Between anger and hate

Jane Crow and I have been trading comments on the subject(s) of the late Andrea Dworkin and hate rhetoric (this will make more sense if you first read our comments on the original post, then her lengthy reply).

I agree with Jane's starting position that hate is hate, and that there is a significant difference between "anger from women directed against men and that of whites against blacks". Where we (appear to) disagree is in the question of whether anger equals hate, and whether the rhetoric of hate is justified. I would answer "no" to both of those questions.

Hate is not anger. You can be angry at somebody you love, without hating them; you can also hate someone without being particularly angry at them.

To feel anger, even rage, towards a particular person (him in the blue shirt) because of specific things that he did or didn't do or say, is natural and reasonable; but to hate a third person (her in the red dress) because of things someone else did is ethically unsupportable and morally repugnant.

The rhetoric of hate declares the world to be in black and white, perfect goodness against absolute evil, and denies the grey tones (let alone the rainbow) that most people live in. Take a simple example: I am a white male and was alive at the time that the abuses that Malcolm X and Andrea Dworkin experienced were perpetrated. Am I responsible for them? I would say not: I was six years old when Malcolm was shot. But a rhetoric that only considers skin colour or gender would be unable to distinguish between me and the leader of a KKK lynch mob. For that matter, such a rhetoric would admit no difference between Adolf Hitler and a male survivor of Buchenwald.

The rhetoric of hate denies the validity of individual experience, and the worth of a particular person, in favour of a romantic myth of victimization and injustice. Is that not prejudice? and do we not abhor prejudice?

The difference between "anger from women directed against men and that of whites against blacks", is that the former arises from the fact of experience, whereas the latter is based on unverifiable and unexamined belief. Scoundrels and politicians have been exploiting our (Hom. Sap.) tendency to look for enemies outside the group rather than errors within it, for thousands of years, and it's unlikely that this will change soon. We are herd animals, and have a strong instinctive urge to identify with a "we"; and that is most easily established through the identification of a separate "they". As the Supreme Court rightly ruled, separate is inherently inferior: "we" are by definition superior to "them". From there to saying that "they" are responsible for every bad thing that happens, is a step that many people are happy to take. It's happening right now in America, with the Christian fundamentalists demonizing Islam (thanks Jane for the link to Ward Churchill).

Tell somebody "I am angry at you about X, because of A, B, and C" and you might just change her mind. Tell somebody that he is a hateful pig, and you guarantee (a) that he will hear no further word that you utter, and (b) that he will reply in kind.

At the end of the day, that was my objection to Andrea Dworkin's hate-laden rhetoric: that it short-circuited discourse by reducing injustice to a kind of Manichean theology: We are perfectly right, and you are perfectly wrong. There can be no debate in those terms, and Dworkin's flame burned so brightly that nothing else in her vicinity was reported.

The microphone is open. Are there any questions from the floor?