Here, in the middle of Pride Month and with Juneteenth just a few days away, I began asking myself some questions, and in ruminating on one question, I landed on a surprising (to me) answer.
Maybe it’s because I’m old. Older. Calmer. With a longer view. More experience from which to draw and evaluate. Maybe.
Or maybe I just had an epiphany. A light-bulb moment—not in the sense of a sudden idea, but more like, Hey, I turned on the light and now I can see what was hiding in the shadows.
Or maybe it’s merely because I asked myself a question that I’d never asked before, never even thought of before.
Regardless of the why, the fact is that I did ask myself a question.
The question: What good is hate?
We all have emotions. It’s in our nature. We love, we fear, we get angry and happy and sad, and we hate*. If I were to posit factors common to them all, I would say that these emotions all
(a) cloud our rational judgement and
(b) have an upside.
Except hate. I just don’t see an upside to hate.
Love definitely clouds our judgement, blinding us to flaws, but it helps us bond and work for mutual benefit. Fear has obvious irrational downsides, but “the gift of fear” is that it can alert us to dangers of which we might not be cognizant. Anger, happiness, sadness, they’re more subtle, but the same factors apply.
Except hate.
I see no benefit to hate. There’s no “gift of hate,” no advantage it bestows that might counter its many and obvious drawbacks. Hate only clouds our judgement and makes it easier for us to do harm, wish ill, lash out, fight, hurt, kill. Hate allows us to impute to others fictitious motivations, fueling our righteous anger. (Those immigrants aren’t coming here to steal your job. They’re just trying to make a better life, live in a safer place, or escape danger, just as you would.) Hate allows us to justify wrongs and persecute others for being different. (Someone who dresses in different clothes, loves a different type of person, or speaks a different language is not trying to make you do the same; they just want to live their life their way, not yours.)
But there’s nothing I do that requires hate. There’s no action that is instigated or accompanied by hate that I can’t also do without hate. I can dislike or avoid people, I can try to change a person’s mind or the way a system works, I can prosecute and jail someone for breaking the law, I can battle a foe with political or (if necessary) physical force, all without hatred. It could also be argued, that I might do all of those things better, more efficiently, absent any feelings of hate, as my judgement would not be clouded by passionate emotion that lead me astray.
There is so much around us today that is seeded in fear and fed by hate—of minorities, of LGBTQ+ folks, of immigrants, even of women—that it’s difficult to get to the core of any of it (much less all of it). I’m not saying we don’t have issues and problems that need to be resolved (we definitely do); I’m saying that it’d be a helluva lot easier to address those issues and problems if we didn’t hate so much. Hate is counter-productive. It only heightens confrontation, diminishes understanding, and leads to brute force methods when ratiocination would almost always provide a a better outcome. Hate is counter to peace.
People will disagree with me on this. Definitely. And if someone can point to an actual benefit for hate, please, shout it out. But saying that “it’s in our nature” isn’t a good enough reason to engage in it. To quote Rose Sayer (from The African Queen, 1951): “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.”
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* In researching for this post, I asked “How many basic human emotions are there, and what are they?” The answers varied, of course, but in general they listed between four and seven basic human emotions. What I found surprising was that neither love nor hate were on the lists, even though (to me) they seem the most human of emotions.
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 