Human Traits and their Social Significance Part 11

HATE. Hate may be described as an extreme form of disaffection usually provoked by some marked interference with our activities, desires, or ideals. But in less intense degree the negative feeling towards others may be provoked immediately and unmistakably by most casual evidence of voice, manner, or bearing. Such immediate revulsions of feeling contrast with the instances of "instinctive sympathy" previously cited, and are as direct and uncontrollable. Even kindly disposed persons cannot help experiencing in the presence of some persons they have never seen before, a half-conscious thrill of repulsion or a dislike colored with dread.

A shifting gaze, a noticeably pretentious manner, a marked obsequiousness, a grating voice, a chillness of demeanor, a physical deformity, these, however little they may have to do with a person's genuine qualities, do affect our att.i.tudes toward them. As the familiar verse has it:

"I do not like you, Dr. Fell, The reason why I cannot tell, But this I know, and know full well, I do not like you, Dr. Fell."

We may later revise our estimates, but the initial reaction is made, and often remains as a subconscious qualification of our general att.i.tude toward another. People of worldly experience learn to trust their first reactions, to "size a man up"

almost intuitively, and to be surprised if their first impressions go astray.

From this merely instinctive revulsion the negative att.i.tude may rise to that terrible form of destructive antipathy which is "hate," as popularly understood. In between lie degrees of dislike depending partly on the strength of the initial antipathy, but equally so on the degree to which others, whether persons, inst.i.tutions, or ideas, interfere with our activities, desires, or ideals. The man who seriously obstructs our love, our pleasure, or our ambition, or who tries to do so, provokes hate, and its concomitants of jealousy, rage, and pugnacity. It is not only that we dislike the mere presence of the person (in the opposite case the mere presence of the beloved object is a joy), but we dislike it for what it portends in danger and threat to ourselves. The more serious the evil or disaster for which a person comes to stand, the more violent the hatred for him, despite his personal fascinations.

The villain is not infrequently a "d.a.m.ned smiling villain."

The provocation of hate is complicated by the fact that it is closely a.s.sociated with fear. We dislike those who threaten our happiness partly because we fear them. And we fear, as was pointed out in more detail in the discussion of that powerful human trait, the unfamiliar, the strange, the startling, the unexpected. The facility with which sensational newspapers can work up in an ignorant population a hate for foreign nations, especially those of a totally alien civilization, is made possible by the fear which these uninformed readers can feel at the dangerous possibilities of mysterious foreign hordes.

The fomenting of fear is in nearly all such cases a prerequisite to the fomenting of hate. And the promotion of hate has historically been one of the frequent ingredients of international conflicts.

Like love, hate is profoundly influential in modifying our interest in persons and situations. To dislike a person moderately is, in his absence, to be indifferent to him. To dislike him intensely, in a sense increases our interest in him, though perversely. Just as we wish the beloved person to succeed, to gain honor and reputation and wealth, so we long for and rejoice in the downfall and discomfiture of our enemies. Thus writes the Psalmist:

Arise, O Lord, save me, my G.o.d; for thou has smitten all mine enemies upon the cheekbone; thou hast broken the teeth of the unG.o.dly....

Thou hast also given me the necks of mine enemies that I might destroy those that hate me.

Hate may be directed against persons, and usually it is.

But hatred may be directed against inst.i.tutions and ideas as well. For many persons it will be impossible for a decade to listen to German music or the German language, so closely have these become a.s.sociated in their minds with ideas and practices which they detest. To a dogmatic Calvinist in the sixteenth century, both an heretical creed and its pract.i.tioners, were objects of abomination. Disappointed men may take out in a spleen and hatred of mankind their personal pique and balked desires.

