I had a couple arguments online recently, and came away with
bruises. The upside of insult, though, for a writer, is always that
you can plow it back into your work and make it pay you. It’s
petty, I’ll admit, to turn your frustrated retorts, conceived too
late (what the French call l’esprit de l’escalier,
staircase thoughts), into end zone dances after your opponent has
left the field. But we writers are petty men.
In this case I was informed by two different persons that I was
motivated by hate, because of certain opinions I hold on
traditional marriage. What intrigues me, now that I’ve had time to
think it over down here at the bottom of the staircase, is that my
actual attitude was of no real interest to either of the people I
argued with. They didn’t care (I’m not guessing; they admitted as
much) whether I hated them or not. It was sufficient that my
opinions went into a file drawer they had labeled “hate.” Actual
personal hatred (contemno in Latin — I looked it up
online) was irrelevant to them. When they talked about hate, they
meant something else entirely.
Hate has fallen on hard times. It hasn’t been entirely
respectable in the West, of course, since the conversion to
Christianity. An idea has risen (or so it seems to me) that hate is
the worst sin for a Christian. This isn’t true. Pride holds that
sorry distinction. (Interesting, isn’t it, that the Gay Movement
has adopted Pride as its battle cry?) When the Bible says that
anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, it isn’t condemning
every kind of hate as a mortal sin. We’re instructed in Scripture
to hate sin, and God (the God of the Bible, not of American popular
religion) often expresses hatred for various transgressions and
hypocrisies.
C. S. Lewis, in a memorable passage in his space novel,
Perelandra, describes a moment of moral clarity when his
hero, Ransom, makes the decision to use his fists to fight a
demonic spirit possessing a man:
Then an experience that perhaps no good man can ever have in our
world came over him — a torrent of perfectly unmixed and lawful
hatred. The energy of hating, never before felt without some guilt,
without some dim knowledge that he was failing fully to distinguish
the sinner from the sin, rose in his arms and legs till he felt
that they were pillars of burning blood. What was before him
appeared no longer a creature of corrupted will. It was corruption
itself to which will was attached only as an instrument…. It is
perhaps difficult to understand why this filled Ransom not with
horror but with a kind of joy. The joy came from finding at last
what hatred was made for.
The old Christian formula, “Love the sinner, hate the sin,” has
certainly gone out of fashion, but unfashionability is not a
logical refutation. That every human being is infinitely valuable
and created for love and glory is a relatively new idea in human
history, a gift of Judeo-Christian theology to Western thought.
That some ideas and practices are destructive of human beings, and
so need to be opposed by every moral means, follows as a necessary
corollary.
Even unsanctified hate used to carry a measure of dignity, at
least in art. “From hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I
spit my last breath at thee,” cried Captain Ahab. Ahab was a much
disordered soul, but the greatness of the whale mirrored the
greatness of his pride. The hatred of Edmond Dantès for the men who
sent him to prison for no cause was a source of horror and pity to
the reader, meant to rouse his moral outrage. Iago’s unreasoning
hatred of Othello raised (or lowered) him to the level of the
demonic, painting his character in the bright colors of a warning
sign: “High voltage. Do not touch.”
This is because hate is more than “that which makes somebody
feel bad.” Hate is a profound, visceral response to an offense, to
an injury, to an outrage. Those who have no capacity for hatred —
who cannot comprehend the hatred of the slave for the master, or of
the victim for the criminal — are emotionally and spiritually
impoverished.
I’m tempted to suggest that the people I tangled with in online
discussions are emotionally and spiritually impoverished in that
way; that they don’t understand hate because they lack profound
moral depth.
But that would be unjust. They know hate, all right.
They just don’t recognize it where it lives.
