Hatred (18 page)

It is sometimes difficult to distinguish the psychotic from the psychopathic. The pure schizophrenic is the easy case. There was a pathetic quality in the schizophrenic demeanor of Lucas Helder—with his serious attempt to create a pattern of “funny faces” out of the bombing sites—that was in sharp contrast to the cold, unyielding, and psychopathic hatred of Timothy McVeigh.

But the extreme psychopath is hard to distinguish from the psychotic, since almost all psychopaths display the marked paranoid traits that are the hallmarks of the paranoid schizophrenic. The organizational abilities and the people skills of Hitler suggest the psychopathic rather than the psychotic. And then there was the fact that the Germans almost universally adored him, actually found him charming. The author and reviewer Naomi Bliven expressed incredulity that the Germans “found charm in a man who gobbled sweets, made disgusting comments on food at the table, engaged in staring matches, bragged about his intelligence, and flew into a rage when anybody questioned one of his statements.”
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She inferred that their love of Hitler revealed some idiosyncrasy of the Germans themselves.

With Stalin, the call is more difficult. He was universally distrusted and hated. With his readiness to locate enemies everywhere and in every population, he may well have been psychotic, although with his well-honed instincts for self-protection, I am likely to include him among the psychopaths. The behavior of such people as Idi Amin and Pol Pot, even when out of power, certainly suggest the psychopath. The evidence seems clear that the major despots of hatred are primarily psychopaths. Still, both psychotics and psychopaths represent the minority of those who kill with hatred.

When considering the torturers, the leaders of the death camps, the various executors of the policies of the governments of hate, we are certainly not dealing with the insane. Some of them, particularly those who volunteer for torture and murder positions, are clearly psychopaths, that is, lucid thinkers with no moral compass. But the most frightening fact is that horrifying mass crimes of hatred are endorsed, supported, and ultimately acted out by “normal” members of the population.

The “ordinary men” of Reserve Police Battalion 101 carried out a massacre of Jewish mothers and children at Jozefow, Poland, on July 12, 1942. Only a dozen of the 500 police had accepted the offer of a senior officer to be excused from the killing. The effect of the slaughter on the murderers was at first “shattering.” Part of their problem was their lack of experience. In the opening days of the slaughter, they shot freehand at point-blank range. As a result, “the bullet struck the head of the victim at such a trajectory that often the entire skull or at least the entire rear skullcap was torn off, and blood, bone splinters, and brains sprayed everywhere and besmirched the shooters.”
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This put severe emotional
stress on the men. One said, “I thought I'd go crazy if I had to do that again.”
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So some changes were made in the procedures. With time and conditioning, the men continued their massacres, and, remarkably, they did not go crazy. They adjusted.

The level of hatred in our modern world is appalling, and the cultures of hatred seem ubiquitous. They are not the products of the deranged. The slaughters in Rwanda and the Sudan—like the destruction of the Armenians by the Turks and the massacre of the Jewish population of Europe by the Nazis—were discharged not by psychotics and psychopaths but by normal members of the population. Not by delusional madmen and conscience-free brutes, but by people like you and me. How does one explain the forces that allow populations of normal people to experience such abhorrence and express such malignant hatred toward other populations of normal people? Here one must look, not to the pathologies of the mind, but to the normal phenomena of group identity and cultural animosities. Here we leave the area of hatred as an emotion and enter the domain of hatred as an attachment.

H
uman development—the process by which people emerge from childhood to become the diverse kind of adults we observe—has occupied students of human nature for centuries. Before the emergence of the social sciences, human development was most eloquently, though elliptically, described in literature. Such writers as Dickens, Stendhal, Balzac, Tolstoi, and Twain gave a literary testament to Wordsworth's assertion that “the child is father of the man.”

Why people behave differently—adopt different values, measure themselves by different standards, embrace aggressiveness or conciliation—has traditionally been attributed to genetic endowment or environmental impact, depending on the biases of the culture. The evidence strongly suggests that overemphasizing either to the detriment of the other is an invitation to disaster.

In the Soviet Union under Stalin the strange concept of equality adopted by the Communists demanded that all children be seen as born with equal potential. The Stalinists' insistence on
this posture led them to deny even the basic Mendelian principles of genetics in all plants and animals. They were reluctant to accept the proven fact that inheritable traits influence all life. They denied the very existence of inherited genetic traits. Instead, they adopted a pseudoscientific “genetics”—called Lysenkoism after its founder, T. D. Lysenko—that better suited the egalitarianism of Marxist ideology. The stubborn adherence to Lysenkoism—denying genetic inheritance while insisting that acquired characteristics could be transmitted—eventually destroyed Soviet agriculture and contributed to the massive starvation that was endemic under Stalin's rule.

Even open societies have had difficulty accommodating to the fact that genetics plays a part in human development and variability. The tragic and distorted use of genetic theory by the Nazis caused liberal communities to reject the possibility of genetic differences in human potential. Humanistic democracies want to believe that any child can grow up to be a Beethoven or a Newton. The rapid evolution of the understanding of genetics in the past fifty years, however, has forced an awareness of the importance of genetics in determining at least some aspects of human conduct and character. Still, in the area that concerns us—not extraordinary talent or genius, but mere fulfilling of natural human patterns—the weight of the evidence clearly attests to environmental factors in human development. As such, the moral character of the child is hostage to the quality of parenting and the values of the culture.

Although the need for some community is a fixed part of our biology—we are obligate social animals—the quality and characteristics of these communities are not dictated by nature, as is the case with animals. Given human flexibility and autonomy, the kind of social environments we create can vary dramatically. As a result we have developed such paranoid cultures as the Yanomamo
Indians of southern Venezuela,
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the Albanians under the Communists, and the shrouded enigma that is North Korea.

