Part 11 (1/2)
HATE. Hate may be described as an extreme form of disaffection usually provoked by some marked interference with our activities, desires, or ideals. But in less intense degree the negative feeling towards others may be provoked immediately and unmistakably by most casual evidence of voice, manner, or bearing. Such immediate revulsions of feeling contrast with the instances of ”instinctive sympathy” previously cited, and are as direct and uncontrollable. Even kindly disposed persons cannot help experiencing in the presence of some persons they have never seen before, a half-conscious thrill of repulsion or a dislike colored with dread.
A s.h.i.+fting gaze, a noticeably pretentious manner, a marked obsequiousness, a grating voice, a chillness of demeanor, a physical deformity, these, however little they may have to do with a person's genuine qualities, do affect our att.i.tudes toward them. As the familiar verse has it:
”I do not like you, Dr. Fell, The reason why I cannot tell, But this I know, and know full well, I do not like you, Dr. Fell.”
We may later revise our estimates, but the initial reaction is made, and often remains as a subconscious qualification of our general att.i.tude toward another. People of worldly experience learn to trust their first reactions, to ”size a man up”
almost intuitively, and to be surprised if their first impressions go astray.
From this merely instinctive revulsion the negative att.i.tude may rise to that terrible form of destructive antipathy which is ”hate,” as popularly understood. In between lie degrees of dislike depending partly on the strength of the initial antipathy, but equally so on the degree to which others, whether persons, inst.i.tutions, or ideas, interfere with our activities, desires, or ideals. The man who seriously obstructs our love, our pleasure, or our ambition, or who tries to do so, provokes hate, and its concomitants of jealousy, rage, and pugnacity. It is not only that we dislike the mere presence of the person (in the opposite case the mere presence of the beloved object is a joy), but we dislike it for what it portends in danger and threat to ourselves. The more serious the evil or disaster for which a person comes to stand, the more violent the hatred for him, despite his personal fascinations.
The villain is not infrequently a ”d.a.m.ned smiling villain.”
The provocation of hate is complicated by the fact that it is closely a.s.sociated with fear. We dislike those who threaten our happiness partly because we fear them. And we fear, as was pointed out in more detail in the discussion of that powerful human trait, the unfamiliar, the strange, the startling, the unexpected. The facility with which sensational newspapers can work up in an ignorant population a hate for foreign nations, especially those of a totally alien civilization, is made possible by the fear which these uninformed readers can feel at the dangerous possibilities of mysterious foreign hordes.
The fomenting of fear is in nearly all such cases a prerequisite to the fomenting of hate. And the promotion of hate has historically been one of the frequent ingredients of international conflicts.
Like love, hate is profoundly influential in modifying our interest in persons and situations. To dislike a person moderately is, in his absence, to be indifferent to him. To dislike him intensely, in a sense increases our interest in him, though perversely. Just as we wish the beloved person to succeed, to gain honor and reputation and wealth, so we long for and rejoice in the downfall and discomfiture of our enemies. Thus writes the Psalmist:
Arise, O Lord, save me, my G.o.d; for thou has smitten all mine enemies upon the cheekbone; thou hast broken the teeth of the unG.o.dly....
Thou hast also given me the necks of mine enemies that I might destroy those that hate me.
Hate may be directed against persons, and usually it is.
But hatred may be directed against inst.i.tutions and ideas as well. For many persons it will be impossible for a decade to listen to German music or the German language, so closely have these become a.s.sociated in their minds with ideas and practices which they detest. To a dogmatic Calvinist in the sixteenth century, both an heretical creed and its pract.i.tioners, were objects of abomination. Disappointed men may take out in a spleen and hatred of mankind their personal pique and balked desires.
Great hates may be present at the same time and in the same persons as great loves. Indeed for some persons strength in the one pa.s.sion is impossible without a corresponding strength in its opposite. We cannot help hating, more or less, not only those who interfere with our own welfare, but with the welfare of those who, being dear to us, have become, as we say, a part of our lives. Thus writes Bertrand Russell in the introduction to his treatment of some of the radical social tendencies of our own day:
Whatever bitterness or hate may be found in the movements which we are to examine, it is not bitterness or hate, but love, that is their mainspring. It is difficult not to hate those who torture the objects of our love. Though difficult, it is not impossible; but it requires a breadth of outlook, and a comprehensiveness of understanding which are not easy to preserve amid a desperate contest.[1]
[Footnote 1: Russell: _Proposed Roads to Freedom_, pp. xvii-xviii.]
Hate may thus be, as great religious and social reformers ill.u.s.trate, invoked on the side of good as well as evil. The prophets burned with a ”righteous indignation.” But hate is a violent and consuming pa.s.sion, bent on destroying obstacles rather than solving problems. It consumes in hatred for individuals such energy as might more expeditiously be devoted to the improvement of the circ.u.mstances which make people do the mean or small or blind actions which arouse our wrath. The complete meekness and humility preached by Christ have not been taken literally by the natively pugnacious peoples of Europe. But as James says suggestively:
”Love your enemies!” Mark you not simply those who do not happen to be your friends, but your _enemies_, your positive and active enemies. Either this is a mere Oriental hyperbole, a bit of verbal extravagance, meaning only that we should, in so far as we can, abate our animosities, or else it is sincere and literal. Outside of certain cases of intimate individual relation, it seldom has been taken literally. Yet it makes one ask the question: Can there in general be a level of emotion so unifying, so obliterative of differences between man and man, that even enmity may come to be an irrelevant circ.u.mstance and fail to inhibit the friendlier interests aroused.
If positive well-wis.h.i.+ng could attain so supreme a degree of excitement, those who were swayed by it might well seem superhuman beings. Their life would be morally discrete from the lives of other men, and there is no saying... what the effects might be: they might conceivably transform the world.[1]
[Footnote 1: James: _Varieties of Religious Experience_, p. 283.]
Dislikes, disagreements, native antipathies are not to be abolished, human differences being ineradicable and human interests, even in an ideal society, being in conflict. But a keener appreciation of other viewpoints, which is possible through education, a less violent concern with one's own personal interests to the exclusion of all others, may greatly reduce the amount of hate current in the world, and free men's energies in pa.s.sions more positive in their fruits.
CHAPTER VII
THE DEMAND FOR PRIVACY AND INDIVIDUALITY
PRIVACY AND SOLITUDE. Although one of man's most powerful tendencies, as has already been pointed out, is his desire to be with his fellows, this desire is not unqualified. Just as men can be satiated with too much eating, and irritated by too much inactivity, so men become ”fed up” with companions.h.i.+p.
The demand for solitude and privacy is thus fundamentally a physiological demand, like the demand for rest.
”The world is too much with us,” especially the human world.
Companions.h.i.+p, even of the most desirable kind, exhausts nervous energy, and may become positively fatiguing and painful. To crave solitude is thus not a sign of man's unsociability, but a sign merely that sociability, like any other human tendency, becomes annoying, if too long or too strenuously indulged. Much of the neurasthenia of city life has been attributed to the continual contact with other people, and the total inability of most city dwellers to secure privacy for any considerable length of time. In some people a lifelong habit of close contact with large numbers of people makes them abnormally gregarious, so that solitude, the normal method of recuperation from companions.h.i.+p, becomes unbearable. Few city dwellers have not felt after a period of isolation in some remote country place the need for the social stimulus of the city. But a normal human life demands a certain proportion of solitude just as much as it demands the companions.h.i.+p of others.