Having dealt professionally with human suffering on the most intimate level in my work with patients, I know that true empathy, producing real compassion and personal suffering, remains a proximal quality. Those rare individuals who have hearts that bleed indiscriminately for humanity in general are likely to have eyes that shed few tears for individual men and women.
The greatest protection against group hatred is the ultimate inclusion of the hated contingent into the population with which we identify. In other words, expand “proximal” identification to larger and larger constituencies. Part of the tragedy of the African states is that statehood was established arbitrarily under European colonialism. As such, the “states” were never identifiable or recognizable by the natives who were its presumed members. The result was that identities were fixed to relatively small units. When there was unification, it was through religion, which, as will later be discussed, managed not only to enlarge the community of identifying people but also to define a larger enemy population.
While not denying the existence of subcultures in the United States, with their multiple divisions into “us” and “them” and the consequent prejudices, what is still amazing is that we have managed to forge a national identity among widely diverse populations. We do have an American identity, and when an American naval ship, the USS Cole, was attacked by terrorists, we responded in unity with appropriate grief and anger, independent of whether the victims were black or white, Christian or Jew, northern or southern, rich or poor.
We have made progress. Aided by the shrinking world of modern travel and the instant awareness made possible through modern communications, we are approaching a global community. We have gone from family to clan to nation. A nation of almost three hundred million grieved over the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. To a lesser extent, a community of similar cultures shared our grief. We can hope for a time when we approach that broadest of identifications, but we must be realistic. The “family of man” is a noble ideal that will never be realized. Nevertheless, noble and impossible ideals serve useful purposes. Few Christians can embrace and live the life of Christ, but in aspiring to do so they may become better people.
Proximal identification can never be extended to include the entire human race. Its biological purpose is exactly the opposite. We serve the species by overvaluing that small section of it for which we are responsible. Yearning for a true “brotherhood of man” is hopeless. There is no psychological way to extend our downward identification to all. It is too heavy a burden. Were each of us to grieve over the suffering of every child in the same way as we do with our own, life would be unendurable. Just as the surgeon must protect himself from the suffering of his patients to facilitate his professional role, we cannot mourn in the truest sense over every tragedy in the daily paper. We are touched and empathic, and that is the most we can expect. That is also the least we should expect of ourselves. We cannot tolerate total indifference.
But what if, beyond indifference, we take delight? We have then moved from the relative indifference that we maintain toward the other and into the area of hatred that we reserve for our enemies. Hatred is an extreme and perverse distortion of the necessary process of group identification. The entire process of identity and identification involves not just locating ourselves but also locating others. It is a method of separation as well as identification. If there is a “me,” then there is a “not-me,” which will eventually be further identified as things and other people. If there exists a group of people with whom I identify and with whom I share a common fate, there must be others with whom I do not identify.
To say that I do not identify with some group is still short of wishing its members ill. It may simply mean that I have no emotional investment in them, no primary concern for them, and little empathy for them. It is a form of prejudice to exclude a whole population from our moral sensibilities, but it is well short of hatred. When I said that the opposite of both love and hate is indifference, it is to this lack of identification that I referred.
This exclusion from identity explains the relative indifference that exists in the more developed countries to the suffering in the less developed world. Even the compassionate vocation of medicine has neglected the search for treatments for crippling diseases that are endemic to alien environments. Schistosomiasis and filariasis, parasitic diseases of the tropics, commanded relatively little research, considering the tragic suffering they cause, when compared with the search for the cures for common allergies. It is not just that there is less money to be made—although that is the primary driver of pharmacological research—but that in general these areas are simply less visible to most of us. We don’t hate these people. They just don’t command our attention.
Certainly there is a bias here. The people affected do not have a strong moral claim on us. They are not members of our community. And while I am hopeful that we can eventually become more inclusive and expand the community of the us, I am well aware that the nature of proximal identification will always place people on a continuum of closeness to our hearts. Still, such indifference begins the process that makes the other not just different from, but less than, us. Indifference and bias are dangerous because they are natural way stations on the road to enmity. Locating an alien other encourages and unleashes the forces of hatred that lie dormant in the biased individual.
11
IDENTIFYING THE ENEMY
Indifference in the face of evil is in itself a moral wrong, but it is still not the active engagement that defines hatred. We must perceive the other as a danger, an enemy, in order to begin to hate him. But more important, we must have an internal conflict for which the location of an enemy will supply some resolution and relief. A sense of personal worthlessness, helplessness, and despair characterize a diminished and desperate individual. Such a population is the soil in which the seeds of hatred may be sown.
