Beyond Love and Hate

• In Defense of Hate
• What is Hate?
• The Reason for Hate

In this series, I have been discussing our tendency to reduce social ethics to a simple dichotomy of love versus hate and the problems such a reductive approach can and often does cause in society. In Part 1, I argued against the seemingly popular view that love is obviously good and hate obviously bad, and I suggested that this view fails to adequately account for or address the complex problems society faces. In Part 2, I focused on the important role of semantics in this issue, pointing out that what we mean by “love” and “hate” can be very different depending on what other beliefs and values we hold. I ended Part 2 by suggesting that even when our differences aren’t just a matter of semantics and people really do choose to openly practice hate, they are not simply crazy or deluded, but they likely have coherent reasons for doing so, some of which are just as reasonable or sophisticated as the reasons others choose to practice love. In this post and the next, I explore some of the reasons why people may choose to hate and why these reasons should not just be dismissed as crazy, foolish, or obviously wrong.

First, an important clarification: I do not mean to suggest that people who choose hate always or even usually have particularly good reasons to do so, nor do I believe that they are ultimately right to do so. What I am suggesting is that people – all people – choose to behave the way they do for some reason, and that this applies to those who hate just as much as to those who love, and everyone in between. Importantly, there are all sorts of reasons we behave the way we do. Some reasons are better than others, and two people may hold many of the same ethical views for very different reasons. Furthermore, our choice of moral standards does not occur in isolation from competing sets of standards, and therefore always involves an evaluation of sorts – a weighing of competing moral standards against each other. This means that in the case of choosing whether to be loving or hateful, our choice might have just as much to do with the reasons for or against love as with the reasons for or against hate. Consequently, if hate, sometimes, to some people, seems more appealing or reasonable than love, this may have just as much to do with their lack of exposure to good arguments in favor of love as to any exposure they have had to good arguments in favor of hate. On a practical level, all of this means that if we hope to convince someone to stop hating others, we need to provide them with a good reason to do so, one that will outweigh their reason for hating in the first place. In other words, we need to provide an answer to the second of our two crucial questions mentioned in Part 2, “why should hate be considered wrong?”

So, how do we usually answer this question? Well, usually (in my experience) we don’t, at least not publicly. We are convinced hate is wrong and quick to condemn it, but when it comes to providing actual arguments against it, we are often silent. We tend instead to repeat our love-not-hate slogans and express our frustration or disbelief over those who would dare to disagree. I think there are several related reasons for this, and they are not all bad. To start with, many don’t see it as their place to convince anyone to change their mind on such matters through argument. Rather, they are content to stand in support of their position and encourage like-minded others in that stance. For some, this may stem from a belief that arguing over certain topics does little or no good when it comes to actually changing the minds of others.[1] Many are also convinced that engaging certain positions in argument could be counterproductive, as it might lend undeserved legitimacy to those positions. I believe it is this line of thought that at times leads some to say things like, “I am not even going to dignify that with a response.”[2]  Finally, I think many do not provide reasons justifying their condemnation of hate because they genuinely believe no justification is necessary. After all, to be openly hateful of someone is beyond the basic standards of human decency; anyone who cannot recognize that this is wrong must be foolish, crazy, or otherwise beyond reason.

I believe I understand to some extent all the perspectives outlined above, and as stated previously, I don’t believe they are all bad (though I don’t think any of them is without its problems).[3] As you may have guessed, it is the last one that I find most problematic and which I would like to focus on now. I have already made the general claim that people choose to believe and behave the way they do for some reason(s). I have also stated that while hate may appear to be outside basic standards of decency, it may still be well within the bounds of rational judgment. To understand how this could be the case, we might first consider what we are saying when we employ phrases like “basic standards of decency.” What makes these standards “basic?” Are we referring to standards that have been arrived at through reasoned analysis based on a set of agreed-upon premises, or that have been shown to be true through some test or process involving agreed-upon criteria? It doesn’t seem so. Far more often, it seems to me, we use this phrase to refer to things that are on principle not subjected to analysis or testing – things considered so basic they don’t require any demonstration. They are simply grasped intuitively or instinctively by every right-minded person. In other words, they are obvious or self-evident, at least to a majority. On this account, then, we tend to believe hate is wrong because it is contrary to basic standards of decency, and that these standards are trustworthy because they seem self-evident to most people; but if this is our argument, we have created one based not so much on demonstration or analysis as on intuition and majority rule. In effect, our claim is that hate should be considered wrong because we feel that it is wrong and so do lots of others like us.

So, what is wrong with that? Shouldn’t the deeply held feelings of the majority of a society count for something when it comes to establishing norms for that society? Yes, I believe they probably should count for something – but they shouldn’t count for everything, and they certainly shouldn’t be the only basis on which to establish a universal social ethic. Why not? There are many reasons, but probably the simplest is just that the majority can easily be wrong. It has happened many times in the past with respect to many things, and I have no doubt it continues to happen today. After all, we are all capable of committing errors in judgment, especially when our knowledge of a subject is limited and/or second-hand (which for most of us describes our knowledge of most subjects). Very few of us can rightly be considered experts in any subject or body of knowledge, and even experts can end up being proven wrong. Moreover, when it comes to ethics, which are often informed by beliefs about all sorts of interrelated subjects, the potential for us to be mistaken (at least somewhat) with respect to a given ethical principle is very great indeed.

