Whom Shall We Hate?

October 4, 1964
Rochester

Whom Shall We Hate?

A couple of weeks ago I reviewed the O.T. story of Micaiah, the prophet, who told King Ahab that there was no necessary connection between what he wanted to do and doing what was right. Because Micaiah was the only adviser who spoke so courageously and pointedly, he also became the object of the King’s anger. When the King of Judah, Jehoshaphat, had suggested that Micaiah be consulted, King Ahab of Israel said, “Micaiah ... but I hate him, for he never prophesies good concerning me, but evil.”

As things turned out, King Ahab would have lived, not ingloriously died in defeat, if he had taken the advice of the candid Micaiah, instead of hating him.

Whom shall I hate?

The person who gives me good advice that I refuse to heed?

The person who is a picture in my mind of something objectionable or evil? A picture not necessarily much like the real person?

The parents who advocate novel changes in human affairs and social structures – hating them because I am fearful that such changes will threaten my place on the status ladder or jeopardize my wishful thinking about preferment or power?

The criminal who has committed foul and loathsome crimes?

The political candidate I oppose, hating him because his possible election would put me among those who backed a loser?

Whom shall I hate?

Hate exists. One can assume from the Warren Commission report that hate was the directing force in the lives of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. Certainly hate took command in the most terrible moments of decision in their lives.

Hate exists. The “hate groups” whose scurrilous literature reaches us so widely, hate all varieties of minority groups, except their own reactionary minorities.

Hate exists. Too many times all law officers are hated because of the brutality, ignorance, or prejudice of a few.

Hate exists. There is something bizarre as well as instructive in the current re-runs of movies made 20 years ago, when the movie propaganda line helped the government propaganda by expressing and inciting hate toward Japanese and Germans – hate which now sounds almost as antiquated as if we could hear the shrill call of the junkman and the slow click of his horses’ hooves on brick-paved streets.

Hate exists. How many socially respectable and outwardly balanced persons in furious solitude have muttered curses at someone and wished him ill-fortune because such an object of hate had become “one-up,” been lucky, clever, or ready for opportunities the other had missed or delayed seizing? Or the hated one merely had been the innocent scapegoat for various frustrations?

What is hate? Hate is an outlaw emotion which has gained sufficient power over us to become a directing motive. Hate is an emotion spawned by ignorance and nursed by fear. The psychologists can outline its maverick growth. Because of our human nature, we can easily become ever-anxious about our own egos to the point of unhealthy vanity, while at the same time cherishing doubts about our own adequacy to achieve goals and our ability to perform up to expectations. When situations arise in which we seem unable to cope, fear increases together with the discomforts caused by being thwarted. If one adds the ingredient of suggestibility, particularly suggestibility to easy, over-simplified answers, then the state of ignorance and the feelings of fear, vanity, thwarting and suggestibility can merge in the guiding motive of hate.

The headline name may be a classic example. Now I neither pass judgment on Lee Harvey Oswald nor attempt an apology for him. Unfortunately for him and for our system of law, even though we are magnetized with the dreadful fascination and speculation of the assassination circumstances, he can never be convicted or absolved of the awful crime. But the Warren Report, judging from excerpts, digests and summaries, has thoroughly established a formidable array of circumstances to demonstrate that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole killer of President Kennedy. That Oswald hated authority figures seems highly probable. What made him hate?

The Warren Report indicates many of the ingredients which combine in a poison broth of hate. Oswald’s childhood was hectic, anxiety-ridden, insecure. His father died when he was a small child. After a short while with his widowed mother, he was sent to an orphanage. Following this experience, he was sent home to his mother when she married again. But this home, too, became broken in three years or less. Thwarting, fear and the pains of a bruised ego must have gathered in ominous merger.

As a boy he was known to authorities for delinquent behavior. It was said of Oswald by one counselor, “no one ever met his need for love.” Then the boy became the man who possessed a “deep-rooted resentment of all authority,” who nursed “hostility toward every society in which he lived.” The Warren Report indicates how this accumulated hostility may have directed the hate motives which triggered assassination.

We know now whom he hated, and the terrible consequences which so profoundly shocked us all and affected our destiny.

