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Loading ...Why do we hate? Academics seek answer in new field
11.19.2009 3:03pm EST
(Spokane, Washington) Why did the Nazis hate the Jews? Why did the Hutus hate the Tutsis?
Hate is everywhere, but the fundamental question of why one person can hate another has never been adequately studied, contends Jim Mohr of Gonzaga University, who is developing a new academic field of hate studies.
The goal is to explain a condition that has plagued humanity since one caveman looked askance at another.“What makes hate tick?” Mohr, director of Gonzaga’s Institute for Action Against Hate, wondered. “How can we stop it?”
Gonzaga founded the institute a decade ago after some black law students received threatening letters. It has since started a Journal of Hate Studies, hosted a conference and offered its first class on hatred last spring.
The hope is that other universities will follow suit, said Ken Stern of the American Jewish Committee in New York, who has been involved in the effort. “We wanted to approach hate more intelligently,” he said.
Stern, who has spent 20 years battling anti-Semitism, said the need for hate studies became obvious when people started fighting groups like the Aryan Nations, which once flourished in this area. Opponents galvanized against the Aryans, but didn’t really know how best to fight them, Stern said.
“We were flying by the seat of our pants,” he said. “There was no testable theory.”
There is not even a good definition of hate, Stern contends.
Philosophers have offered numerous definitions: Rene Descartes said hate was the urge to withdraw from something that is thought bad. Aristotle saw hate as the incurable desire to annihilate an object.
In psychology, Sigmund Freud defined hate as an ego state that wishes to destroy the source of its unhappiness.
Gonzaga, a Jesuit university best known for its basketball team, offered a class on the subject taught by five professors from different disciplines.
Student Kayla De Los Reyes was in that class, and said the information both horrified her and gave her hope.
“Hate is something that is part of the human emotional makeup,” she said. “Everyone feels it at one point or another. You have to learn to control it.”
The goal is to create an academic home where a variety of disciplines, including history, psychology, religious studies, anthropology and political science, can be brought together to focus on hate. It’s the same sort of effort that led to the creation of disciplines like black studies or women’s studies, Mohr said.
Such academic efforts are not without controversy. Some skeptics fear they are little more than attacks on the dominant power structure.
“This stuff tends to be one dimensional and presumes the guilt of an archetypal white male,” said Glenn Ricketts, spokesman for the National Association of Scholars.
Indeed, De Los Reyes said one of the more interesting topics in the class involved white privilege. The most recent Journal of Hate Studies contained articles about oppression of gays, Nazi experiments on Jews, the local battle against Aryan Nations, and Muslim support for suicide bombings.
Heather Veeder, a graduate assistant for the institute, said the organization has an important mission.
“Hate thrives in areas not illuminated by education,” she said.
But Stern said it is too easy to blame ignorance for hate. People can have plenty of knowledge about something and still hate it, he said. The problem is when one person or group can separate another person or group from their humanity, thinking of them as an “other,” Stern said.
“We dehumanize them and justify violence against them,” Stern said.
There is no simple answer to why people hate, Mohr said. Hate can be sparked by greed, or fear, or a tribe bonding together in opposition to another. People looking to belong will hate others to fit into a group, he said.
With all the political conflict in the United States, it can seem that hate is on the rise. Some people seem to hate President Obama. Some hate Muslims. Some hate homosexuals.
But Mohr said he wouldn’t pursue a field of hate studies if he didn’t think something positive could be achieved.
“We can change,” Mohr said. “There has to be hope.”
Interesing question: what part does religion play in HATE?
Hate is a compound emotion, comprised of fear and anger. In the back of every human’s mind is the idea that we (or our descendants) might be wiped out by the enemy. We fear this annihilation on a primordial level, and feel angry about that fear.
People fear homosexuality because we are taught that any distraction in the race to outpopulate our enemies would be a threat to our future. This is not without irony, because humanity’s homosexual nature may save the planet from us, and save us from ourselves because it allows us to procreate responsibly by making it a conscious choice to arrange a new child, rather than baby-making being relegated to “chance.” There are no accidental births among gay people, and this is the advantage evolution has provided, and which humanity has suppressed for so long, with the impending collapse of the ecosystem as a consequence of that suppresion.
hate = the fear of losing what 1 has be it be material or status lose!!!!What a great place to study with the vast amount of hatefull little skinhead boys in the area!
