Them and Us. We and They. Nationality, Ethnicity, Race, Religion, Political Party, Vocation, Avocation, Gender Identity, and so on. All of these give us an opportunity to identify, to belong, to be a member of a group. Belonging can give us validation and comfort. It can also estrange us from everyone who is not in the group.
Sitting on the deck this afternoon, I couldn’t find a news program that I hadn’t already heard yesterday. It’s the weekend, after all. I choose to listen to a BBC podcast titled Deeply Human. The moderator is Dessa Darling. Today’s episode was titled, “Hate.” It was only 23-minutes long, but it was 23 minutes well spent. I invite you to listen to it.
A few years ago, one of my neighborhood acquaintances whose children were elementary school mates of our son told me that he had grown up in a racist environment and was an avowed racist until he had a transformative experience. After working against his upbringing for (what I suspect was) a long time, he was able to experience “the other” as fellow human being. This is the kind of injury that hate inflicts on the human psyche. I have met but a few people in this life who had that level of maturity and insight. I suspect such people are rare, and I am not one of them.
Those of us most vulnerable to hate want to believe that the world is about Good versus Evil. We want things to be clean and simple. Nuance is our enemy. We do not believe that we are hateful. We want to believe that we are righteous, and that makes us all the more hateful and blind to our own hate.
It’s the kind of thing that makes those of us who are atheists pessimistic about the fate of humanity – that we will be driven to extinction by those who believe that they and only they are right. Alas.