Whom will I hate? Whom will you hate? Must there be hate? Several observations:

First, we must never forget the relationship between emotion and intellect. Among the unverified statements I have recently noted, was an item that by body weight man is composed of 43% muscle and 2.5% brain. The intellect must reasonable control all that muscle or the outlaw emotion of hate can ride amok, unchecked by higher values.

It has been said that for 2400 years all Western Philosophy has been commentary on Plato. Certainly he gave many an enduring clue to the priority that reason must claim over passion if we are to be truly human. In TIMAEUS, Plato used the analogy of anatomy to make the point that reason must exert control or we fail to achieve the human stature which could be ours:

“Now of the divine, he (God) was the Creator, but the creation of the mortal he committed to his offspring ... they proceeded to fashion a moral body, and made it to be the vehicle of the soul, and constructed within the body a soul of another nature subject to terrible and irresistible affections – first of all pleasure, the greatest incitement to evil; then pain, which deters from good; also rashness and fear, two foolish counselors, anger hard to be appeased, and hope easily led astray – these they mingled with irrational sense and with all-daring love, according to necessary laws, and so framed man .... That part of the inferior soul which is endowed with courage and passion and leaves contention they settled nearer the neck, midway between the midriff and the neck, in order that it might be under the rule of reason and might join with it in controlling and restraining the desires when they are no longer willing of their own accord to obey the word of command issuing from the citadel.” (See Synopticon, Vol. 7).

Plato may have underestimated the power of emotions as well as speculating fantastically on anatomy, but he did not overstate the primary role that reason must play in policing the outlaw emotions of hate and irrationality.

The reasonable mind should not be given an assignment to smother emotion, even if it could – which it can not. One of the realities of human existence is that squelched and repressed emotions can sabotage the effort to achieve health in body and mind. The power of reason is disclosed when the reasoning mind directs the expression of emotions toward the achievement of goals which are not just ego impulses, but rather goals made authentic by effective knowledge; and illuminated by the higher values which, in our better moments, we have learned to prize.

When caught up by the splendid dreams of the best of our heritage and the most inspired moments of our personal experience, we are persuaded that truth, beauty and goodness represent the true goals of human endeavor, particularly in the application of these virtues in life.

When there is knowledge instead of ignorance, then there is courage rather than fear. And when courage triumphs over fear, then love casts out hate. Nowadays, some persons wince at the word, “love.” But in the closing sentence of his essay, “Knowledge and Understanding,” Aldous Huxley, unsparingly and incisively, emphasized both the flaws and the irreplaceability of this word, “love”: “Of all the worn, smudged, dog-eared words in our vocabulary, ’love’ is surely the grubbiest, smelliest, slimiest. Bawled from a million pulpits, lasciviously crooned through hundreds of millions of loud speakers, it has become an outrage to good taste and decent feeling, an obscenity which one hesitates to pronounce. And yet it has to be pronounced, for, after all, love is the last word.”

Let me attempt to emphasize another dimension when considering the question, “Whom shall I hate?” The hazard of falling victim to the hate virus increases when we play the treacherous game of “odd man out.” “Tag – you’re it” may be noisy, active, harmless play for children, but it can be a most dangerous game for adults when used to condemn and despise persons. Yet it’s a game we are constantly tempted to play.

For example, if I hate a person, a Communist, Fidel Castro, for example, I can expand my hostility on cussing him out in absentia; I can suspiciously surmise his secret agents are manipulating every political and diplomatic decision I oppose; and all the while because my energies have been channeled into personal hate, I may never exert myself intellectually to grapple with the momentous historical question of why people plan, carry out and sustain revolutions.

If I hate, as a person, a Neo-fascist storm-trooper, George Lincoln Rockwell, the American Nazi, for example, I can recite the authentic list of totalitarian horrors and tremble at the possibility that it could happen here. But to the extent that I hate him as a person, I have used up my energies and emotion which should be rationally directed toward the problem of handling in a democracy the activities of those who would destroy for others, the very rights which permit these conspirators to incite and attract the ignorant, the fearful and the thwarted.

