Why is there so much political hatred today?

Why is there so much political hatred today?

It’s not just online discussion, where it can seem that everybody hates everybody. Nor is it just the Church, where the Francis papacy has heightened differing positions that are often expressed in political terms. The polls confirm that polarization is real, even among the general public.

It’s an alarming situation, since St. Augustine tells us that common loves are needed to make a community. People have different theories about why it is happening. The simplest theory is that the other guys have gone crazy and chosen obvious evil. That might be true, since if everybody thinks everybody else is insane, there must be a lot of insanity around.

But we should stand back a little and try to get some perspective.

The need for common loves is basic. To make a political community, something has to support cooperation, trust, and willingness to sacrifice. That’s not easy to bring about, and the obvious way to do it is with common loves that are broadly accepted and relate to things that are fundamental and enduring.

That has made religion, along with basic human ties like kinship and a long history of life together, the usual basis for political order. That’s never worked perfectly, since nothing human does, but it’s how the world has generally bumped along.

But people today view such things as unjust and even bigoted when treated as the basis for political community, since that means that some people get preferred. Mr. O’Hara, whose ancestors have lived in County Sligo for hundreds of years, will have advantages there over Mr. Ohara from Kyoto, and the reverse will hold true in Japan.

What, people ask, is so important about the happenstance of birth and a slight difference in spelling?

Instead, they believe, political community should be based on laws that affect all equally, and on universal values that inspire them. But not all universal values will do. God and the Good, Beautiful, and True are universal, but they aren’t considered universal enough, since different people—and different religious and cultural groups—understand them differently.

In the end, the only universal value that’s good enough turns out to be universality itself—in other words, the principle that everyone and everything should be treated the same. If we are to have a political community of the kind now considered legitimate, it must be based on an attachment to equality.

But how well will that work? Equality, like other versions of justice, sometimes eliminates real oppression, or at least opens opportunities. But it’s not central to most things we care about, and rarely determines whether we’re satisfied with the choices we make, successful in pursuing them, or happy in our personal relationships. And it’s usually connected to resentment of those who seem to have some sort of privilege. So how much love will it really inspire?

Also, efforts to promote it—when taken to the extremes necessary when something so abstract and demanding is made an ultimate standard—suppress real goods and bring their own forms of oppression. How, for example, can we be allowed to associate with the people we love, and praise and promote the things we value, when that freedom means that the people and goals favored by the majority, or by the rich and powerful, will receive more social support than others?

Equality thus means that attachments other than our attachment to the system itself must be weakened for the sake of nondiscrimination. But the latter attachment, even if real, seems unlikely to endure. Liberation from particular ties may seem like fun for a while, but how happy will the weakening of family life and unforced local community it brings make anybody?

Most basically, perhaps, equality is never real, since every society depends on hierarchy. If everything is to be equal, there have to be people who decide what that requires and have the power to enforce it. These people will not be equal to the rest of us, and if they’re like every other privileged group, they won’t limit their privileges to those necessary for their social function.

Even their necessary privileges will be extensive. Love of equality is too much at odds with the human tendency toward particular attachments to prevail through unforced consensus. So it will have to be supported by a system of propaganda, censorship, and regulation. If you don’t like it, you’ll be shut up and forced to comply.

Worse, the weakness of the love supporting the system means it will need other, less appealing supports. The usual solution has been to promote the common love of getting stuff. So governments now promise both equality and ever-increasing prosperity. But that can’t motivate much mutual loyalty or willingness to sacrifice. Also, it can’t be guaranteed, and it’s led to a system of deficit-supported payoffs that can’t last forever.

The obvious alternatives for motivating collective political action include fear, envy, and hatred of real or supposed enemies, including people who seem to have privileges. Such sentiments are easy to stir up in a society in which human connection and mutual trust are weak, and they always seek out a focal point. So, a system of equality will become a system of scapegoating as well.

A system that puts equality first thus presents itself as one of universal love, with particular concern for the disadvantaged. But it becomes more and more a system of suspicion, envy, division, and hatred. Since everyone must pretend to feelings he does not have, it becomes a system of lies and hypocrisy as well.

With all that in mind, it’s not surprising that the most vigorous attempts to do away with economic and legal inequality—for example by communizing property and instituting a system of people’s courts—have resulted in the most extreme and violent inequalities imaginable. Who wouldn’t rather put up with our present system, or for that matter with rule by George III and a parliament of British landowners, than with Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot?

What to do? The simple-minded way to escape from a system that puts equality and abstract reason at its center is to go for inequality and irrationalism instead. That’s been tried, and it’s led to catastrophe. One interpretation of Nazism is that it looked at Soviet communism, kicked out the hypocrisy about equality and reason, and kept what was real: tyranny and terror.

But, someone might ask, what’s the relevance? Kamala Harris may be on the (theoretically) egalitarian side, Donald Trump on the side opposing that, but concrete similarities to Mao and Hitler are hard to find, in spite of absurdly overheated claims to the contrary.

Even so, some of the same dynamics are at work. We’ve seen enough suspicion, envy, division, hatred, and even violence to last us for a long time. Nor do the problems seem likely to go away, since we seem locked into equality as an ultimate standard, and nothing better is visible on the horizon. “Wokeness” has supposedly receded somewhat, and MAGA has taken a stand against it. But the anti-woke Right has proposed no alternative standard other than “winning” and “Team America” in the case of MAGA, and “let’s be a bit more sensible” in the case of more genteel conservatives.

Genteel conservatism can do little more than slow things down, since it lacks vision, and a vision like “Win Team Win” may promote a more functional society to some extent, but the benefits are likely to play out soon. What is needed are strong and substantive common loves, but it is easier to call for them than bring them about.

Human beings remain human beings, and darkness is never uniform, so practical improvements in our public life are undoubtedly possible, and we need to support them. But what we really need is love of God. Without that, an order worthy of human nature becomes impossible.

Toward the end of Mater et Magistra, Pope Saint John XXIII spoke of “the absurd attempt to reconstruct a solid and fruitful temporal order divorced from God.” Our basic political goal must be to heal that divorce. If we heal it in our own lives, we will be in a position to persuade others, and it may catch on.

If we don’t, what hope is there for ourselves or the world?