Hatred (6 page)

In an animal, the rage not only prepares it physiologically for the struggle ahead, but also communicates to the opposition its readiness to fight. David Hamburg, a behavioral biologist, describes both the adaptive values and the maladaptive hazards of anger in the following way:

This observation continues with an optimism that should be reassuring. Group animals establish a pecking order that serves to avoid constant confrontations. Once in place, this order serves as a civilizing mechanism that facilitates group cohesion and survival. This nice biological mechanism for stabilizing groups has not been as effective in human societies. Most human encounters are not so neatly packaged. Certainly, most of us know better than to attack a policeman or snarl at the boss, but in most social situations the pecking order is not established or, worse, is in a constant state of flux. Too often, the “significant others” will assess the situation differently from the way we do. Their assessment of the pecking order and our relative places in it may differ significantly from ours. Pecking orders in human relationships are rigidly defined only in special groups like the army or the workplace. In social groups they will often be viewed differently by the different participants. And they are ephemeral and readily modifiable. Human beings are often ready to enter the power struggle, to test, challenge, or confront the prevailing order. In human beings the biological imperative to get along with the members of the pack, defined by the pecking order, has been abandoned, without necessarily a different cultural one having been substituted.

The rules are always simpler with lower animals. In animals, aggression is limited for the most part to matters involving food, water, sexual objects, and the territory that commands these.
With human beings, however, what we define as basic interests are usually elaborate, metaphoric, and symbolic, involving such nonbiological factors as status, position, self-esteem, pride, face, and dignity. The cunning human animal is likely to respond to the symbol more aggressively than to the fact. Slights to esteem are weighed with the most delicate of balances, and injuries viewed through the most magnifying of lenses. Human beings appreciate the strength and force of money, the relative power of weapons, the importance of allies and allegiances. And they can check and delay intuitive responses. They can dissemble, anticipate future rectification, store grievances. The human being has a longer perspective. He can anticipate a future and knows that for everything there is a season. He can even bear humiliation while he prepares himself to balance accounts.

Psychiatrists deal on a daily basis with the perceived humiliating aspects of life in our times. Often the symptom that drives the patient to therapy is a persistent and poorly controlled rage or a symbolic equivalent of it. The patient must be guided through this network of conflicting emotions to understand the causes of his diminished sense of self and his tattered ego. This is often a process of tracing the path of a perceived threat that leads to fear, and through fear, to rage. Similarly, to understand those who hate, one must follow the elaborate pathways that lead from vulnerability to hatred.

F
ear and anger were designed to serve as responses to threats to our survival. To our survival—not to our pride, status, position, manhood, or dignity. Somehow we have developed in our minds a crucial linkage between even minimally measurable affronts to our status and the very fact of our survival. We respond to these affronts with biological defenses appropriate to an actual assault. Even a simple direct gaze may be perceived as an attack. “Dissing” someone on a subway or the streets of the city may be an invitation to an assault. In the subways of New York City something as inoffensive as a direct look may be interpreted as an act of contempt and assault on dignity.

For years the direct relationship between fear and rage remained undiscovered. Fear was clearly a response to someone who threatened to harm you. Rage was the seemingly opposite emotion. You had rage in the face of someone who affronted you or frustrated you in your pursuits. The intimate connection between them was not appreciated.

These two emotions operate on a toggle switch, readily convertible, one to the other. In cultures where fear is perceived as
unmanly—and where is it not?—the emotion of fear is humiliating and must be repressed. Men, real men, do not eat quiche or show fear. Rage is the public face of fear in most men and many women. The two can be considered as opposite sides of the same coin, the same emergency response. Therefore, to determine what enrages a population, look for what threatens them.

Anything in society, in daily life, or in the broader conditions of existence that makes the environment seem more threatening can invoke rage. Anything that diminishes self-confidence or raises questions about one's strength, value, or worth—in other words, one's capacity to defend oneself, one's honor, one's territory—can also invoke rage. The vital balance perceived between the power of “them” and “us”—the measure of our vulnerability—will determine the degree of fear and rage operating on any individual or in a culture.

The unconscious roots of rage are found in all the symbolic ways we feel diminished. Some of the more common psychological assaults perceived by modern people follow. They are often many steps removed from the primal paradigm of the tiger in the compound.

Feeling deprived bears no relationship to the actual amount of comfort or goods that a person may possess. One can be surrounded with all the indulgences of the affluent society and still feel deprived. Contrary to this, we can observe people existing in great poverty, where each expenditure must be measured and considered, every nutrient stored and rationed, who still do not feel deprived.

Human beings can tolerate amazing privation and hardship. People can exist in poverty, even to a point of cold and hunger,
with dignity and nobility. I remember as a child watching Robert J. Flaherty's exceptional documentary,
Nanook of the North,
with amazement. I had grown up in the relative comfort of a middle-class family, experiencing little privation, certainly no hunger. Raised in the bleak and extended winters of the Great Lakes, however, I had come to hate the cold.

I watched the Eskimos enduring hunger and poverty, struggling with minimal modern tools to sustain daily life for themselves and their children. Everything depended on the luck of the hunt and the vagaries of nature. The struggle for survival was real here. The hunt was an accepted part of life. Its failure in a season could mean hunger or starvation. Tension and anxiety would be inevitable, but no evidence of self-pity, no sense of “poor me” seemed present in the documentary or was evident in the anthropological studies of these communities.