Great hates may be present at the same time and in the same persons as great loves. Indeed for some persons strength in the one pa.s.sion is impossible without a corresponding strength in its opposite. We cannot help hating, more or less, not only those who interfere with our own welfare, but with the welfare of those who, being dear to us, have become, as we say, a part of our lives. Thus writes Bertrand Russell in the introduction to his treatment of some of the radical social tendencies of our own day:

Whatever bitterness or hate may be found in the movements which we are to examine, it is not bitterness or hate, but love, that is their mainspring. It is difficult not to hate those who torture the objects of our love. Though difficult, it is not impossible; but it requires a breadth of outlook, and a comprehensiveness of understanding which are not easy to preserve amid a desperate contest.[1]

[Footnote 1: Russell: _Proposed Roads to Freedom_, pp. xvii-xviii.]

Hate may thus be, as great religious and social reformers ill.u.s.trate, invoked on the side of good as well as evil. The prophets burned with a "righteous indignation." But hate is a violent and consuming pa.s.sion, bent on destroying obstacles rather than solving problems. It consumes in hatred for individuals such energy as might more expeditiously be devoted to the improvement of the circ.u.mstances which make people do the mean or small or blind actions which arouse our wrath. The complete meekness and humility preached by Christ have not been taken literally by the natively pugnacious peoples of Europe. But as James says suggestively:

"Love your enemies!" Mark you not simply those who do not happen to be your friends, but your _enemies_, your positive and active enemies. Either this is a mere Oriental hyperbole, a bit of verbal extravagance, meaning only that we should, in so far as we can, abate our animosities, or else it is sincere and literal. Outside of certain cases of intimate individual relation, it seldom has been taken literally. Yet it makes one ask the question: Can there in general be a level of emotion so unifying, so obliterative of differences between man and man, that even enmity may come to be an irrelevant circ.u.mstance and fail to inhibit the friendlier interests aroused.

If positive well-wishing could attain so supreme a degree of excitement, those who were swayed by it might well seem superhuman beings. Their life would be morally discrete from the lives of other men, and there is no saying... what the effects might be: they might conceivably transform the world.[1]

[Footnote 1: James: _Varieties of Religious Experience_, p. 283.]

Dislikes, disagreements, native antipathies are not to be abolished, human differences being ineradicable and human interests, even in an ideal society, being in conflict. But a keener appreciation of other viewpoints, which is possible through education, a less violent concern with one's own personal interests to the exclusion of all others, may greatly reduce the amount of hate current in the world, and free men's energies in pa.s.sions more positive in their fruits.

CHAPTER VII

THE DEMAND FOR PRIVACY AND INDIVIDUALITY

PRIVACY AND SOLITUDE. Although one of man's most powerful tendencies, as has already been pointed out, is his desire to be with his fellows, this desire is not unqualified. Just as men can be satiated with too much eating, and irritated by too much inactivity, so men become "fed up" with companionship.

The demand for solitude and privacy is thus fundamentally a physiological demand, like the demand for rest.

"The world is too much with us," especially the human world.

Companionship, even of the most desirable kind, exhausts nervous energy, and may become positively fatiguing and painful. To crave solitude is thus not a sign of man's unsociability, but a sign merely that sociability, like any other human tendency, becomes annoying, if too long or too strenuously indulged. Much of the neurasthenia of city life has been attributed to the continual contact with other people, and the total inability of most city dwellers to secure privacy for any considerable length of time. In some people a lifelong habit of close contact with large numbers of people makes them abnormally gregarious, so that solitude, the normal method of recuperation from companionship, becomes unbearable. Few city dwellers have not felt after a period of isolation in some remote country place the need for the social stimulus of the city. But a normal human life demands a certain proportion of solitude just as much as it demands the companionship of others.

With the spread of education and the general enhancement of the sense of personal selfhood and individuality among large numbers of people, the demand for privacy has increased.

The modern reader is shocked to discover in the literature of the Elizabethan period the amazing lack of a sense of privacy there exhibited. In contemporary society this sense and the possibility of its satisfaction are variously displayed on different economic and social levels. In the congested life of the tenements it is almost impossible, and many social evils are to be traced to the promiscuous mingling of large families (and sometimes additional boarders) in congested quarters.

