TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/091790/0917640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.1 KB | 130 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 88

The Anatomy of Hate


By Lance Morrow


    The international conference on hate seemed a bravely
ambitious proposition. Elie Wiesel's idea was to assemble the
forces of charisma and rationality in Oslo, to focus their
light for three days, and thus force the darkness to recede a
little.

    It was Wiesel's moral authority that brought together Vaclav
Havel and Nelson Mandela; Jimmy Carter and Francois Mitterrand;
the authors Gunter Grass and Nadine Gordimer; Chai Ling and Li
Lu, leaders of the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square --
an astonishing collection of Nobel prizewinners, professors,
rectors, saints. A man could not make his way through the SAS
Scandinavia Hotel in Oslo without ricocheting off one paragon
or another. Such saturations of virtue and celebrity gave me
a jolt of anxiety: this is a perfect target for a bomb. But the
choice of Oslo was canny. Norway has its immunities.

    Hate is difficult to discuss. The mind resists it. The
subject is amorphous, disorderly, malignant. Presiding over the
Oslo conference, Elie Wiesel controlled a red light on the
podium that he used to warn a speaker when his time was up
(even Carter got red-lighted).  It was as if hatred is
intellectually and morally such a dangerous, unmanageable mess,
such a monster, that Wiesel, the kindest of men, had to police
the dialogue like an anxious warden. He said he had nightmares
about the red light.

    While wondering vaguely why hatred is not one of the Seven
Deadly Sins (Is it covered under Wrath?) and why the Old
Testament is so full of hate, I stared at the back of Nelson
Mandela's head as he sat at the conference table -- a nimbus
of television light around his charcoal hair, the man enveloped
in utter stillness, the most thorough self-possession I have
ever beheld. Does 27 years in prison make a man so calm? As I
listened to Gunter Grass (a stolid German with some huge
gravity pulling him earthward) discussing the Nazis, my mind
drifted to Vaclav Havel, who I decided is an alert woodland
creature. Jimmy Carter shines with a likable sweetness, but he
is tougher than you may think.

    What is hate? A "black sun," as Wiesel wrote? The image may
give hate too much of a strange literary prestige. Black sun.
White whale. Whatever. The reason the subject is hard to
discuss is that hate is simultaneously a mystery and a moron.
It seems either too profound to understand or too shallow and
stupid to bear much analysis -- a cretin with a club, violent,
repulsive, irrational, a black intoxication, an accomplice of
death.

    The delegates in Oslo were virtue's choir, of course, and
they sang beautifully. If there was a hater among them, he kept
his secret and did not stain the refulgence. Virtually the only
controversy organized itself in a division between objectivists
and subjectivists. The subjectivists (poets and moralists)
looked for the seeds of hatred within the human heart. The
objectivists (economists, historians, lawyers) dismissed such
vaporings and located the causes of hatred in the conditions
of peoples' lives. "Hard, visible circumstance defines
reality," said John Kenneth Galbraith. In the past 45 years, he
pointed out, no one has been killed, except by accident, in
conflict between rich industrial countries. In poor nations of
the world, millions of people have died in struggles during
those years. "Out of poverty has come conflict." Elena Bonner,
the widow of Andrei Sakharov, stated the objectivists' case in
an irritable burst: "Moral concepts are lovely, but the key is
governing these things by law."

    Vaclav Havel began by confessing an incapacity to hate --
a suspect claim from most other men. "I look at hatred only as
an observer," he said, and then proceeded to look at hatred as
an artist does. He began with the psychology of individual
hate: "It has a lot in common with love, chiefly with that
self-transcending aspect of love, the fixation on others, the
dependence on them and in fact the delegation of a piece of
one's own identity to them . . . The hater longs for the object
of his hatred."

    Hatred, Havel said, "is a diabolical attribute of the fallen
angel: it is a state of the spirit that aspires to be God, that
may even think it is God, and is tormented by indications that
it is not and cannot be." The typical hater: "a serious face,
a quickness to take offense, strong language, shouting, the
inability to step outside himself and see his own foolishness."

    The subtitle of the conference was "Resolving Conflict
Through Dialogue and Democracy." But neither dialogue nor
democracy is ultimately the answer. The author Conor
Cruise-O'Brien pointed out that Neville Chamberlain's faith in
dialogue gave the world the appeasement at Munich. As for
democracy, said Carter: "Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Germany
evolved from the results of a free election. We do not like to
remember that."

    What is the antidote? Education. Law. Justice. Charity.
Love. I came at last to think that the subject in Oslo was not
exactly hate, but on the dark side, evil, and on the other,
hope. Havel said he is neither an optimist nor a pessimist: "I
just carry hope in my heart. Hope is not a feeling of
certainty, that everything ends well. Hope is just a feeling
that life and work have a meaning." Hope is the thing with
feathers. Or the thing in diapers.

    The conference dispersed. The plane climbed up from Norway
and made its way into the thinnest, coldest air. The planet
became a fluffy abstraction beneath the wings. Time warped. A
man who was in Auschwitz as a boy walked down the aisle to
borrow the Wall Street Journal. Someone told a joke about
Eleanor Roosevelt. Survivors and ghosts at 35,000 feet -- moral
afterlives.

    My own trajectory from Oslo ended a day or so later in the
New York City subway station where a tourist was murdered. The
sociopaths who killed him did not hate him. Not at all. They
wanted money to go dancing at Roseland. That blank, murderous
absence of hate holds terrors that did not come up in Oslo.