The Conservation of Hatred

Lately my comments have refused to quit in my own brain.  They just keep on going, turning into posts.

A couple of days ago Michael said:

I think we're at a paradigm shift. [...] The left-right paradigm is gone.  It is essentially meaningless. [...]  That world, the left-right, Teddy Kennedy-Rush Limbaugh world is already meaningless to the next generation. [...] Dear Baby Boomers:  the world is finally moving on, and finally we and our tired-ass ideas are being left behind.

In a reply (not entirely sequitur, I see now), I wrote:

The "new paradigm" you're talking about (how about a new way of saying that?) tends to be "both-and." Patriotic AND global, pluribus AND unum, etc. etc. Frankly, I feel like I've been there for quite a while, baby boomer though I am. [...]  At the same time, my conservative hemisphere warns that most annunciations of "something finally, really new" are a bit overblown. People are still people.

Later I felt compelled to expand on that:

We are forever imagining that something new -- a new generation, a new technology, a new movement -- will finally make people no longer power-hungry, indiscriminately horny, vain, or corrupt. That hope is always disappointed. People remain the same mixed bag they've always been, in different costumes, talking different slang, and playing with different gadgets. [...] 

The realest change I think you can point to is the growing recognition that we are all one species and that individuals should be judged by their conduct, not their category. That's a real falling of barriers.

Then today it hit me in a flash that if you hold a conservative view of the conservation of human nature, the very falling of barriers explains the peculiar virulence of political partisanship today.  As and wherever old ethnic, racial, religious, and national tribal hatreds have faded, as they unquestionably have in most of the United States, new ones -- Democrat vs. Republican,  conservative vs. liberal, Red Sox fan vs. Yankee fan -- must arise to take their place.  Granted, it is real progress that these reconfigured tribes no longer slaughter one another, or abduct and enslave each other's women.  But as soccer hooligans and certain blogs show, there is often a sense that that atavistic impulse is only barely being restrained, and we can never take the restraint for granted.

It yields nicely to an evolutionary explanation:  hatred breeds reproduction.  Haters have more children -- to outnumber "them," to replace those "they" have killed or abducted, to beef up the "us" troops.  Nietzsche would have said the two are linked in a group's will to power, Willen zur Macht, which he defined as follows:

[E]very specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (--its will to power:) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. [...] [Anything which] is a living and not a dying body... will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant. [trans. Walter Kaufmann]

(Do you know the first sentence of that book?  "Of what is great one must either be silent or speak with greatness. With greatness--that means cynically and with innocence.")  This is certainly a definition today's pronatalist right could agree with:  they warn that effete liberal societies are going to be outbred and overrun, conquered demographically if not also militarily, by Muslims and other tribal hordes, who have turned their virile hatred on modernity itself.  And the pronatalists counsel a warlike vigilance consciously coupled with a resolute fecundity.  (A traditional warrior-mother sex-role division is naturally implied.) 

The one thing I think you cannot demonstrate is that the many children of haters will themselves necessarily become the same kind of haters, especially in an open world where they see other, perhaps more attractive alternatives.  So let's say they leave the ranks of haters, adopt a less warlike, more experiential and savoring view of the world -- and have fewer children.  Hatred then becomes a great hot engine pumping out people, who cool as they move outward and mix more with "others."  It's possible to envision a strange kind of equilibrium in which the human species today needs both haters and reconcilers in order to continue reproducing yet avoid self-destructing.  This is, of course, a much too hydraulic, nineteenth-century, steam-engine analogy, but you know what I mean.

Comments

[Ron]

Has the history of the US for at least a hundred years been other nations and cultures telling us we're weak because we have an "effete liberal society"? Bushido warlords, Nazis, Stalinists, Islamic terrorists all yapping at us about how weak we must be because of our decadent approaches to a lot of things, especially how women are treated in society.

Well...we're still here, thank you very much, and they, mostly are not!

[huxley]

Hatred breeds reproduction.

If the story were as simple as "hatred breeds reproduction", humanity would have bred itself into pure hatred by now and we wouldn't be enjoying the pleasant civility of AmbivaBlog.

The story, as I make it, is "Urbanization, literacy, and modernity breed less reproduction." All of humanity is on this curve. Global population is projected to peak in 2050 and start dropping.

