An Anatomy of Hate
Full disclosure: I think "hate speech" laws are unnecessary, illiberal and arguably counter-productive (see below). If you support such laws, you may want to speculate that I am a covert Nazi sympathizer who probably tortures kittens in his spare time, and read what follows with this possibility firmly in mind.
Why this post? Very simple. As a linguist I am forced to be aware of polysemy and of semantically diffuse terms, and as an armchair philosopher I often find myself wondering to what extent our individual and collective thought is constrained by verbal imprecision, which may be built into the language we use. The lexis of emotion, for example, is puzzlingly inadequate: many everyday mental states are impossible to reference in English without recourse to circuitous figurative language and symbolism, or to Eliot's Objective Correlative. Well, it strikes me that "hate" is an obvious example of a word whose meaning is seldom, if ever, precisely and adequately defined; and it also strikes me that the moment you elevate Hate Speech and Hate Crimes to the status of legal categories, this lack of definition becomes a problem.
Not that whatever I have to say in this respect will change anything or influence anyone, of course: but I still like to have things clear in my own mind. In the marketplace of ideas I'm that little stall at the end where everything is dirt cheap and most of what's on offer looks as if it was salvaged from a house fire, but you never know, there might be something usable in there somewhere if you rummage around a bit.
First: semantic imprecision. I assume it's obvious to the reader that statements such as the following do not all reference a single mental state, attitude or emotion:
I hate beetroot.
I hate it when you open the ice cream tub and it's all melted.
I hate people who put little circles instead of dots over their i's.
I hate Mormons, Jews, Nazis, Communists, women, blacks, gays, men, scientists, Finns, and people with too much nostril hair. Everyone else I'm fine with.
I hate my life.
I hate liars.
I hate Tom Cruise.
"For I hate divorce, says the LORD, the God of Israel..." (Malachi 2:16)
"I hate divorce," Rumpole said. "Those cases are just so boring. Give me a good old assault and battery any day of the week."
Well, you get the idea. Now, while the instinct of a scientist or a philosopher might be to castigate at least half of the speakers above for using words loosely or without proper demarcation of terms, that of a linguist is to simply smile wryly and murmur "polysemy". We can't reasonably expect people to give up such a useful word in everyday speech, or to second-guess themselves every time they are about to utter it. However, I think it's reasonable to apply a higher standard to political and legal discourse. After all, it's not as if the word, or its various near cousins (homophobia, misogyny, Islamophobia, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, etc.) were infrequently used. (I will argue that most of them should be.) So if we are going to accuse people of expressing, or acting on, or fomenting, or being prejudiced by, hate, then we need to explain exactly what we mean by the word.
Uncle Wiki, as always, has his own idea:
Well, that's not a bad starting point, and in fact, on examination, it comes pretty close to the definition I wish to put forward. All I would say against it is that, arguably, it casts the net too wide for my present purposes, since I am uninterested in the phenomenon of people hating spiders, ringtones, Horniman's so-called "tea", or pub opening hours, as matters without any obvious political significance. What concerns me is people hating other people, or being accused of doing so. What I especially like about the wikidefinition is that it acknowledges the confluence of three distinct factors - anger, disgust and hostility - which more or less align with my own somewhat more developed proposal below.
The first thing I would like to examine, though, is the question of whether hate is adequately described as an emotion. Uncle Wiki seems to think that it is not: the term "emotional dislike" suggests that the emotion is accompanied by some more stable cognitive element (I don't just passively experience hatred, I entertain it: the term "dislike" hints at an attitude of tacit acceptance on my part, whereby the emotion is regarded as having a legitimate place and role in my cognitive landscape, enough to give it a respectable sounding name). My own somewhat limited experience in this regard suggests that, under certain circumstances, a volcano of hatred can erupt in you, apparently unbidden (though perhaps taking advantage of a certain predisposition or weakness), but what happens in the next few seconds is down to you: you can choose to entertain the emotion, suppress it, or distance yourself from it. Of the three options, I personally think the least healthy is that of suppression (because as a general rule, emotions that are prematurely stifled will come back to haunt you in some shape or form), and the healthiest (but most difficult) is that of adopting a certain distance: you recognize and acknowledge the emotion in yourself, give it its proper name, then try to understand and study it, without at any moment letting it control you or try to muscle in on your identity.
In both the above cases, you've "dealt with it" (for now). Consensually (and here I do agree with the consensus) the hatred we can actually see and identify, most of the time, in others, is the result, not of people suppressing or detaching themselves from the emotion, but of, as I say, "entertaining" it. And in order to entertain it, by which I mean stabilize it in the mind and incorporate it somehow into that part of consciousness which determines willed behavior, we need to provide it with some sort of stable cognitive avatar. We need to associate the emotion with something we can imagine and describe, and recall any time we like. We need to turn the emotion into thoughts.
This, of course, begs the question: why would we want to do that? If hatred is, as popularly and simplistically supposed, a "negative emotion", why would I want to prolong it in my own mind?
