The preservation of the environment is another focus for purely ideological enmity. Until fairly recently, environmental groups eschewed violence. Over the past few years, however, they have moved into active aggression. The Earth Liberation Front has so far specifically targeted only research facilities, offices, and equipment. But the rhetoric level has been rising, and eventually the groups justify the direct targeting of people. Their setting fire to the construction site for the Microbial and Plant Genomics Research Center at the University of Minnesota’s St. Paul campus in January 2002 is frighteningly reminiscent of the actions of Ted Kaczynski. After the accidental death that occurred, the activists tried to justify the murder on utilitarian grounds, comparing it to the incidental deaths of civilians in a war zone. Once such a philosophical argument has been made, it stands as an a priori basis for any extreme member to extend the violence intentionally. This is the pattern that has evolved in the pro-life activist community as well.
Despite the occasional abuses of the fanatic fringe elements that accumulate around all protest groups, I would not classify the three ideological communities cited above as cultures of hatred. The vast majority of their memberships clearly are not violent. But all three of them have spawned satellite groups that are classic single-issue radicals, for whom the importance of their cause transcends, and worse, preempts other values and virtues. In addition, these radicals are prepared to risk the death of others in their passionate pursuits. All three groups lend themselves to the crusader mentality and, wittingly or not, encourage terrorism by utilizing language that is incendiary and apocalyptic. And all three causes have already produced followers who have executed murderous assaults on innocent people. For these reasons, the leaders of these groups have some moral responsibility for the evil done in their name.
The ideological enemy is conceived as doing evil and, thus, lends an element of righteousness to our hatred; the territorial enemy offers a past reality, if not a present threat, which can be used to justify hatred. The scapegoat, on the other hand, is an enemy manufactured out of whole cloth. Most cultures of hatred combine all three elements in their scenarios of hatred. To the chagrin of devout and decent believers, the forces that have seemed best capable of fusing all the elements into a culture of hatred have been the orthodoxies represented by organized religions.
To summarize: To forge a hate-driven group like Al Qaeda, there must be present a dynamic internal need for an enemy. Then the enemy must be located. The enemy will not be chosen at random. Proximity is important, but not essential. Ideological differences also serve the purpose. The choice of the “enemy” will be dictated by fear, rage, guilt, or envy. With fear, guilt, and rage, some grievance, real or perceived, directs the hatred. With envy, the victim may have no presence in the life of the hater. The victim is purely a scapegoat. These dynamics are brought together most clearly in the context of a culture of hatred, which we must now examine.
THE CULTURES OF HATRED
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A CULTURE OF HATRED
There are two distinctly different types of communities dominated by hate. These communities are equally malevolent, but the difference in their structures point to differing means to prevent or confront them.
The first I have labeled a “culture of hatred”; the second, a “culture of haters.” A culture of hatred is a natural community that breeds and encourages hatred. This is a group with a shared history and usually a shared locale, a country or its subculture. The leadership, the educational institutions, the dominant religious forces—individually or in concert—indoctrinate the members of the community with their venomous attitudes toward the designated enemy. Nazi Germany was a full-fledged culture of hatred. The Palestinians are an emerging one.
A culture of haters is an artificial community created when individuals who share a common hatred join forces in alliance against their enemy. They do not require a shared culture, history, language, or locality. The culture is an artificial one, formed of people with different backgrounds and disparate values. The members of these groups need not be indoctrinated. They come together only because of the shared enemy, with the hatred often being the only shared value. Al Qaeda and the various neo-Nazi movements across the world are examples of cultures of haters.
When considering the special qualities and natures that define different cultures, one is forced to make generalizations. That is dangerous, as one runs the risk of committing the same stereotyping that we condemn in bigotry. Yet in order to do justice to the profound influence cultures have on individuals, one must generalize.
We are not programmed insects. The way we are treated as we grow up will determine the nature of our character and, through that, our conduct. We cannot even determine whether a person is behaving irrationally or “normally” without considering the widely diverse demands of varying cultures. Our environment sets the values that define good and evil behavior. Thus, honorable and virtuous members of differing cultures will behave in ways that will be deemed shameful and immoral by contrasting cultures.
The Americans viewed the Japanese suicide bombers who were so effective and terrifying against the U.S. fleet at the end of World War II as madmen. The Japanese viewed these same suicide bombers as martyrs. Ritual suicide is a respectable tradition in Japan. In America suicide is almost invariably viewed as a sign of mental illness. So, although we Americans will honor the occasional soldier who throws himself on a grenade, we do not actually view this act as suicide, but rather a noble sacrifice of the treasured self to save the lives of comrades.
