Hatred (4 page)

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:

Readers of the novel know that Huck has been on an adventure in which he has risked imprisonment for aiding the runaway
slave, 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:

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:

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.

The Emotional Core of Hatred

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

F
or 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.