Now, it strikes me that this is not at all an easy question to answer. But before trying to do so, I would advise the reader to decide, from her own experience, whether the question even deserves an answer at all. Do people, in fact, deliberately choose to prolong the emotion of hatred, to recall it, to cultivate it, to strengthen it in themselves? Before answering this, I would suggest thinking back to some occasion in your life when you consider you were grievously wronged in some way. In my case it would be when my house was burgled about six years ago. What was happening in your mind during the subsequent period of coming to terms with the injustice? Did you find yourself obsessively bringing up the image of the person responsible, demonizing that person, and perhaps dramatizing in your imagination some future reckoning or come-uppance that person would have to face? Or let's try this: have you ever watched a Hollywood drama in which you felt the bad guy got off too lightly (he died, but too quickly and without enough obvious suffering to constitute a proper catharsis)? If the answer is yes to either of these, you will have no trouble following the train of thought I will develop in the rest of this post. If no, then I should perhaps take a moment to congratulate you on your apparent immunity, while reiterating my belief that the response I have described is at least fairly common. In other words, I am going to proceed on the assumption, derived from introspection and anecdotal observation, that people do in fact, under certain conditions, more or less deliberately cultivate in themselves the emotion of hatred. If you disagree with that starting assumption, you'll probably remain unconvinced by all that follows, and it will have to be peer-reviewed studies at dawn.
As to why people do this, well, I strongly suspect that here we would have to hand the mike over to the neurologists, who I dare say could do an excellent job of explaining which neurotransmitters are involved in which parts of the brain and how they relate to what may be characterized as a mild form of addictive behaviour. As to how we perceive this phenomenon subjectively, well, perhaps the closest analogy is that of scratching an itch. The object of hatred comes to represent, to symbolize or causally explain, all that is unsatisfactory in our life or in the world around us (in extreme cases). We may not be able to eliminate this locus of evil, but reminding ourselves of its existence at least brings the problem more sharply into view, and makes us feel that bit closer to resolving it.
There's another possible complementary explanation, of course: the tribal one. Hatred is, without doubt, a preeminently tribal emotion, in that it governs and demarcates social relations, and helps to establish and police in-group and out-group membership. This fact alone points strongly to an evolutionary connection and some hard-wiring.
Now, having dipped a toe into "why", let's get onto "how". The following is my personal account of the cognitive process involved:
0. Some event has caused you to experience momentary hatred (or at least dislike) towards another person or group of people. The emotion was powerful and heady and exotic and, in a perverse sort of way, made you feel good. Instinctively, you decide you want to prolong this emotion, if only so as to understand it better.
1. You rationalize the hatred as the natural consequence of a perceived offence or injustice committed against you by the object of your hatred. If there is none, you hurriedly invent one. This need to rationalize may be strengthened by the common perception of hatred as a negative emotion, one that "good" people don't normally experience. In order to justify to yourself how you, a "good" person, can experience and want to prolong something so negative, you are forced to exaggerate somewhat the scale of the offence or injustice. You feel a twinge of bad faith at this point, but brush it away. No, really, the offence or injustice was very serious indeed! If you can justify the hatred as deriving not from an offence to you, but to a wider category of people (ideally, innocent, oppressed people) then even better: you can now, while entertaining hatred, congratulate yourself on your altruistic stance and motives.
2. The animosity you feel towards the object of your hatred, and the immense scale of the injustice suffered, seem to demand revenge and reparation. You experience hostility towards that person or those people. You want to hurt or humiliate them, or to see them suffer. This, in your mind, would be "justice".
3. The only remaining problem, that threatens the stability and continuity of this emotion, is empathy. Imagining harm coming to another human being makes you feel uncomfortable, and calls forth an opposing empathic response. To circumvent this, you are forced to caricature your enemy in your mind, exaggerating their supposed negative qualities and dismissing the possibility of there being any positive ones. Taking this to extremes, you will persuade yourself that the enemy is practically subhuman. In this respect, it is interesting to observe that in pretty much all cultures, the portrait of "the other" that hatred tries to build up tends to be very much of a piece: he is cunning but not intelligent, devious, treacherous, sneering and arrogant, totally lacking in generosity or finer feelings, feverishly acquisitive and covetous, physically repulsive... oh, and he murders babies and horribly mistreats women. (And yes, the fact that we have to go to such extremes of caricature to stifle the empathic response is, in a paradoxical way, a tribute to the strength of that response, to our essential humanity.)
And that's it. Your personal quarterpounder of hatred, with fries, is now ready to go. Have a nice day! To sum up, then:
Hatred = Offence (real or imaginary, justifying "Anger", as per Wiki, or "moral outrage") + Desire to harm ("Hostility" - Wiki) + Negative portrayal of characteristics of the Other (thus, per Wiki, allowing "Disgust")
Now, if we are going to apply this formula to those manifestations of hatred that are considered politically significant in some way, or that are deemed to justify legal categorization, we need to ask first how many of these elements need to be present for the label to be justified. That's an important question. Let's try the one by one approach:
Offence. Imagine someone who has been, and knows himself to be, the victim of some sort of offence or wrongdoing, and is perhaps angered by this. Yet he has no desire to harm the offender, nor does he deny the latter's essential humanity and possible redeeming traits. Would we be inclined to accuse him of hatred? I doubt it. He would more likely be complimented on his humanitarian disposition and maturity in refusing to seek revenge.
Desire to harm. Now imagine someone who, presumably in the grip of a sexual paraphilia, delights in causing token harm to members of the opposite sex in (ahem) a bedroom context. This person does not consider himself a victim of any kind of wrongdoing, and has, if anything, a rather idealized and rosy vision of the sex in question. Does he "hate" his victims? That's harder to answer, but I would recommend a "no" - if only because a yes would fundamentally distort our understanding of what was going on. (A person who desired to inflict more extreme harm on people with no attempt at justification or sense of offence would probably be considered an extreme pathological case, a full-fledged psycho. Even Hannibal Lecter tended to eat only people who were "rude" to him. Nevertheless, "hate" still seems somehow the wrong word.)