There have been beaten down and deprived populations that have passively endured without hatred for centuries. Their condition was accepted by them as an existential fact of life, not a humiliation imposed from above. Indeed, when supported by religion, the impoverished life may be viewed as a key to the kingdom of heaven. “And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”54
Only when we feel that we have actively been deprived—or sense that we have been denied that to which we are entitled—will we seek some external cause of our adversity. When the cause is perceived as within our nature, our own fault, we despair; if the cause is perceived as imposed from outside, we are ripe for hatred. The change from despair to feeling humiliated and exploited involves shifting responsibility from the self to others. It requires identifying an enemy. When the other is indeed the oppressor, a revolutionary rage (a righteous anger) may be liberated. But more often that not, a scapegoat population is targeted, one that bears no responsibility for the perceived or real injuries. This scapegoating is the paranoid mechanism behind hatred. It is why most group hatred may be viewed as an irrational phenomenon.
The choice of the enemy will not be totally arbitrary, even when it is at heart an irrational choice. It must seem rational to the hater, which is the basis of rationalization. The choice may be territorial—bearing some historic rationalization for the current hatred—or the enemy may be selected on ideological grounds. In either case, it is my thesis that the choice will always be in the service of scapegoating.
Scapegoating
Jean-Paul Sartre, in his brilliant (but deeply flawed) essay, Anti-Semite and Jew, made two profound observations.55 He indicated: “Anti-Semitism . . . is something quite other than an idea. It is . . . a passion.”56 And later, the much-quoted statement: “Far from experience producing his [the anti-Semite’s] idea of the Jew, it was the latter which explained his experience. If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.”57 These two statements expand the concept of hatred beyond a mere emot
ional experience and beyond the confines of reality.
An enemy is defined as a “foe”: “One who feels hatred toward, intends injury to, or opposes the interests of another.” Enmity, real enmity, exists between nations as between individuals. There are opposing personal and national interests that are perceived as threatening. I use the word “perceived” because with the perspective of hindsight, many conflicts—in both the individual and the national arena—that were fought on the assumption of real injury or threat proved to be conflicts of ego. It is hard to discern the “real” principles defended in the monstrous slaughter of World War I. Still, there were and will be true enemies and legitimate conflicts, but those are a minority. For hate-driven groups such as the Nazis, Al Qaeda, or the Ku Klux Klan, the enemy is more often a convenience than a true threat. The enemy is a necessary device to alleviate a sense of shame, humiliation, and impotence. If no traditional enemy is at hand, one must be created.
The enemy becomes an essential ingredient in the life of the haters. Like a delusion, it is created to serve the needs of the hater. And also like the typical symptom, it invariably represents a displacement of a conflict from the internal world of the person to an outside agency. We alleviate our internal conflicts and protect our self-esteem by placing the source of our misery outside of our own area of culpability; we find some other to blame. After having found that other, we can absolve ourselves of responsibility; view our inadequacies as products of external assault; and vent our spleen on the enemy, taking comfort in “fighting back” rather than suffering the humiliation of passive acceptance. An enemy adds purpose, passion, and hope to a dismal existence. The enemy must be found, and if one is not readily available in the political or social world around us, an enemy must be created out of whole cloth. The true purpose of an enemy will be to serve the modus vivendi, the lifestyle, of the hater. Understanding hatred requires treating it as a metaphor and searching for the symbolic displacements.
The classic and most direct example of displacement occurs in Leviticus with the story of the sacrificial goat, the literal scapegoat.And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions, even all their sins; and he shall put them upon the head of the goat, and shall send him away by the hand of an appointed man into the wilderness. And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land which is cut off.58
In the biblical text, the story of the scapegoat depicts a symbolic gesture, a metaphor to show God’s mercy and forgiveness. The displacement is conscious and its meaning apparent to the participants. The goat was, along with bullocks and rams, a traditional sacrificial animal and seems arbitrarily selected. When Shirley Jackson wrote “The Lottery,” a modern fable of scapegoating, substituting a human member of the community for the goat, the story became an instant classic of terror.59 This simple tale, told in everyday language, exploited an element of human nature as a vehicle for horror: We do not want to know that we are prepared to sacrifice the innocent for our own purposes. When we commit moral crimes for selfish reasons, we want to pretend that we commit these wrongs in the service of the good. We deny we are attending anything so trivial as our ego, but claim we are serving God and country.
Scapegoating, as used today, is an attempt to place our own transgression onto the shoulders of a target group. The purpose is no longer to seek God’s forgiveness in penitence and honesty but rather to avoid guilt by denying responsibility. Therefore, the displacement is unconscious—otherwise it would be simple deceit—its purposes disguised from both victim and victimizer. And the sacrificial group is rarely arbitrarily selected. To maintain the self-deception, the selection must be sufficiently artful in design to seem credible. The displacement must be of such a nature that it seems to make sense. The scapegoated group will, however, always carry some symbolic clue as to the nature of the internal conflicts that they are symbolically being used to resolve.
