Religions, or their ultranationalist equivalents, have the power to choose and identify “enemies.” They do so by defining evil or heretic populations: Jews, Irish Protestants/Catholics, Serbs/ Croats, Muslims/Hindus. Genocide sanctioned by dogma or orthodoxy and rationalized by political leaders can then be declared a means of purification, a defense of principle—in the service of God or the good—and even an act of survival. Religious leaders have enormous special powers to influence the believer far beyond that afforded secular leaders.
First, religion has “the Word.” The prestige of the Church bureaucracy resides in its self-appointed position as intermediary between God and his subjects. Their authority is both interpretive and directive. Most of us do not hear the voice of God and are not privy to his wants. The power of religious leaders resides in their arrogation of the capacity and right to interpret the divine text.
Second, the Church is an educator. The Church bureaucracy, in its self-perpetuated role as interpreter of the divine text—whether the Koran or the Bible—arrogates a responsibility to inform and instruct the layman. The word of God is what the leaders say it is. They define the appropriate beliefs and the proper code of conduct. As God’s instruments, religious leaders are regarded with the kind of fear and awe that inspire obedience. We now have a culturally accepted alternative to paranoid delusion, a method of receiving instructions from God and following his commandments. This power allows religious leaders to locate the source of misery in the populace; define the enemy, the infidel or the anti-Christ; and command action, whether crusade, jihad, or an act of personal martyrdom.
Third, faith supplies power. It demands allegiance and obedience beyond the tests of reason. Faith is demanded in most religious observers. One suspension of reason can facilitate the next. If one believes that Moses literally received the tablets of the law from God on Mount Sinai, then one is prepared to accept the delivery of the golden plates of the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith in Palmyra, New York. And one can believe that the Reverend Jim Jones will lead us out of the modern wilderness.78 We unfairly denigrate the faith of believers in new religions, but the same suspension of logic is required in the traditional religions. The miracles of the Old and New Testaments would seem strange indeed if newly presented in the twenty-first century.
The power of faith is in its ability to counter all the impulses of instinct and the directives of rational thinking. Even the ubiquitous fear of death can be overcome by the promises of faith, whether through fusion with Christ, enshrinement in Valhalla, or admission to the earthly paradise, with its corporal and carnal pleasures, promised by Islam.
Finally, religion supplies passion. Religion (or ultranationalism) does more than define the enemy and rationalize the hatred. It supplies the passion. The kind of passion that allows for torture and cruelty is borrowed from religious ecstasy. Very little besides terror, sexual passion, or religious fervor can support the excesses of group hatred. The passion supplied by religion sustains hatred over a lifetime and across generations. The institution of religion is particularly well endowed with all the ingredients necessary to supply the tinder that ignites group hatred.
Another traditional role of religion that has made it useful to secular authorities is its ability to bring comfort to the masses, and comfort may be used in the service of civil control. Since life for the masses has historically been one of misery and toil, often because of exploitation by the privileged minority, the comfort offered by religion can serve as an emollient to the masses, making misery tolerable. One argument for the ready acceptance by secular powers of an alternative and potentially competitive leadership, the Church, has been the usefulness of religion in stabilizing a feudal and exploitative state. The promise of an afterlife makes the here and now more bearable. Poverty may be endurable, even preferable, if it is true that the meek shall inherit the earth, and the poor man find justice in heaven.
For years, one of the intended or incidental effects of culturally sanctioned antisemitism in the Catholic and medieval cultures of Europe was the stabilizing effect it offered the state. The Church encouraged the perpetuation of antisemitism, “the longest hatred,”79 for its utilitarian effects. The value of the Jews as scapegoats was in their capacity to divert the masses from the proper sources of their despair, a miserable and impoverished existence. This status quo was easy to maintain when the Church was powerful and unified, the states were weak and diverse, and there was no powerful middle class.
