The safety of hatred, and hatred in safety-- Observations on hatred, because Christmas (and irony)

 It is Christmas Eve, for those who celebrate it, and so I have some observations on hatred, because Christmas and irony go together like two things that I cannot think to write because I just started and the coffee has not yet kicked in.  Gimme a break, it's early.  In a better world, one would contemplate nothing but virtue and beauty, yet without vice and ugliness for contrast, what would there be to contemplate?  Virtue only exists in challenge, and challenge only exists amid vice and ugliness.  So, as we look around a nation and a world with so much vice, and so much ugliness rooted in hatred, rooted so often in deeper motivations, more insidious motivations like resentment, we contemplate hatred.  A one-liner that I can no longer attribute from a bad stand-up routine went as follows.  "Prejudice is such a stupid thing because there are so many perfectly good reasons to hate people on an individual basis."  Har-har, and being something other than a social butterfly, the line stuck with me, and has knocked around the ole' noggin for several decades, so I cannot knock it all that convincingly, can I?  Consider, though.  I must return, as ever, to Steven Pinker's observation that by any objective measure, life has gotten better over the years and centuries.  Life expectancy has extended, standards of living have improved, deaths by war and disease have reduced, and generally speaking, if you take the long view, we are doing better than we were.  Even by the measures of things like "hatred," consider the world of the 18th Century, and the world of today, or even the early and mid 20th Century.  There, too, it is no contest if you look with a clear-eyed and objective perspective.  Yet hatred simply is.  Where there are people, there are resentments, where there is resentment, there is hatred, and so it goes.

The pre-packaged, pre-approved explanation for hatred goes as follows.  Hatred at the mass level is based in tribalism.  There's a calorie count on the back, grams of sugar, and so forth.  I recommend a diet of fresh foods, but then, I'm one of them.  And sure, there is a tribal element to hatred, but the point is both banal and at this point, easy to overstate.  My point for this morning is something else I would like to explore, buried within the tribal observation.  It is easier to hate from a perspective of safety.  Within a tribe, you have the safety to hate, protected by your tribe.  Consider, too, the perverse effect of Pinker's observation on quality of life.  Hatred is a luxury, or at the very least, hatred at a distance is a luxury.  When your life is constrained by simple needs, you may hate, but you can hate only those proximate to your basic needs.  Once met, you have the safety and the luxury to hate those who do not really affect you, convincing yourself through perverse reasoning, that you have either a self-protective need or a moral duty to hate.  In either case, though, you have the luxury to hate from the position of safety when otherwise, in an earlier era, you could only hate the guy across the village, or maybe the next village over.

Behold, the world in which you can hate another state.  People around the country, whom you have never met.  Across the world.  Bask in the luxury of your hatred, from the safety of your cozened life.

When I was in grad school, I took a sequence on political psychology and political sociology, and at the time the politics of identity was ascendant but not yet all-consuming.  We read the literature on topics like "political tolerance," which is a clever euphemism, right?  Who tolerates whom, and who doesn't, which variables predict tolerance, and so forth.  Some of that literature still has analytic value and predictive power, but if you want the one-line version, the variable that had the most predictive power for concepts of tolerance, civil rights and civil liberties, it was... wait, are you ready for this?

You're never gonna guess what they told us in a Ph.D. program.  You're gonna fall out of your seat.  Buckle up, buckaroos.

It was... education.

So obviously, they told us in my Ph.D. program (Berkeley, no less), that the more educated you are, the more tolerant you are, and the more supportive you are of minority groups, minority rights, and all that good stuff, so yay for you, you good people making yourselves better by being here and getting an education and this totally is not self-congratulatory, we swear, it is totally a coincidence that we are saying that we are the good people, and they are the bad people.

Total coincidence.

Jokes aside-- to the degree that I can stop snarking-- education really did have predictive power.  The literature arose from the civil rights era, and generally speaking, it was the more educated people that supported the civil rights reforms of the '60s, and the less educated who were less supportive.  That kind of pattern carried forward to issues like support for gay marriage, and really, snark aside, there is some history to education being associated with what we may call tolerance, and being on what we generally consider now to have been the right side, although one should not reason by saying, "this will later be deemed, 'the right side of history,' therefore this shall be my position."  You actually do need to justify your position on the basis of data and/or moral principles, or you risk being one of the kids running the struggle sessions during the Chinese cultural revolution.  They were on the wrong side of history, convinced they would be vindicated by history, leftist activists that they were.

Anyway, point being, there has been some empirical and philosophical basis for the yay-education argument.

And yet.  I had a conversation recently with one of my more leftist friends who has gone along with the movement's leftward drift.  I posed some questions, in the form of simple data.  Uncontested, simple data, and since it was just two people (I will not identify the person), the person admitted, upon examination, to being motivated largely by "hatred" of "conservative Christians."  In... the formation of policy preferences.

You know, tolerance.

And this was someone with a rather high level of education.

