Do you wonder, as a lot of people have wondered all this time, what was going on in the heads of those hijackers, seconds before that flash moment of impact, when they slammed their pirated planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon?
For all our moral disgust at their act, we seem to have no idea what propelled those men to assert their right to exercise such terrible power over the lives of others. We know about the horrendous violence they inflicted, but little about what that violence expressed, or was meant to express.
In the American public debate today, the facile answer to that question is given in the form of a four-letter word: Hate. They hated us so much. That’s possible. Let us suppose that the perpetrators hated America — and let us suppose that they hated it for the same hackneyed reasons that powerless people have hated big powers, from ancient Rome to colonial Britain — and thus wanted to demonstrate, if for a moment, their immutable superiority over it.
But what exactly is this thing we call hate? For all our efforts to combat it (the US has legislated laws against “hate crimes”), we still have only the vaguest of ideas about what it is and what role it plays in our lives. But despite all the psychological traps that a discussion of the subject bristles with, hate is still no more complex an emotion than, say, jealousy, guilt, fear and revenge, impulses that are a necessary function not only of our human condition but of our human survival.
Imagine, if you will, a hypothetical community devoid of jealousy and you imagine a community with laissez-faire sex where the family system has collapsed along with whatever social formation held it together. Equally, without guilt, without, in other words, a sense of remorse over our actions, we become a people shorn of morality. And as far as fear (along with its extreme expression, cowardice) is concerned, we as humans learned early in our evolution to be alert about who was friend and who was foe, since that knowledge was a matter of survival. (Today, if we do not fear the prospect of crossing the street at a red traffic light in front of oncoming traffic, the results are predictable.) And in like manner, revenge has a function to play in our existence by giving us the healing thrill of knowing that those who wronged us got their deserts, and the chance of anyone messing with us again are diminished.
Thus, if hate is one such impulse (as no doubt my therapist will concur) then it has grown out of a specific set of conditions rooted in the objective reality of the hater, and is a perfectly normal human response.
But what if we attribute to hate, as the public debate now has it, a political stance, a specific belief or position, as in, they “hate America” because of its freedom of expression, democracy, open society, cultural vitality and, the clincher, foreign policy?
Hate here — indeed, especially here — I say lay off. To combat hate in this instance becomes, in a way, unconstitutional, for it infringes on our First Amendment rights to free expression of our ideas and our emotions. Surely, if I kill a man because I hate him, I should be prosecuted for murder, not for the sentiments I harbored toward him.
Hate is everywhere because hate is human. It is wired into our brain. We can no more erase it than we can jump outside our own skin. And thus hate has nothing to do with the dreadful events of Sept. 11, or at least, as a fuzzy concept, it should not insinuate itself into our analysis of the events of that dreadful day.
Those responsible for the crime should be punished not for the putative hatred they felt for America but for what they did: killing thousands of innocent civilians going about their daily lives, for spreading alarm in society at large, and for objectifying human beings as symbols, abstract symbols of the ideology or the political system they declared war on.
When you kill a black man, an immigrant, an Arab, or an ordinary American because, respectively, of the color of his skin, his ethnic background, his religious faith, or his nationality (that is, rather than because he happened to be a neighbor with whom you had a quarrel that went out of hand), your crime should be disproportionately punished, for the simple reason that by assaulting any one of these individuals, you have spread panic in their entire community, in effect, victimizing more than the victim himself.
The random murder of an American serviceman in a bar altercation in Frankfurt, for example, will merit a short mention on the inside pages of the International Herald Tribune; whereas the murder of Robert Stethen, while a passenger on a hijacked plane in 1986, simply because he was an American serviceman, saw American government agencies worldwide mobilizing their resources to track down the killers.
Unlike random murder, targeted murder, that is, murder that targets human beings by objectifying them as symbols, threatens a whole society.
But to involve hate in this context, as so many American commentators have gone out on a limb doing, is not only to invoke a cliche, but to be irrelevant.
Hate, then, is not as indefensible or as egregious an emotion (come to think of it, no emotion is) as we have accustomed ourselves to view it. Palestinians hate Israelis, Tutsis hate Hutus, Armenians hate Turks, Jews hate Nazis, Kosovars hate Serbs, and so on. What’s the big deal?
People, especially victimized people, hate for psychologically healing, or for politically compelling, reasons. They hate because no one shares their pain. They hate because no one recognizes the truth behind that pain. They hate because, heck, they feel that way.
So let us. I say, leave the issue of how Muslims and other Third World peoples hate America out of the public debate. Let us not poison the wells, as it were, between East and West, between the Euro-American world and the Islamic world, in these difficult times, by dwelling on the irrelevant issue of what it means to hate and be hated.
For, in the end, what’s hate got to do with it?