With the Reformation, the creation of the modern state, and the rise of a bourgeoisie, the balance shifted. The power of the universal Church was diminished. Diverse “truths” were revealed. The nation materialized as an alternative source of power, an alternative allegiance, and a new community of identification. After the separation of Church and state, rival loyalties were offered to the masses—Church and state—with diminished powers for each, or variable apportioning of the areas of power between the two, depending on the specific culture.
Out of the masses emerged a strong middle class with the kind of secular life that would be less easy to sacrifice for the admittedly grander, but less certain, future in heaven.80 As life approximated in richness the qualities ascribed to an afterlife, it would be harder to abandon that which we know—the bird in the hand—for that which was only promised. Still, conditions would arise where a population filled with frustration, resentment, and despair would be ripe and waiting for an explosion into hatred. Max Scheler labeled this emotional state as ressentiment, and he described it as a dangerous, pathological, and destructive condition. Ressentiment is not exactly translatable to resentment, as it is more powerful than that, a toxic brew of resentment, envy, spite, rage, and revenge: “Ressentiment can only arise if these emotions are particularly powerful and yet must be suppressed because they are coupled with the feeling that one is unable to act them out—either because of weakness, physical or mental, or because of fear.”81
Scheler described this condition as endemic in the Germany of 1912 in which he was writing. Twenty years or so later, the conditions were only intensified. In the period following the massive defeat of Germany in World War I, a nation emerged that was joined in humiliation and impoverishment. With the coming to power of a paranoid leadership—obsessed with a virulent anti-semitism born out of the leaders’ individual psyches—a new Germany emerged. Democracy was replaced with a Fascist dictatorship. The pathological leaders offered a paranoid justification for the feelings of the Germans that relieved them of responsibility and supplied them with a culpable enemy. The qualities of both religion and statehood were combined under the Nazis. And then to supply passion and justification, a religious and mystical mission was offered. A crusade was initiated with the emphasis on protecting not just the people or the state but the purity of the Aryan “race.” The Holocaust became a reality.
Ultranationalist dictatorships share certain characteristics of religious orthodoxy but these qualities are joined with the military powers of the state. When one combines the two, as is so common now in the Arab world, it becomes apparent why the Islamic state is now viewed as a center for international terrorism.
The work of Al Qaeda, the ideological community, is also supported by its fundamentalist assumptions. It is supported in its efforts by the existence of theocratic dictatorships throughout the Middle East, which erase the traditional balance of power between national and religious interests, limiting the excesses of either. With Al Qaeda the role of religion is central and all-powerful. Religion creates, encourages, rationalizes, and supports hatred—and supplies enemies, the infidel. Al Qaeda is particularly effective in its capacity to wreak havoc because it attaches its religious fanaticism to political struggles, operating as both a political movement and a religious crusade.
Al Qaeda has been described as the Muslim version of the Christian Crusades. The comparison is grossly inexact. The assumption is that because the Crusades represented the particular ideologies of a religion—the Christians—
it was an ideological action. It was, in fact, a territorial one. When Pope Urban II gave his clarion call at the Council of Clermont in 1095, his purposes were clear. The object was not conversion of the heathen, but the liberation of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. It is generally agreed that the primary mission of the Church was gaining access to the holy places, whereas the promise of power and wealth motivated the secular leaders who actually mobilized the troops and initiated the actions. One of the major positive consequences of the Crusades was the creation of a larger community of interests and contact. The world of the West was enlarged, enriched, and complicated by its exposure to the East.
The modern networks of communication facilitated the formation of Al Qaeda. But what is the articulated purpose of this crusade? What is its Holy Sepulcher? What does Al Qaeda want? The easy answer is the security of a Palestinian state. That certainly is the goal of the Palestinian terrorist. But Al Qaeda is not motivated by the establishment of something. It is the destruction of something that Al Qaeda wants. But what is it? Some would say the destruction of the state of Israel. But the evidence and the chronology of their activities belie that. When they began to mention Israel, it seemed to come only as an afterthought. Destroying Israel appears to be an opportunistic claim, a Johnny-come-lately plan. Their true venom seems to be more directed to Jews in general as representative of the larger host of infidels.
