Hatred (20 page)

Why even call it identification? It does not have the trappings of the traditional identifications practiced by the child growing up. We don't model ourselves after our children. We may adopt some of their interests, and we ought to be able to be influenced by their sensibilities. But we don't go through anything like the wholesale adoption of mannerisms, tastes, judgments, or values that is a part of the process of growing up. What relates the two forms of identification—upward and downward—is something called fusion.

The basic ingredient that defines identification is not the unconscious modeling, but the fusion of the stuff of our very self with the substance of another. Identity starts by knowing the toe we bite is a part of us, and the teething ring or a maternal nipple is something other. With fusion there is an erosion of the rigid boundaries of self, a blurring of the sense of the isolated “I,” or ego.

With upward identification, the child mentally “injests” the image of the parent and then fuses his own sense of self with that now-internalized image of his parent. The parental figure becomes a part of the self. So much a part, that the child, willy-nilly, takes over many of the attitudes and actions of the parent in an unthinking and wholesale manner. This “fusion” of the two identities is what is referred to as identification. Identification blurs the distinction between the perceived self and the incorporated person. It is nonetheless a selective process—there are multiple models we take in. And it is a gradual process, one of which the child is almost totally unaware.

With the downward identification that a parent feels on first seeing her newborn child, the process of fusion tends to be total, instantaneous, and wonderfully conscious. If anything, the confusion about where we end and the child begins is more profound in this direction than the other. With the identification of love, a union occurs that binds one's fate to another's. To praise my child offers me praise. To do damage to my child is to injure me and will cause me greater pain than to harm me directly. It may be the greatest pain. The grief over the loss of a child is the open, festering, and agonizing sore of Philoctetes—the wound that never heals.

For some reason, the response to my first grandchild is now more vivid in my memory than the birth of my own children. I had seen this child within an hour of his birth and with that seeing knew, not just understood, the meaning of biological imprinting.
His image seemed to course through me like some secret message to an internal computer readjusting all the patterns of my consciousness. To the lifetime of experiences that had shaped my characteristic perceptions and behavior, a new experience had been added of such magnitude that a new sensibility, a changed me, was created. I knew that from that time on, that image was unshakably within me—an essential part of me—and, in some way that I did not yet understand, would inevitably alter, in ways that I could not predict, all my awareness and all my judgments.

What exactly happens in this identification with a child? I did not “swallow up,” introject, this grandchild, or my two daughters before him. I have done the opposite. I had somehow or other catapulted myself into their shells. I have inserted “me” into them. My children are containers, and fragile ones at that, which cradle, not just my hopes and my ambitions, my aspirations and my vanities, but my essential self. They are me. With this kind of identification, we have located our core within another corpus. We have placed our destiny in a body under someone else's control. If my child does something foolhardy or willfully self-destructive, the pain will be experienced by hapless and innocent me. In great part this explains why no one is as capable of enraging us as our own children. They carry the helpless parent within them during all their reckless escapades. How dare she risk the purpose of my existence, my only immortality, my existential “meaning,” and the person I most cherish, by endangering herself? This explains the evident distress and horror of the mother of the suicide bomber, even as she is claiming pride for his action.

Downward identification has the power and tenacity that one associates with the fixed instincts of animals—biologically driven and species-preserving devices. Unfortunately, in this area too, downward identification can be modified and abandoned through the capacities of the human beings to change their very natures. Fortunately, it generally operates almost universally like
a “maternal instinct.” It brings into play all the protective devices in a human mother to preserve her child, and thus the species. One can observe the same kind of behavior in the protective maneuvers of a doe. By protecting her offspring, the mother, animal or human, carries genes forward beyond the limited span of her lifetime. Her child will transport essential components of her self to her own children and the future generations.

These processes of identification are central in comprehending the limits of empathy and the contradictions of the workings of conscience. They help us understand our exquisite sensitivity to the pain of some and our indifference to—even our pleasure in—the pain of some others.

To complete an understanding of the mechanisms of empathy or indifference, I must introduce another principle of identification, particularly relevant to group identifications. I call this “proximal identification.” Proximal identification is not a moral principle but a psychological reality, an indisputable, universal phenomenon. It is best understood by comparing our varying responses to tragic events.

There is no question that an injury to my child, even of a relatively trivial sort, hurts me more than a more serious injury to the child of a stranger. In my sensibilities my child's pain has a transcendent priority over your child's pain. I am not pleased or proud of this observation—it represents a limit on my capacity for empathy—but I am convinced it is true for you as well as for me. When I extend the argument even further, it becomes more appalling, but no less true. A severe trauma to my child, a scarring that would affect her life throughout her existence, would cause me more grief than the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children in the Sudan.

Let me clarify what I am saying. Of course I am distressed by the agony and injustices that have occurred in modern-day Africa, the starving in Somalia, the butchery and enslavement in
the Sudan, the kidnapping and maiming of thousands of children in Sierra Leone, the slaughter of innocents in Rwanda and Burundi. When I witness these tragedies on the faces of real people through the pictures on television, or in my imagination while I am reading the newspaper accounts, a true sense of grief overcomes me. It is not simply an intellectual response. But this grief has a pathetically ephemeral existence. Although I may maintain my intellectual involvement and moral commitment through political and relief activities, my true and enduring emotions will not be the same as the pain caused by my everyday awareness of the injured child with whom I share my life. The most refined of consciences, the most overdeveloped capacity for guilt, will nonetheless rebuke our logical sense of justice and override our sense of proportionality when we deal with the suffering of those we know and love—our own—in comparison with the suffering of some distant others.

