The Anatomy of Hate

By LANCE MORROW

The international conference on hate seemed a bravely ambitious proposition. Elie Wiesel's idea was to assemble the forces of charisma and rationality in Oslo, to focus their light for three days, and thus force the darkness to recede a little.

It was Wiesel's moral authority that brought together Vaclav Havel and Nelson Mandela; Jimmy Carter and Francois Mitterrand; the authors Gunter Grass and Nadine Gordimer; Chai Ling and Li Lu, leaders of the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square -- an astonishing collection of Nobel prizewinners, professors, rectors, saints. A man could not make his way through the SAS Scandinavia Hotel in Oslo without ricocheting off one paragon or another. Such saturations of virtue and celebrity gave me a jolt of anxiety: this is a perfect target for a bomb. But the choice of Oslo was canny. Norway has its immunities.

Hate is difficult to discuss. The mind resists it. The subject is amorphous, disorderly, malignant. Presiding over the Oslo conference, Elie Wiesel controlled a red light on the podium that he used to warn a speaker when his time was up (even Carter got red-lighted). It was as if hatred is intellectually and morally such a dangerous, unmanageable mess, such a monster, that Wiesel, the kindest of men, had to police the dialogue like an anxious warden. He said he had nightmares about the red light.

While wondering vaguely why hatred is not one of the Seven Deadly Sins (Is it covered under Wrath?) and why the Old Testament is so full of hate, I ; stared at the back of Nelson Mandela's head as he sat at the conference table -- a nimbus of television light around his charcoal hair, the man enveloped in utter stillness, the most thorough self-possession I have ever beheld. Does 27 years in prison make a man so calm? As I listened to Gunter Grass (a stolid German with some huge gravity pulling him earthward) discussing the Nazis, my mind drifted to Vaclav Havel, who I decided is an alert woodland creature. Jimmy Carter shines with a likable sweetness, but he is tougher than you may think.

What is hate? A "black sun," as Wiesel wrote? The image may give hate too much of a strange literary prestige. Black sun. White whale. Whatever. The reason the subject is hard to discuss is that hate is simultaneously a mystery and a moron. It seems either too profound to understand or too shallow and stupid to bear much analysis -- a cretin with a club, violent, repulsive, irrational, a black intoxication, an accomplice of death.

The delegates in Oslo were virtue's choir, of course, and they sang beautifully. If there was a hater among them, he kept his secret and did not stain the refulgence. Virtually the only controversy organized itself in a division between objectivists and subjectivists. The subjectivists (poets and moralists) looked for the seeds of hatred within the human heart. The objectivists (economists, historians, lawyers) dismissed such vaporings and located the causes of hatred in the conditions of peoples' lives. "Hard, visible circumstance defines reality," said John Kenneth Galbraith. In the past 45 years, he pointed out, no one has been killed, except by accident, in conflict between rich industrial countries. In poor nations of the world, millions of people have died in struggles during those years. "Out of poverty has come conflict." Elena Bonner, the widow of Andrei Sakharov, stated the objectivists' case in an irritable burst: "Moral concepts are lovely, but the key is governing these things by law."

Vaclav Havel began by confessing an incapacity to hate -- a suspect claim from most other men. "I look at hatred only as an observer," he said, and then proceeded to look at hatred as an artist does. He began with the psychology of individual hate: "It has a lot in common with love, chiefly with that self-transcending aspect of love, the fixation on others, the dependence on them and in fact the delegation of a piece of one's own identity to them . . . The hater longs for the object of his hatred."

Hatred, Havel said, "is a diabolical attribute of the fallen angel: it is a state of the spirit that aspires to be God, that may even think it is God, and is tormented by indications that it is not and cannot be." The typical hater: "a serious face, a quickness to take offense, strong language, shouting, the inability to step outside himself and see his own foolishness."

The subtitle of the conference was "Resolving Conflict Through Dialogue and Democracy." But neither dialogue nor democracy is ultimately the answer. The author Conor Cruise-O'Brien pointed out that Neville Chamberlain's faith in dialogue gave the world the appeasement at Munich. As for democracy, said Carter: "Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Germany evolved from the results of a free election. We do not like to remember that."

What is the antidote? Education. Law. Justice. Charity. Love. I came at last to think that the subject in Oslo was not exactly hate, but on the dark side, evil, and on the other, hope. Havel said he is neither an optimist nor a pessimist: "I just carry hope in my heart. Hope is not a feeling of certainty, that everything ends well. Hope is just a feeling that life and work have a meaning." Hope is the thing with feathers. Or the thing in diapers.

The conference dispersed. The plane climbed up from Norway and made its way into the thinnest, coldest air. The planet became a fluffy abstraction beneath the wings. Time warped. A man who was in Auschwitz as a boy walked down the aisle to borrow the Wall Street Journal. Someone told a joke about Eleanor Roosevelt. Survivors and ghosts at 35,000 feet -- moral afterlives.

My own trajectory from Oslo ended a day or so later in the New York City subway station where a tourist was murdered. The sociopaths who killed him did not hate him. Not at all. They wanted money to go dancing at Roseland. That blank, murderous absence of hate holds terrors that did not come up in Oslo.