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:Could you imagine yourself ever taking a hammer and hitting someone?
I could. I could consider that I could not be in control.
If something is so outrageous in my makeup that could be triggered and I could just lash out.
Have you ever attacked anyone with an instrument?
No, I haven’t.
Yet you have been outraged by social conditions every day of your life.
Yes, I have, but it has been small and inconsequential.
But you really could imagine picking up a hammer and crushing a skull?
I don’t know the difference in picking up a hammer and I can see myself losing control and doing practically anything.
Under what conditions have you actually ever lost control?
No, I have never lost control. But I pick up the newspaper and it seems to happen so much. If it can happen to one person, it can happen to me.
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.
Still in this amalgam of malignancy and horror that permeated the Holocaust and the current terrorist attacks, there are common elements of hatred that are understandable. A suicide bomb directed at a school bus is composed of the everyday elements of nails, wires, and a cheap radio. It is equally composed of anger, despair, self-justification, cynical manipulation, promise, and perversity. It is time to deconstruct the hater the way we deconstruct his weapons.
“What do they want from us?” is the common question of the day. It is a question that invites socioeconomic and political explanations. But they are insufficient. The question presumes a rational basis for hatred and suggests a direct link between the hater’s needs and the selection of his victims. It will not explain the kind of perversity we are today experiencing, any more than it could explain the massacre of the Jews in the Holocaust. It denies the pathological core of hatred. To understand hatred we must do what Euripides and Shakespeare did. We must get into the head of the hater. We now have a psychological framework for
doing this. We must apply modern psychological understanding of perception, motivation, and behavior to discover what hatred is. Only when we have identified the nature of the beast can we properly address the environmental conditions that support it.
Hatred is severe psychological disorder. The pathological haters, whether Al Qaeda today or the Nazis under Hitler, claim to be fighting in defense of an ideology. In truth, the ideology is a convenient rationalization. They are externalizing their internal frustrations and conflicts on a hapless scapegoat population. They are “deluded,” and their self-serving and distorted perceptions allow them to justify their acts of hatred against the enemy they have created.
We must start our investigation, therefore, with an examination of the hater’s mind rather than his milieu. What is he thinking and feeling? What motivates him? What, if anything, will satisfy him? Does he even know? These are questions that I deal with daily in trying to understand and treat the havoc that the neurotic patient wreaks on himself and those around him. An application of such psychological knowledge is essential if we are to confront the organized terror that now threatens the entire civilized world. To date there has been little call for such information, and little volunteered from the psychological community.
The 9/11 bombings brought home to Americans, in particular, the awareness that understanding hatred is no longer a theoretical problem. We have been treated to pictures of jubilant Arab crowds cavorting in the streets and shouting their delight at the tragic deaths in the United States as a consequence of the World Trade Center massacres. Their palpable hatred of us leaps off the screen, affronting our senses.
There is nothing new about such hatred. What is new is provided by our modern world of technology—the extraordinary reach of the haters and the frightening potential for destruction of the available tools. These innovations add an imperative to the need for containing the emerging cultures of hatred. We must investigate and understand hatred now, before it seeps into our civilized world and destroys our way of life. It is a matter of survival.
2
DEFINING HATRED
Early attempts to define the problem of hatred have not been encouraging. I have already rejected as simplistic (and just plain wrong) the assumption that hatred is normal to the huplain wrong) the assumption that hatred is normal to the human condition. Even given the opportunity—freedom to do it and go unpunished—we would not all enjoy torturing and killing our neighbors, or even our enemies.
I equally reject the economic and sociological explanations for acts driven by hatred. The desperation in the Palestinian camps does not justify, or explain, the acts of terrorism Palestinians commit. It is not that poverty is irrelevant but that it is not a sufficient condition for hatred; not all poor communities harbor such hatred, nor do they commit terrorist acts. The poverty in America during the Great Depression is incomprehensible to Americans who try to understand it by extrapolation from the “hard times” and recessionary phases of the last thirty years of the twentieth century. The Great Depression was a monumental burden on the American people during the 1930s. Yet there was a remarkable absence of malice toward authority or government. Indeed, the most powerful man in the land, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was adored by the deprived populations of the country, just as he was abhorred by the privileged classes, who lived in a state of luxury facilitated by the cheap labor of the time.
Nor is poverty a necessary condition for a culture of hatred; not all communities of hatred are poor. The skinheads in America did not arise from any despised and deprived minority. They emerged from the white Protestant community, which constitutes the majority in this country. The lynch mobs in the southern states were culled from the oppressor, not the oppressed, albeit still not the privileged classes in that hierarchical time. The poorest countries of Europe did not sponsor Hitler and the Holocaust. The Germans were hardly the most primitive and uneducated people.