The severity of the anxiety that tortures a psychotic individual demanding respite is such that the rationalization that will be used to explain it must be of a proportionate dimension. A patient must fabricate a monstrous evil. If the person turns to hypochondria to rationalize his anxiety, the disease he selects must be equal to his terror. It will not do to perceive his imaginary illness as chicken pox or conjunctivitis. In order to rationalize severe anxiety, he will perceive symptoms of cancer or heart failure. Similarly, with the classic paranoid delusion, the forces opposing the individual must also be perceived as formidable and life threatening. They must be aliens of great cunning, the devil or his agents. In destroying the enemy, the paranoid wants to feel he is saving not just himself, but his country or, as with Schreber, redeeming the entire race of man. The individual will be supported—more often, directed—by an equally powerful ally. He will view himself as the agent of the president of the United States or of God himself.
Those who are not delusional do not have the capacity to distort or ignore reality sufficiently to claim that the devil or aliens from Mars are out to destroy them. Instead, they must locate their enemies in the real world among their traditional antagonists. Not all of these antagonists will at first be perceived with a deeply ingrained hatred. That will emerge in time. The object of group hatred is often a product of calculated propaganda generated to mobilize the population. During a period of actual conflict, as in wartime, a concerted campaign must be launched to demonize the enemy. This propaganda will facilitate the assaults on morality that are inevitable in wartime. Often these wartime hatreds disappear faster than they are created. To the shock of most Americans, within a period of time no longer than the conflict itself, the German and Japanese enemies became our allies in the Cold War against our former ally and new enemy, the Russians.
We are free to locate enemies anywhere, but it is always easier to place blame on a traditional enemy, to revive past grievances, and by so doing, to rationalize our choice. When locating enemies, therefore, we are likely to start by looking at our neighbors. I have labeled such enemies as “territorial.” At the opposite end of the spectrum are enemies whom we could not recognize on contact, but whose ideologies offend us, and who may be labeled “ideological enemies.” These terms—territorial and ideological— are part of a seamless whole, since even those based on actual territorial disputes inevitably will require an ideological component to perpetuate a lasting hatred.
Ideological enemies may be built on a framework of true ideological differences, such as in religious wars. But as with the Christian Crusades, there is often a crude territorial objective hidden within these “ideological” struggles. Sometimes enemies seem to be manufactured out of chance and coincidence. The Holocaust was constructed out of the paranoid needs of the German leaders, since the Jews in Germany were a tiny minority and were by most objective standards simply “Germans” in their day-to-day behavior and their loyalty to the Fatherland.
It is often only too obvious that the “enemy” is merely a convenient contrivance to serve some inner anguish and rage. This is particularly apparent in the often drunken “let’s get them” Saturday night entertainments that once were endemic throughout America and that involved tormenting blacks, Jews, gays, or whatever despised group could be found. What is more difficult to perceive is that even when there are true ideological differences, the ideology itself is rarely the issue. Here, too, the primary purpose is to find a rational alternative to ourselves and our leaders as the source of our deprivations and misery and as an outlet for our anger. The goal is to shift the blame.
The Territorial Enemy: The Enemy at Hand
The injunction “to love thy neighbor as thyself” has always seemed to me to be the most unreasonable directive in the New Testament. This casual statement in Leviticus was embraced and elevated in importance in the New Testament, where love rather than justice played the central role. The Old Testament is a practical guide for living, and its Ten Commandments are a poss
ible, though admittedly difficult, code of conduct to maintain. The commandments also attend to our behavior with our neighbors. They proscribe both “coveting” and “bearing false witness against” one’s neighbors. But loving your enemy as you love yourself or your loved ones? This seems to me beyond the reach of most human beings. One is more likely to “love” a stranger or an abstraction—humankind—than the competitor at the borders of your private space. I have made the point that identity is proximal. Love and hate both are founded in the cauldron of identity. One is more likely to hate one’s neighbor than a distant creature who does not impinge on or limit one’s actions. The injunction to love thy neighbor as thyself is deemed so central to the Christian ideal that this same directive appears at least five times in the New Testament.60 But then, Christianity is a religion that motivates its followers by an image of admittedly unattainable perfection. The New Testament simply wants you to try and allows for forgiveness
These cautionary statements about one’s neighbor—not rules of general decorum among people—implicitly recognize that the most likely source of war and conflict in earlier history would involve those others who are at our borders. It specifically pinpoints the competitive rivalries in early times, when communities were small, competition for food and water great, and mutual cooperation for a larger good not yet anticipated. The injunction to love thy neighbor serves a political as well as an ethical purpose. At the least, it was a prophylactic attempt to inhibit the emergence of hatred in neighboring communities by aspiring to brotherly love.
The history of civilization is a matter of a paltry few thousand years in the millions of years that our species, Homo sapiens, has existed. By definition, we have no records or proofs of the exact nature of prehistoric life. We have some knowledge. We can roughly date the discovery of metals, tools, and agricultural techniques. We have cave drawings that date and define hunting procedures. What we do not have is any evidence, any record, of what the prehistoric people thought.
Hatred Page 16