Disgust. Finally, imagine someone who, perhaps through upbringing or one of those apparently irrational phobia-type things, feels an invincible revulsion in the presence of people of a different ethnic group, or nationality, or (more rarely) gender. This person does not, however, consider himself personally offended by those people, nor does he wish them any harm. Does he hate them? I would say not, and I hope you would agree. (In the old Spanish blog, I had a commenter who admitted to just this sort of ungovernable physical repulsion, I won't say who to.)
In my view, it is clear that none of these factors on its own constitutes "hate", though it may still be pathological. However, if you look at any of the possible combinations of two, a curious thing happens: the missing third element of the trio seems to suggest itself almost irresistibly, by which I mean it is actually hard to imagine it being absent. Try it. Try imagining someone who thought that, say, Irish Protestants were foreign colonial invaders (offence) and that they were also ugly, rapacious, arrogant, smug, sneering bastards (dehumanization) and then listen to that person saying "...but naturally I don't wish any harm to them." Do you believe him?
If it is true that the presence of two of these factors in the mind tends, by a powerful and perhaps evolutionarily reinforced mechanism, to call forth the third, this has important legal repercussions in the domain of Hate Speech laws and the like, since we could then confidently stipulate that a particular discourse would count as Hate Speech if it contained two of the above three elements: the speaker would be counting on the third being supplied by the mental reflexes of the listener. Nazi propaganda, for example, as referenced in the link to Der Sturmer above, tended to wax lyrical on the (entirely imaginary) offences committed against the Germans by the International Jewish Conspiracy (Die Juden sind Unser Ungluck!), while at the same time going to extreme pains to caricature and dehumanize the target group. The assumption was clearly that the German people would then find any sort of Final Solution quite justified: it was hardly even necessary to hint at the idea.
Do we find examples of such discourse in the modern world? Definitely: one only needs to think of anti-Jewish propaganda in some Middle Eastern countries. Is it commonplace? Fortunately, no, at least in the blatant and direct form we see in the ideological propaganda of the mid twentieth century. I don't think there's any simple answer to the question of why we don't see more developed hate speech than we do, given certain fundamentals of human nature, but among the list of possible incomplete explanations, I find "because it's illegal in some countries" far less persuasive than "because it's legal in others". What I mean is that one needs to see and hear a little of it, and to observe its effects, and the kind of people who resort to it (check out some of the seedier YouTube comments sections), in order to gain a proper understanding of its socially virulent and destructive nature. Mithraditism remains the best approach to dealing with a poison - at least, of that sort. This is one of the reasons why I think that trying to ban Hate Speech is as wrongheaded as, say, trying to prevent children from finding out about sex.
Another partial explanation for the current dearth of would-be Hitlers is that in order to effectively conjure politically useful hatred on a large scale (remembering that for a politician, having an entire population busy hating the same real or imagined "enemy", under your astute direction, is very heaven) the enemy in question should ideally be remote and difficult or impossible to engage at close quarters (lest his harmlessness and humanity be prematurely discovered): and with the advent of the Internet it's much harder to prevent people from finding out, in direct conversation, what the enemy is really like, and to conclude that they probably don't eat babies after all. This is why it is, for me, no coincidence that the most successful populist governments across the world (including here in Ecuador) have perfected the daily hysterical denunciation of a largely non-existent and otherwise socially remote enemy to a fine art. Here, the enemy is "neoliberalism" - a made-up ideology with an international subscriber base of precisely 0 people - along with "selfish bankers" (if I ever meet a banker, I shall be sure to ask him whether he is selfish or not), "US Imperialism" (as if Uncle Sam could give a shit, post Berlin Wall, what went on in any of the surviving Banana Republics). "traitors to the Fatherland", "cocktail-quaffing mummies" (sic) and other hippogriffs: this show will run and run.
In a globalized world, it is seldom as useful as it once was for the politician to stir up hatred against foreign nationalities. Yet people still yearn, instinctively, to belong to, if not a homogeneous nation, at least a tribe, some sort of social group with a common identity, tokens of membership, and, inevitably, some sort of out-group to exclude and distrust. It is a sad fact of human nature that, apparently, we need to exclude someone in order to feel included ourselves (this happens even at the basic level of water-cooler gossip). I personally believe that humans are potentially smart enough to overcome such inherited kinks and to get along together in a civilized manner: but I don't believe this will happen as long as we are allowed and encouraged, or even forced, to devolve the responsibility of managing our social relations to governments or corporate monoliths (by which I mean the policing of social media like Twitter and Facebook). We need the freedom to take risks in order to understand ourselves and our own emotional responses, and we need to take direct responsibility for our behaviour. In this regard, Hate Speech laws have an obstructive, infantilizing effect, and point in entirely the wrong direction.
One of those aspects of human behaviour I believe deserves to be addressed and discussed is a particular variant of behavioural confirmation, whereby if we tell a person that some trivial aspect of his or her personal identity - e.g. skin colour, or gender, or religious affiliation - is fundamental to their tribal identity, or at least is held to be so by others, and may even be involved in some sinister dynamic of collective suspicion and hatred, this will cause the person, reflexively and defensively, to identify with that aspect and hypostatize it into something it doesn't have to be: a membership token. Put yourself in the position of a Muslim living somewhere on the Old Kent Road. On different occasions, but in a single week, you hear the following:
NASTY BAD PERSON: You Muslims are all murderous terrorists.