When we began to identify specific terrorists instead of terrorist societies, they confound us by revealing the advantaged nature of their early lives. The Baader Meinhof Gang, which terrorized Germany from 1968 to 1977; Carlos, “the Jackal”; and Kathy Boudin as well as most of her colleagues in the Weather Underground were privileged members of the bourgeoisie. The leaders of Al Qaeda seemed to have emerged largely from the advantaged classes of Saudi Arabia and Egypt. I allow that economic factors are not incidental. They are relevant, but they are not central, as they have been assumed to be. When we do not have answers for social problems, we are likely to assume poverty to be the cause and money the solution. Confessing ignorance, abandoning clichéd and faulty answers, is an essential first step to understanding.
Looking for causes by rounding up the usual suspects, poverty and inequity, will not work here. Worse, it adds two harmful dimensions to the discourse: First, it draws our attention away from a study of the pathological nature of the terrorist. Second, it suggests that if only the victim population had been more charitable, the slaughter would not have occurred—blurring once again the crucial moral distinction between the murderer and the victim, a pervasive tendency in modern liberal cultures. We have behaved like the well-meaning narcissists that we are. We have asked why they did this to us. We have been searching our souls, when we should have been examining theirs.
The ultimate flaw in the analyses that draw on the history of terrorist populations is that they attempt to locate the root causes of something before defining or even knowing what that something is. To discover the cause of, and thus a cure for, erythroblastosis, one must start with the knowledge that it is a fetal blood disease, not an adolescent skin rash. We must ask what hatred is before we assay the nature of its causes.
Hatred is, if nothing else, a feeling, an emotion. One would logically have expected much of the commentary in response to the 9/11 nightmare in the United States to have focused on human feelings. Instead, the psychology of hatred has barely been mentioned. Having started in the middle of the problem, we are in danger of going off half-cocked. Since the shock of the 9/11 attacks, all sorts of experts have weighed in to explain why this happened. So far no one has called in the doctors.
Because the actions of the terrorists arose in the context of political events, we have concentrated our attentions almost exclusively on historic causes. But before we ask what historic or political factors cause hatred, we ought to ask, “What is hatred?” And that requires a different kind of exploration with a different set of investigative tools. The difference between exploring the causes of an entity and defining its essence leads to a different kind of argument, a different expertise, and is articulated with a different “story line.”
The story that emerges with any investigation of human motivation will always vary with the investigative tools employed as well as with the biases of the investigator. A physiologist looking at migraine headache will offer explanations different from those of a psychiatrist. Both will contribute accurate but incomplete knowledge. Each specialist finds answers consonant with her discipline; when your only instrument is a hammer, everything looks like a tack. Looking for the roots, the conditions that created something, directs one inevitably to a historic and political narrative. When, instead of a purely historic event—for example, the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s—we are examining a psychological and emotional state like hatred, we had better define the condition before calling in the experts in causation.
Take the example of stress. What causes stress? Where can one locate its roots? Start by defining what one means by stress. There are six distinct and different definitions in my dictionary. If you mean stress as: “an applied force . . . that tends to strain or deform a body,”10 and the “body” is a bridge, then one needs to consult an engineer or a metallurgist. On the other hand, if you mean: “a mentally or emotionally disruptive or upsetting condition . . . capable of affecting physical health,” you had better call in the doctors. Whether you prefer a psychiatrist or an internist is dependent on your bias. Both would h
ave much to contribute.
Let me make it clear. I am not disparaging historic, sociological, or economic analyses of the roots of hatred. I have learned immeasurably from such sources, but they will not be the focus of this book. They are an essential part of the armamentarium in our battle against the disease of hatred, but they are not alternatives to exploring the nature of hatred. That requires using philosophical and psychological tools. The few great works written in modern times on the nature of hatred have been created by philosophers and psychologists, such as Max Scheler, Gordon Allport, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
The most evident aspect of hatred is the intense emotion that supports it. Therefore, hatred historically was first studied by those interested in human nature and human conduct. In the days before a field of inquiry called psychology existed, human emotion was the purview of philosophy. To understand the influence of emotions on human conduct one turned to the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Pascal, Hume, Rousseau, and William James. They were the ones who dissected and examined the complex nature of emotions.
William James was a major transitional figure. With James we see the fusion of the traditional philosophical approach and the burgeoning new field of psychology, in which he was a pioneer. From its earliest days with Freud and Pavlov, psychology has brought a new illumination, a new emphasis, to the analysis of emotions by focusing on the internal psychology, the underlying physiology, and the interpersonal dynamics of the emotions. The emotions are of particular importance when dealing with hatred.
Hatred Page 2
