Hatred (19 page)

What has developed is the sense of an incomplete self that is a part of a community of supporting others whom we may influence. As the child develops, he takes the attitudes and lessons he learned in the family and applies this understanding in building new attachments. He makes friends—and enemies. He finds alternative parental figures in siblings, teachers, religious or political leaders. He builds networks and joins communities. He identifies with heroes other than his parents and with communities other than the family. He becomes a social human being. And all of these new identities and attachments influence his values and modify his perceptions and behavior. His community establishes his standards, sets his goals, and defines his conduct. And finally, his religious community will set the ultimate judgment on his moral worth.

In nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish families, religious service was a respected tradition. Many families assumed one son would become a priest and one daughter a nun—and often they did. It was a matter of family pride to have a “religious” in the family. It is horrifying to realize that there are religions that may define “religious service” broadly enough to include blowing oneself up while taking as many “enemies” as you can along with you. But when that is the cultural definition of religious service, there will be a multitude of suicide bombers willing to do it and proud families to support it. Certainly, you would not expect a suicide bomber in every family, because that which is required is not a way of life, but death. Still, if the family life is squalid and unrewarding, and if the religion, as in some current Islamic jurisdictions, promises an afterlife rich in the material goods that are denied on earth today, a sufficient number of suicide bombers will be located to serve both the religious and the political agendas.

Since early nurture differs among individuals both qualitatively and quantitatively, the strength of the self varies. There are
parents who beat, neglect, or brutalize their children. If the deprivation is sufficiently severe, the child will not survive. Or if he survives, what may emerge is an adult who is deficient in those very humane qualities that shape humankind. The child who is deprived of the proper care to which he is entitled may become an adult incapable of caring for others. It is likely that early scarring, more than genes, destroys the conscience mechanism and produces the psychopaths of our world. Guilt, shame, pride, and love are attributes inherently built into the human organism, but they must be nurtured to grow and survive.

Human behavior is not merely a struggle for survival, a battle to avoid destruction. There are powerful positive motivating forces that serve other interests beyond survival, like ideals and pride. To understand both the positive and negative influences on character development, one must understand identification and modeling. Both shape behavior but do it through different pathways. In a discussion of hatred, this distinction is crucial. Heroes set standards for the rest of the population. They are models to emulate. One martyr will lead to another.

Identification—the process of fusing one's personality with a person or a group—determines our essential character traits, how loving and compassionate or resentful and paranoid we may eventually become as adults. Identification is central in deciding both whom we choose to love and whom we decide to hate and how inclusive each group will be.

Modeling refers to the child's consciously attempted mimicry of his parents, and later of other idealized figures, in a conscious effort to conform to their standards and gain their approval. We are most likely to choose as models those who seem most powerful,
and to the young child it is always the parent. That will change with adolescence, as every parent knows only too well. In a strictly behaviorist model, the child responds to rewards and punishments. Some of these are explicitly stated by the parents. But parents are generally unaware of the degree to which tacit clues will equally be followed by the child. Parental facial expressions and their body language will influence the child's behavior more than specific injunctions. When an annoyed parent says, “Do what you want,” she is really saying, “Do what I want, which I have clearly indicated in one way or another.” Even the child's syntax, tone, inflections, and speech patterns are borrowed from the parents, which is why family members tend to resemble each other in more ways than just the physical.

What most likely happens is that the typical child randomly tests the parents with a variety of behaviors intended to gain their love and approval. If through trial and error the child finds that being cute, charming, and cuddly evokes a positive response or brings forgiveness for transgressions, he will use those methods more and more. If, on the other hand, the parent responds to the ingratiating behavior with distaste because he cannot tolerate it, the child will find an alternative path to approval. The way to this parent's heart may be through self-sufficiency—being a good boy, with everything that implies.

These two types of children will grow up to be different. One will see performance and achievement rather than ingratiation as the primary means for gaining approval. He will see action rather than accommodation as the way to approval. Each will tend more and more to use the successful methods. Children are masters at reading their parents' moods. They have to be. Their lives—at least in their distorted perceptions—depend on it. But a child operates in other ways that are independent of trial and error. A child shapes conduct through mimicry and imitation, using the devices of both modeling and identification.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, we are not limited in our modeling to the parental figures alone. Older siblings often serve as models. In later life we can identify with teachers, mentors, friends, and public heroes. One's identity is therefore an amalgam. It will involve conscious modeling of these icons, where certain traits are scrupulously copied and others just as avidly eschewed. But we may not be as much in control as we would like to believe. We may discover ourselves in adult life—often to our chagrin—behaving precisely the way our parents behaved, and in fashions that previously embarrassed or humiliated us.

Conscious modeling is generally most effective only in less important aspects of life. We can reject the European or Midwestern cadences with which we were raised, substituting the tonier Eastern accents of our classmates or teachers, or for that matter, the ghetto-speak that seems cooler. We can tailor our clothes and cut our hair to whatever pattern is de rigeur for our generation. But most of what drives behavior in crucial areas will have been established earlier in life through less voluntary and rational means.

Modeling has minimal influence compared with the power of the automatic identification that goes on willy-nilly even when the child assumes he is rejecting the parental directives. Identification is a peculiar process. It operates on an unconscious and involuntary basis. A mother is likely to influence the design of her child through those areas of her behavior over which she, herself, has little or no conscious control. In governing the nature of her offspring, what she
is
will be more a determinant than what she
wants
. This concept of identification is so powerful that it mystifies parents, who are unaware of the distinctions between their instructions and their actions. A little girl will often behave as her mother wants her to behave out of fear of her mother or love for her. But that same little girl will behave like her mother—even if that may not be the way the mother wants her to behave—out of a strong and almost automatic process of identification.
When a girl starts talking like her mother, employing her inflections and tonality, when she starts demonstrating the same walk and body language, it is not a conscious act of imitation. It just happens. It is a reflection of identification.