Americans have volunteered in every war for high-risk duties, but America could never have recruited a specific group of suicide bombers to hurl themselves at the enemy. Such volunteers would not have been at hand. More significant, the American public would never have understood or condoned their sacrifice. The waves of Americans who stormed the beaches in Normandy or hacked their way to the heights of Iwo Jima may have seemed to be involved in the same kind of suicidal assaults as the Japanese suicide bombers, but they were not. The intentions of the Japanese were to die in the service of their emperor, their country, and their religion. The Americans were prepared to die while hoping that they would survive. These contrary motivations reveal that the two seemingly similar activities are almost diametrically antithetical actions.
In making this comparison, I am not attributing a higher moral standing to one value over the other. Obviously, I have my values, but they have no relevance here. This analogy is not for the purposes of ascribing moral superiority or inferiority; I am not prepared here to call one behavior sick and the other healthy. The juxtaposition is presented to demonstrate that individual actions can be completely understood only within the culture from which they emerge. Nonetheless, I will make the case that some cultures are morally corrupt.
As a practicing psychiatrist, I am always aware of the specific culture in which a person is raised. Family values (in themselves influenced by culture) and the larger culture acting together shape the emerging conscience of the growing child. I obviously must attend to environmental influences in treating patients. When I do, I have to take into account the degree to which certain types of behavior are aberrant only by the standards of the society at large. Certain beliefs and conduct that are perfectly normal in one culture are signs of neurosis in another. This is equally true for subcultures in a diverse community like the United States. The psychiatrist who does not recognize these differences does a disservice to his patient. He may unfairly view something as neurotic that is perfectly normal in the subculture in which the patient was raised. Certainly a committed Mormon boy from a small town in Utah who practiced sexual abstinence until marriage should be viewed differently from the thirty-two-year-old virgin raised by bohemian parents in Greenwich Village. I respect the validity of such cultural differences. Like differences as to sexual conduct, subcultures nurture diverse attitudes toward aggression and paranoia. In order to understand the actions of an individual—to ascri
be meaning, to appreciate motive, even to place proper value judgment on behavior—one must take into account the differing cultural directives that influenced it.
Cultural observation and generalization are risky but legitimate and necessary tools in sociological and psychological investigations. Here, rather than attempting my own defense of cultural generalizations, I will quote Primo Levi, who was himself profoundly victimized by such generalizations, yet became a penetrating student of them.
I agree with you: it is dangerous, wrong, to speak about the “Germans,” or any other people, as of a single undifferentiated entity, and include all individuals in one judgment. And yet I don’t think I would deny that there exists a spirit of each people (otherwise it would not be a people), a Deutschtum, an Italianita, an Hispanidad: they are the sums of traditions, customs, history, language, and culture. Whoever does not feel within himself this spirit, which is national in the best sense of the word, not only does not belong to his own people but is not part of human civilization. Therefore, while I consider insensate the syllogism, “All Italians are passionate; you are Italian; therefore you are passionate,” I do however believe it legitimate, within certain limits, to expect from Italians taken as a whole, or from Germans, or other nations, one specific, collective behavior rather than another. There will certainly be individual exceptions, but a prudent, probabilistic forecast is in my opinion possible.64
Some profound differences in moral values among different cultures are justifiably a matter of opinion and open to debate. Whether abortion, therapeutic cloning, arranged marriage, capital punishment, paternalism—on all of which I have strong opinions—are wrong or right is a proper area for legitimate differences. Decent people can disagree on many important issues without conceding the ethical ground. But there are not “two sides to every question.” With many questions there is only one morally acceptable opinion. There are values that transcend cultural directives and that must always be honored. Immoral behavior cannot be exonerated on the grounds that it was influenced by an immoral culture. He who subscribes to the values of a culture of evil is by definition evil. The white Boers who ruled South Africa were products of their environment. But apartheid was an evil practice, and the fact that Boers were raised in a racist environment does not exempt their racist actions from condemnation.
We consider actions to be a product of an autonomous individual, even while acknowledging the power exerted by the culture on that individual during his formative years. We may be sympathetic to the individual, while still loathing his behavior. We do not have to subscribe to moral relativism. We can insist that there are universal goods and evils that transcend cultural differences.
Violation of those universal values must not be tolerated on the basis of “cultural diversity.” Slavery is wrong always. Racial and religious persecution, child abuse, the subjugation of women, torture, gratuitous cruelty (to people or animals), rape, and pederasty—to list but some—are never justifiable. Were a culture to espouse these values, we would then be perfectly free—morally obligated, I would say—to condemn it as pathological or evil.
We have a significant list of characteristics that by general agreement allow us to define a culture of hatred. The prime example in modern times, and perhaps in all history, is surely Nazi Germany. This is not to say that there have not been other monstrous events of mass slaughter and destruction in the past. But Germany in the twentieth century—with its newfound might and powers—created a Holocaust against the Jews that became the event that redefined that term. In its pathological assaults on the Jew, often to the detriment of its self-interest in the war; in its calculated and perverse technology of mass torture and killing; in its psychotic rationalizations; in its senseless cruelties; in the persistent and unremitting pursuit of genocide to the final moments of the war—Nazi Germany became the defining example of a culture of hatred.