The earlier-maligned Spengler covered this with respect to Islam, the most hate-filled religion of all, in The demographics of radical Islam.

Falling fertility measures the growing influence of modernity upon the Muslim world. Literacy rates, especially female literacy, best explain the difference between the very high fertility rates of pre-modern society and the moderate fertility rates of industrial countries,

[karen]

Yup-- i'm kinda glad huxley paraphrased because i was begining to loo like a filthy Papist-- i KNOW how to breed reproduction;0).

In Africa(or so i'm told)-- education of women leads to less children/family and better spacing- even while using NFP(natural family planning). Imagine that.

I think a lot of inductrialized countruies have a lower birth rate. I think it's called increasing @a decreasing rate.

[karen]

above: loo=look. I should probably have written "feel".

[Clark]

Interesting thought, that people need to belong to a tribe and have another tribe to hate, even if it's just Yankees fans. This shows progress, I think, even if progress is slow. If we can continue to survive, despite our mistakes, some of that promised new morning might happen in a few more centuries.

[Icepick]

Granted, it is real progress that these reconfigured tribes no longer ... abduct and enslave each other's women.

Speak for yourself!

[amba]

LOL!

[Liza]

"Us" vs. "aliens" - the oldest survival mechanism; fortunately, for a big number of people the idea of "us" shrinks to cover no more than members of the immediate family: that's our tribe these days. Belonging to more extended group is more often seeing as a weakness of mind (unless it's a game, of course): religious tepidity is better than fanaticism; patriotism is good unless as long as it means defense, not aggression; seeking an approval of peers is a teenage behavior; etc.

[wj]

To expand on huxley's point, fertility actually changes in several ways with civilization:
- the starting point is high fertility, combined with high death rates, not least for children. Net increase in population, minimal.
- with civilization comes an improvement in survival rates. ("Civilization" here can be any stage from agriculture to modern medicine.) Net increase in population, substantial.
- then, after society has adjusted to the greater survival rates, fertility rates drop substantially. Net increase in population returns to low levels.

Those social adjustments include a lot of factors, including increased education and equality for women. But men adjust, too -- albeit, perhaps, more slowly.

On another issue, I think describing all partisanship (political or otherwise) as "hatred" is a bit misleading. Certainly there are some who hate; and many of them are not too picky about what excuse they grab to clothe their hatred.

But a lot more partisanship is merely the desire to belong to a group. The us-vs-them thing is often way milder than anything I would describe as hate. And it isn't even necessarily the driver, or even present, in all cases.

Think, for example, of some professional societies. Often they even talk about becoming "the best organization for" whatever group they involve. But the implicit competition of that phrase is not linked to hatred [or, even to any awareness] of what other groups they might be competing with for the title of "best".

[amba]

The us-vs-them thing is often way milder than anything I would describe as hate. When it comes to the liberals and conservatives I know, I couldn't disagree with you more. They DESPISE each other. Many have commented on the zeal and fervor of this opposition compared to the more collegial disagreement of, say, William F. Buckley's era.

I stick by my point that it's one of the main places hate has gone as older divisions have faded.

[christopher]

I think a realistic and honest assessment of the human condition keeps us mindful that the dynamics and tendencies of us/them will always find some outlet. The question is are there contructive outlets? I think sports can be one possibility, for example. But even they can be cheapened, turned into vicious rivalry and mobism.

On the other hand, I don't expect that bigotry ceases, it usually comes out sideways or in new configurations, or that we can end poverty in our lifetime. So many complex factors and human self-centeredness are not likely to lead to such a vision, a vision nonetheless worth working for. That's not an excuse to not to examine ourselves or do what we can for fellow human beings, but it should chasten us into enough humility to recognize limits, complexity, and the contradictions of human beings to prevent being hoodwinked.

What I don't buy about progressivism is the tendency to utopianism or kingdom-of-Godism that we build on earth--if it's up to us, we're screwed as I commented to a seminary student last week.

Conservatism was until recently an antidote in that regard, recognizing the limits of human beings, that frankly, the more the change the more we also stay the same--that the human condition as is isn't somehow getting better and better and better, we just find new ways to do unto others what we would not want done unto us. Our Founding Fathers were conservative in that regard, recognizing that human beings given power are likely to want more, hence, our checks and balances.

