If
string theory is the astrophysicist’s theoretical attempt
to explain the subtle 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 strings calling the shots as they concern
human behaviour are 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 the species-specific prime movers. Love and
hate direct our movement either towards or away from things.
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, which he procures through his gifts
and dedication.
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 want 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 country
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 immediately 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, 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 is 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.
Despite
public declarations to the contrary, we know that in their
private thoughts Jews and Palestinians would like to be relieved
of the cause of their hatred -- which is the other. 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 mind-set of the contestants where both sides, in proportion
to the hatred they harbour, desires to be relieved of the
cause of their 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.