GOOD VIRTUE-SIGNALLY PERSON: We must take steps to combat the massive tide of Islamophobia that threatens to engulf the Western World.
When I hear the first, my adrenalin levels rise from 2 to 3. When I hear the second, they shoot up to 6 or 7. So high do they shoot, in fact, that I make a mental note to start attending my local mosque (despite being lapsed since 2009) in order to find out what is going on. Y'know, in case any collective defence strategy is needed.
Irresponsible, baseless, frivolous accusations of "hatred" are thus arguably as bad as, or worse than, direct manifestations of same, when it comes to social polarization. What do I mean by irresponsible? Well, the following is from a Guardian article of a few days ago:
What the impartial reader will immediately note is that no actual evidence of hatred of women ("misogyny") is presented here, despite the author apparently having mustered his very best arguments, and despite the fact he seems willing to engage in a little misdirection. As far as I am aware, Trump has never asserted that all women, or women in general, are "dogs" or "pigs": what he has done is used these terms to refer to individuals who happened to be women. Since these are not gendered insults (and, arguably, even if they were), his use of such language is utterly irrelevant, unless you think that when it comes to insults, women should be treated with especial delicacy - which while not being a misogynist belief, is clearly a very sexist one. (As is the odd idea that men shouldn't rate women out of 10 on looks: women do this with men all the time. HotOrNot, anyone?) Otherwise, what we have here is a series of examples of rude (but in the rough 'n' tumble world of debased political discourse, pretty run of the mill) behaviour towards individual women, one or two of which strongly suggest a willingness to exploit existing gender stereotypes ("time of the month" stuff, appeal to physical (un)attractiveness) as rhetorical weapons for immediate tactical advantage. And that's it. On the "Hate Speech Rubric" outlined above, I would have to say that given the above evidence, Trump scores a resounding 0 out of 5 on Attribution of Offence/Moral Outrage/Anger, 0.1 out of 5 on Hostility or Desire to Harm (he was certainly aggressive to the women in question, but there is no evidence that the fact they were women is causally implicated in that hostility), and perhaps, given the appeal to stereotypes, 1 or even 2 out of 5 on Dehumanization/Disgust. Even if you insist on giving him a 4 or a 5 on the last parameter (the fine print on the rubric is illegible at present), he's still failed the exam.
By the way, I wouldn't vote for Trump (in an imaginary parallel universe in which I was an American citizen) if you held a gun to my head. Reasons to follow in future post: let's just say that the overwhelming weight of evidence that he's a complete arsehole is, in my opinion, at least marginally relevant. But that's no reason to swallow all the propaganda. My perception is that Mr Trump does indeed have a sexist attitude to women, but sexism does not equal misogyny (a point I will probably need a further post to develop fully): there is no evidence that he either believes women have collectively wronged him in some way, nor that they collectively deserve to be harmed, or that he would be pleased to see some terrible vengeance wrought upon the sex. Cretinous though his social behaviour undoubtedly is, I don't even believe his attitude to them, collectively, is one of unmitigated disgust. It just looks like it from a certain distance and with certain ideological glasses on.
But that's just a random example. My point is simply that throwing around accusations of misogyny, racism, homophobia or Islamophobia like confetti, on inadequate evidence, is not a responsible way to carry on, however "virtuous" it makes the speaker look (at least in her own imagination): it has consequences. It encourages suspicion, anxiety, fear, distrust, paranoia, polarization. It encourages people to view minor aspects of their personal identity, such as gender or pigmentation, as somehow tribal and significant. A person who believes they are engaged in a "gender war" is correspondingly less likely to seek out and find a really meaningful peer group, one based on genuinely significant traits such as intelligence and shared interests, to belong to and benefit from and make a contribution from.
Work is piling up, and time is running out. Two more points and I'm done:
One. Ironically or not, accusing people of being "hateful" (there, I've said it) is an excellent way to promote or direct hatred against those same people: if falls under Criterion 3, the "dehumanization/disgust" response. It is no accident that the most politically effective piece of anti-Semitic propaganda of the last 100 years, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was a forgery depicting a Jewish conspiracy apparently motivated by hatred of, and contempt for, the "inferior" Gentile. In such cases, as a simple rule of thumb and going by the schema presented above, to determine who is the real spreader of hatred all you need to do is ask whether the attempt at dehumanization is, or is not, accompanied by reference to some alleged offence or wrongdoing - or, to borrow that ridiculous term, "oppression" - committed by the target group (Criterion 1) or else by some suggestion that the target group should be made to suffer, or that any such suffering they do actually experience is somehow just and deserved and may legitimately be revelled in (Criterion 2). A worthwhile and none too difficult intellectual exercise.
Two. I am an ambitious, power-hungry, manipulative individual in the modern world. My dream is to control people's behaviour with my words. Hmm. I also wonder. People are on their guard against hate speech directed at some demonized and denigrated Other. Hmm. How about trying to make my targets hate themselves?
No, I haven't thought this one through yet. But perhaps you might like to.
