If string theory
is the astrophysicist’s theoretical attempt to explain
the subtlest workings of the universe (he wisely doesn’t
concern himself with the recent emergence of -- for the lack
of a better word -- intelligent life on the planet Earth), the
two strings calling the shots as they concern human endeavour
are doubtlessly love and hate. One way or another, everything
we do is their issue. Love and hate are the categories, the
impulses through which we negotiate our happiness, decide on
the things we hold on to and let go, the causes we support and
reject, the choices that irrevocably define for us what is meaningful
in life, and, in general, the how and on what we spend our time,
our human capital. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in The
Little Prince, writes, ‘the meaning of a rose is
the time I spend with it.”
Since all life is
characterized by movement or, pace Heraclitus, flux, and all
movement requires agency, we inferentially designate love and
hate as irreducible, species-specific, secular prime movers.
Love and hate direct our movement either towards or away from
things, and this holds true for the most primitive forms of
life. Our first volitional gestures are subsumed in love and
hate: towards the mother figure who provides warmth and succour,
away from a cold and indifferent universe. “Love,”
says philosopher Merleau-Ponty, “is an impulse that carries
us towards another.”
When we love, we
want to possess the object of that love, we want it to endure,
to flourish, we want to be in relationship with it. Our relationships
with the things we love are special. We become known or identified
by what we love and love to do: the clothes we wear, our commitment
to a religion, a cause, a hobby, a life-style, living for work,
working to live. Like implements used to clear brush, we employ
love and hate to find our way to what we value in life: we hate
racism so we practise tolerance; we value life for life’s
sake, so we lead healthy life styles; we value pleasure for
its own sake so we seek out pleasurable activities; we love
to be respected for what we do so we conceive of plans and exceptional
projects that will confer that outcome. Much of what commands
our attention in the arts results from the artist’s exceptional
need of love, and the ability to supply it through his enterprise.
Be as it may that
love and hate are symmetrical in their weight and expression,
we are constitutionally given to prefer being in the loving
rather than hating mode. There are quantifiable physiological
indices that reveal we are rewarded when, consequent to our
choices (and sometimes luck), we move away from hating towards
loving: stress levels drop, our immune systems function more
optimally, we are more socially integrated, we eat, sleep and
perform better. Human nature -- that unseen, uncompromising
puppeteer on the strings -- encourages us to remove ourselves
from, overcome, avoid, neutralize or vanquish all that which
causes hatred to well up in us. If I hate myself for neglecting
my child, I am rewarded when I attend to that child, which is
consistent with life’s first principle: to preserve and
perpetuate itself.
The hating mode
implies the existence of an entity from whose effective range
we want to distance ourselves, or an activity we want ourselves
or others to cease or refuse. I hate a particular smell so I
move away from it. I hate the loud music coming from my neighbour’s
adjacent flat so I ask him to turn down the volume. But what
about those things we cannot move away from, or activities of
others over which we have no influence: a schoolyard bully,
an individual act of terror, an organization’s terror?
What is my nature asking me to do concerning the persons or
group or organization I rightly or wrongly hold responsible
for the world’s ills? What is the likelihood that I will
choose to dispassionately interrogate the cause of my hatred
when my instinctive response is to relieve myself of it -- now?
Are we not constituted
to hate so as to eradicate the person who has raped and murdered
our child, since his removal from existence is consistent with
the upkeep and conservation of a healthy and thriving gene pool?
In such an open and shut case, the desire to remove is so insistent
we don’t apologize for it -- nor is an apology expected.
Nonetheless, we allow for the fact that the laws that vary from
one society to another may arbitrarily describe the removal
process as an act of vengeance at one end of the scale or justice
at the other. As civilization advances, we devolve the execution
of Nature’s instinctive response to capital crime to institutions
that have been evolved for that purpose, the result of which
invariably satisfies polite society but rarely the parents whose
child has been taken away, whose hatred will only and gradually
subside with the passage of time. But for the jealous man who
comes to hate his wife for having an affair, and either by his
own hand or hired hand eliminates the cause of his hatred, he
will be rewarded -- physiologically and psychologically -- in
a manner that dwarfs the consolations offered by civil society
and its institutions, which is why the laws of every land are
frequently found wanting in their practical application. The
failure to recognize how easily we, as a species, are moved
to relieve ourselves of the things and activities that give
us cause to hate leaves us perilously impervious to the culture
of law and order that distinguishes mankind from the lower orders.
Despite our practised
abhorrence of all activity associated with genocide -- acts
committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
ethnical, racial or religious group -- its historical expression
has been more frequent than granted in part because the institutions
dedicated to its prevention have not sufficiently understood
the workings of human nature. Without exception, when one group
comes to harbour hatred of another, human nature predicts that
the former will at a minimum desire the elimination of the latter.
What encourages the hating group to carry out the deed –
and the world to turn a blind eye -- is the biological disposition
(the reward system) of the hater to be relieved of his hatred.
It’s the same sequence of genes operating when Tribe A,
with only enough food and water for itself, is threatened by
Tribe B, for whom that same food and water is the difference
between life and death. But when Tribe A wipes Tribe B off the
map for all time, we don’t call it genocide but survival
of the fittest.
That same gene sequence
predicts we would all rather be loved than hated, just as the
rewards conferred by love are consistent with the outcomes favoured
by natural selection. The successful hunter returns to the love
of family and tribe, in failure he returns to opprobrium.
Despite public declarations
to the contrary, but in view of the fact that Jews and Palestinians
hate each other, we know that in their private thoughts each
would like to be relieved of its hatred, code for wishing the
elimination of the cause of that hatred. Which makes the Palestinian
Charter -- that denies the existence of the state of Israel
-- not an obstacle to peace but an open ended confession that
hasn’t been given its due, whose truth has been obfuscated
by principals acting in bad faith since both sides are symmetrically
implicated in the shaping of that truth. To fully grasp the
meaning of the conflict in the Middle East is to discover what
is invariable in it such that it will hold true for all groups
in conflict. Love and hate and the movements they author predict
in advance of any particular conflict the manner in which any
given conflict will unfold, where one side, in proportion to
the hatred it harbours, desires to be relieved of the cause
of its hatred.
Since there is no
escaping the DNA-fixed modalities of love and hate that continue
to underwrite in dry pages the blood-soaked pageant of human
history, what remains as an option is the decision to seize
upon what is contingent in that one-sided contest that overwhelmingly
favours human nature, so we can at least provisionally call
into question the manner and to what degree love and hate operate
through us. We can’t change the chemistry of love and
hate, but we can prepare for a more civilized, reason-based
outcome by learning to recognize that what we love and hate,
upon closer inspection, might be the loves and hates of others
more forceful than ourselves, or those a society or institution
has imposed on us for its own ends.
Only by finding
our way to those dead ends will we be able to map out a new
beginning. And there’s no reason for that new beginning
not to begin on our watch because we are all naturally disposed
to prefer the loving over the hating mode.
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