The demand for privacy and solitude becomes acute among people who do a great deal of mental work. "Man," says Nietzsche, "cannot think in a herd," and the thinker has traditionally been pictured as a solitary man. This is because quiet seems to be, for most men, an essential condition of really creative thought. There are some men who find it impossible to write when there is another person, even one of whom they are fond, in the same room. "No man," writes Mr. Graham Wallas, "is likely to produce creative thoughts (either consciously or subconsciously) if he is constantly interrupted by irregular noises." Constant a.s.sociation with other people means, moreover, continual distraction by conversation which seriously interrupts a consecutive train of thought. The insistence in public and college reading rooms on absolute quiet is a device for securing as nearly as may be privacy in intellectual work.

Privacy is again demanded as a matter of emotional protection in individuals in whom there is a highly sensitive development of personal selfhood. We like to keep our concerns to ourselves, or to share them only with those with whom we have a marked community of interest and feeling. Children love to "have secrets they won't tell," and older people, especially sensitive and intelligent ones, feel a peculiar sense of irritation at having their personal affairs and feelings publicly displayed. Nearly everyone must recall occasions where he was vividly communicative and loquacious with a friend, only to relapse into a clam-like silence on the entry of a third person.

This is primarily due to the fact that while men are by nature gregarious, their gregariousness early becomes specialized and aroused exclusively by people for whom they develop a sense of personal affection and common sympathy. Any intrusion from without this circle becomes an intrusion upon privacy.

SATISFACTION IN PERSONAL POSSESSION: THE ACQUISITIVE INSTINCT.

An almost universal human trait of considerable social consequence is the satisfaction men experience in having objects that are their own. Both animals and humans, apart from training, display a tendency to get and hold objects. This tendency may take extreme forms, as in the case of miserliness or kleptomania. It is evidenced in special ways in the collections that children, and some grown-ups, make of miscellaneous objects without any particular use, and with no particular aesthetic value.

The objects which satisfy this instinct of possession may include material goods, family, or larger groups. In primitive tribes under the patriarchal system, the patriarch practically owns the tribe. Our laws not so long ago recognized the marriage relation as a state in which the wife is possessed or owned by the husband.

Possession gives the owner various kinds of satisfaction.

The instinctive satisfaction in possession itself may be quite irrespective of the values of the objects owned, and deprivation may be fiercely resisted out of all proportion to the value of the objects. Especially will this be the case if the object possessed has become surrounded with other emotional attachments, so that an individual may be as bitterly chagrined and piqued by being deprived of some slight memoir or keepsake as of a large sum of money. In the same way the fighting spirit of a whole tribe or nation may be aroused by the invasion or seizure of a small and unimportant bit of land, or by the chance of its possession.

The instinctive sense of satisfaction, as in the last mentioned case is enhanced by the sense of importance which comes from possession, and which enhances one's own individuality and personality. A man's vast holdings in wealth, land, factories, machinery, or private estates is, in a sense, regarded by him as an extension of his personality. He is confirmed in this impression because it is so regarded by his neighbors and the whole social group. A great landowner is a celebrity throughout the countryside, and, as Mr. Veblen points out, a large part of the luxurious display and expenditure of the leisure cla.s.ses is their way of publicly and conspicuously indicating the amount of their possessions.

As in the case of any other strong native tendency, interference with the instinct of acquisition, whether displayed by the individual or the group, provokes often fierce anger and bitter combat. The history of wars of aggrandizement throughout the history of Europe are testimonies to the efficacy of this instinct at least in the initiation of war.

The progress of civilization beyond its earliest states is held, by some sociologists and economists, to be ascribed to the power of the acquisitive instinct. The acquisition of material wealth or capital, the development of the inst.i.tution of private property with its concomitant individual development of land and natural resources is maintained by Lester Ward to be of paramount importance in social advance:

... Objects of desire multiplied themselves and their possession became an end of effort. Slowly the notion of property came into being and in acquiring this, as history shows, the larger share of all human energy has been absorbed. The ruling pa.s.sion has for a time long anterior to any recorded annals always been proprietary acquisition.... Both the pa.s.sion and the means of satisfying it were conditions to the development of society itself, and rightly viewed they have also been leading factors in civilization.[1]

[Footnote 1: Lester Ward: _The Psychic Factors of Civilization_, p. 156.]