Why this post? Very simple. As a linguist I am forced to be aware of polysemy and of semantically diffuse terms, and as an armchair philosopher I often find myself wondering to what extent our individual and collective thought is constrained by verbal imprecision, which may be built into the language we use. The lexis of emotion, for example, is puzzlingly inadequate: many everyday mental states are impossible to reference in English without recourse to circuitous figurative language and symbolism, or to Eliot's Objective Correlative. Well, it strikes me that "hate" is an obvious example of a word whose meaning is seldom, if ever, precisely and adequately defined; and it also strikes me that the moment you elevate Hate Speech and Hate Crimes to the status of legal categories, this lack of definition becomes a problem.
Not that whatever I have to say in this respect will change anything or influence anyone, of course: but I still like to have things clear in my own mind. In the marketplace of ideas I'm that little stall at the end where everything is dirt cheap and most of what's on offer looks as if it was salvaged from a house fire, but you never know, there might be something usable in there somewhere if you rummage around a bit.
First: semantic imprecision. I assume it's obvious to the reader that statements such as the following do not all reference a single mental state, attitude or emotion:
I hate beetroot.
I hate it when you open the ice cream tub and it's all melted.
I hate people who put little circles instead of dots over their i's.
I hate Mormons, Jews, Nazis, Communists, women, blacks, gays, men, scientists, Finns, and people with too much nostril hair. Everyone else I'm fine with.
I hate my life.
I hate liars.
I hate Tom Cruise.
"For I hate divorce, says the LORD, the God of Israel..." (Malachi 2:16)
"I hate divorce," Rumpole said. "Those cases are just so boring. Give me a good old assault and battery any day of the week."
Well, you get the idea. Now, while the instinct of a scientist or a philosopher might be to castigate at least half of the speakers above for using words loosely or without proper demarcation of terms, that of a linguist is to simply smile wryly and murmur "polysemy". We can't reasonably expect people to give up such a useful word in everyday speech, or to second-guess themselves every time they are about to utter it. However, I think it's reasonable to apply a higher standard to political and legal discourse. After all, it's not as if the word, or its various near cousins (homophobia, misogyny, Islamophobia, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, etc.) were infrequently used. (I will argue that most of them should be.) So if we are going to accuse people of expressing, or acting on, or fomenting, or being prejudiced by, hate, then we need to explain exactly what we mean by the word.
Uncle Wiki, as always, has his own idea:
Hatred (or hate) is a deep and emotional extreme dislike. It can be directed against individuals, groups, entities, objects, behaviors, or ideas. Hatred is often associated with feelings of anger, disgust and a disposition towards hostility.
Well, that's not a bad starting point, and in fact, on examination, it comes pretty close to the definition I wish to put forward. All I would say against it is that, arguably, it casts the net too wide for my present purposes, since I am uninterested in the phenomenon of people hating spiders, ringtones, Horniman's so-called "tea", or pub opening hours, as matters without any obvious political significance. What concerns me is people hating other people, or being accused of doing so. What I especially like about the wikidefinition is that it acknowledges the confluence of three distinct factors - anger, disgust and hostility - which more or less align with my own somewhat more developed proposal below.
The first thing I would like to examine, though, is the question of whether hate is adequately described as an emotion. Uncle Wiki seems to think that it is not: the term "emotional dislike" suggests that the emotion is accompanied by some more stable cognitive element (I don't just passively experience hatred, I entertain it: the term "dislike" hints at an attitude of tacit acceptance on my part, whereby the emotion is regarded as having a legitimate place and role in my cognitive landscape, enough to give it a respectable sounding name). My own somewhat limited experience in this regard suggests that, under certain circumstances, a volcano of hatred can erupt in you, apparently unbidden (though perhaps taking advantage of a certain predisposition or weakness), but what happens in the next few seconds is down to you: you can choose to entertain the emotion, suppress it, or distance yourself from it. Of the three options, I personally think the least healthy is that of suppression (because as a general rule, emotions that are prematurely stifled will come back to haunt you in some shape or form), and the healthiest (but most difficult) is that of adopting a certain distance: you recognize and acknowledge the emotion in yourself, give it its proper name, then try to understand and study it, without at any moment letting it control you or try to muscle in on your identity.
In both the above cases, you've "dealt with it" (for now). Consensually (and here I do agree with the consensus) the hatred we can actually see and identify, most of the time, in others, is the result, not of people suppressing or detaching themselves from the emotion, but of, as I say, "entertaining" it. And in order to entertain it, by which I mean stabilize it in the mind and incorporate it somehow into that part of consciousness which determines willed behavior, we need to provide it with some sort of stable cognitive avatar. We need to associate the emotion with something we can imagine and describe, and recall any time we like. We need to turn the emotion into thoughts.
This, of course, begs the question: why would we want to do that? If hatred is, as popularly and simplistically supposed, a "negative emotion", why would I want to prolong it in my own mind?
Now, it strikes me that this is not at all an easy question to answer. But before trying to do so, I would advise the reader to decide, from her own experience, whether the question even deserves an answer at all. Do people, in fact, deliberately choose to prolong the emotion of hatred, to recall it, to cultivate it, to strengthen it in themselves? Before answering this, I would suggest thinking back to some occasion in your life when you consider you were grievously wronged in some way. In my case it would be when my house was burgled about six years ago. What was happening in your mind during the subsequent period of coming to terms with the injustice? Did you find yourself obsessively bringing up the image of the person responsible, demonizing that person, and perhaps dramatizing in your imagination some future reckoning or come-uppance that person would have to face? Or let's try this: have you ever watched a Hollywood drama in which you felt the bad guy got off too lightly (he died, but too quickly and without enough obvious suffering to constitute a proper catharsis)? If the answer is yes to either of these, you will have no trouble following the train of thought I will develop in the rest of this post. If no, then I should perhaps take a moment to congratulate you on your apparent immunity, while reiterating my belief that the response I have described is at least fairly common. In other words, I am going to proceed on the assumption, derived from introspection and anecdotal observation, that people do in fact, under certain conditions, more or less deliberately cultivate in themselves the emotion of hatred. If you disagree with that starting assumption, you'll probably remain unconvinced by all that follows, and it will have to be peer-reviewed studies at dawn.
