Hatred (28 page)

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:

W
hether 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 underpinning 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.

Known terrors are always more bearable than the dread of the unknown. What is knowable may be controllable. We use anticipation to protect ourselves by making contingency plans in advance of the impending disasters. When the reservoirs are dangerously low, we restrict water consumption. We store the bountiful harvests in anticipation of droughts, thus preventing famines. We arm ourselves in the presence of the predator; secure food supplies and stake out territories that supply them; protect ourselves from the elements; and in this modern age of medicine, take care of our health. Above all, we plan and anticipate. But there is no way that we can prepare our psyche to accept the unknown and unknowable. We, therefore, find means of rationalizing the unknowable.

The greatest perceived threat is always the unknowable one, which is epitomized by one of the earliest fears of childhood—fear of the dark. Even this fear represents a reparative step. It defines a way out. If that which one fears is literally “the dark,” one can always turn on the light. With the intellectual and metaphoric darkness, we need symbolic candles. The evolution of the varying symptoms of neurosis, as described in Chapter 7, can all be explained in terms of controlling the unknowable by adding light and understanding. Neurotic behavior can be viewed as an attempt to control an existential, or free-floating, anxiety through various displacements and rationalizations.

All of us have felt anxious, as distinguished from worried. We worry about events. We are anxious about what we do not know. But for most of us, the anxiety we occasionally experience is
similar to the temporary feelings of depression that we endure. We know that this vague anxiety—extending in severity from unease to dread—will pass. With some people, the anxiety will not pass. This is the state we psychiatrists refer to as an “anxiety neurosis.” Such patients are forced to use the reparative devices of neurotic symptoms to help limit their anxiety. The phobic
avoids
the source of his anxiety; he decides that an animal is the true source of his fear and he stays away from that animal. The obsessive
eliminates
the source of his anxiety; if every aspect of life is managed and controlled, there can be no surprises, and thus there will be no uncontrollable events. The delusional
explains
it; that which seems threatening is really a part of a grand design to exalt rather than to reduce one. But all neurotic repairs eventually fail, as reality inevitably breaks through, necessitating newer distortions and displacements.

Hatred can be understood in the language of repair and symptoms. Hatred is a neurotic attachment to a self-created enemy that has been designed to rationalize the anxiety and torment of a demeaning existence. It is a defense against the hopelessness of despair. Hate-driven people live in the distorted world of their own perceptions. Normal people also live in the perceived world rather than the actual one, but saying that both the bigoted hater's perceptions and the normal person's perceptions are subjective does not eliminate the real distinction between those perceptions. It does not morally equate the hater with us. Hatred is their disease at this point, and we normal people must protect ourselves against it. To do so we must appreciate its complexities.

Hatred must not be perceived as a mere extension of the transient feelings of rage that we all have experienced. It is an emotion, but beyond that, it is also a psychological state that defines the self in terms of a relationship with an enemy. Hatred can be seen as being structured very similarly to love. However, the opposing feelings that underlie the two emotions make love an enriching
and expansive experience, while hatred is a constricting and destructive venom. One can compare hatred and love:

In neither hatred nor love is the object of their attachment, the obsessive focus of their passion, all that the individual makes it out to be. It is not surprising that, as William Congreve wrote, “love to hatred turned” is such a familiar story. All that is required is a shift in the emotion. Everything else is in place.

The fact that hatred is formed and structured like a neurosis does not mean that we ought to grant to hatred the exculpation afforded the sick. Antisocial behavior must be governed and controlled. To do that we insist on autonomy and responsibility. Unless you are truly insane, the presence or absence of mental illness has little relevance in the law. As Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Men who are not insane nor idiotic [are expected] to control their evil passions or violent tempers or brutal instincts,
and if they do not do so, it is their own fault.”
⁸⁵
The sardonic statement of the judge in Samuel Butler's
Erewhon
highlights the central position that responsibility holds in the social contract: