Hatred (2 page)

A startling and unexpected example of romanticizing an act of hatred appeared in an article in the
New York Times
on April 5, 2002. Unexpected, because it was after 9/11,
³
and in New York City. The article was entitled “2 Girls, Divided by War, Joined in Carnage.” It featured large side-by-side, strikingly similar, pictures of two lovely brunette teenage girls.

“Two high school seniors in jeans with flowing black hair, the teen-age girls walked next to each other up to the entrance of a Jerusalem supermarket last Friday. . . .

“The vastly different trajectories of their lives intersected for one deadly moment, mirroring the intimate conflict of their two peoples. At the door of the supermarket, Ms. Akhras detonated the explosives, killing Ms. Levy and a security guard, along with herself.”

The total effect of the article, whether intended or not, was to equate the two in tragedy, like star-crossed lovers drawn to a common cataclysmic end in a romantic movie like
Titanic
. As the article indicates, they were drawn to their deaths via the irony of “two vastly different trajectories.” But what distinguished the two was not simply their differing orbits, but their purposes, their reasons for being in that particular grocery store at that particular time. As the article itself succinctly stated: “Ayat al-Akhras, 18, from the Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem, was carrying a bomb. Rachel Levy, 17, from a neighborhood nearby, was carrying
her mother's shopping list for a Sabbath eve dinner.” Rachel's purpose was to prepare for celebration of the Sabbath. Ayat's mission was to kill Rachel and as many more of her kind as she could. One was a murderer and the other her victim.

I am not denying the tragedy inherent in the life of the bomber. I admit to being touched by the frustration, the poverty, and the deprivation of the Palestinian refugees. But this story, occurring only seven months after the World Trade Center bombing, indicates the peculiar distortion that remoteness allows, the romanticizing made possible when identification is mitigated by distance. Can anyone imagine the
New York Times
running a similar article with the pictures of Muhammed Atta side by side with a New York City fireman of his age and general appearance? Would the reporter do an extended comparison of their youth and backgrounds, and then describe them as “two young men drawn together by different trajectories,” thereby erasing all distinctions between murderer and victim? We want the fireman to be a tragic hero; we do not want to hear of his foibles and imperfections. Muhammed Atta is the identified villain; we are not prepared to hear that he loved dogs and was kind to his mother.

All of us are more capable of distancing ourselves from hatred when we are not bound to the victims in a community of identity. Even in the wake of the World Trade Center bombing, in a city like New York, with great affinities to the Israelis, we do not truly identify with them. They are not of us and we will not “feel their pain” for long. We set different standards for Israeli activities of retribution or self-defense in an assault on the Palestinians than we do for our own pursuit of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

We are reluctant—unwilling—to acknowledge and condemn hatred, to confront evil head-on. Evil is the Medusa's head. To see it directly might turn us to stone. So we “rationalize” it. We make it comfortable, by explaining it in everyday terms of sociology and psychology. We look to politics and economics to explain
why and how hate-driven acts occur, forgetting that hatred is ultimately a pathological mental mind-set. In such a way we trivialize the acts of terror and in the process romanticize the terrorists, supplying them with ready defenses.

In an article in the
Nation
magazine, Patricia J. Williams bitterly anticipated the eventual distancing from evil in relation to a once-notorious hate crime, the murder of Matthew Shepard, a twenty-one-year-old man who, on October 6, 1998, in Laramie, Wyoming, was severely beaten and then bound to a fence and left to die. Apparently Matthew Shepard was viciously killed only because he was gay.

Williams wrote:

Williams is arguing against a moral relativism that has been pervasive in modern culture. Moral relativism denies absolute evil. It abandons strict moral rules, judging behavior in terms of motivation and life history. As a result, we are reluctant to condemn a crime or a criminal. Instead we attempt to “understand” and “treat” the criminal, as we are reluctant to commit what the
eminent psychiatrist, Karl Menninger, called “the crime of punishment” in the 1950s.
⁵
This moral relativism has been supported by a psychoanalytic view of behavior that perceives all present-day behavior as the inevitable—and therefore nonculpable—product of our developmental past. We commit abominable acts because we were conditioned to do so. Since we have no choice, it is not our fault. This reasoning is an imaginative and useful way of treating mental illness in a health setting. I earn my living that way. But it is no way to run a country.

Psychoanalysis erased the formerly rigid distinctions between normal and sick behavior and expanded the definition of mental illness beyond anything imaginable in the nineteenth century. The patients I see in my practice would never have been remotely identified as having mental health problems a century ago. And that is fine. Fine, that is, in a therapeutic relationship, but not in the world of morality and justice.

Philip Rieff brilliantly labeled this transformation of our culture as
The Triumph of the Therapeutic.
⁶
Illness replaced evil. Nothing was bad, only sick. We became one big, happy therapeutic community. The negative implications for the law were significant when it became clear that if all aberrant behavior were sick, there would be no longer any room for judgment. Therefore, both penance and punishment were outdated. As it turned out, the therapeutic approach to crime and evil was a prelude to disaster, even for the criminals themselves. By calling them sick, we could keep them incarcerated well beyond the sentencing limits that would have been tolerated by law, all in the name of treatment.

