Hatred

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Doing Good: The Limits of Benevolence
(with I. Glasser, S. Marcus, and D. Rothman)

The Proper Uses of Coercion and Restraints in a Liberal Society
(with Bruce Jennings)

And next to him malicious Envie rode,
Upon a ravenous wolfe, and still did chaw
Between his cankred teeth a venomous tode,
That all the poison ran about his chaw:
But inwardly he chawed his owne maw
At neighbors wealth, that made him ever sad;
For death it was, when any good he saw,
And wept, that cause of weeping none he had
But when he heard of harme, he wexed wondrous glad.

 

EDMUND SPENSER

O
ne day, in July 1941, half of the population of Jedwabne, Poland, murdered the other half—some 1,600 men, women, and children representing all but 7 of the town's Jews. Before killing them, the Poles tortured and humiliated the Jews. They gouged out their eyes with kitchen knives, dismembered them with crude farm instruments, and drowned the women in shallow waters. Infants were pitchforked in front of their mothers and thrown onto burning coals, all accompanied by the shrieks of delight, indeed the laughter, of their neighbors.

The slaughter of the Jedwabne Jews lasted a whole day. And their neighbors, the entire Polish population of the town, either witnessed or participated in the torment. Roughly 50 percent of the adult Polish males were later identified by name as active participants. Even in Nazi Germany whole communities of “normal” people did not rise up to destroy their neighbors. They mostly left that to the professionals while they passively assented—crime
enough. In Poland an entire community voluntarily butchered their neighbors and delighted in the activity.

How can one explain such cold passion, such monumental hatred, such cruelty—not on the part of some insane and deranged madman—but by an entire populace in concert, and against the very neighbors who had previously shared their everyday community and life? Jan T. Gross, who wrote an account of the slaughter in his remarkable book,
Neighbors,
¹
made no attempt to explain the phenomenon, having set as his task the meticulous documentation of this seemingly incredible event.

A distinguished journalist, commenting on this book in his column, addressed the question of motivation (always a treacherous and difficult assignment), which Gross chose to ignore. His answer to the question of why the Poles acted with such bestiality and hatred was “because it was permitted. Because they could.” This response implies that given the opportunity, we would all delight in such pursuits; thus he denied the special impact of history, culture, religious passion, individual and mass psychology, and paranoia—and blamed it squarely on human nature.

As a lifelong student of human nature and human behavior, I know this to be wrong, dangerously wrong. All of us have the opportunity to torture animals, but the majority of us do not. We are disgusted and bewildered by that minority that takes pleasure in doing so. Surely, then, we would not all avail ourselves of the opportunity to torture our neighbors, given the opportunity. I would not pitchfork an infant merely because the opportunity presented itself (“because it was permitted”), nor would the journalist. I would not pitchfork an infant under duress, nor would he. I would like to think that neither one of us would do it even at risk of our lives, but of this I cannot be sure. And I suspect that the
columnist himself, when not pressed by journalistic deadlines, would agree that this slaughter was not purely opportunistic.

To say that a massacre such as the one at Jedwabne is not normal to human conduct is obviously not to deny that it is within the stretch of human behavior.
We know that it was done
. But it was beyond normal expectations. A tsunami may occasionally devastate the coast of Japan, drowning thousands, but we do not consider it an expected or reasonable aspect of weather conditions. Human behavior is as unpredictable as, and more variable than, the weather. Such behavior could not have been anticipated by most of us and even now is not believed by many.

Still, while not “natural,” hatred is a function of human nature. To understand hatred, one must understand the special qualities of human, and only human, life. Human behavior is famous for its plasticity and variability. As a result, we have witnessed such brothers in humanity as the grotesque Pol Pot and the glorious Saint Francis. Neither of these extremes expresses the expectations one has for ordinary people, but both are testament to the protean nature of the human species. I am not offering these two eccentrics as products of genetic determinism, as I might have with the examples of Newton or Mozart. I am merely acknowledging that conditions can exploit human plasticity to produce unexpected extremes even in relatively normal people. Had I been born in a Palestinian refugee camp and exposed to precisely the same conditions as a suicide bomber, I might have become a suicide bomber. But then again, I might not have. Culture shapes personality, but inheritance is also relevant. Not all of those raised in the camps are prepared to become suicide bombers.

Most animals—from the insect to the higher mammals—have few choices of importance. Everything essential is genetically wired in: how they live, where they live, what they eat, when they mate. This is not true of human beings: We live in tropical
islands and arid deserts; in Arctic tundra and equatorial jungles; we control when we have children, if we have children, even how we have children. As a result, the differences among human beings in size, strength, imagination, intelligence, and temperament are unparalleled in the animal kingdom.

Penguins not only look alike, they are alike—not just in our eyes, but in actuality. They possess limited capacity to deviate from their nature. We, in contrast, share with nature in our own design. We were not endowed by nature with wings, but still we fly—and faster than the speed of sound. If a panda cannot find bamboo shoots, he dies. It is bamboo shoots or nothing for him. If we were surviving on bamboo shoots and ran out, we'd eat the panda.

We are more variable because we possess more traits that can be modified; we use our highly developed brains to adapt to the widely diverse environments our imagination drives us to explore. Our lifestyles, conduct, and very physical appearances are so alterable that we might appear to an outside observer as multiple and varied species. This capacity to redesign ourselves, to slip the yoke of instinct and genetics, is a cardinal element of human nature.

The result of this variability is that we are capable of developing into saints or monsters. Still, both of these extremes are alien to the average person leading his ordinary life. Terrorists, sadists, and torturers are the evil examples that define the borders of normal human behavior. We must not trivialize the tragic extremes of their hatred by assuming that they are commonplace representatives of human variability. Such a judgment is an attempt to deny their depravity and contain our anxiety. These people are different from you and me. We are capable of feeling transient extremes of rage that we call hatred, but the true haters live daily with their hatred. Their hatred is a way of life. It is, beyond that, often their raison d'être. They are obsessed with their
enemies, attached to them in a paranoid partnership. It is this attachment that defines true hatred.

When we confront the true hater, he frightens us. Too often we struggle to avoid facing this extreme hatred by emotionally distancing ourselves from it. One way to do this is through denial, a mental defense mechanism that permits us to cope in the presence of the unbearable. Its classic embodiment is in the denial of death that is part of the universal human condition. Human beings are burdened with the awareness that their lives must end, independent of anything they may do. We handle the existential dread of death by denying its presence. We go on living as though there were no end. We must do that. We are “in God's hands.” It is all part of “a grand design.” Our dead child is “safe now,” “in a better place.”

I do not believe that it is mere coincidence that during a period in which terrorists purposely targeted buses of schoolchildren for maximum effect, the American public embraced a novel like
The Lovely Bones,
²
in which dismembered and murdered children are portrayed as living in heaven, sucking lollipops, and playing in fields of flowers in perpetual bloom. We must find ways to avoid facing the abominable and incomprehensible.

Another way of distancing ourselves from horror is by romanticizing it. The right to a “death with dignity” is a recent shibboleth of medical reformers. What they really want is a death without the dying. Not the retching, puking, pained, and bloody death of the intensive care unit, but the romantic death of
Love Story
and
La Traviata.
Of course, we all wish for a “proper” and “dignified” death, but we are unlikely to get it. Dying is rarely dignified, and death is the ultimate indignity. Still we dream of a painless and peaceful death in our sleep, in the comfort of our homes, with the
companionship of our loved ones. We create a romantic and rarely achievable illusion. We treat hatred the same way.