That might sound pessimistic and hardnosed, but with that in mind we can more soundly laud true achievements of change in individuals and in societies while recognizing that none are perfect, nor will be.

[wj]

amba, I'm not disagreeing with you that the liberal vs. conservative thing (at least in the more extreme ends) does run to hatred. Although my personal experience is that moderate liberals and moderate conservatives managed to get along OK -- just agreeing to disagree on some issues.

But my point was that not all groups run to hatred of other groups. Some groups do, and even have that hatred of the "other" as their defining characteristic. And some generally non-hating groups have individual members who hate with enthusiasm. But the operative word there is "some." As opposed to "all", which is what I interpreted your post to say.

Similarly, some individuals do hate, and their hatred drives them to try to expand their in-group biologically. But other individuals manage to reproduce just fine without hatred as a driving force. And I think that there is some reason to believe that the latter outnumber the former. Certainly we hear a lot about those who hate -- such is the joy of modern improved communications. But the fact that we hear a lot from that quarter does not necessarily imply that the percentage of those who are driven by hate has gone up.

[huxley]

Sure, humans aren't perfect and the United States is not utopia. Yes, we're living in a particularly polarized age and tempers run high, but is this really any worse than the sixties? Or far worse, the 1860s? Or how about this:

On this day in history, May 22, 1856, United States Representative Preston Brooks criminally attacked Senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate, beating Sumner on the head with a heavy cane until the cane broke, and incapacitating Sumner for four years. Volokh Conspiracy

The bigger picture is that we are becoming increasingly civilized with each century.

Several archaeologists and anthropologists now argue that violence was much more pervasive in hunter-gatherer society than in more recent eras. From the !Kung in the Kalahari to the Inuit in the Arctic and the aborigines in Australia, two-thirds of modern hunter-gatherers are in a state of almost constant tribal warfare, and nearly 90% go to war at least once a year. War is a big word for dawn raids, skirmishes and lots of posturing, but death rates are high—usually around 25-30% of adult males die from homicide. The warfare death rate of 0.5% of the population per year that Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois calculates as typical of hunter-gatherer societies would equate to 2 billion people dying during the 20th century. --Noble or Savage?

[amba]

Huh? I've just been researching the Inuit for work. They used to struggle too hard to survive to waste much energy fighting each other. Nowadays they die from snowmobile accidents and diabetes. Tribal warfare? The !Kung?! The tendency to tribal warfare varied widely in preliterate societies, depending on culture and the relative scarcity of resources.

I agree with you that we have made real progress, and there may even be an evolutionary component to it in that warrior types don't do well in cubicles. There are ever fewer niches for warriors, whether you lament or celebrate that fact.

wj, of course I'm speaking in broad strokes in order to make what I think is a valid point. It's hard to express an idea clearly without overgeneralizing. If I was going to qualify it to death I wouldn't have bothered posting it. Again, the point is a hypothesis that one reason why political partisanship has become so virulent in our time is precisely that older identifications and enmities are fading.

[amba]

. . . although capitalism is a pretty good niche for warriors, actually. So maybe that's wrong. The warriors are in the executive suites and the jails.

[huxley]

Amba -- I'll look into Inuit and !Kung, however, the arguments, as I've read them, don't depend entirely on those two tribes, and besides you cede the point anyway that progress has been made.

So your overall point is ... what? Hatred breeds reproduction? That there are haters and reconcilers and together the equilibrium makes the world work?

Overall it seems to me that your claims here are either dubious, muddled or too general to be worth much.

And now you seem to conflated "haters" and "warriors". Really?

[amba]

My point is that hatred might be conserved, and persevere, because it's a good part of what got us here. Having an enemy made groups cohere and want to strengthen themselves. It's not going to go away. Vanquish it one place it will pop up someplace else: if not theology, then ideology.

I said that right-wing pronatalists wanted men to be warriors and women to be mothers because it's the only way to avoid "demographic winter" and takeover by more tribal and virile peoples. There are really two kinds of enemies, for them: the Islamic adversary whom they, in some ways, respect, and the reconcilers whom they despise as defeatists.