“special right’s” is what gives them any status whatsoever which is why they hate “minorities” because we want to remove the “special” rights & be equal!
So by trying to rise ourselfs up to “there level” they are afraid that with equality we wont be such convienant victums & worst maybe we will victumize THEM but karma has that handled!!…..
I have always said, forgive me for I may not be the most elegant writer, that with the existence of love there is always the risk of hate. If someone believes that their love is in jeopardy, they will act in a hateful manner in order to countermand it. Also it has to do with insecurity with oneself; if you can’t love yourself how can you love others? All men and women experience this; whether they just want to fit in or are desperately trying to prove something to other. People are naturally irrational. A great man once said “People have a way of going against common sense in order to accomplish petty goals. They see the truth right in front of them, however refuse to follow it.” We have lost the instinct that animals have through development of critical thinking. Ultimately it can be said that hate is the blight that comes with intelligence and is impossible to get rid of completely. It is like energy, no hate is every created or destroyed. It is just refocused and applied.
An interesting question it is Kelson! I have seen throughout my life, that religion, especially organized religion is one of the great proponents of hate, especially when it comes to the homosexual community. Religion has always used fear of the unknown and intimidation to gain control of the masses. In the words of Lucretius, a first century B.C. Roman philosopher “religion, as a disease born of fear, is a source of untold misery to the human race”. People fear things that they don’t understand, and this fear develops into intolerance, ignorance and hate which organized religion has used over and over again to their advantage. Bertrand Russell back in a 1927 lecture “Why I am Not A Christian” echoed Lucretius thoughts “you find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in human feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step towards the diminution of war, every step towards better treatment of the coloured races or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world”. Without organized religion there would be no fear, there would be no intolerance, there would be no hate. People would be free to make up their own minds and come to informed decisions based on their own learned knowledge and experiences. And I personally think everyone would be better off for it, who needs a organized religion or a church building to worship God when his creation is all around us everyday.
Hate cannot exist without an underlying feeling of helplessness. You can be angry without helplessness, but you cannot hate.
And general helplessness is not always linked to a special situation.
More often it is driven by depression.
And against depression there are drugs (and psychiatrists).
Is that an answer too easy for you ?
Hate is an expression of arrogance, in which the hater’s monumental ego, socialized by culture, generates contempt for anything or anyone that does not fit his world view. The more profound the hater’s ignorance, the more likely he will be violent toward the object of his hate.
Good summary, Andreas. And what a great field of study?
It’s primal, it’s fear, anger, competition and it’s not unique to humans. It’s all about us and them – whoever us is, and who ever them is.
Race, religion, culture, hunting/gathering grounds, etc.
Yep. I was thinking about this in regards to racism, and it’s application to our struggle.
When I learned about racism in school, our history of slavery, segregation, civil rights violations, violence and hate, the reaction I had to learning these things, and the reaction of my peers, was essentially this:
“Why the hell would you do that to people just because they had a different skin color. That’s so stupid.”
It didn’t make any sense. At all. It was not just horrifying to learn, it was genuinely confusing.
But the rationale advanced for discriminating and oppressing African-Americans was not: “They have black skin. We have white skin. Therefore, let’s oppress and discriminate against them.”
That was of course the reason, and the desire, behind the rationales that were made. But there was always a rationale advanced. Whether it was thinking African-Americans wouldn’t be able to take care of themselves if they didn’t have masters, or whether it was because black men were considered a threat to white women, and couldn’t control themselves, or whatever.
There was always a rationale. Not a legitimate one. Not a moral one. But it was there.
So how has society (largely) moved past racism? It’s moved past racism, not just because the rationale advanced for racism was debunked, but because people lost the desire, the instinct, to want to discriminate against people solely on the basis of race.
Where does that desire — to treat people differently from yourself because of some arbitrary and stupidly superficial thing — come from? Arguably it partially comes of our biology and the instinct towards “tribalism” (seeing people with obvious differences from ourselves as, well, different, and wanting to privilege our own tribe over theirs). But more importantly, I think, because people are born into a prejudiced culture.
