Dualities pervade human existence. There are several key concepts in human life that arise in pairs within our experience and are defined in terms of one another: truth/falsehood, beauty/ugliness, finitude/infinity, good/evil.
Dualities pervade human existence. There are several key concepts in human life that arise in pairs within our experience and are defined in terms of one another: truth/falsehood, beauty/ugliness, finitude/infinity, good/evil. Hate is one of these concepts: it contrasts with love; love/hate. In order to better understand hate, let us begin by considering love.
Love embraces the other, it unites, brings together, fosters coherence and harmony, strives for wholeness, fosters unity within diversity. Neither love nor hate are reducible to emotions. The drive to foster coherence and harmony arises in us spontaneously, it is integral to our temporality and manifests itself in innumerable ways in everyday life. Philosopher Eric Gutkind writes:
“Love is not sentiment…. True love is an act of swinging outwards, swinging away from the lover and reaching his fellowman, where it remains and does not return. Is there not at the very heart of revolutionary unrest this urge to transcend?”
Love permeates our being as the urge to transcend, to unify, to harmonize. What is transcended? Our limited selves, our immaturity, our narrowness as well as the absolute boundaries outside of us known as—”the Other.” Love strives to overcome separation by these boundaries, to make the boundaries into distinctions of a diversity that does not separate, alienate, or kill the Other. In hate, the Other is turned into an opposite of me, into a non-me, to be repudiated, ostracized, marginalized, or killed.
In a finite universe, all things have boundaries, differences, distinctions. The UNI-VERSE is one, integrated reality, but all things within it are distinguishable while at the same time they overlap, interpenetrate, and mutually influence one another. Human consciousness relates to the universe as a single, integrated whole in which all things function together in interdependency. Philosopher Teilhard de Chardin declares that today “the infinite modalities of action are fused into one, single, colour…. Love, the higher, universal, and synthesized form of spiritual energy,” permeates the cosmos and human life. Love, here, transcends all boundaries and unites all “Others” within its embrace.
Love here need not be an emotion. It is the telos for harmony, unity, and coherence within our lives and within the cosmos. In the Christian Gospels, the primary word that Jesus uses for love is agape. In Matthew 5:45, Jesus compares God’s love (the same agape commanded of us) as being like the sun and the rain: “for he makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust.” Agape is sometimes contrasted with another form of love, eros. Eros, as Plato points out in his Symposium, is desire for what to us appears beautiful and good. We want to possess the beautiful and good. There may be emotion involved. However agape is non-attached love, indiscriminate, like the sun and the rain. We do not want to possess, but to harmonize.
In the immaturity of youth life is often egocentric and ethnocentric. We look at the world through our own egoistic point of view or from the point of view of the culture, religion, or nation in which we happen to have been born. And certain institutionalized forms tend to confirm and encourage this egocentric orientation. My religion, for example, is institutionalized and uses language that makes it appear that there has been only one revelation exclusive of all other religious manifestations. My militarized sovereign nation-state is institutionalized to see the world in terms of allies and enemies and is ready to fight and kill those considered enemies. My ethnic group is acculturated to see itself as truly special and superior to other peoples and cultures.
Our capacity to turn the Other—those beyond certain boundaries—into something less: less human, less valuable, less intelligent, less good, is hate. No emotion need accompany the discrimination. And the institutionalized boundaries, insofar as they absolutize differences, become a form of structural hate. If my nation has absolute “sovereign-state” boundaries separating us from all others, putting us in potential military conflict with those others, then the nation-state embodies structuralized hate. It institutionally puts me in conflict with those considered enemies whom I have a right to militarily sanction, dominate, maim, or kill. If my religion claims it is the true revelation and that all other religions are mere idolatry or superstition, then my religion embodies structuralized hate. The history of humanity’s religious wars testifies to these implications.
Is war a manifestation of structural hate? In war, we become part of a military machine whose purpose is to destroy or kill some designated enemy. The enemy is now considered an absolute “Other” whom I may bomb or destroy with impunity, just as they will be attempting to bomb and destroy me. In the heat of war, emotions of hate will just get in the way. Soldiers need efficiency, routinized skill in operating weapons systems quickly and without emotions. Hate as emotion will only get in the way. How do such gigantic mechanized systems of structural hate arise?
The present system of militarized sovereign nations, most scholars say, was founded in 1648 at the Peace of Westphalia. The treaty divided the world up into permanent territories, each government of which had absolute “sovereign” authority over its internal affairs and complete freedom in terms of its external affairs (its foreign policy). The 17th century knew little or nothing of the cosmic holism revealed by 20th century science. It thought the world was a gigantic collection of particular objects (humans, planets, solar systems, etc.) with only external connections between these objects.
The implication was that all these objects, including other people, are external to me. The 20th century discovered that this view of the world is utterly mistaken, that everything in the cosmos is interrelated with everything else. Everything is internal to everything else. If I am required to “love my neighbor as myself,” as Jesus declares in Matthew 22, that is because the Other is part of myself and I am part of them. We saw above that philosophers like Gutkind or Teilhard call this interconnectedness “love.”
Since the founding of today’s world system in the 17th century, many thinkers have characterized the system as inherently a “war-system.” In the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes declared that sovereign nations confront one another “as gladiators.” This has become known today as “Hobbes’ Paradox.” Hobbes argued that to keep the peace we need government, but that beyond borders of nations there was no government and hence no peace. John Locke repeated this observation, as did Rousseau and Kant in the 18th century and Hegel in the 19th century. Since war is institutionalized and mechanized hatred (willingness to kill that “Other” who is not part of me), the entire world system as we know it today is predicated on structural hate.
Institutions can also embody structural love. There can be institutions that unite and harmonize those who participate in them, just as there can be institutions that divide and place people in conflict with one another (like the sovereign nation-state system). The World Parliament of Religions brings religious people from around the world together periodically in dialogue and conversations directed toward coherence and harmony. This is an institutionalization of love. Love can structurally function in both non-governmental and governmental forms. At the level of nation-states, hundreds of world citizens have worked together throughout the late 20th century to write the Constitution for the Federation of Earth in order to make love possible for government at the global level.
The Preamble to the Earth Constitution declares that “Humanity is One despite the existence of diverse nations, races, creeds, ideologies and cultures and that the principle of unity in diversity is the basis for a new age when war shall be outlawed and peace prevail; when the earth’s total resources shall be equitably used for human welfare; and when basic human rights and responsibilities shall be shared by all without discrimination.” What is proposed for planet Earth here is structural love to replace the war-system of structural hate. The Earth Constitution sets up a democratic world system that embraces all peoples and nations. Sovereignty now belongs to the people of Earth not to a fragmented system of nation-states. The Constitution sets up agencies such as the World Parliament, the World Judiciary, and the World Enforcement System to concretize the harmony and to handle the inevitable conflicts that people and nations will have through just, nonviolent, and respectful mechanisms.
The vitriolic movements and emotions of hatred and division that are today arising in nations around the world are exacerbated by the forms of structural hate embodied in our institutions. The institution of the sovereign militarized nation-state is the largest and most dangerous of all such institutions. It is leading us to the brink of nuclear war. It allows genocides (like that in Gaza or the DRC) to take place before our eyes with no one apparently able to stop the slaughters. We can overcome these movements of hatred and division only if we also overcome the institutions that protect and encourage these movements. We need to replace the fragmentation of humanity with the unity and coherence of humanity. We need to replace structural hate with structural love, uniting humanity under democratic world law. 