Conquering the Rule of Hate
I have a hard time watching the news these days. The primary cause of my hesitancy to subject myself to the daily barrage of disturbing sounds and images is not the devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, hurricanes, floods, or wildfires. It is the visage of unconcealed hate that has surfaced, intensified, and exacerbated the existential challenges facing civilization.
Hate has benefited from a resurgence in recent years, propped up by a politics intent on fostering and exploiting division to gain power. We continue to see it in the usual places – hate born of racism and other forms of prejudice, hate fueled by rigid and exclusionary ideologies, even hate generated by obscene distortions of religious teachings. We also have found it in new spaces – hate wielded by parents opposed to school mask mandates, hate that killed five and injured more than 100 at the nation’s Capitol during what should have been a peaceful transfer of power, and hate that is making huge strides in state legislatures to restrict voting and abortion rights. According to the Boston Globe, last week the FBI reported that hate crimes in the United States in 2020 increased to the highest level in 12 years, and even that tally may be under-counted.
Of course, America has no monopoly on hate. Hate is a worldwide phenomenon, a condition afflicting us humans ever since Cain killed Abel. How else can one explain the recent bombing of Afghan civilians and American troops at the Kabul airport, or the persecution of ethnic minorities in China, Russia, and other countries, or the refusal to allow families fleeing humanitarian crises to cross the borders into safer lands.
Democratic nations like ours have an important guardrail against hate. It is called the Rule of Law. As a lawyer and former bar leader, I have always advocated for the importance of the Rule of Law as essential to upholding democratic values (note the non-partisan, lower-case “d”) and protecting us from violent means for instituting change. It has been and remains the last and most important defense to tyranny.
But the Rule of Law, vitally important as it is, has never been enough. After all, American history is replete with examples of unjust laws, such as laws that permitted slavery to persist for nearly a quarter of a millennium, laws enacted after abolition that perpetuated forms of discrimination such as racial segregation and bans on inter-racial marriage, laws that permitted the forced relocation of native tribes, and laws that set up internment camps for Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. Even today, many Americans question the morality of laws permitting capital punishment and abortion, while many of them see no inconsistency in pushing a “pro-life” agenda that allows for ending the lives of those convicted of certain crimes. When laws are enacted as part of a partisan agenda, as we are witnessing now with the assault on voting rights, it is easy to see that the Rule of Law alone is necessary but not sufficient to achieving justice.
Perhaps what we need today in addition to the Rule of Law is the Rule of Love or, if love is too much to ask, at least a Rule of Anti-Hate. Rather than continuing to escalate partisan rancor, we could concentrate on dialing down the hateful rhetoric and working to resolve our differences with a recognition that those who do not agree with us need not be our enemies. Only by coming together in a spirit of cooperation and goodwill will we have the strength to combat the common problems that confront us, problems like overcoming the current pandemic and preventing the next one, reducing and mitigating the effects of climate change, and preserving our democracy and the institutions that make it work. The combination of preserving the Rule of Law and working towards a Rule of Love may be the only effective antidote to so much that ails us.
What we are witnessing with the pandemic may provide a useful analogy. We have learned that the solution to the pandemic is something called “herd immunity,” which can be achieved by a combination of vaccination and immunity caused by infection. Either route entails the building up of antibodies in our systems that target and decimate the dreaded virus. Imagine what would happen, though, if instead of only targeting the virus, the antibodies also targeted each other. Such infighting among the proteins designed to protect us would leave us at the mercy of the potentially lethal agent.
Just as infighting antibodies would nullify our bodies’ response to infection, so the divisions caused by hate nullify our efforts to prevail over the common crises we face, including the pandemic, climate change, and foreign-sponsored attacks on our democracy. If we cannot do a better job of working together across partisan lines to overcome these challenges, they will surely overcome us.
I will end this reflection by recounting a story in today’s Boston Globe. In it, correspondent Mitchell Zuckoff, who with other reporters wrote the Globe’s lead story the day of the 9/11 attacks, writes about a man named Jack Grandcolas. Mr. Grandcolas’ wife and unborn child were on Flight 93 when terrorists forced it to crash into the Pennsylvania countryside. Despite the devastating losses he suffered, Grandcolas has refused to embrace hate. Today’s story, which I highly recommend, includes Mr. Zuckoff’s description of his conversation with Mr. Grandcolas:
“In our society, love must conquer hate. So I won’t go down the hate path,” he said. “I can disagree, I can dislike, but hate is a learned, very dangerous ideology.
“It never made sense to me how you could hate someone you don’t know. In fact, they may turn out to be your best friend.”
That’s one of the lessons Jack draws from the events on Flight 93.
“The individuals on that flight didn’t know each other either. They chose not to fight with each other but to bond together,” Jack said. “The people on that plane were representative of the melting pot — old, young, gay, straight, male, female. From all races. Mothers, fathers, grandfathers, grandmothers, husbands, wives. Mothers to be.”
His voice trailed off for a moment.
“I believe — not to borrow someone else’s phrase — that’s the real way to make this nation great again. It’s about how we come together as strangers in a moment of dire need. And right now I think we’re in a moment of dire need.”
May we all find the strength, courage, and conviction to heed Mr. Grandcolas’ wise and compelling advice.