As to why people do this, well, I strongly suspect that here we would have to hand the mike over to the neurologists, who I dare say could do an excellent job of explaining which neurotransmitters are involved in which parts of the brain and how they relate to what may be characterized as a mild form of addictive behaviour. As to how we perceive this phenomenon subjectively, well, perhaps the closest analogy is that of scratching an itch. The object of hatred comes to represent, to symbolize or causally explain, all that is unsatisfactory in our life or in the world around us (in extreme cases). We may not be able to eliminate this locus of evil, but reminding ourselves of its existence at least brings the problem more sharply into view, and makes us feel that bit closer to resolving it.
There's another possible complementary explanation, of course: the tribal one. Hatred is, without doubt, a preeminently tribal emotion, in that it governs and demarcates social relations, and helps to establish and police in-group and out-group membership. This fact alone points strongly to an evolutionary connection and some hard-wiring.
Now, having dipped a toe into "why", let's get onto "how". The following is my personal account of the cognitive process involved:
0. Some event has caused you to experience momentary hatred (or at least dislike) towards another person or group of people. The emotion was powerful and heady and exotic and, in a perverse sort of way, made you feel good. Instinctively, you decide you want to prolong this emotion, if only so as to understand it better.
1. You rationalize the hatred as the natural consequence of a perceived offence or injustice committed against you by the object of your hatred. If there is none, you hurriedly invent one. This need to rationalize may be strengthened by the common perception of hatred as a negative emotion, one that "good" people don't normally experience. In order to justify to yourself how you, a "good" person, can experience and want to prolong something so negative, you are forced to exaggerate somewhat the scale of the offence or injustice. You feel a twinge of bad faith at this point, but brush it away. No, really, the offence or injustice was very serious indeed! If you can justify the hatred as deriving not from an offence to you, but to a wider category of people (ideally, innocent, oppressed people) then even better: you can now, while entertaining hatred, congratulate yourself on your altruistic stance and motives.
2. The animosity you feel towards the object of your hatred, and the immense scale of the injustice suffered, seem to demand revenge and reparation. You experience hostility towards that person or those people. You want to hurt or humiliate them, or to see them suffer. This, in your mind, would be "justice".
3. The only remaining problem, that threatens the stability and continuity of this emotion, is empathy. Imagining harm coming to another human being makes you feel uncomfortable, and calls forth an opposing empathic response. To circumvent this, you are forced to caricature your enemy in your mind, exaggerating their supposed negative qualities and dismissing the possibility of there being any positive ones. Taking this to extremes, you will persuade yourself that the enemy is practically subhuman. In this respect, it is interesting to observe that in pretty much all cultures, the portrait of "the other" that hatred tries to build up tends to be very much of a piece: he is cunning but not intelligent, devious, treacherous, sneering and arrogant, totally lacking in generosity or finer feelings, feverishly acquisitive and covetous, physically repulsive... oh, and he murders babies and horribly mistreats women. (And yes, the fact that we have to go to such extremes of caricature to stifle the empathic response is, in a paradoxical way, a tribute to the strength of that response, to our essential humanity.)
And that's it. Your personal quarterpounder of hatred, with fries, is now ready to go. Have a nice day! To sum up, then:
Hatred = Offence (real or imaginary, justifying "Anger", as per Wiki, or "moral outrage") + Desire to harm ("Hostility" - Wiki) + Negative portrayal of characteristics of the Other (thus, per Wiki, allowing "Disgust")
Now, if we are going to apply this formula to those manifestations of hatred that are considered politically significant in some way, or that are deemed to justify legal categorization, we need to ask first how many of these elements need to be present for the label to be justified. That's an important question. Let's try the one by one approach:
Offence. Imagine someone who has been, and knows himself to be, the victim of some sort of offence or wrongdoing, and is perhaps angered by this. Yet he has no desire to harm the offender, nor does he deny the latter's essential humanity and possible redeeming traits. Would we be inclined to accuse him of hatred? I doubt it. He would more likely be complimented on his humanitarian disposition and maturity in refusing to seek revenge.
Desire to harm. Now imagine someone who, presumably in the grip of a sexual paraphilia, delights in causing token harm to members of the opposite sex in (ahem) a bedroom context. This person does not consider himself a victim of any kind of wrongdoing, and has, if anything, a rather idealized and rosy vision of the sex in question. Does he "hate" his victims? That's harder to answer, but I would recommend a "no" - if only because a yes would fundamentally distort our understanding of what was going on. (A person who desired to inflict more extreme harm on people with no attempt at justification or sense of offence would probably be considered an extreme pathological case, a full-fledged psycho. Even Hannibal Lecter tended to eat only people who were "rude" to him. Nevertheless, "hate" still seems somehow the wrong word.)