Al Qaeda leaders, by embracing a general antisemitism, have now joined a traditional bigotry. They have found the one-size-fits-all enemy, the Jews. They send tanker trucks to destroy a Jewish synagogue in Tunisia and people with bombs to destroy Jewish cultural institutions in France. Israel appears to be a temporary convenience for Al Qaeda, a rationalization created to influence the liberal communities of Europe that have been offended by the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and impatient at the lack of progress in a peace settlement. Israel is most likely a way station for Al Qaeda in its jihad against the hated modern state.
One suspects that the attacks on Jewish (not Israeli) targets in Europe and North Africa represent a temporary and safer alternative to the “Jewish schools and neighborhoods in the United States” that Al Qaeda indicated were to be its prime targets. And what perfect targets! By assaulting these American-Jewish institutions, it would threaten both the security of Jews in the United States and the country itself. That would join the surrogate, the Jews, to the great Satan that really offends it, the United States.
What is special about either Jews or Americans? Nothing. All infidels, all unbelievers, constitute Al Qaeda’s theoretical enemy. But it is difficult to mobilize hatred toward so large and amorphous an enemy. Focus is necessary in a crusade. These two groups represent the most convenient entry points for Al Qaeda’s hatred.
Al Qaeda represents the new community of hatred, as Nazi Germany represented the old. Traditional hatred has always been stoked by rage. And rage has been triggered by fear. Both are the products of feeling humiliated and threatened. Traditional hatred was built on competition for food, land, and survival. The enemy is at our gates; it is them or us. The savage hatred and barbarity manifest between the Iroquois and their enemies, the neighboring and related tribes during the American colonial period, were a product of that special animus often reserved for neighbors and brothers. The enmity was based on a competitive struggle for the means of survival.
The bloodshed in the Balkans was similar, one of feared enemies competing in an enclosed and limited space. Fear and anger went hand in hand. The Palestinian/Israeli conflict can be structured in this way. But not Al Qaeda. Territory is not its goal. Ideology is. And envy, not fear, is the emotion that dictates its selection of an enemy.
Nevertheless, whether the battle is over ideology or territory, the real enemy is always the one within. The real mortification is one’s own sense of personal inadequacy and failure. The hated communities are psychological displacements. For members of Al Qaeda and other anti-Americans, that displacement is dictated by envy. Neither the Jews nor the Americans threaten the religious belief of Islam. At least not by direct evangelical expansionism. The threat to Islamic communities is from the seductive image of a different life visualized through the extended perception of such modern technologies as international television, movies, CDs, DVDs, and particularly the Internet.
The United States is hated, not for the evil it has inflicted, but for its envied achievements, its seductive way of life. Anger is a response to the negative aspects of a culture; envy is a response to the positive. And who better to envy than the United States. The jihad may have been initiated by the mullahs out of their rejection of modernity, which they view as sacrilegious. But the masses have an authentic craving for the comforts and decencies of modern society. Only those with access to electricity romanticize the candle. Iran may have seceded from the modern world under the repressive regime of the mullahs, but Iranian antimodernism barely lasted one generation, even under the constrictive regime of a totalitarian theocracy.
Still, neither evangelical fervor nor envy can sustain a state of hatred. Hatred at its base is always a rationalization. It is a displacement to an identifiable other as the source of our personal miseries. Hatred is a disease, a social disease. And it is highly contagious.
I have heard many say, in defense of Palestinian hatred, that after generations of being kept in squalid refugee camps by their own people, becoming increasingly aware of a different and superior standard of living available to others, feeling frustrated and humiliated by the exercise of Israeli power, Palestinians are “entitled” to their hatred. This is one of the sad misunderstandings of the nature of hatred. Hatred is not entitlement like health care. It is a disease like tuberculosis. It may infect others, but it inevitably destroys the hater, diminishing his humanity and perverting the purpose and promise of life itself. No one is entitled to hatred any more than he is entitled to cancer.
