From Althouse, the chant against RFK Jr as he was addressing the Senate Hearing (and being interrupted) was "RFK kills people with hate." This is the sort of thing where people start to lose me. I think some of RFK's policies, especially around vaccines, will cause people to die. But that's because he is wrong, not because he is hate-filled.
Are we moving to a world where hatred is the only sin that matters? There is no need to prove you wrong, only to show that you must have hatred in your heart, and that is enough. One problem I can see right off is that you can call anyone who is angry hate-filled. It has a superficial persuasiveness, and it gets you off the hook for thinking any harder. Yet it is also quite elastic. You can call the angry people on your own side "justifiably outraged," and not have to think any more about that one either. If both sides are angry, my people can be considered justifiably outraged by your hateful ones, and no one need think at all. Just check the emotional energy present and put your wager down on the red or the black.
As I am wont to do I back-checked this through the history I have lived through to see whether it looked different then. A lot of ink was spilled opposing wars on the grounds that we had hatred for Muslims, or for Southeast Asians, or for various Africans or Latin Americans. Callous indifference, outmoded ideas, short-sightedness, or plain dimness were not enough, it seems. It must be hatred or nothing. Even greed, fear, or wounded pride - traditional bad reasons for going to war -are brought forward only if they are mixed with hatred.
Yes, hatred for women, hatred for Jews, or hatred for Blacks were always explanations ready to hand for other ills of the world, yet I think they have loomed larger in the 2000s and the others receded a bit. Am I imagining this?
8 comments:
I don't know if Alec Ryrie would agree with me but I think you are running parallel to his observation that, given the hash that self-proclaimed Christian societies made of the first half of the 20th Century, most everyone in the West stopped using Jesus as a model of good human behavior and adopted Adolf Hitler as a model of what *not* to do. As is our want we have dumbed down even that simplification to "don't (be accused of) hate."
"...no need to prove you wrong, only to show that you must have hatred in your heart, and that is enough..."
Worse, you could be right in some crucial matter and still be discounted for a hate that was not wrong to hold. Chesterton, Ballad of the White Horse, describing the charge that saved England from its invaders:
Roaring they went o'er the Roman wall,
And roaring up the lane,
Their torches tossed a ladder of fire,
Higher their hymn was heard and higher,
More sweet for hate and for heart's desire,
And up in the northern scrub and brier,
They fell upon the Dane.
To spur yourself and others on, you need an offense greater than mere "dimness" in your adversaries. You have to rouse in yourself and your allies a hatred adequate to the battle, and match your hate to their putative hate.
It's an old story: some of Martin Luther's language is .. um .. tart.
True, some of the older propaganda includes claims of blasphemy, but in our era in the West that's less horrifying. Although perhaps claims of heresy and blasphemy are merely harder to recognize when the god in question is an ideological idol and not a supernatural one.
Personally, I feel defeated and stupid for letting anger take me. Who does not think that anger makes you stupid? ( notwithstanding there are individuals who argue calmly about it , that see anger as recreational and energizing )
My rational side struggles and loses the argument that hatred in the case of stupidity, as contrasted with a person, is wrong. But what if it is. Hatred opens the door to Satan. It isn’t ever a good thing and I don’t follow/disagree even with such a man as with G.K. Chesterton in that view of his.
Neither feeling nor rationality then, are good guides.
Arguing with the Great Gilbert, too.
Its a lonely place to be.
G.K.s good friend, Hilaire Belloc, the sailor of the Nona, may have known better than the shining Mr Chesterton in this.
Coming about to run before the wind, it takes only a small touch of tiller to see the boom try to take your head off.
If the people you hate are haters, it's okay to hate them.
And if one explains away ethical concerns that one does not share, or honest doubts about certain controversial research, as dishonest façades for malice, one grows self-righteous.
I should have noted that this isn't my opinion, but how I perceive theirs being. I could be wrong. YMMV.
Post a Comment