We are grieved by the everyday, by what we see, and what is close. The priority of the news media in focusing on local over international news is a testament to the interests of their audiences. More true grief and tears are generated by the discovery of the body of a murdered child in the neighborhood than of hundreds of children killed in floods in Bangladesh. The nearby disaster has more meaning, even though lesser than the distant one. It is not a new idea. Hume observed more than two hundred years ago, “Pity depends, in a great measure, on the contiguity and even sight of the object.”
⁵³
And certainly the capacity for television to bring disaster into our very homes has expanded the population of those with whom we can identify.

Although proximal identification may not require the physical
proximity to or sight of the individual that Hume suggested, it certainly requires something comparable, a clearly defined kinship, for example. Such kinship may allow us to identify with people we have never known. We can identify with those in a future too far for us to envision and back to a past we never experienced. The chaotic and random killings in Northern Ireland, taking the lives of hundreds of innocents, inevitably touched the hearts of Irish Americans who had never been in Ireland more than the loss of a hundred thousand lives in Iran. A terrorist bomb exploded in a bus full of Israeli children feels like a personal blow to an American Jew who has never been to Israel.

These ethnic and religious identifications—with the limitation of empathy they suggest—can be seen as deriving from important survival patterns built into our genetic matrix before the emergence of modern culture. Proximal identification may seem irrational and unjust in our current period, when we are approaching a global culture, but it was a biological necessity at an earlier period. Without it we could not have saved the species in those days of limited awareness of space and even more limited vision of the world as a whole. We preserved the species by each protecting his own. The units of survival in prehistoric times were much smaller than those of today. There were no nations, and there was no consideration of the universality of mankind. There were only family clusters, no “family of man.” Survival of the species, particularly through the protection of the vulnerable young on whom the future rests, demands an overvaluation of the needs of those young who are our own specific charges.

We can see that among herding animals, the herd is best protected when the antelope protects her offspring, and hers alone, from the marauding lion. If every mother were concerned about all the young—the general welfare—none would survive. The propensity of human beings to overvalue their own is part of the biological inheritance we share with lower communal animals.

Having dealt professionally with human suffering on the most intimate level in my work with patients, I know that true empathy, producing real compassion and personal suffering, remains a proximal quality. Those rare individuals who have hearts that bleed indiscriminately for humanity in general are likely to have eyes that shed few tears for individual men and women.

The greatest protection against group hatred is the ultimate inclusion of the hated contingent into the population with which we identify. In other words, expand “proximal” identification to larger and larger constituencies. Part of the tragedy of the African states is that statehood was established arbitrarily under European colonialism. As such, the “states” were never identifiable or recognizable by the natives who were its presumed members. The result was that identities were fixed to relatively small units. When there was unification, it was through religion, which, as will later be discussed, managed not only to enlarge the community of identifying people but also to define a larger enemy population.

While not denying the existence of subcultures in the United States, with their multiple divisions into “us” and “them” and the consequent prejudices, what is still amazing is that we have managed to forge a national identity among widely diverse populations. We do have an
American
identity, and when an American naval ship, the USS
Cole,
was attacked by terrorists, we responded in unity with appropriate grief and anger, independent of whether the victims were black or white, Christian or Jew, northern or southern, rich or poor.

We have made progress. Aided by the shrinking world of modern travel and the instant awareness made possible through modern communications, we are approaching a global community. We have gone from family to clan to nation. A nation of almost three hundred million grieved over the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. To a lesser extent, a community of similar cultures shared our grief. We can hope for a time when
we approach that broadest of identifications, but we must be realistic. The “family of man” is a noble ideal that will never be realized. Nevertheless, noble and impossible ideals serve useful purposes. Few Christians can embrace and live the life of Christ, but in aspiring to do so they may become better people.

Proximal identification can never be extended to include the entire human race. Its biological purpose is exactly the opposite. We serve the species by overvaluing that small section of it for which we are responsible. Yearning for a true “brotherhood of man” is hopeless. There is no psychological way to extend our downward identification to all. It is too heavy a burden. Were each of us to grieve over the suffering of every child in the same way as we do with our own, life would be unendurable. Just as the surgeon must protect himself from the suffering of his patients to facilitate his professional role, we cannot mourn in the truest sense over every tragedy in the daily paper. We are touched and empathic, and that is the most we can expect. That is also the least we should expect of ourselves. We cannot tolerate total indifference.

But what if, beyond indifference, we take delight? We have then moved from the relative indifference that we maintain toward the other and into the area of hatred that we reserve for our enemies. Hatred is an extreme and perverse distortion of the necessary process of group identification. The entire process of identity and identification involves not just locating ourselves but also locating others. It is a method of separation as well as identification. If there is a “me,” then there is a “not-me,” which will eventually be further identified as things and other people. If there exists a group of people with whom I identify and with whom I share a common fate, there must be others with whom I do not identify.

To say that I do not identify with some group is still short of wishing its members ill. It may simply mean that I have no
emotional investment in them, no primary concern for them, and little empathy for them. It is a form of prejudice to exclude a whole population from our moral sensibilities, but it is well short of hatred. When I said that the opposite of both love and hate is indifference, it is to this lack of identification that I referred.