What makes a man into Robert Bowers? What choices did he have to make, what stories did he choose to believe, how many cruelties had he inflicted on others, how much pleasure had he taken in evil, to have so killed his conscience? What life did he live to become the man who walked into a synagogue while people were worshiping to kill them?
That’s the question last week’s Eradicate Hate Global Summit raised for me. Other people will be occupied with other questions, and important ones like how to keep social media from encouraging hate. The discussion between people who’d lost loved ones at the Tree of Life shooting was painful to hear, though the people sharing their stories were heroic in doing so. It made me ask what sort of man does that to people.
My colleague Gene Collier wrote about the Summit and the hope it proclaimed on Sunday, in “After the trial, hope.” We’re fortunate — religious people would say blessed — that our city has the people to think up and the resources to create such an enterprise.
The mystery of iniquity
Theologians talk about the mystery of iniquity, especially when trying to explain someone like Robert Bowers. He stands out in a way very hard to explain.
Looking at the typical human being, we have our good points and our bad points. We can be selfish and unkind and deceitful, and very good at rationalizing hurting others to get what we want or hurting them just because we dislike them. But we can be kind to strangers and sacrifice ourselves for people we don’t know.
Still, we’re mediocrities at being bad. We couldn’t be a monster like Robert Bowers. Why is he the way he is? He didn’t have to be. Psychologists and sociologists and other people will have some ideas.
Vaclav Havel, the great Czech dissident leader who became the first president of post-communist Czechoslovakia, for example. In his address to a 1990 conference on “The anatomy of hate,” he described how sharing a hatred attracts a certain kind of person.
“Collective hatred eliminates loneliness, weakness, powerlessness, a sense of being ignored or abandoned,” he said. “This, of course, helps people deal with lack of recognition, lack of success, because it offers them a sense of togetherness. It creates a strange brotherhood, founded on a simple form of mutual understanding that makes no demands whatsoever. ... The conditions of membership are easily met, and no one need fear that he will not pass muster. What could be simpler than sharing a common object of aversion?”
It’s a “yes, obviously” observation, that some people join hate groups to try to cure their social or personal inadequacy — like the young men described in the old joke as still living in their mother’s basement. Hatred can provide a haven in a heartless world.
The capacity for hate
But Havel’s describing a lot more people than the monsters. He says at the beginning of his talk that he does not have “the capacity to hate.” That seems to have been true. It helped him survive the regime’s persecution, which was alternately brutal and cruelly petty. It made him an effective leader and the one major dissident trusted enough to unite all the factions when the communist government fell.
But most of us mediocrities-not-monsters have some capacity for hate, especially in the stepped-down modes like contempt, disdain, and scorn. Let’s call it hatefulness. If we don’t hate in the all-encompassing way Robert Bowers did, we can enjoy being hateful. And collectively hateful. We can enjoy it especially when we can feel righteous in doing so.
But hate exists on a spectrum and people can move down it the wrong way. I think the spectrum’s often titled with deep hate at the bottom, and some people slide down naturally. Hatefulness encourages hate in those inclined to it, and helps create a world in which people feel hate is normal and admirable, and even necessary. It makes the lonely person Havel speaks of feel even lonelier and even happier to find a band of people as hateful as he.
Our own part
We can do our own part in eradicating hate by speaking less hatefully. By speaking to people we think wrong politely, respectfully, generously, assuming they’re open to reason, as we would wish people who think we’re wrong would speak to us. It’s a small act, and probably not often successful in getting people to see what we see, but at least it would reduce the amount of hatefulness in the world. That’s something.
We can do something also to try to stop people from becoming the kind of people Havel describes. The lonely drawn to eliminate their loneliness in a shared hate need friends and a community that would give them what they find in hate groups. They must be reachable at some point before they go too far.
That means trying to like people, to spend time with them as friends, that may not be very likable. I find this hard. But it’s something we can do to pull someone away from the hate that attracts him, that may change the person just enough that we change the world without knowing it.
David Mills is the associate editorial page editor for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: dmills@post-gazette.com. His previous article was “Children aren't culture war foot soldiers.” He wrote about Havel here.
First Published: October 2, 2023, 11:13 p.m.