One would have thought that the one community that would
resist the conflation of evil into sickness would have been the world of theology. Yet the scandals that erupted in 2002 and plagued the Catholic Church stemmed as much from an abandonment of its moral heritage of distinguishing between good and evil, sinner and saint, and an adoption of the more fashionable language of psychoanalysis, where all aberrant behavior is a sickness requiring treatment.

During the emergence of the scandal involving pederast priests, it was astonishing to read the reports from the Boston archdiocese. The leaders indicated that whereas previously they had viewed sexual offenses of priests in terms of moral transgressions, in the past twenty years or so they were encouraged to adopt a therapeutic approach to the problem. The “problem” being no less than pederasty, lying, violating a position of trust, and desecrating sacred vows.

They were encouraged to adopt a therapeutic approach? By whom? Everyone who had studied the problem had known by then that sexual perversions were intractable to standard—or, for that matter, any—treatments. Never mind that there is no affective treatment for pederasty. Even if there were, that would be the bailiwick of the therapeutic community and we would have preferred the Church to continue its moral fight for righteous behavior.

This abdication by the Church of its traditional role as a moral authority was expressed with numbing clarity by Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, the archbishop of Boston (until late in 2002). In his deposition on his actions in the case of the pedophile priest, the Reverend John J. Geoghan, Cardinal Law stated, “I viewed this as a pathology, as a psychological pathology, as an illness.”
⁷
He went on to concede that the events had “a
moral component,” but it was the
illness
that drew his attention and commanded his action. He referred the errant priest to those who better understood this illness, the molester's personal physician and a suspect psychiatrist.

But sick or not, Father Geoghan had violated his vows of celibacy and he had committed multiple homosexual acts viewed by Cardinal Law and his church as grave sins. He had also sodomized innocent children, which is certainly—in addition to being a felony in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts—a sin against God and an act of evil. Surely, violation of vows, corruption of the innocent, sin, and evil fall within the purview and jurisdiction of the Church. Yet these monstrous actions seemed beneath the concern of Cardinal Law, who referred the matter to the attention of his assistants, thus so successfully putting these “incidents” behind him that, when deposed, he was “unable to recall” his most dramatic involvement in these heinous crimes.

I first became aware of this dangerous slippage in the attitudes of the Catholic Church during the 1970s, when I was examining the brutal slaying of a young Yale coed by her fellow student and former boyfriend, Richard Herrin.
⁸
The leadership of St. Thomas Moore Church—the seat of the Catholic chaplaincy at Yale—chose to view Herrin, a poor Mexican-American boy from the barrio of Los Angeles, as a victim, more to be pitied than censured. Worse was the tendency of this religious community to “normalize” his behavior by assuming that given the right stimulus, we might all pulverize a loved one's head. Or pitchfork our neighbor's child, I presume.

During an interview I had with Brother Thomas, a Christian Brother in Albany, New York, an incident revealed to me the danger of universalizing, thus normalizing, malignant and even psychopathic and psychotic behavior. The Christian Brothers
had shielded Richard Herrin when he was on bail in their custody, even allowing this impulsive murderer to attend a college campus under an assumed name. The pedophile shuffle of the Church, revealed only recently, was in full swing during this earlier period, again under the rubric of compassion, understanding, and treatment.

Brother Thomas was the mildest, gentlest of men, with other-worldly qualities that would have made him perfect casting for a thirteenth-century scholastic monk: When I asked him if he could imagine himself ever taking a hammer to the head of a sleeping and innocent girl, the following dialogue occurred, which I record verbatim:

The last naive statement denies the corrupting influence of both family environment and life history. Of course, given the same life history—and even this does a disservice to genetic influences on behavior—we might all do the same thing. But we do not have the same life history, and therefore, we become different people. The adult person who emerged as Saint Theresa and the person who became Agrippina, mother of Nero, were not likely to do the same thing “given the same opportunities.”

It is time to reverse the therapeutic trivialization of morality, where nothing is either wrong or right, only sick or healthy. Where nothing is deemed punishable, only treatable. Where evil is only one among other symptoms of mental illness, like depression and anxiety. Where anyone may be excused for any act regardless of how wantonly depraved it is. It is time to liberate morality from the tyranny of psychodynamic models. Even the redoubtable Dr. Menninger became appalled at what he had inadvertently helped to create and in his later days wrote a book entitled
Whatever Became of Sin?
⁹

Most of us are fortunately ignorant of the kind of evil experienced in Jedwabne and the hatred that is the subject of this book. I am not talking about rage, but raw hatred, the hatred that goes beyond betrayal and destruction for purposes of advantage, material gain, or revenge; the hatred that finds pleasure in the pain of others; the hatred of Medea and Iago, of Caligula, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Osama bin Laden. Evidence of such hatred is only too evident in this modern world of tyrants and terrorists, but we have been unready and unwilling to face it. It is time to
confront evil and punish it accordingly. It is time to restore the respectability of moral judgments in public affairs.

Next, we must apply the tools of modern psychological knowledge to the problem of hatred. I do not presume to believe that in the end I, or anyone, will be able to “explain” the Jedwabne massacre. It is incomprehensible. Our minds will not take it in. We cannot recognize such perversity as being explicable within the conditions of human sensibility, any more than we can understand murderers eating the body parts of their victims or men having sex with infants.