HATE: A Snapshot of our Moral History

The twentieth century has been filled with hate. It has now spilled over into the new millennium. Globally, it tore apart our civilizations, took the world to war, and left a scar on the face of humanity. Why do we hate? And why does our hate compel us to such evil? We may never know the answers to these questions, yet, we must try to answer them.

Whether we are talking about the horrific genocide of the Jews by Hitler’s Nazi’s, or the ethnic cleansings in Rwanda, Kosovo, and recently in Darfur, or the slaughter of innocents in My Lai, Hiroshima, and the Middle East, hate and cruelty have driven our primitive species to these heinous acts. Hate also manifests itself in the form of discrimination. The United States went through decades of racial discrimination against African-Americans, Latinos, and now homosexuals. In the news recently, there are loads of headlines on hate related crimes such as the assassination of abortion provider, Dr. Tiller, and the shooting at the National Holocaust Memorial Museum by a Holocaust denier. For a species that prides itself on its ingenuity, civilization and intelligence, we do not seem to be as advanced as we think. We are the only species on the planet that hates. Lions do not discriminate. Bears do not lynch other bears. Monkeys do not try to exterminate gorillas. Imagine what our great civilization would have been like had the Aztecs not been wiped out, if genius scientists had not been killed in the Holocaust, or if some intelligent slave was never a slave at all. Imagine the possibilities. Hate has only served as a hindrance to the advancement of the human race.

What good comes from hate? The Afrikaners in South Africa would have lived the same good life had the Africans been treated equally, and apartheid never existed. The Jews were not to blame for Germany’s problems after WWI. African-Americans did not degenerate American life. And homosexuals do not erode the moral fabric of America, or the world. It seems that we fear only what is different from us. We learn to hate what we do not understand, simply because it does not look or think like us. We mask our hate in the guise of nationalism, patriotism, tribalism, and most importantly, religion. We use our differences to create rifts, and then use these rifts to delineate some imagined superiority between ourselves and that which we mean to hate. Even our political system suffers from hate and discrimination. Look at the Republican Party and their recent woes due to their rejection of unity and inclusiveness. Instead of focusing on our differences, we should instead focus on what binds us to each other. Once we do that, we will be surprised to find that we have more in common than we think. The poor black boy from the projects has more in common with a young Klansman from a trailer park than we would expect. If the hate stopped today, I guarantee that the progress of humanity would grow exponentially.