In our concern for individual hatred and cultures that encourage hatred, we must address human development at least minimally. Since hatred—beyond being an emotion and a thinking disorder—is a pathological attachment of one person to another, we must examine the nature of attachments. We must follow the trail from the first identification of a self; distinguishing ourselves from others; attaching ourselves to others; and, finally, identifying with those to whom we are attached. In this process we find allies, build communities, and ultimately locate enemies.

How do we first discover our “self”? Before even differentiating the me from the you, how do we distinguish the me from the inanimate things around us, the blanket or the diaper? No one can peer inside the mind of the neonate and precisely determine what thoughts exist there. Nonetheless, we have learned to communicate quite well with infants. Researchers have found ingenious ways to determine the likes of a newborn and by inference something about his perceptions. Newborns have variable sucking rates, for example. If we reward fast sucking, the newborn will signal for that reward by sucking fast. In this way we learn what rewards are preferred by the neonate. To our amazement, it turns out that certain newborns will indicate that they prefer light shows, that is, visual stimulation, to sound shows. A minority
of neonates prefers the sound shows. And this latter group, when followed into maturity, seems to produce more children with dyslexic problems.

Brilliant new sonar technologies suggest that the late-stage fetus is more aware than we had previously thought. But aware of what? Certainly not of himself versus the surrounding amniotic fluid in which he floats or the placenta to which he is attached. And certainly not to the mother who carries him within her body.

Most theories that have emerged from developmental psychology suggest that the earliest consciousness of the neonate is an awareness of a self and nothing but a self. In other words, the problem is not self-discovery, but world discovery. Many fanciful phrases have been applied to this period, such as the stage of “primary narcissism” and the age of “magical omnipotence.” The reasoning behind these assumptions is based on the knowledge that before the neonate has any true perception, he experiences sensations. Some see the first sensations as occurring around the mouth during the feeding experience that dominates early life. Others place the first sensations as tactile, noticing that with dogs, the process of urination, essential to survival, will not be initiated without perineal licking and stimulation by the mother.

Still others see the first sensation as the proprioceptive senses. These are the awareness of body parts experienced in the stretching and contracting of muscles. We do often sense “ourselves” in adult life through the positions of our body parts in relation to each other. To know where we end certainly means that we know where something else begins.

At any rate, sensations precede emotions, and both precede ideas. We know that a child responds to pinpricks, wetness, and hunger. But what do we mean when we say that the baby is hungry? The “concept” of hunger can't yet exist. All that he is aware of are the gastrointestinal hunger pains. He screams in a special way different from the distress of sleepiness. Is that rage? It is
hard to tell. If it is, a case can be made for a very early consanguinity between deprivation and rage. Most parents, recognizing the cry as a plea for food, supply it and assume the baby is “asking” to be fed. Some parents assume all cries to be requests for food, and we are on our way toward an obese child.

Then what happens? The infant cannot possibly understand the complex chain of events that result from the cry: If the father awakens first, he will more often than not nudge the somnolent mother to prepare the bottle or commence nursing. The infant's cry should not be perceived as a wake-up call. He cannot possibly be aware of this as a form of communication. This has led to the assumption that he views the screaming itself as leading directly to the suffusion of the warm liquid that alleviates the distress. I seem to remember as my first memory the feeling that, when lying in the dark in a crib, I could make it become light by simply opening my eyes. As though no time elapsed, but the presence of dark and light were results of my closing and opening my eyes. No sense of day and night as phenomena independent of me and my actions was yet present. This presumed sense of one's own self alone, and in control of one's needs, leads to the assumption that the earliest stage of childhood is one of magical omnipotence. The child is aware of only an isolated and powerful self.

Soon the child learns differently. He begins to perceive an alien environment out there that is essential for his survival, but that seems indifferent or unresponsive to his needs. With that he discovers his own impotence. He can do nothing for himself. He is helpless and dependent. In his mind he has been reduced from the all-powerful to the least fit. Oh, how the mighty has fallen! Despair could be the result. Some early psychoanalysts, Melanie Klein in particular, assumed that there is a normal period of childhood depression during the phase when the child reaches such awareness.

This sense of helplessness is quickly mitigated by the awareness
that there are others out there who are strong and can take care of him. The child discovers his caretakers. The first differentiated figure is usually the mother. While the sense of his helplessness is slowly becoming apparent, the perception of her extraordinary power is magnified. In relation to the limited needs of an infant, the mother has godlike powers to satisfy them all. Through this transfer of powers from the self to the other, the infant has unearthed some immense realities that will influence him for the rest of his life: Despite our own limited powers, there are others who can take care of us; one can survive through dependency; others are essential for our survival.

With time, the child learns that the parents have the power not only to give services but also to withhold them. It is in this discriminatory behavior of the parents that the child discovers his relationship to authority. The child learns that parental willingness to care for him is related to the nature of their feelings for him. If they love and approve, they will tend to him. If they are angered and disapprove, they will withhold or even punish. The need to ingratiate the parents—and later all authority figures—will be perceived as an essential, life-and-death matter. We know our helplessness and we exaggerate their power. The child will strive, at least at first, to do that which the parents want. This means subscribing to their values. If generosity pleases them, we will be generous; if selfish pursuit of success is their aim, that will be our original goal.

This concession may seem like further humiliation, but it is truly empowering, for now our fate is back in our own hands. Pleasing the powerful is the next best thing to being powerful. Later the concept of an all-powerful God may emerge, one who can fill the gap left by the growing recognition of the inadequacies of our parents. This gives further evidence to the immense power that invoking “God's will” can have in motivating human behavior.