Disgust. Finally, imagine someone who, perhaps through upbringing or one of those apparently irrational phobia-type things, feels an invincible revulsion in the presence of people of a different ethnic group, or nationality, or (more rarely) gender. This person does not, however, consider himself personally offended by those people, nor does he wish them any harm. Does he hate them? I would say not, and I hope you would agree. (In the old Spanish blog, I had a commenter who admitted to just this sort of ungovernable physical repulsion, I won't say who to.)
In my view, it is clear that none of these factors on its own constitutes "hate", though it may still be pathological. However, if you look at any of the possible combinations of two, a curious thing happens: the missing third element of the trio seems to suggest itself almost irresistibly, by which I mean it is actually hard to imagine it being absent. Try it. Try imagining someone who thought that, say, Irish Protestants were foreign colonial invaders (offence) and that they were also ugly, rapacious, arrogant, smug, sneering bastards (dehumanization) and then listen to that person saying "...but naturally I don't wish any harm to them." Do you believe him?
If it is true that the presence of two of these factors in the mind tends, by a powerful and perhaps evolutionarily reinforced mechanism, to call forth the third, this has important legal repercussions in the domain of Hate Speech laws and the like, since we could then confidently stipulate that a particular discourse would count as Hate Speech if it contained two of the above three elements: the speaker would be counting on the third being supplied by the mental reflexes of the listener. Nazi propaganda, for example, as referenced in the link to Der Sturmer above, tended to wax lyrical on the (entirely imaginary) offences committed against the Germans by the International Jewish Conspiracy (Die Juden sind Unser Ungluck!), while at the same time going to extreme pains to caricature and dehumanize the target group. The assumption was clearly that the German people would then find any sort of Final Solution quite justified: it was hardly even necessary to hint at the idea.
Do we find examples of such discourse in the modern world? Definitely: one only needs to think of anti-Jewish propaganda in some Middle Eastern countries. Is it commonplace? Fortunately, no, at least in the blatant and direct form we see in the ideological propaganda of the mid twentieth century. I don't think there's any simple answer to the question of why we don't see more developed hate speech than we do, given certain fundamentals of human nature, but among the list of possible incomplete explanations, I find "because it's illegal in some countries" far less persuasive than "because it's legal in others". What I mean is that one needs to see and hear a little of it, and to observe its effects, and the kind of people who resort to it (check out some of the seedier YouTube comments sections), in order to gain a proper understanding of its socially virulent and destructive nature. Mithraditism remains the best approach to dealing with a poison - at least, of that sort. This is one of the reasons why I think that trying to ban Hate Speech is as wrongheaded as, say, trying to prevent children from finding out about sex.
Another partial explanation for the current dearth of would-be Hitlers is that in order to effectively conjure politically useful hatred on a large scale (remembering that for a politician, having an entire population busy hating the same real or imagined "enemy", under your astute direction, is very heaven) the enemy in question should ideally be remote and difficult or impossible to engage at close quarters (lest his harmlessness and humanity be prematurely discovered): and with the advent of the Internet it's much harder to prevent people from finding out, in direct conversation, what the enemy is really like, and to conclude that they probably don't eat babies after all. This is why it is, for me, no coincidence that the most successful populist governments across the world (including here in Ecuador) have perfected the daily hysterical denunciation of a largely non-existent and otherwise socially remote enemy to a fine art. Here, the enemy is "neoliberalism" - a made-up ideology with an international subscriber base of precisely 0 people - along with "selfish bankers" (if I ever meet a banker, I shall be sure to ask him whether he is selfish or not), "US Imperialism" (as if Uncle Sam could give a shit, post Berlin Wall, what went on in any of the surviving Banana Republics). "traitors to the Fatherland", "cocktail-quaffing mummies" (sic) and other hippogriffs: this show will run and run.
In a globalized world, it is seldom as useful as it once was for the politician to stir up hatred against foreign nationalities. Yet people still yearn, instinctively, to belong to, if not a homogeneous nation, at least a tribe, some sort of social group with a common identity, tokens of membership, and, inevitably, some sort of out-group to exclude and distrust. It is a sad fact of human nature that, apparently, we need to exclude someone in order to feel included ourselves (this happens even at the basic level of water-cooler gossip). I personally believe that humans are potentially smart enough to overcome such inherited kinks and to get along together in a civilized manner: but I don't believe this will happen as long as we are allowed and encouraged, or even forced, to devolve the responsibility of managing our social relations to governments or corporate monoliths (by which I mean the policing of social media like Twitter and Facebook). We need the freedom to take risks in order to understand ourselves and our own emotional responses, and we need to take direct responsibility for our behaviour. In this regard, Hate Speech laws have an obstructive, infantilizing effect, and point in entirely the wrong direction.
One of those aspects of human behaviour I believe deserves to be addressed and discussed is a particular variant of behavioural confirmation, whereby if we tell a person that some trivial aspect of his or her personal identity - e.g. skin colour, or gender, or religious affiliation - is fundamental to their tribal identity, or at least is held to be so by others, and may even be involved in some sinister dynamic of collective suspicion and hatred, this will cause the person, reflexively and defensively, to identify with that aspect and hypostatize it into something it doesn't have to be: a membership token. Put yourself in the position of a Muslim living somewhere on the Old Kent Road. On different occasions, but in a single week, you hear the following:
NASTY BAD PERSON: You Muslims are all murderous terrorists.
GOOD VIRTUE-SIGNALLY PERSON: We must take steps to combat the massive tide of Islamophobia that threatens to engulf the Western World.
