Article by John Derbyshire |
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| Hatred,
Horace and Homer In Book 20 of The Iliad,
when mighty Achilles re-enters the battle in his dazzling new armor, the
Trojans are at first “taken every man in the knees with trembling and
terror” at the sight of him. At
this point, however, the gods come down from Olympus, some to help one
side in the battle, some to help the other, according to their
inclinations. Says Homer*:
“After the Olympians merged in the men’s company, strong Hatred,
defender of peoples, burst out...” Strong Hatred, defender of
peoples.
Apparently Homer thinks that hatred serves a useful purpose,
spurring soldiers on to defend their country against invaders.
It helps, he seems to be saying, to hate the enemy.
He even hints that this fortifying hatred is a gift from the gods. It would be hard to think of a
sentiment more at odds with the spirit of early 21st-century America.
Homer’s implication, if I have read it correctly, would be
rejected by every significant political faction in modern American life.
To the political Left, hate
is, well, hateful. Haters, in
the leftist imagination, are snaggle-toothed rednecks looking for black
people to lynch, or uncouth beery types beating up homosexuals, or
insecure, starch-collar Soames Forsytes trying to keep their womenfolk in
the kitchen and the bedroom, where they belong.
Haters are people so benighted they cannot appreciate the enriching
effect on our society of having millions of scofflaws pouring across our
borders. Haters are conservatives, who want to turn back the
clock to Jim Crow, the closet, the Patriarchy, and the Exclusion Laws.
Leftists are not haters, they are lovers, possessed of a compassion
for their fellow men so profound, so all-embracing, that their political
platforms consist mainly of proposals to shower money — your money, of
course — on the wretched of the earth. Yet hate does not have much of
a constituency on the Right, either.
I hang out with these folk, and read their stuff. I have not yet heard any one of them say, even in private
conversation, that we should make war on Iraq because Iraqis are loathsome
people. Those who do want to
make war on Iraq mainly want to do so for the benefit of the
Iraqis, to relieve them of a horrid dictatorship and bring them the joys
of democracy and prosperity. Those
who do not want to go to war mainly argue that there is insufficient
cause, that the Iraqis are not doing us any harm, and that it is wicked,
or at least unwise, to go to war against people who haven’t attacked
you. The range of attitudes
on display towards the people we might shortly be dropping bombs on, goes
from indifference to tender concern.
Not a spark of hatred in sight. Certainly hatred is not a part
of our military code nowadays, not in the West, at any rate. The modern military ethic in the USA is one of cool
professionalism, “getting the job done,” in which hatred of the enemy
plays no part. GIs in WW2
used to boil up the heads of dead Japanese to get the flesh off, then send
the skulls home as presents to their wives and sweethearts, who used them
as living-room decorations. (There
are some actual photographs of this process in Paul Fussell’s book Thank
God for the Atom Bomb.)
None of that in the Army of One.
There is no proscription against actually killing the enemy, not
yet, but having killed him you pass on to the next task, feeling a mild
regret at the distasteful thing you have just done to a fellow human
being. Like you, the poor guy
was only doing his job. I am speaking here about
generalized hatred, the kind of hatred that fired up the Trojans as they
faced the army of well-greaved Achaians advancing on their city.
It is OK — though not, I think, entirely PC — to express hatred
for Osama bin Laden, or Saddam Hussein.
What President Bush calls “the evil ones” are legitimate
objects of our hatred. Hatred
has thus been corraled and tamed, directed towards a very small number of
particular persons, the way our great-grandparents tried to fence off and
tame sexual desire into the institution of monogamous marriage.
Like that other taming, this
one has a lot to be said for it. Personally,
I don’t want to live in a society awash with promiscuous hatred.
Yet I can’t help but notice that there is plenty of generalized
hatred around still. Taking
the world at large, I don’t think there can be much argument that the
commonest form of strong, generalized hatred is antisemitism.
Hundreds of millions of people hate Jews — all Jews, not any
particular Jews. I don’t
know how one could measure the sheer quantity of antisemitism in the
world, but I feel pretty sure it is greater now than it has ever been.
My impression from reading the papers, and web sites like MEMRI,
and my e-mail, is that we have entered a new age of virulent antisemitism,
when hatred of Jews is going to drive large historical events. Antisemitism seems
to me to be only a “slight and
occasional” feature of life in the U.S.A.
We do have at least two common forms of widespread generalized
hatred here, though. I write
as an American who first came to this country in adult life, so that the
national peculiarities presented themselves for inspection in a clear and
striking way. The two hatreds
that I am most aware of are:
Both points need a good deal
of qualification, of course. Neither
is anything like universal. A
lot, very likely a majority, of irreligious Americans couldn’t care less
about Christianity one way or another.
Likewise, millions of nonwhite Americans — again, probably a
majority — don’t hate whites at all.
Our current national ethic is, as I said, one that deplores hate. Most Americans subscribe to that ethic, more or less
whole-heartedly. It’s hard
not to notice, though, the endless rancorous campaigns against the public
display of Christmas trees, or the Ten Commandments, or the Cross.
(It doesn’t help that some of the people running those campaigns
seem to be quite dewy-eyed about Islam.)
Nor was it easy to miss the celebrations of glee with which the O.J.
Simpson verdict was greeted, or the fact that New York City
Councilman Charles Barron remains a New
York City Councilman, and more
popular than ever with his constituents, after remarking at a reparations
rally recently that he’d like to "go up to the closest white person
and say, ‘You can't understand this, it's a black thing,' and then slap
him, just for my mental health."
Most likely hatred —
generalized hatred, hatred of people who look like that, or act like this,
or live over there, or whose ancestors did such-and-such to my ancestors
— is bred deep in the bone, and we are indulging ourselves in a lot of
self-deception and wishful thinking about it, as our great-grandparents
did about that other source of passion.
We can do this because we are tremendously rich and powerful.
We are so rich we have little occasion for envy, on which hatred so
often feeds and grows fat. We
are so powerful that Homeric hatred, the hatred that fortified the Trojan
warriors, “strong Hatred, defender of peoples,” is not a necessary
part of our armory. We shall not any time soon be meeting our match in battle, as
Achaian met Trojan, because we have no match, being better-equipped
for war than our nearest rival by an order of magnitude. We can look generously on our enemies because: “We have got
/ The carrier group, and they have not.” Let’s enjoy our dreams of a
hate-free world, then — for a while, at least, since nothing lasts
forever, certainly not national supremacy.
But while we’re nosing around in the classics, let’s also
reflect on Horace’s remark that you can drive Nature out with a
pitchfork, but she’ll always come running back.
Is Homer’s assumption that hatred is a normal part of human
nature — that it can actually serve some purpose, at least in battle —
a profound insight into the human condition?
Or does it belong strictly in the Bronze Age, along with war
chariots, plumed helmets, slavery, concubinage, and the exposure of
unwanted infants? Look around
you, listen, and read. The
answer’s not hard to find. ——————————————— |
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