How could the Holocaust have happened? How could such a monstrous policy have been initiated in a modern, highly educated, technological society, in so public a manner, with so little resistance from the outside world of passive onlookers, the Zuschauenden? In other words, why Germany, why the Jews, and what explains the passivity in the face of such evil by the Christian churches and the leaders of liberal democracy?65 These are questions for all times and all disciplines. These are questions that result in multiple, but only partial, answers. Here, I use the Holocaust only as an extreme example to illustrate the psychology of group hatred, without any pretense of explaining its historic meaning or political evolution.
Antisemitism
In an uncharacteristically overwrought article in Esquire magazine in 1974, Cynthia Ozick, the talented writer and brilliant social critic, declared that in the warmest of Christian hearts there is a cold place reserved for the Jews. This was in response to the fact that with the opening of Chinese society (then just happening), antisemitism seemed to be one of the first Western ideas to be heartily embraced by the Chinese, despite an obvious lack of any significant association with Jews. How could the Chinese so quickly adopt antisemitic stereotypes? One would normally expect, as Ozick clearly did, that some contact, some bad experiences, some history of animosity, must antedate a rancorous condemnation of an entire group.
A similar dejected feeling to that of Ozick’s must have permeated the atmosphere at the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism in Jerusalem, when they were made aware in 1994 of the presence in Japan and Korea of a “mystifyingly positive response to the antisemitic stereotype of the Jew found in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion”—a poisonous antisemitic tract then being actively circulated in Asia. These two countries are even more unlikely to have had any extensive experience with Jews than China.
The Jews are the quintessential scapegoats—the oldest pariah population, the most universally demonized people. Antisemitism has been traced back to earliest recorded history. And over the centuries, its ready recrudescence and the intensity of loathing and hatred that has been directed against the Jews have been astonishing.
The history of antisemitism is so well documented that one would expect nothing new could emerge. The literature is so imposing—more than thirty thousand volumes at the Sassoon Center—that one would assume little headway could be made by a new historian or sociologist approaching the subject. Yet each new emergence of militant antisemitism is a particularly lurid reminder of its ubiquitous presence and produces a rash of new analytic studies. The Holocaust, in its irrational extreme and terrifying results, ushered in a new era of scholarship on anti-semitism and, arising in the post-Freudian era, offered new emphasis on its psychological aspects. Earlier attempts at psychological understanding had some perverse results.
In the wake of the Dreyfus Affair—an antisemitic outrage that rocked France at the end of the nineteenth century—a French Jewish journalist, Bernard Lazare, wrote his now-controversial but important book, Antisemitism: Its History and Causes.66 It is now controversial because the text is most likely to be quoted these days in antisemitic literature. It is important because it was a pioneering effort to understand the psychological foundations of antisemitism. The psychological underpinnings of anti-semitism, as distinguished from its sociological and historical roots, are relevant to all forms of hatred.
The Jew haters have drawn comfort and ammunition particularly from Lazare’s first chapter, which deals with general causes. In it he stated:This race has been the object of hatred with all the nations amidst whom it ever settled. Inasmuch as the enemies of the Jews belonged to diverse races, as they dwelled far apart from one another, were ruled by different laws and governed by opposite principle; as they had not the same customs and differed in spirit from one another, so they could not possibly judge alike of any subject, it must need be that the general causes of antisemitism have always resided in Israel itself [this was written a half century before the creation of the state of Israel, and therefore, “Israel” as used throughout Lazare’s text refers no
t to a state but to the Jews collectively], and not in those who antagonized it.67
That statement has become a credo of antisemitic literature, and the arguments that follow from it have led to an unfair labeling of Lazare by many as a Jewish antisemite. Nevertheless, he continued in the very next—and less quoted—paragraph: “This does not mean that justice was always on the side of Israel’s persecutors, or that they did not indulge in all the extremes born of hatred; it is merely asserted that the Jews were themselves, in part, at least, the cause of their own ills.”
As one follows Lazare’s text, the source of the confusion becomes apparent. It stems from the ambiguity in his use of the word “cause.” We tend these days to use “cause” when we mean “the agent that necessarily or ineluctably leads to a result.” We use “reason,” a similar word, to refer to that which might “explain the occurrence or nature of an effect.” Similarly we have the word “occasion” to use for “a situation that permits or stimulates existing causes to come into play.” Although the victim population may seem to offer significant reasons and occasions for their being targeted, they are never the cause.
Hatred, to be sustained as an ongoing relationship, is always an attempt by the hater to deal with the humiliating and frustrating conditions of his own existence. The hater is attempting to resolve an internal conflict and requires the victim population to facilitate his displacement and rationalization. The only reason for examining victim populations is to find clues as to how they serve the unconscious machinations of the haters.
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