On Demonization II: The Nature of Hatred

This post is a continuation of the series of posts begun here, and assumes you have read its predecessor.

Of the Seven Deadly Sins, two, and only two, essentially involve wanting to see another person be harmed. Pride, Avarice, Sloth, Gluttony and Lust may cause you to desire another person's harm as a side effect; but one may be proud, greedy, lazy, gluttonous and concupiscent without any particular malice toward anyone else.

But Anger and Envy are quite different. The man consumed by Anger believes, emotionally if not intellectually, that another person's harm is his (the angry man's) good. The man consumed by Envy believes, emotionally if not intellectually, than another person's good is his (the envious man's) harm. They are two different sides of a single coin.

That coin is Hatred -- the desire for another person's harm in itself. ...continue reading...

Understand, if I am a greedy man and I want out of my marriage but don't want to pay a divorce lawyer, I may long to see my wife dead. But that just means that Greed can lead one to Anger. And it is the same with the other sins: they can bring you to the place where you want to see another person harmed, but that is because each sin, once it has established residence, has the potential to invite its brothers in as house-guests.

(Okay, a digression here that I can't resist just because I like the joke, as told by the stand-up comic and ukelele virtuoso of the Austin band the Geezinslaws, having as his target the lead vocalist who, other than his singing, remains mute:

Awhile back I noticed that Son was looking awfully depressed; so I asked him, "Son, what's the problem?"

"Well, Sammy," Son answered, "you know my wife's birthday is comin' up? So a couple of days ago I asked her, 'Hon, what do you want for your birthday?' And she answered, 'Well, since you asked, what I'd really like is a dee-vorce.'

"And I said, 'Well, now, I hadn't been plannin' on spendin' quite that much...'"

We now return to the topic at hand. [clears throat and hits the reset-mood button]

I was, before so rudely interrupting myself, emphasizing that hatred, being the habit of indulging oneself in either or both of anger and envy, is what Christianity calls a "sin" -- a term one tends to avoid in talking to the public at large because so few people outside of the Church really grasp what Christians mean when calling something a "sin." If you aren't a Christian, you can just think of it this way: dumping sugar in the gas tank of your car is a "sin" with respect to your car in the same way indulging yourself in hatred is a "sin" with respect to your well-being. In each case, the owner's manual warns you not to do it -- not because the people who wrote the respective owners' manuals want to spoil your fun, but because they know it's destructive behavior that can have devastating consequences for the car in one case and for yourself in the other.

I don't expect anyone who isn't a Christian (or from a similar tradition that also tries to warn its adherents away from hatred) to say, "Oh, well, if it's a sin, then I guess I won't do it." But just as most of us are very sorry to see anybody smoking -- and the more we love them, the sorrier we are to see them ensnared by that vice -- I myself am very sorry to see anyone spouting bile and hatred and anger...though naturally, being much less than perfect, I do it myself from time to time.

But it is important to emphasize that when I speak here of "anger" and "hatred," I mean "anger" and "hatred" in the Christian sense, that is, in the sense in which such things are sins (that is, acts of our will) rather than emotions (that is, states we experience). To feel anger, or to feel hatred, is not in itself evil; and the sort of rant that is meant as venting, and is known to be such by the person doing the venting, can be a perfectly healthy release.

But again, it very much depends on the attitude with which you approach it. If you are blowing off steam because you want to get past the emotion and return to a state of charity, that's one thing. And in that case, I personally find that the more ridiculously exaggerated I can make my accusations, the faster it all becomes absurd -- and, for me at least, laughter and anger have a very difficult time co-existing, especially when I'm lauging at myself. Maybe I'm a uniquely bizarre person in this respect, but it works for me. So, if you're demonizing along the lines of...well, okay, here's an example, referring to an earlier ranting comment I posted on All Things Beautiful.

