Love's Necessary Hate

Like everyone else, I have been following recent events in Israel, and the response to the attacks by Hamas. The violence, whatever of the reporting on it can be trusted, is horrible. But what has been on my mind is the instant taking of sides by Americans, who are not directly involved in the conflict. It is understandable if Israelis hate Palestinians and Palestinians hate Israelis. But why do Americans (or anyone else who is not Palestinian or Jewish) take sides in this conflict? Shouldn’t one care first about one’s own country before that of others? No one begrudges the Israelis this rather natural inclination. Why do Americans seem to do the opposite?

I am pretty sure that this has to do with a corruption of the message of the Christian Gospels. Post-Enlightenment sensibilities seemed to have turned the parable of the Prodigal Son and the Bible’s injunction to '“love thy neighbor as oneself” on its head. Whereas Christ wanted to extend the love of neighbor outside the circle of one’s family and people, there is a sense today that to be a virtuous person you must love those outside of your family and nation more than those basic group loyalties. Otherwise, you are some sort of awful troglodyte who wants to kill anyone not related to them.

How much of a reversal this is not only of the Gospel but also of common sense can be viewed by looking at some peculiarly modern thinkers, many of whom were atheists, who thought just the opposite. Freud thought it was impossible to love strangers, was almost a crime to do so, because love should be reserved to those like one’s self. Nietzsche says somewhere that in the days of the Last Man it will be considered madness to distrust one’s neighbor (implying, I think, that it is perfectly natural to distrust one’s neighbors).

What bothers so many today in such assertions is not only that we should love our own more than outsiders but the suggestion we should positively hate them, or that there is a natural, almost deterministic drive that makes us do so. This quote by Freud captures this idea:

“It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.” Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (W.W. Norton & Co.) p. 72

What “hate” means in contexts like these is part of the problem, one that Freud contributed to. People when they hear the word “hate” seem to assume that it means what Freud means, an instinct of aggression in which we lust to murder our enemies. But clearly hate doesn’t mean that exactly.

For example, in the Gospels, Christ says that “if any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” Christ is not saying here that you must start a blood feud with your family or have violently hateful feelings about yourself. He is talking about the prioritizing of one’s love, one’s loyalties. And it is this that bothers many people today, because they have egalitarian conceptions of love that must apply equally to everyone everywhere, all the time (perhaps embodied by the phrase “love is love”).

It is often said that hate is not the opposite of love but indifference. I think this is too clever by half, mainly because people are thinking of “hate” in terms of enmity or aggression. Indifference is by definition the opposite of nothing, since it indicates a lack of something. Hate is the opposite of love but not in the sentimental meaning it has taken on in modern times.

It is not simply an opposite emotion, but an opposing loyalty. The saying “love is to will the good of another” (usually attributed to Aquinas, I think) is true, but kind of bloodless. To love is to act: when we love something or some one, we take their side over that of others, necessarily.

Perhaps we can understand this better if we look at love in personal terms. I used to be baffled at the way leaders in business, government, religion, and other areas of life seemed to never be able to admit to mistakes (or crimes, for that matter). Why is it seemingly so hard to admit when you have done wrong, when you are in such a powerful position?

I realize now that, having never been in a genuinely powerful position, socially speaking, such as a politician or the CEO of a major company, I failed to see things as these types of people might see them. You see them deflect responsibility for major mistakes and see only arrogance. What they see is a whole host of people ready to do them in. There are many people who think they should have that job or prized position, and many of will be ready at a moment’s notice to leap upon any mistake to suggest they are unfit for your job. If you fail, there will be no shortage of takers. Thus, because the stakes are so very high, there is a serious psychological risk in admitting mistakes. Admit a mistake, and people may lose confidence in your abilities. Worse, you may lose confidence in your abilities. And if there is one certainty in all social situations, it is that if you do not believe in yourself, nobody else will.

This does not justify the obfuscations of the powerful when they bungle or make mistakes. But it does explain why they so often fail to admit mistakes. And that is because self-love, at the expense of others, is sometimes a necessity.