When I hear the first, my adrenalin levels rise from 2 to 3. When I hear the second, they shoot up to 6 or 7. So high do they shoot, in fact, that I make a mental note to start attending my local mosque (despite being lapsed since 2009) in order to find out what is going on. Y'know, in case any collective defence strategy is needed.
Irresponsible, baseless, frivolous accusations of "hatred" are thus arguably as bad as, or worse than, direct manifestations of same, when it comes to social polarization. What do I mean by irresponsible? Well, the following is from a Guardian article of a few days ago:
But we didn’t need to hear that recording to know Trump is an aggressive misogynist. His serial outrages are well known. He has called women dogs and pigs; he humiliated the winner of his Miss Universe beauty pageant for gaining weight, forcing her to exercise in front of the cameras; he rates women’s bodies out of 10; he dismissed Republican rival Carly Fiorina on the grounds that no one would vote for “that face”; he suggested TV anchor Megyn Kelly was hostile because “she had blood coming out of her wherever”. Even when seeking to rebut the charges of sexual assault, he couldn’t help himself. His defence amounted to: “Have you seen what these women look like? I don’t think so.”
What the impartial reader will immediately note is that no actual evidence of hatred of women ("misogyny") is presented here, despite the author apparently having mustered his very best arguments, and despite the fact he seems willing to engage in a little misdirection. As far as I am aware, Trump has never asserted that all women, or women in general, are "dogs" or "pigs": what he has done is used these terms to refer to individuals who happened to be women. Since these are not gendered insults (and, arguably, even if they were), his use of such language is utterly irrelevant, unless you think that when it comes to insults, women should be treated with especial delicacy - which while not being a misogynist belief, is clearly a very sexist one. (As is the odd idea that men shouldn't rate women out of 10 on looks: women do this with men all the time. HotOrNot, anyone?) Otherwise, what we have here is a series of examples of rude (but in the rough 'n' tumble world of debased political discourse, pretty run of the mill) behaviour towards individual women, one or two of which strongly suggest a willingness to exploit existing gender stereotypes ("time of the month" stuff, appeal to physical (un)attractiveness) as rhetorical weapons for immediate tactical advantage. And that's it. On the "Hate Speech Rubric" outlined above, I would have to say that given the above evidence, Trump scores a resounding 0 out of 5 on Attribution of Offence/Moral Outrage/Anger, 0.1 out of 5 on Hostility or Desire to Harm (he was certainly aggressive to the women in question, but there is no evidence that the fact they were women is causally implicated in that hostility), and perhaps, given the appeal to stereotypes, 1 or even 2 out of 5 on Dehumanization/Disgust. Even if you insist on giving him a 4 or a 5 on the last parameter (the fine print on the rubric is illegible at present), he's still failed the exam.
By the way, I wouldn't vote for Trump (in an imaginary parallel universe in which I was an American citizen) if you held a gun to my head. Reasons to follow in future post: let's just say that the overwhelming weight of evidence that he's a complete arsehole is, in my opinion, at least marginally relevant. But that's no reason to swallow all the propaganda. My perception is that Mr Trump does indeed have a sexist attitude to women, but sexism does not equal misogyny (a point I will probably need a further post to develop fully): there is no evidence that he either believes women have collectively wronged him in some way, nor that they collectively deserve to be harmed, or that he would be pleased to see some terrible vengeance wrought upon the sex. Cretinous though his social behaviour undoubtedly is, I don't even believe his attitude to them, collectively, is one of unmitigated disgust. It just looks like it from a certain distance and with certain ideological glasses on.
But that's just a random example. My point is simply that throwing around accusations of misogyny, racism, homophobia or Islamophobia like confetti, on inadequate evidence, is not a responsible way to carry on, however "virtuous" it makes the speaker look (at least in her own imagination): it has consequences. It encourages suspicion, anxiety, fear, distrust, paranoia, polarization. It encourages people to view minor aspects of their personal identity, such as gender or pigmentation, as somehow tribal and significant. A person who believes they are engaged in a "gender war" is correspondingly less likely to seek out and find a really meaningful peer group, one based on genuinely significant traits such as intelligence and shared interests, to belong to and benefit from and make a contribution from.
Work is piling up, and time is running out. Two more points and I'm done:
One. Ironically or not, accusing people of being "hateful" (there, I've said it) is an excellent way to promote or direct hatred against those same people: if falls under Criterion 3, the "dehumanization/disgust" response. It is no accident that the most politically effective piece of anti-Semitic propaganda of the last 100 years, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was a forgery depicting a Jewish conspiracy apparently motivated by hatred of, and contempt for, the "inferior" Gentile. In such cases, as a simple rule of thumb and going by the schema presented above, to determine who is the real spreader of hatred all you need to do is ask whether the attempt at dehumanization is, or is not, accompanied by reference to some alleged offence or wrongdoing - or, to borrow that ridiculous term, "oppression" - committed by the target group (Criterion 1) or else by some suggestion that the target group should be made to suffer, or that any such suffering they do actually experience is somehow just and deserved and may legitimately be revelled in (Criterion 2). A worthwhile and none too difficult intellectual exercise.
Two. I am an ambitious, power-hungry, manipulative individual in the modern world. My dream is to control people's behaviour with my words. Hmm. I also wonder. People are on their guard against hate speech directed at some demonized and denigrated Other. Hmm. How about trying to make my targets hate themselves?
No, I haven't thought this one through yet. But perhaps you might like to.
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