“I bear the creature no ill-will,” William Hazlitt wrote of a spider in his 1826 essay, “On the Pleasure of Hating.”
[B]ut still I hate the very sight of it. The spirit of malevolence survives the practical exertion of it. We learn to curb our will and keep our overt actions within the bounds of humanity, long before we can subdue our sentiments and imaginations to the same mild tone. We give up the external demonstration, the brute violence, but cannot part with the essence or principle of hostility.
Hazlitt speculated that “without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action.”Antoine Leiris, a Paris journalist, has made a name for himself by attempting to “part with the essence or principle of hostility” in the face of an overwhelmingly good reason not to. When his wife, Hélène Muyal-Leiris, was killed in the 2015 Bataclan theater massacre, he addressed a brief but forceful Facebook message to her murderers. In part: “I will not give you the satisfaction of hating you. That is what you want, but to respond to your hate with anger would be to yield to the same ignorance that made you what you are. You want me to be scared, to see my fellow citizens through suspicious eyes.”
Leiris’s message has been shared many times; it is now the crux of this brief, heartrending memoir. Leiris’s book proceeds from the trauma of learning that Hélène has been killed to the understanding that he must remain strong for his now-motherless 17-month-old son. It is a remarkable account, one impossible to weather without tears. When the tears have subsided, however, the reader may find himself pondering some uncomfortable questions.
Is withholding the “satisfaction” of your hatred not, itself, a manifestation of it? Through what philosophical or ethical framework is it “ignorant” to feel anger at those who have done you a grave, deliberate injury? Why has a reverence for unconditional forgiveness survived, like a superstition, into our secular age? Does it really make sense outside of a religious context? Is it honest—or is it just an empty assertion, an apotropaic ritual, a kind of wishful thinking?
Why, in other words, not hate?
Consider that among those inspired by Leiris’s words, there are without a doubt many people who (to borrow Hazlitt’s terms) not only embody the spirit of malevolence but also indulge in the practical exertion of it—enthusiastically so. They see a rarefied moral victory in refusing to hate the Bataclan terrorists but never hesitate to express the vilest opinions of their own neighbors for daring to think or vote the wrong way. In a recent interview with the Guardian, Leiris said, “About the journey towards radicalism, I try to understand.” It is unusual to see such patience or curiosity extended from one end of the American political spectrum to the other, in either direction.
Hazlitt was right: Human beings love having something to despise. “All that hate’s gonna burn you up, kid,” says one character to another in 1984's Red Dawn. The ready response: “It keeps me warm.”
The question isn’t whether we can fully subdue our hatred but, rather, when and to what degree we ought to try. One might argue that there is no harm in hating those who kill innocent people. Indeed, hating them, even in the abstract, serves as an affirmation of higher values. This is not a hate that closes the mind or corrodes the soul. It is one that says that these actions are unacceptable to civilized people, to people who, at their best, do understand what love means.
Does hatred of political opponents function in anything like the same fashion? Some would argue that it does. In a Slate piece entitled “There’s No Such Thing as a Good Trump Voter,” Jamelle Bouie addressed Trump’s supporters directly, in the fashion of Leiris—and not to tell them that they will not have his hate. “[Y]our frustration at being labeled a racist,” Bouie writes, “doesn’t justify or mitigate the moral weight of your political choice. . . . To insist Trump’s backers are good people is to treat their inner lives with more weight than the actual lives on the line under a Trump administration. . . . [I]t’s morally grotesque.” Along similar lines, one Charles Gaba tweeted at a Washington Post writer: “Not all Trump supporters are racist, but all of them decided that racism isn’t a deal-breaker. End of story.”
In fact, empathy for Trump supporters is in no way incompatible with empathy for those who fear Trump supporters. One is hardly obligated by solidarity with either group to believe the absolute worst about the other. “[A]ll of them decided that racism isn’t a deal-breaker,” Gaba writes—as though having been told that Trump was racist required all of them to believe it. This is, in essence, a shortcut to hatred: If we can't hate you for what you say you believe, we’ll decide what you really believe and hate you for that. This is not a behavior that suggests one is devoted to the principles of charity or empathy, let alone the love that we hear so much about—in the absence, frankly, of much evidence that it exists at all.
This is not to defend Trump or his supporters from the charge of hatred. Surely they hate “libtards” with as much passion as they are hated by them. Everybody hates. Everyone hates because, as Hazlitt knew, hating is pleasurable. Political hatred is especially pleasurable in the United States, where it may be pursued almost entirely without fear or risk. To imagine that Donald Trump—or Barack Obama—and his jack-booted myrmidons have the potential to do genuine evil is to cast oneself, raging on Twitter or Facebook, as a resistance fighter in a world-historical drama. The reality is less exciting as well as less flattering: Many systems are in place to safeguard our right to vent spleen, and were that not so, many of the most vocal haters would shut up and do nothing.
Seen in this light, our outsize hatreds seem not only childish but also a waste of time, a missed opportunity. Every minute spent fantasizing about improbable nightmare scenarios is one not spent addressing the real, frequently mundane, problems that it’s possible to fix. True, trying to give one’s political enemies the benefit of the doubt may not sound like much fun at first. Yet grappling with their principles, priorities, blind spots, and flaws is a lot more humane and rewarding than treating them as if they’re caricatures of evil. And just think of all the hate you’ll have left over for those who really are evil.