If you are not convinced, let me take a page from my own personal life to illustrate this. I confess that I am very bad at handling rejection. I have always wanted to be a creative writer but fear of rejection has prevented me from trying until middle age. I have the same fear in every part of my life. I will spare you the gory details, but sufficed to say, after years of therapy and medication, the reason for my problems is that I treated every rejection as if it were a referendum on my being, because I assumed that those who rejected me were right. In other words, I automatically took their side over my own. Perhaps it is an artefact of my being a middle child, but I have, without admitting to myself until very recently, always craved the love of everyone in equal measure, and so thought there must be something wrong with me if I did not receive it.

That was my first mistake, assuming that I needed to love everyone in equal measure, and be loved in return that way. The second was not taking my side over theirs—not “hating” them. You might object that the question is not an either or proposition and that I simply made too much of these things. In a sense that is true.

But in another sense this is clearly wrong, because they took their side over mine. I not saying they should have taken my side over theirs, or that I wish to pursue a blood vendetta against anyone who has, however politely, turned me down. Nor am I saying that people should worship me because I am so wonderful. But for the sake of one’s mental and spiritual health, one has to believe they have made an error in judgment, at least as a visceral response. To do otherwise is to doubt one’s capacity to love, and receive it, with devastating consequences. After all, if I am not for myself, who will be?

All this may sound far removed from violent conflict in the Gaza strip. The problem in that case is that those peoples love themselves far too much in the terms I have laid out. It is well known that in tribal or clan like societies, empathy and compassion are limited to one’s in-group almost exclusively. Everyone outside of that circle is fair game for contempt, if not violence or retribution. We seem to be descending into that maelstrom in the United States too, and everywhere I seem to hear the paraphrase of Lenin (“the only question is, who will crush whom?) or the strictures of Carl Schmitt (that the “friend-enemy” distinction is the basis of all politics). And it is true, there are always boundaries, always insiders and outsiders; we cannot be everyone’s friend. But it does not mean everyone who is not is automatically your enemy. To walk around believing that sincerely (which many appear to do) is something that any person who wants to be called civilized must reject.

But this is not exactly the problem in America at the moment. America, with its yearning for moral perfection, plastered on every street corner with its perversion of the Gospel’s message, with its injunctions to love others more than yourself, has twisted itself into a tragi-comic spectacle of self-loathing both on a personal and a public level. Much of this is, no doubt, little more than the performative activism of elites jockeying for power, but not all of it.

It really does appear that, for some people, many of them influential people in our society, the laudable desire to “welcome the stranger” has been corrupted into the idea that self-hatred—the idea that you should never take your own side over that of others, even that of avowed enemies—is the solution to the problem of tribal conflicts. The incessant cries of activists that the United States is the most evil county ever to have existed is perhaps the most obvious symptom of this condition. But another can be found in all those depressing statistics you see more and more of these days, such as the surveys on loneliness, and the rise in the number of suicides among white males (and others) noted after the 2016 presidential election. It turns out that if you convince people they should never favor themselves, they never will—even unto death.

One remembers the quip that a liberal is someone who refuses to take their own side in an argument, when you see politicians lining up to start wars halfway across the globe for the sake of countries other than their own. This sort of thing suggests the projection of the tribal instinct onto other peoples, and not its eradication in our selves. Seeing people you know on social media argue passionately that one side or other in this conflict is either the blameless victim or pure evil is astonishing to me. I have opinions on the matter, but I cannot fathom identifying so passionately with nations other than my own. That this is a compensation for not being allowed to express love of one’s own country seem obvious to me, and I cannot view such behavior as anything but an unhealthy obsession formed by perverted notions of love.

One aspect of the modern, Enlightenment project was to tamp down such conflicts by getting people to love their own less, and appreciate the humanity of the Other. I am not sure how one could view this project as anything but a failure. The desire to remove “hate” from our souls in the aggressive, Freudian sense of the term was noble in its intentions, and there is no reason to gloat over its demise. But you can’t separate hate as taking one’s side over others from hate as aggressive animus against others, not completely, though of course one must always try. It is part of the tragedy of our existence that we will often fail, and a desire to avoid destructive conflict does not relieve of us the obligation to first take our own side, before considering that of others. Love is born into this world with its twin tugging at its heel, and no amount of Utopian social engineering can change that.