The Age of Hatred
Bigotry goes beyond race and gender. All group-based contempt is bigoted
Who do you despise?
Republicans or Democrats? Christians, Muslims, or Atheists? “Zionists?” Billionaires? Southerners? Asians?
I don’t mean which individual people, I mean which groups of people?
Stereotyping any group is bigotry. Not just a racial, religious, gender, or ethnic group. As the dictionary defines the word, bigots are “prejudiced against or antagonistic toward a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group.”
And these days most of us do dislike some groups of people. We may not realize we are bigoted, but we are.
Even Christians, who actually have a religious requirement not to hate anybody, have a strong propensity to dislike Atheists, and Atheists generally feel the same way in return. Progressives, who ostensibly champion diversity, are statistically just as intolerant as everyone else:
[F]indings confirm that conservatives, liberals, the religious and the nonreligious are each prejudiced against those with opposing views. … While liberals might like to think of themselves as more open-minded, they are no more tolerant [than conservatives].
To be sure, many Christians and Progressives live their values and are remarkably tolerant. But the trend is not good.
Bigotry is bad even while individual accountability is good
Bigotry is often confused with legitimate criticism of individuals. In fact, the essence of bigotry is to find or hear about some people in a group who behave badly and generalize to the entire group.
So to be clear — it is fine to dislike or even attack one person from some group. You can hate a criminal who happens to be Black, a Jew who happens to run a bank, or a racist who happens to be Asian.
But to generalize beyond that erases the individual humanity of every other person in those groups.
Of course, a very rare set of groups are bound so tightly and centrally by an offensive idea or practice, that we should actually judge them personally by their group membership. Virtually anyone who joins the Klan is scum, for instance. The group is completely and unavoidably defined as a racist hate group. 100% of them are anti-Black. I’m similarly not going to go out drinking with a Satanist.
Yet it is still bigoted to stereotype almost every group. E.g. a good 18% of Muslims do endorse terrorist attacks on civilians. But 18% is very, very different from 100%. The 82% of Muslims who don’t support terrorism deserve our good faith, support, and engagement as individuals. This is core to American values, in particular.
Justifying hatred is next-level intolerance
The trend toward intolerance has continued so far, that it is not only growing, but is becoming required and justified, or even demanded of others.
It is no longer enough to think right and do right — you need to hate right too. Consider Michelle Obama, who is friends with George W. Bush. Merely for spending time with him and moving beyond their political differences, she has herself been roundly criticized. Consider anyone on the right who decides to criticize Donald Trump. They’ll be shunned.
Politically, new studies show that :
[A] new type of division has emerged in the mass public in recent years: Ordinary Americans increasingly dislike and distrust those from the other party.
Why?
The psychology of irrational intolerance
Nobel Prize-winning researchers Kahneman and Tversky did extensive research into cognitive biases and particularly found that our thinking can be divided into related categories of “System 1” and “System 2” thinking. System 1 thinking is pre-rational, gut feel thinking. “I hate Evangelicals,” or “I hate Democrats” or “Cleveland sucks,” and so on. System 2 thinking is more rational, but unfortunately usually works to justify existing System 1 reactions rather than challenge or refine them. As they write:
In the context of attitudes, however, System 2 is more of an apologist for the emotions of System 1 than a critic of those emotions — an endorser rather than an enforcer. Its search for information and arguments is mostly constrained to information that is consistent with existing beliefs, not with an intention to examine them. — Kahneman and Tversky, Thinking Fast and Slow
For this reason, people who viscerally dislike some group (bigots) will always and easily find rational justifications for their noxious behavior.
In our somewhat-enlightened society, these people won’t admit they are “bigoted.” They’ll say that the group they hate really is so terrible that their dislike is rational, justified, or even ethically required.
The trend is profound. Bigotry feels so right, that people justify it, demand others fall in line, and are losing their ability to define and talk about these biases as being intolerant rather than justified.
Attacks on civility
Language is a key front in this ongoing battle. Many will now attack the ideas of “civility,” “tolerance,” “moderation,” “centrism,” and the like as being flaws rather than virtues.
It is no longer enough to think right and do right — you need to hate right too.
When Michelle Obama praised her friend George W. Bush, saying that “I love him to death. He’s a wonderful man. He’s a funny man … Party doesn’t separate us. Color, gender, those sort of things don’t separate us,” New York Magazine responded with “Expectations that Bush be held accountable for his policies apparently don’t separate them either.”
DailyKos asked, “What is the virtue of civility with jerks?” Many others also criticized her.
The issue was not merely that Michelle Obama chose this particular friend. It is that she crossed the line and made peace with a Republican. As “barrykcooper” writes in the DailyKos comments:
Come on in for a fine meal. (This invitation does not apply to Republicans, especially Trump supporters. You are too lacking in judgement, wisdom, decency, rationality, compassion, insight, ethics and humanity to have any dealings with reasonable, respectable humans.
This sums it up perfectly. The “other” group is inhuman, and must not be treated as people.
Word games
Everybody wants the best words now. Framing a debate is half the battle, in today’s political arena.
So all Republicans are now “white supremacists.” All Democrats are “woke Socialists.” All Evangelicals are “racist.” Rich people are “colonialists.”
Any long-term harm toward any group is often and quickly a “genocide.”
And of course, everyone is (literally) a “racist.”
It seems harmless, but all these accusations are directed against groups of people. Nobody claims Jeff Bezos actually, you know, colonized some country — he’s just “a billionaire.” No mainstream Democrats are actually “Socialists.” Yet these group labels stick and serve to block further thought.
Any (large) group will have outliers. Some Democrats are actually Socialists in the true sense of pursuing a planned economy. A few — and far too many — Republicans are actual, old-school racists. But generalizing to the group from the extreme views of the worst members is the essence of bigotry.
Respect, civility, and ideological diversity
What we actually need is for people with different views to work together to find good solutions to common problems. Demonizing one another, and blocking discussion using broad, group-based smears makes that harder rather than easier.
There is some reasonable compromise to hammer out for most of our thorniest issues. We all know we want a healthy form of immigration (in the U.S.), but also do not want 100M impoverished people streaming across our borders. We (almost) all want some reasonable form of birth control and abortion, but (almost) never want on-demand abortions the week before a baby is due. We know the free market works — but not always; some regulation to avoid market failures, and a strong social safety net, particularly for children, are needed too.
This is not that hard, but a key step is to interrupt the normalization of hate. Let’s start by relating to one another as individuals and dropping the labels.
Please forward this article to the people you know who remain constructive and respectful even in these difficult times, and to those who are tipping toward hatred and don’t even realize it.
I also look forward to reading your productive comments and insights.