In recent times the civilized European communities and the United Nations have honed their skills at detecting injustice by focusing on “American imperialism” and the “Israeli occupation.” As I do not take any human rights violations lightly, I pay attention to their charges. Still, I am amazed by their peculiar insensitivity—one might say blindness—to the heinous crimes and atrocities committed on the African continent. Their umbrage threshold is very high when dealing with the slavery, abuse of women, child labor, even genocide that are endemic there. Whether this disparity of response is political correctness operating in concert with latent hostility to the privileged populations, or a reverse manifestation of racism that perceives barbarity as a more natural and permissible aspect of black and Arab cultures, I am not sure.
The hand-wringing in the United Nations and the press in Europe over the victims of American and Israeli acts of “genocide” in Afghanistan or the West Bank have so occupied the debates of the world community that the unspeakable war of true genocide in Sudan goes relatively unattended. The people of the Sudan live and starve in makeshift refugee camps in the shadows that lie beyond the astigmatic vision of the world bureaucracies. We can not afford the luxury of standing by. There are no more “local” problems in the area of hatred. We must heed the warning of Nelly Sachs:You onlookers
Whose eyes watched the killing.
As one feels a stare at one’s back
You feel on your bodies
The glances of the dead.
How many dying eyes will look at you
When you pluck a violet from its hiding place?
How many hands be raised in supplication
In the twisted martyr-like branches
Of old oaks?
How much memory grows in the blood
Of the evening sun?82
14
CONFRONTING HATRED HEAD-ON
Whether through the special creation of God or a radical evolutionary adaptation, we human beings are unparalleled in the world of animals. That gift of freedom is the defining attribute of our distinctiveness. It is the underpinn
ing of both human glory and human agony. It defines our way of life. The gift of freedom demands responsibility. Responsibility justifies moral condemnation and punishment. With knowledge comes good and evil, imagination and dread, anticipation and despair, creation and destruction. This combination of knowledge and freedom—freedom of action and responsibility—creates the moral universe.
The intellectual and creative use of knowledge—the foundation of our intelligence and imagination—has liberated most of us from spending our days absorbed in the struggle simply to stay alive. Through knowledge we have woven an elaborate cultural tapestry that defines modern existence beyond mere grubbing for survival. Through the exercise of freedom we have suffered unaccountable pain, but we have been able to lift ourselves out of the caves to traverse the very heavens.
But with our special knowledge we know how perilous that existence is. We know that however carefully we protect ourselves from predator or disease, death awaits us all. Animals fear the predator, but they do not know death. They cannot experience the human agony caused by the certitude of our own death. Cautious or not, lucky or not, privileged or deprived, we all die and the world goes on without us.
Many psychologists place the knowledge of death—and our need to live with this dreadful burden—at the forefront of our lives. How can something so central, so pivotal, to our own personal world—our self—be but an ephemeral and passing phenomenon? How can we be disposable? Such a narcissistic injury, such a blow to our own inflated self-worth, is simply not allowable. Since our own knowledge has brought us to the brink of this abyss, perhaps our imagination and intelligence can keep us from falling in.
The psychological term for closing your eyes to a reality is “denial.” Ernest Becker, in his book The Denial of Death,83 viewed the world of neuroses as an elaborate means to disavow our own death. Many of the irrational anxieties that plague our existence he explains as mere displacements from the transcendent terror of our own inevitable end. Freud postulated the human invention of religion, with its promise of eternal life, as the ultimate denial of death. Freud saw religion as a human illusion designed to comfort us in the existential world of vulnerability and anxiety that we occupy.84 The promise of the form of immortality known as an afterlife may be seen as an elaborate structure to support the denial of death. The martyr trades the irrelevancy of a temporal and degraded life on earth for a permanent position at the side of God through eternity. The paradox is that except for the occasional martyr, most of us—including believers—cling tenaciously to life and try to protect ourselves against the terrors known and unknown that threaten us.
Hatred Page 21