There are many other motives to activity than acquisition, but there are many evidences of its intense operation even in modern society. Many men go on working long after they have money enough to enable them to live in comfort, merely for the further satisfaction of this impulse. "While in the course of satisfaction of most other desires, the point of satiety is soon reached, the demands of this one grow greater without limit, so that it knows no satiety."[1]

[Footnote 1: McDougall: _loc. cit._, p. 323.]

The power of this tendency to personal acquisition and possession seems an obstacle to all thoroughly communistic forms of political and social organization. The conception of a state where n.o.body owns anything, but where all is owned in common--an idea which has been repeated in many modern forms of socialism and communism, fails to note this powerful human difficulty. Many socialist writers, it must be noted, however, point out that they wish social ownership of the means of production rather than of every item of personal property, such as books, clothing, and the like.

INDIVIDUALITY IN OPINION AND BELIEF. Men frequently display with regard to their opinions and beliefs the same pa.s.sionate attachment that they exhibit with regard to their physical possessions. Like the latter, these come to be regarded as an extension of the individual's personality, and the same tenacious defense may be made of them as of a house, land, or money.

Individual opinions and beliefs are not themselves possessions, from a social point of view, so much as is the right to express them. A man's private opinion may influence his own conduct; his conduct itself may be an expression of opinion. But unless an opinion is communicated, it cannot influence any one else's conduct, and society has never been much concerned about opinions that an individual harbored strictly in his own bosom. Silence, socially, is as good as a.s.sent. The insistence on the right to one's own opinions becomes, therefore, an insistence on the right or the freedom to express them.[2] This right is cherished in varying degrees by different individuals in different ages. It becomes p.r.o.nounced in persons in whom there is marked development of individuality, and, in general, where, as in Anglo-Saxon countries, a social and political tradition of liberty and individuality has become very powerful.

[Footnote 2: Beliefs and opinions may come to be regarded as important personal possessions in themselves, as in the case of rival claimants to some theory or idea, as in the case of Leibnitz's and Newton's dispute over the calculus.]

Individuality in opinion and belief becomes critical chiefly when the opinions and beliefs expressed are at variance with those generally current among the group. For reasons already discussed in connection with man's instinctive gregariousness and the emotional sway which habits of thought have over men, dissent is regarded with suspicion. Especially is this the case where the dissenting opinions have to do with new social organization and custom. The psychological causes of this opposition are various, but include among other things a positive feeling of fear.

It is only recently that men have been abandoning the belief that the welfare of a state depends on rigid stability and on the preservation of its traditions and inst.i.tutions unchanged. Wherever that belief prevails, novel opinions are felt to be dangerous as well as annoying, and any one who asks inconvenient questions about the why and the wherefore of accepted principles is considered a pestilent person.[1]

[Footnote 1: Bury: _History of Freedom of Thought_, p. 9.]

Throughout history there has been a long struggle for freedom of thought and discussion, and there have been great landmarks in the degree with which freedom was attained, and the fields wherein it was permitted. For a long time in the history of Europe, dissent from the prevailing opinion on religious matters was regarded both as abominable and socially dangerous, and was severely punished. Since the middle of the nineteenth century there has been no legal punishment provided for dissent from established opinions in religion, although penalties for heterodoxy in countries where religious opinion is strong and fairly unanimous may be exerted in other ways. In social matters also, there has practically ceased to be legal coercion of opinion.[2] The argument for the suppression of individual opinion has been tersely summarized by the author above quoted:

[Footnote 2: Except in the recent period of excitement and stress during the Great War, when suppression of opinion was, for better or for worse, taken as a measure of national defense.]

Those who have the responsibility of governing a society can argue that it is inc.u.mbent on them to prohibit the circulation of pernicious opinions as to prohibit any anti-social actions. They can argue that a man may do far more harm by propagating anti-social doctrines than by stealing his neighbor's horse or making love to his neighbor's wife. They are responsible for the welfare of the State, and if they are convinced that an opinion is dangerous... it is their duty to protect society against it as against any other danger.[1]