Identification is the most powerful of the behavior-determining forces.
⁵¹
Most things are learned piecemeal, one at a time, through trial and error. With identification we learn automatically and with a “wholesale” adoption of the forms, habits, and even the values of the parents and the culture that shaped them. Through identification, we psychologically swallow up the parent—called “introjection” in psychoanalysis—and fuse his or her identity with our own. In this way we adopt behavioral patterns in big, indiscriminate blocks by incorporating the character and identity of others.

Identification, however, does not mean that we cannot reject aspects of our parents' personalities. Rebellion and self-assertion are also a part of the growing-up process. In an elementary school every child “votes” the way his parents do. By high school one will find Democratic children of Republican parents, indicating both adolescent revolt and independent thinking. When a child insists on behaving in complete opposition to his parents, the behavior is a perverse form of dependency. Dependence can be expressed in defiance as well as obedience. When a child does something just because her parent objects, the parent is still the determinant in her behavior.

For the most part, even after allowing for rebellion and true independence, we retain more of the parents within us than we like to admit. This helps to explain the “hereditary” nature of personality—why Japanese children tend to grow up and behave
like Japanese, whereas Swedish children persist in behaving like Swedes. It certainly explains the culture shock many of us feel on first being exposed to a culture significantly different from our own.

When we identify in this way, we are not only likely to talk, walk, dress in the manner of those with whom we have identified, but of more significance, we will tend to reason and think like them. We adopt not only the manners but also the mind-set of those with whom we identify, and we do it wholesale.

An admiration for certain traits sets a standard for a revulsion against others. Almost a century after the great massacres, Armenians—whose grandparents may have only known about the tragedy from second-hand sources—harbor an intrinsic distrust, even hatred, of the Turks. I am not offering this phenomenon as a universal finding, but its persistence even fractionally in a population four or five generations removed from the event is a tribute to the powers of identification.

The 2002 Nobel laureate in literature, Imre Kertesz, said in an interview: “My Judaism is very problematic. I am a nonbelieving Jew. Yet as a Jew I was taken to Auschwitz, as a Jew I was in the death camps and as a Jew I live in a society that does not like Jews.” He felt that to a large extent his Jewishness was “imposed” on him. Still, when he visited Israel, he was surprised by the power of his identification: “I am not impartial and, moreover, cannot be. I have never assumed the role of impartial executioner. I leave that to European—and non-European—intellectuals who embrace this role for better and often for worse. They have never bought a ticket for a bus ride from Jerusalem to Haifa.”
⁵²

The power of identification places a great burden on the leadership of major populations, whether on the national or religious scene. Group identification often depends upon the existence of an other, an outside, nonbelonging population. By setting an alien population outside the moral community, the leaders lay the groundwork for possible stigmatization and demonization of the other. The hatred of the Serbs for the Croats was inflamed by the active cooperation of the Croats with the Nazis. But the hostility between these two groups extended back to the Byzantine world, which separated the Greek Orthodox from the Roman Catholics. Since the split dates from the synod of Photius in 867 A.D., it is centuries before the life and personal memory of any living relatives. This hostility had to be abetted by the attitudes of the churches themselves, which have a longer memory for differences than for shared ideals. Certainly nothing was done within the institutions of the two churches to minimize the distinctions and mitigate the sense of alienation of these two closely related populations.

Under the iron rule of Tito, the newly founded state of Yugoslavia forged a union of groups that had existed in isolated hostility for generations. But as has been said by many, Tito was both the first and the last Yugoslav, and with his death the cultural hostilities that lay dormant emerged in bloody assaults on the traditional “enemies.” These hatreds are symptoms based on nothing in the real world, but on something in the internal world of identities and enemies.

Can anyone pretend to distinguish the Irish Protestant from his Catholic equivalent in physical appearance, speech patterns, Irish traits, Celtic humor, or even cultural values? Only when the discussion turns to religious politics do the enmity and the differences emerge. In an Irish-American bar, no one has any idea whether the Callahan or Kelly with whom one is speaking is Catholic or Protestant. The same is true for the traveler in
Northern Ireland. A person's roots become apparent only when the discussion turns political. Then the degree of hatred that can emerge is nothing short of astonishing. These hatreds were sucked into the unconscious of the younger generations along with the wholesale adoption of the personae of the elders through the processes of identification. A channel for “inherited” hatred was created between parent and child.

The identification that I have just briefly discussed I have labeled “upward identification.” That is not necessarily the most elegant term, but it is one that serves to contrast it with another and somewhat different form of identification called, naturally, “downward identification,” with which I will compare it. Downward identification is another thing entirely from the identification of the child with the parent.

What is one to make of the almost instant identification that the parent makes with the child at the moment of its birth? The experience I underwent on seeing my own children for the first time was an epiphany. It seemed more closely related to things I had read about than other experiences I could recall. It appeared much more akin to that instant bonding of a duckling for the first object it perceives moving than to traditional human modes of relating. Unlike friendship, which takes time to evolve; unlike love, which requires sharing, vulnerability, trust, and commitment—this had the quality of a mechanical or chemical reaction.