These lives were lived from birth to death in the bleakest and harshest of environments and in a cold that I could but imagine. Despite hardships that to me would have been unbearable, Nanook and his comrades experienced joy, absolute joy, in their search for food and struggle for survival. In this environment of privation, they not only endured, they triumphed.

During the Great Depression, multitudes suffered true privation and most were not alienated. People were jobless, homeless, and often hungry. Fear was palpable, but not anger. What anger existed focused on the times, the “system,” the landlords, and the bosses. The most aberrant response emerged from among the more intellectual-minded who embraced a half-baked and optimistic attraction to Marxist literature and Marxist causes. Although Marxist literature had a peculiar affinity for the hyperbolic language of hatred, most of my socialist relatives and teachers seemed immune to the vitriol and wonderfully free of malice. There was little rage and resentment neighbor to neighbor. All were members of the same community sharing the same fate. I
am not trying to romanticize poverty and privation. Grinding poverty is degrading and dispiriting. It is indecent. It can cause severe damage to the spirit and psyche. Only in the capacity to generate rage and hatred is relative deprivation more important than actual privation.

A sense of deprivation thrives on differentials: when others have what we do not. It is a relative feeling, more closely associated with entitlement than want. We suffer from the fact that we do not have that which we need, unless we feel it has—somehow by someone—been denied to us or, worse, taken from us. We then experience a sense of violation, of assault on our dignity that ultimately is perceived as denigration.

When a sense of deprivation ceases to be a transient phenomenon and is perceived as a way of life not just for ourselves but for our group, the parent society is ripe for an explosive release into organized hatred and violence. If this were the Congo in the nineteenth century, such rage could not have been directed at those who actually deprived them. Leopold II, the King of the Belgians, would not even have been known to them and certainly not available. Instead, the resentment might have been deflected onto those who were innocent of cheating them, but in some unfathomable way could have been considered the agents of their deprivation. They might have been a traditional enemy, a neighboring tribe, who by its proximity could afford a convenient outlet for this rage. These local battles became diversions from the true sources of deprivation in the economy or the culture of colonial Africa.

The smoldering rage that results from feeling cheated is always a component of deprivation. Who deprived us is not particularly important. We know deprivation when we see a disparity between that which we have and that which, by observing the standard of some others, we assume to be our due.

A sense that the world we occupy operates according to principles of equity and fairness is essential for peace of mind and a relative contentment with the state of authority. The moral sensibility of a child is born within the concept of fairness. “It's not fair” is so often the first statement of moral outrage that one is inclined to believe that some concept of equity or justice must be a part of our genetic inheritance.

Often, this outcry is first heard in the context of sibling rivalry, the sibling “got away with” something, was given something more or better, or was allowed a privilege or indulgence that we were denied. It may be equally present when the parent seems to be changing the rules of the game, violating the standards they, themselves, had previously seemed to endorse. To have played the game according to the rules and still be penalized carries the grievance beyond unfairness to the more generalized feeling of injustice. If the social order is corrupt, outrage and rebellion are justified. This is why the downbeat endings that fascinate so many novelists and movie directors prove to be anathema to the public at large. We want the good guys to triumph and the villains brought to justice. We believe in just deserts.

The anomie that infected some sections of the white working class in the latter half of the twentieth century and led to the various white supremacy movements had its roots in a profound sense of injustice. Members of this group began to feel deceived and treated unfairly (a halfway house to paranoia, as will be discussed later). They felt they had been seduced by promises not kept. They had kept the faith, played by the rules, and still were denied the respect they felt they had earned. The injustice that the bourgeoisie as well as the working class felt may well have started in the 1960s with the revolt of their own children.

The revision of values that began in that decade was perceived by parents as an assault on their standards and way of life. In the short-lived antimaterialism of the student revolt of the 1960s and 1970s, the white middle-class parents joined with the working class in a sense of outrage and betrayal. The parents had purchased the material goods, which their children affected to reject, at extraordinary cost in sweat and labor. They had lived their lives doing unrewarding work, consoling themselves with the assumption that what they could purchase with the earnings from their labors was adequate reward for the sacrifice and drudgery they had endured.

Their children—by rejecting and thereby showing their contempt for split-level homes, two-week vacations, large American-made cars—were challenging the trade-off these parents had been forced to make. Spitting on the flag was not all that outraged these parents; spitting on the twenty-one-inch color television set, the wall-to-wall carpeting, the patio furniture, the microwave oven, and the Buick was worse. Finally, the image of the drop-out child and the druggie became the ultimate assault on the work ethic by which their parents lived—and sacrificed. The children were ridiculing a way of life for which their parents had paid dearly.

In addition, these parents identified the trappings of a middle-class lifestyle as the social sign of their upward progress from the Great Depression days of their childhood. While their children were choosing to go barefoot, they were recalling the times when, for them, going barefoot was not a choice but a necessity. It was a shameful stigma of social caste. For children to affect the dress of the working class—the overalls, the work shoes—was a bewildering rejection of the very status symbols for which the parents had traded much of their pleasure and time. They had sweated out their lives for these “things,” not just for their own sake, but for their children's. In attacking these symbols of success,
the student revolution had raised doubts about the irrevocable contract that the middle class had signed. It was too painful to acknowledge the possibility that they had opted for simply another mess of pottage.