Hate is a uniquely human phenomenon. While antisemitic and anti-Muslim hatred is rampant today, hate has been a painful and often deadly human curse for as long as history has been recorded. Hate, sadly, is part of the human condition. We, alone within the animal kingdom, experience hate (apologies to anyone offended by my reference to humans as part of the animal kingdom). Hate competes well with famine, disease, and war as causation for misery on earth. It always has.
When their smash musical toured in the South, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein risked everything by refusing to remove “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” from South Pacific. One legislator in Georgia, who must have himself been carefully taught, insisted that the song was implicitly a threat to the American way of life. Indeed, hate might be considered the only curse man has carefully nurtured from time immemorial. Hate far transcends anger as man’s greatest folly because anger is rational and can be mediated, while hate is generally irrational and, therefore, mainly beyond reason.
While hate, like anger, is probably as old as man, we are cursed to live in an age where antisocial people populate so-called social media platforms for the sole purpose of promoting their particular antisocial causes.
Imran Ahmed, director of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, an organization that monitors social media for hate speech, noted that “hate actors have leaped at the chance to hijack social media platforms to broadcast their bigotry and mobilize real-world violence against Jews and Muslims.”
Sadly, most Americans self-select and, therefore, rely on so-called news sources that simply confirm and reinforce their views, biases, and often their hatreds. According to Pew research, more than eight in ten adult Americans say they get all or much of their “news” from a smartphone, computer, or tablet. Anyone can become a news distributor or commentator. Numerous publishers, broadcasters, YouTube prognosticators, and other social media denizens labor to influence rather than to inform objectively, and, as a result, tens of millions of us are aggressively primed but substantively ignorant.
As Charles Dickens opined in A Tale of Two Cities, it is the best of times and the worst of times. In one respect, it is the best of times. After all, so much information is at our fingertips, and, at the same time, it is the worst of times because so much of what is available to inform us is deviously curated to lead us to dark choices and dark places.
Within 24 hours of the October 7th Hamas carnage that took over 1400 Israeli lives, including men, women, children, and even an unborn pulled from a dead mother’s womb, Elon Musk’s Twitter hosted the hashtag #Hitler WasRight, which was then propelled on another 46,000 times. Not to be outdone by the Jew-haters on X, the hashtag #DeathtoMuslims was quickly pushed on X, with thousands of shared postings. Soon, similar violent postings proliferated on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. and other channels that are happy to pass along such mind-numbing and soul-corroding messages.
Like a spreading pathogen, antisemitic invective exploded over 900 percent on Musk’s X and nearly 30% percent on Facebook following the Hamas rampage on October 7th. Hate speech directed at Muslims soared on X, jumping 422 percent on Oct. 7 and Oct. 8, and rose 297 percent over the next five days, according to the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
So, precisely what is going on with this explosion of hatred? Well, nothing that hasn’t been going on for time immemorial. Social scientists know a lot about hate. It is a rather well-researched phenomenon, an emotion quite distinct from anger. Anger is rational and, therefore, can be mediated with reason or when the event or behavior that caused the anger is corrected.
People often feel disgust and hatred toward others even though they have never interacted with those who are the objects of their disdain. They are simply conditioned to accept what they perceive as the prevailing societal view of the other.
When another group hates persons or entire groups, it is often because of what the hating group has been told about the hated group, that is, what the hated group is perceived to represent rather than who they actually are or any interaction the hating group has actually had with the hated group. Once a group has been sufficiently maligned, it becomes easy to transform them into victims of hate.
The anatomy of hate has been well understood throughout history. Even Aristotle weighed in on the subject. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle defines anger as a painful desire for revenge caused by a perceived undeserved slight. In other words, tit for tat. Hate, on the other hand, far transcends momentary retribution. A slight hatred often presages a permanent state of affairs.
There is abundant evidence that many emotions can be experienced individually as well as in groups. Yet, not all emotions have the same potential to transcend from the individual level to the group or the collective level. Hatred can more easily transform from the personal level to the group level than can other negative emotions; some will even claim that it is the most “group-based” emotion. Aristotle believed that while anger is usually directed toward individuals, groups are often the target of hatred. The very nature of hate makes it relatively easy to appropriate the behavior of a specific person to the group with which that person is identified. The advent of a single hateful incident can be easily appropriated to the group of which the perpetrator is identified. Generalizing that behavior as characteristic of all or most members of a specific group creates ample justification for the hate of the entire group. The appropriation of hatred from the individual group member to the whole group has been a constant feature of collective hatred.
Rank hatred as a weapon in American politics has now been perfected and unabashedly and routinely infused into political campaigning by former President Trump. “I am your retribution” isn’t merely careless campaign rhetoric. It is an inferred campaign promise and a dangerous new low in American politics.
Ie terrible, although very true, editorial. Hate is not in a newborn. It must be taught and somehow aborded by the child as they grow and facilitated by mis-education. So sad, there is no reason to hate unless one has specific behaviors set against oneself. I was brought up without hate - why have not more received such an upbringing?