Of course, just because the majority view could be wrong doesn’t mean it is wrong, and some may even be able to offer compelling reasons why intuition or majority opinion as such should serve as evidence for truth. In such cases, I welcome this discussion and believe it ought to be articulated in answer to the question of why hate should be considered wrong. As I mentioned, however, it has been my experience that these reasons are rarely, if ever, discussed publicly, and that is a problem. For, if we cannot articulate an argument for why the majority is right in feeling that love is better than hate, we haven’t really provided an answer to the question of why hate should be considered wrong. Consequently, we have given minority groups no real reason to change their views – at least, no reason they are likely to find compelling. Even a very weak argument is more compelling than no argument whatsoever, and those who continue to view hate as a good thing may well do so in part simply because no one has offered them a compelling reason not to. Recall that my claim was not that the majority of us are necessarily wrong to condemn hate, but that our reasons for doing so are often no better than the reasons others condone hate.[4]

Perhaps you agree so far, and grant that we don’t often give others good enough reasons to abandon hateful ideas or values, but that still doesn’t explain what the reasons are to adopt those ideas or values in the first place. So, what about the other side? Does anybody really have what we could rightly call a reason to condone hate? Surely there are explanations for such behavior – maybe some sort of skewed sense of reality brought on by mental illness or misplaced emotional angst – but are there reasonable, coherent ideas behind hate? I believe there often are. Sometimes psychopathological factors are present, but not always, and especially not when there are hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people apparently engaging in the behavior in question. In these cases, we cannot simply explain it away by labeling them all “crazy,” no matter how much we might want to. No, people have reasons for the things they believe and the things they do, whether these things are hateful or not. That we might not understand these reasons or that they might seem strange to us may have much to do with a fundamental disagreement we have with the premises underlying them.[5] As we saw with the example of the preacher in Part 2, our real disagreement might lie at a more basic level than is at first glance apparent. Rather than decrying as “senseless” what we fail to understand, we would do well to remember the limits of our own understanding. Sometimes to make sense of what appears senseless we need to look at things from another perspective.

So, what of those other perspectives? What are the reasons for hate? I’m sure there are many, just as there are many reasons for love. There are certainly more than I am personally familiar with or can address adequately here. What I can do is discuss some examples to demonstrate how hate can actually appear relatively reasonable from a given perspective. I turn this time not to a personal experience of mine, but to some of the most well-known examples of hate (or at least of evil) from history and our time. In the next post, I plan to analyze some of these cases, and, in so doing, I hope to demonstrate that there can be coherent reasons behind even the most extreme examples of hate one could consider.

[1] For many of us, personal experience drives us to this position. After countless seemingly fruitless arguments over the same issues with the same people, it is no wonder we give up hope. This is a significant problem with important implications for society, perhaps deserving of its own post in the future. For our present purposes, I would point out two things. First, if our arguments with others are in fact fruitless, this may have much to do with the way we tend to go about arguing. Second, I would ask anyone who considers the minds of others to be unchangeable to consider themselves first. If you believe you are capable of changing your own views under the right circumstances, why should you assume otherwise about anyone else? What circumstances would be necessary for your views to change?

[2] I think there may be certain situations in which the most prudent course of action is to ignore for a time an opposing position rather than respond to it immediately. However, history has shown us that continuing to ignore ideas we don’t like does not make them go away, and ideas have consequences. In the worst cases, the consequences can be disastrous. Increasingly, I tend to view any sincerely held belief as something worth taking seriously on its own terms, especially if I find it repulsive.

[3] See the two previous footnotes.

[4] I do not mean to suggest that everyone who has used love-not-hate rhetoric hasn’t adequately considered the reason for their views, and I am sure there are those who do make an effort to articulate arguments to defend a love-not-hate ethic. What I am suggesting is that, as a general trend, we don’t make an effort to articulate these reasons in such a way as to convince our opponents they are in the wrong. Now, I recognize that some of our forms of communication, particularly those through online media, are by nature limited to simplified expressions of ideas, that lack the sort of detailed explanation I might prefer (there’s only so much one can say in 140 characters). I also recognize that sometimes slogans express more than the bare words themselves, whether implicitly, through additional imagery, or by the context in which they are shared. I further recognize that many times they arise in reaction to particular events and that they are probably just expressions of sentiment, not intended to convince anyone of anything through argument. I think that emotive responses such as this are valuable, and if this were the extent of what I am critiquing then you would be right to wonder why I am so concerned. My real suspicion and concern, however, is that emotive response is not the full extent of what is happening and that these statements actually reveal a larger trend in the way many of us think about morality. It seems to me that many who champion “love” don’t always take the time to consider what they mean by it and how others may understand and practice it differently. My fear is not just that our statements could be interpreted by others to appear overly simplistic, but that often they are expressions of a way of distinguishing right from wrong that actually is overly simplistic, dangerously so.

[5] The astute reader will recognize that much depends here on what one means by “reason” or “rational.” The question of what constitutes reason, or whether any such hard-and-fast category does or should exist, is one that I find myself increasingly puzzled by and forced to ponder. For our purposes here, I don’t mean to use “reason” in any very strict sense – for example, as a faculty completely distinct from emotion or one that is purely logical. Rather, to stipulate a working definition, by “reason” I simply mean any idea that is based at least in part on evidence from the real world (that is, the world we share as a common reference) and that is concerned with describing or explaining reality (or some part of reality). Note that under this definition, almost any idea could count as a reason, but not all reasons are equal. Ideas could be thought of as more or less reasonable depending on the quality and/or quantity of evidence they take into account, and on how well that evidence is interpreted.