between perpetrators and bystanders:Most contemporaries of the Jewish catastrophe were neither perpetrators nor victims. Many people, however, saw or heard something of the event. Those of them who lived in Adolf Hitler’s Europe would have described themselves, with few exceptions, as bystanders. They were not “involved,” not willing to hurt the victims and not wishing to be hurt by the perpetrators. Yet the reality was not so uncomplicated.12

  We draw a significant distinction between bigotry and hatred. That distinction is the boundary that separates those who passively observed while the Jews were being slaughtered in the death camps of the Nazis and those who did the slaughtering and enjoyed it. I grant that passivity in the face of evil is a form of moral “activity” and must be held morally accountable. Still, before passing judgment, one must understand what motivated the passivity. It may have been prompted by a lack of courage in those who actually disapproved of the actions. Cowardice is no virtue, but it is still short of evil. On the other hand, it may have been that the bystanders truly enjoyed the suffering. But even here I do not condemn those who only harbor feelings of hatred as much as I condemn those who act on them. The law, and for the most part the moral law, differentiates between feeling and conduct. Such actions as the torture and murder of the scapegoat population are defining qualities that take us beyond bigotry to hatred.

  Some form of prejudice is present in most of us. When evidence of our prejudice surfaces, many of us will, in conscience, feel ashamed. But by the willingness to define our negative attitudes and feelings as “prejudice,” we have made a self-critical judgment that mitigates the force and reality of the feeling. A smaller number of us may go beyond prejudice and become actual bigots. With the bigot, the prejudice will not be defined as a failing in himself. The bigot assumes his felt superiority to the alien population is real, not a product of his own pathological viewpoint.

  The bigot may have contempt, even disgust, for the outsider, but he will not commit crimes of hatred. A bigot may feel malevolence whenever he thinks of the despised group, but he is not obsessively preoccupied with them. When he becomes so, he crosses the border into hatred. Hatred requires both passion and a preoccupation with the disdained group. It requires an attachment to the hated person or population. And among the population of haters there will be a range of intensity. Many Jew haters among the Nazis who approved of the death camps could not necessarily have performed the acts of destruction. Because of this complexity, hatred can best be understood by exploring its three major components individually:1. Hatred is clearly and most obviously an emotion, an intense emotion, that is, a passion. To better understand hatred, it is helpful to have some sophisticated understanding of human emotions—the irrational underpinnings of human behavior and the darker side of the human spirit.

  2. Hatred is more than an emotion. It is also a psychological condition; a disorder of perception; a form of quasi-delusional thinking. Therefore, to understand the condition of hatred, one must understand the nature of a delusion, a symptom of severe mental disease. One must examine the meaning of the paranoid shift that is central to the thinking of a hating individual and a culture of hatred. This examination will lead us into the somewhat bizarre world of symptom formation.

  3. Finally, hatred requires an attachment. Like love, it needs an object. The choice of an object—also like love—may be rational or irrational. Obsessive hatred is by definition irrational. The choice of the victim is more often dictated by the unconscious needs and the personal history of the hater than by the nature, or even the actions, of the hated.

  With some understanding of these parts that add up to hatred, we can conceive how much more malignant is the sum of the parts. Since it is the feeling of hatred that directs the terrorist or the bigot to his acts of horror and enables him to justify them in his mind, it seems logical to start our understanding of that which seems beyond understanding—hatred—by examining its emotional underpinnings.

  HATRED

  AS AN EMOTION

  3

  RAGE

  The Emotional Core of Hatred

  For years I have struggled with the task of defining the multitude of human emotions that inform and illuminate the human condition.13 Not an easy task. Feelings are not measurable. They have no atomic number or weight. And regardless of how advanced modern biological psychology may become, we are unlikely to find a way to objectively define, calibrate, or titrate an emotion.

  It is unlikely that we will ever be able to distinguish such refined emotions as “feeling touched” and “feeling hurt” by analyzing their chemical components. We may never locate the brain centers and neural pathways that differentiate shame from guilt, and even if we do, will that determination advance our understanding of those most subtle of human feelings? To paraphrase the great psychiatrist Franz Alexander, with all the advances expected in the science of acoustics and harmonics, we may someday be able to reduce a Beethoven symphony to frequencies, vibrations, overtones, and so on. But it is inconceivable that we will ever understand the Eroica Symphony better that way than by just listening to it.

  My definition of the feeling of hatred is as follows: a sustained emotion of rage that occupies an individual through much of his life, allowing him to feel delight in observing or inflicting suffering on the hated one. It is always obsessive and almost always irrational. It has at its core an emotion, albeit one elaborated into a relationship. In everyday life we clarify the meaning of an emotion by saying: “You know how you feel when . . .” The problem with hatred is that most people have never really been part of the experience of hatred, and to make matters worse, they are often confident that they have.


  What we can identify with is the underlying feeling of hatred. This is a relatively simple task, since the feeling of hatred is simply an intense form of anger, like rage, something that we have all experienced. Human emotions, like anger, occur in a spectrum of intensity, and we tend to use different words for each step on the scale. Anger starts as annoyance, irritation, or pique and extends to its extremes in rage and fury; it is still all anger. In this text, I will use anger and rage in human beings interchangeably, since both words are used in the literature. With animals, the emotions are less variable in intensity of expression. As a result, in the areas of psychology where animal studies are relevant, the studies tend to refer to the basic emotion as rage. I am inclined to use rage when exploring the biological aspects of hatred.

  As we discuss the feeling component of hatred, one must keep in mind that the feeling is only one ingredient in the pathological relationship that defines hatred. Even when we all feel the same, it is still not the same thing. To take a homely example, while the intensity of road rage may astonish us, particularly if we are the ones experiencing it, we are still unlikely to become suicide bombers using our cars to destroy the enemy along with ourselves. The “if I only had a gun” feeling on the highways of America is a metaphoric expression. It does not mean that if we had the gun, we would use it. Those few that would are a pathological minority.

  Further, anger is different from hatred by the very ephemeral nature of the feeling. Most of us, even moments later, will not remember the white Pontiac or the man driving it or the fact that he “gave us the finger.” After a brief “do you believe that guy?” we will continue our conversation with our passenger right where we left off. Since rage does not compel the paranoid shift associated with hatred, no obsessive involvement is present, no ongoing passionate attachment. The driver of the white Pontiac is not an enemy and will be quickly forgotten.