I note, then, that if you go back and read books like Political Tolerance and American Democracy, by John Sullivan et al. (which I was assigned in grad school, and remains on my shelf),  that tolerance of Christians was not tested.  That's just not one of the dependent variables.  Tolerance of racial minorities, tolerance of communism (which was, at the time, not as popular because we didn't have blinkered zoomers being brazenly indoctrinated), and an assortment of other groups to be tolerated, but things change.

Consider the 2020 National Election Studies data.  We may offer our critiques of the "feeling thermometer" as a measure, but it has its uses.  It runs from 0 to 100, measuring how coldly or warmly the respondent claims to feel towards a group, and let's see what happens when I calculate average feelings towards "Christian fundamentalists," by education level.  Shall we?

Less than high school:   56.04

High school diploma:    54.34

Some college:                49.03

Bachelor's:                     43.14

Graduate degree:            36.83

Did you notice a trend?  As education increases, the average feeling thermometer towards Christian fundamentalists moves from slightly positive to pretty negative.  Tolerance, of course, implies more than simply affect, and involves rights, so one may ask about the potential infringement of rights, but of course, Christian fundamentalists would tell you that they are having their rights infringed, specifically as they relate to parenting, and while the purpose of this post is not to get into legal or policy mechanics, there are legal issues, and they are directly associated with affect.

You know, tolerance.  But the flip is that according to the old line of reasoning, education is supposed to increase tolerance.  In some ways, it does.  As long as you only look at the groups that are more tolerated as education increases, and not the groups that are less tolerated as education increases.

Like Christian fundamentalists.  There are more groups where the patterns flip, but that's a fun one, directly related to a lot in modern politics, and it gets into the elitism/populism narrative, and blah-blah, yadda-yadda.

Of course, where will I have an easier time, as a Jew?  Among Christian fundamentalists, or the mainstream of academia?  Given the hard-left turn in academia and its intersection with anti-Semitism, I'll take a fundamentalist church, thank you very much, and I never thought I'd say or write that.

But that is sort of where I'm going.

Hatred alone must either be personal, or unsafe.  You may hate at an individual level, as the line goes, but if you hate a group, then the larger the group, the more enemies you have.  That is pretty much by definition.  To hate at scale requires enough support for safety in numbers, at the very least, but beyond that, it requires the cognitive safety of reinforcement.

If you hate, then why do you hate?  At an individual level, if someone truly wrongs you, then how you feel is your own business.  You are well advised not to let hatred consume you, of course, but you will be wronged.  People will lie to you, lie about you, cheat you, steal from you, berate you, beat you down, demean you, tell you that you are nothing, no one, worthless, perhaps assault you, perhaps more.

All of this will happen.  There are 8 billion people on this planet, just right now, to say nothing of the history of humanity.  Do you think that you are unique in these experiences?

The more that is done to you, the more understandable an extreme emotional evaluation of your counterpart.

But to hate at scale?  That requires support.  Without that, how can you hate safely?

A belief system, be it an ideology, a religion, the intersection of the two, or something altogether different, can teach you to hate, but without the safety of reinforcement, you run the risk of questioning what you believe.  The safety of reinforcement, from a community, ensures that you are told about how horrible, and evil, and vile, and wrong those people are.  No, really, hate them.  It's OK, it's morally safe to hate them.  It's OK.  Generally, hatred is bad, but they're different.  Don't you feel better now?  See?  It's safe.

A world of hatred is an ugly place, and nobody wants to live in that world.  We all know this.  You know that hatred is wrong, but don't worry.  We love you.  So it's safe to hate them.  You're still safe.  Because you actually love.  You love us.  So you aren't a hateful person.  Because you love us.  So it's safe to hate them.  That hatred is safe.  So safe.  Hate in safety.  Don't you feel better now?

No, don't talk to them.  Don't interact with them.  It's unsafe.  We're the safe ones, so safe that you are safer hating them.  If you listened to them, you might not hate, but isn't it safer not to?  You know you're right, right?  So don't.  It's safe.

And if never confronted, you can truly hate in safety.  From a distance, with the luxury of a life on the upward slope of Pinker's curve.  The serfs of the Middle Ages, the Asian farmer toiling away two thousand years ago, the Maasai on the savannah, however many centuries ago, some Olmec laborer, do you think they had the luxury to hate anyone even 50 miles away?

But you?  How glorious is it, to have so much that you can hate globally, knowing how righteous your hatred is, and how safe it is?

C'mon.  You know there's someone.  Some ones.  Plural.

_______

OK, that was slightly creepier than I had intended.  Nevertheless, view hatred with clarity.  It disguises itself in so many ways.  See it for what it is.  For whatever Christmas is, if you reflect on anything, reflect on this.

Allan Holdsworth, "The Things You See (When You Haven't Got Your Gun)," live.  The original studio version is on I.O.U.  Holdsworth was arguably the greatest guitarist ever, and among the sillier exclusions from that recent Rolling Stone list, given that every serious guitarist on their list would have put Holdsworth above basically everybody listed.  Enjoy the keyboard player's '80s mullet, and yes, the sound is very '80s fusion but this guy helped set the template.  If you are not a guitarist, you may notice the speed and clarity of his legato, but it is not just that.  The progressions themselves are just fucking impossible.