I imagine it is obvious to anybody who knows me and has read that comment, that Dubya had well and truly pissed me off with his slimeball "defense" of his immigration bill. But also, anyone who knows me will notice that by the end of that rant I managed to get back to, "Well, that's life as a reasonably rational libertarian in modern America," which is my ordinary state of relatively charitable resignation to the habitual folly and dishonesty of the political elites who hold the keys to power in our nation. I was able to work my way back toward charity in part because I went back and previewed the thing, and started deliberately going (mentally) for over-the-top absurdity in my complaints. I didn't type them in because I was making them as outrageous as I could as a sort of private do-it-yourself therapy...but I'll give you one example here:

Original version: "And I can't imagine the slightest reason for anybody at this point to believe that George W. Bush will ever be willing to enforce, for real, any law that closes the border to illegal immigration, for real."

Mentally over-the-top version: "Dubya and the Rovester have no more intention of enforcing any law that stops the flow of illegal immigration than they have of personally impregnating every male prostitute in San Francisco."

And after you've come up with something grotesque like that, then unless you're one of the denizens of the Democratic Underground (who would saying something like that with a perfectly straight face and no sense of hyperbole), you can take a deep breath, say, "Okay, Pierce, you are now officially out of control," and break the mood. Or, at least, I can.

But if you come up with exactly the same sentence for the purpose of inflaming your own rage, of whipping it up into a hurricane of fury, or even just for the purpose of telling yourself that it's fine for you to hate Dubya because after all the bastard deserves it -- well, that isn't just the emotion of hate. It's a deliberate choice to hate. And to make that choice, my friends, is to begin to participate in your own destruction.

See, the intent makes all the difference: if you've recognized that you are swamped with the emotion of rage or hatred, and you are employing a tactic that you have found is effective in breaking the emotion's hold over you and allowing you to return to a state reasonably close to charity, then that's fine, it seems to me. But if you are revelling in the state of anger or hatred and you are trying to rationalize it, or excuse it, or inflame it, or worst of all to induce that same state in others, then you are in effect saying, "Let me die with the Philistines."

There's one other exception to the principle that what we in English call "anger" is self-destructive and therefore a sin. Sometimes the emotion of anger is aroused because somebody we care about is being harmed, and we are angry at the person harming them. Now, insofar as that anger is driven by concern for the innocent person's good -- and insofar as we have wisely identified what is really good for him -- it's an emotion that has its root in love. And insofar as we use our anger to motivate us to protect the innocent, that's okay. But we have to keep in mind something Sheldon Vanauken (the Sixties activist who coined the term "sexism") realized late in his life about his own self-righteousness back in the day. He drily says someplace (I think in A Severe Mercy) something along the lines of, "I failed to realize that loving one's neighbor, and hating the oppressor of one's neighbor, were not precisely the same thing."

The real question is: if you're angry about what a bad person is doing to an innocent person, then by all means show your love for the innocent person by stepping in to protect them. But you have to keep loving the bad person all along, too. To moderns who take it for granted that you can't love the sinner while hating -- and even punishing -- the sin, this distinction may seem nonsensical. I can only assure you that it is a distinction that a great many of your devout fellow men know personally through direct experience. When you understand this distinction, you can understand that it is not hypocrisy to say to a convicted murderer, "...and thence to the place of execution, and may God have mercy on your soul." It's the inability to comprehend this distinction as an emotional reality that causes so many would-be ethicists to be incapable of distinguishing between retributive justice and "revenge," or to be able to make sense of Dorothy Sayers's observation that any system of public justice that does not have as one of its central aims, getting the criminal to recognize, if possible, that he deserved the punishment he was receiving, is an unjust and un-Christian and ultimately less-than-effective system of public justice.

So, if you don't already see exactly what I'm talking about with this distinction, my chances of getting the light bulb to appear over your head are quite slim, and I'm not going to keep trying. But, if you can just agree that anger or hatred that doesn't result in corrective action, or that goes beyond the degree necessary to accomplish corrective action, has all the destructive effects of anger and hatred without a sufficiently offsetting corrective benefit...if you can accept that premise, then that's enough agreement for us to go on with.

In the next couple of posts, we'll talk about the effect hatred has on one's intellect and good sense.

This series of posts continues here.