One of the insights provided by the old Hebrew Scripture of Proverbs is found in the eighth chapter where there appears a long, superb passage praising “Wisdom.” Two lines, (vs. 36), read,

“but he who misses (wisdom) injures himself;
All who hate me (wisdom) love death.”

This applies directly to the “tag – you’re it,” “odd man out” method of combating supposed danger or threat. It is far wiser to deal with problems not personalities. All who hate wisdom, by hating persons, may utterly fail to meet the issues competently.

Another way of looking at this aspect of hate is to recall how frequently the “Devil” theory of religion or history has appeared. From ancient times people have been unable to reconcile what they believed to be the goodness of God with the obvious occurrence of disasters – fire, flood, disease, tornado, volcanic eruption – disasters wherein the lives of persons, good and bad, were rubbed out indiscriminately. The belief in demonology arose in very ancient times and was carried forward into our Judeo-Christian heritage, that God could not be responsible and that there must be a supernatural spirit of evil nearly equal in power to God.

By and large, most persons do not take the notion of a supernatural Devil seriously any more, but we have been sufficiently tainted by ancient ways of believing so that we tend to personify, readily, a philosophy or government we oppose in the person of an adversary, usually a striking personality, who becomes a Devil (the nonsense about “Impeach Earl Warren” is a current and deplorable example). Somehow the crude notion arises that if we could ship this Devil back to hell, then there would be peace and light and everything nice. But most controversies are deeper and stronger than the personalities who may be their current advocates, even though we have made devils of them. I have no real expectations that conditions will be otherwise in my lifetime, but is not the whole atmosphere of political campaigns fogged over with the “Devil” theory of political choice?

We are warned about the devilish nature of a candidate’s manners, morals or associates. If we people of this land would exert some special mental effort to permit our reason to direct our 45% muscle around, perhaps some day the Devil theory of opposing factions will have gone the way of the sacrifices to Moloch; and candidates will respond to a reasonable demand that campaigns be devoted to basic issues, defined problems and authentic prospects.

But the Devil theory, the “odd man out” way, the “tag – you’re it” gambit will remain until the answer to the question, “Whom shall I hate” is “No person. I hate no one.”

The hate groups, the Neo storm troopers, those who cherish only a conspiratorial view of history are passionately involved in a search for significance, distorted and brutalized though that search is. But twisted crusades are marked by a conspicuous omission, which is the concluding observation on the topic, “Whom shall I hate?”

Those who hate neglect the ancient and imperishable reality that healthy and moral human significance is realized only when (As Hilary Frye remarked at the G.A., 1964, SF), “the individual finds worthwhileness in helping others grow and in the process, grows himself toward his own fulfillment.”

When the question is put to us, “Whom shall we hate?” and we answer truthfully, “no one,” the point is not alone that we are placing the supreme worth of human personality as a value superior to the temptation to hate; but also we are coming into our own as persons. As Dr. Herbert Mowrer, research professor of psychology at the University of Illinois has observed, “we can be true to ourselves only if we are first true to others.”

Even amidst strong differences, there is little doubt that this policy of mutual good-will is intimately related to physical health as well as moral virtue. There have been some findings to the effect that only patients with high blood pressure and kindred ills are reported with considerable consistency to be persons cherishing feelings of intense hatred or guilt.

When the greatest of the ethical prophets, Amos in the eighth century, B.C. came down to the corrupt city from the clean hills where his sheep ranged, he was caustic in his indignant condemnation of the rich and powerful who oppressed the poor and needy; he excoriated the lazy, the political grafters, the swindling merchants. Yet this prophet who is perpetually the model for the goals of ethical religion, did not hate persons. His most famous passage illuminates the clear distinction:

“I hate, I despise your feasts,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings,
I will not accept them,
and the peace offerings of your fatted beasts
I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
to the melody of your harps I will not listen.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

Amos hated the hollow ritual and the solemn hypocrisies, but he did not hate people: “I hate, I despise your feasts.” In another famous passage he said,

“hate the evil and love the good,
and establish justice in the land.”

We are true to ourselves when we refrain from hating any person. Hate the evil deed, but not the person. Whom shall I hate?