Today, especially among young people (although it is regionally dependent), that desire to want to discriminate against people based on the color of their skin has largely vanished. Without a desire to discriminate, the rationalizations to discriminate do not form. More than that, any rationalization to discriminate against a person based on the color of their skin, is rejected out of hand by a person who has no desire to form such a rationalization in the first place.
Racists today often use crime statistics to rationalize their intolerance and hatred towards blacks. But a person who has no desire to discriminate against blacks (because they grew up without that prejudice being planted), responds thusly:
First, they’d probably call the person a racist, white-trash, nazi bigot. But if they wanted to engage the person intellectually, they might say:
“Well, if it’s true that crime in black communities is such a problem, then we have an obligation as a society to help solve that problem and improve those communities”
Similarly, bigoted homophobes of today often use statistics about STDs to rationalize their intolerance and hatred towards gay people. But again, a person who has no desire to discriminate against gay people (because they grew up without that prejudice being planted), responds thusly:
Bigot, blah blah blah — and if they want to engage the person intellectually, they might say:
“Well, if it’s true that STDs are a problem within the gay community, we should help fix that, maybe by more safer sex education” (And of course another way to diminish that problem would be to cultivate a culture a marriage among gay people).
I’m reminded of an experience back in high school. I was socializing with two guys during class (freshman), and during the course of that conversation, I ended up coming out to them (I think I was responding to a question about hot girls, or something).
There was a little bit of smiling and giggling. Then they started to ask me some (good-natured) questions. They were curious — I was the first openly gay person they knew, I think.
One of those questions was: “So are you going to marry a guy when you’re older?”
My response: “Yes, I probably will. But unfortunately it’s not legally recognized.”
Their response: “Why wouldn’t it be legal?”
They were genuinely confused as to why that discrimination would exist. It was quite endearing.
I think we can categorize people into 3 groups, which might be a helpful model for what persuasion tactics we use in the future, and give us an idea of what we’re up against:
1) People who grow up with prejudice against gay and lesbian people deeply instilled in them. These people need no reason to discriminate against us, they simply desire to do so. They will rationalize it in any way that they can. If you knock their rationalizations down, they will be undeterred. The did not arrive at their position through reason, and reason won’t get them away from it. The only exception to that rule is people who are intellectually honest, reflective, and empathetic, and really care whether they are right or wrong about certain things. Such people are, unfortunately, exceedingly rare.
2) People who have received conflicting messages about homosexuality, and absorbed them. These people aren’t really sure what to think. They’ll go where the wind blows. They may have some prejudice against gay and lesbian people, but they’ve also received a strong message that such prejudice is wrong. They don’t really have a desire to discriminate against gay and lesbian people (for it’s own sake), but they aren’t sure that such discrimination is really wrong or unjustified, because they’ve received conflicting messages. These people are persuadable by reason (from both sides of the argument).
3) People who have grown up in an atmosphere that is accepting of homosexuality. These are the people that have no desire to discriminate against gay and lesbian people in the first place. They may be genuinely confused about why such discrimination would even exist. They reject, out of hand, any rationalization for such discrimination as bigoted.
Of course these groups are not static. It’s possible to move between them without having to meet the intitial condition I specified (in the first sentence). But what we can say is: It’s very hard to move people out of group 1, and it’s also very hard to move people out of group 3.
So that’s both good news and bad news for us. The additional good news is that acceptance leads to more acceptance. Our trajectory is obviously headed in the right direction, group 3 is growing, group 1 is shrinking.
But the bad news is that group 1 is still massive. group 2 follows it. And group 3 is mostly young people, who, although on our side, are often apathetic about voting, and often ignorant of the real struggles that are faced by gay and lesbian people due to discrimination (because, in their own youth culture, they don’t necessarily see it).
Anyway, that is my analysis
Ya’ll can be the judge if it’s crackpotted or not 
My question is why do Christians hate gays?
Yes, I know that a FEW American and Canadian denominations, such as Episcopalians, UCC and part of the Lutherans officially don’t hate gays, but the vast majority of Christian Churches and denominations either discriminate against or outright hate gays.
How cute, a troll.
366gay said, “My question is why do gays hate everyone?”
Ummmm, generalize much?
It is so very easy to explain hate. People hate one another because of the principle of Social Darwinism. We are coded genetically to believe that what looks and acts like us is preferential to that which is alien. It’s called survival of the species. It’s primitive. It explains all discriminaton; and it’s sick.