The Power of Love Versus Hate

The Air You Breathe

When you grow up feeling loved, you don’t notice it. At least not at first. After a while, you begin to understand your home is different from the homes of your friends. You realize that other mothers, for instance, don’t call their girls “dear darling daughter,” that sometimes they call them cruel names you never heard before, and they chastise them in front of you and invade their privacy, breeding shame and insecurity.

As you come to understand this, you feel shocked. You start to be grateful that, though the polite stillness in your own home sometimes drives you crazy, and though you sometimes feel lonely and confused, you are respected. No one is trying to make you an extension of themselves or of their dreams for you or their dreams for the child they were once upon a time. They see you for who you are and accept you without question. You come to understand that this is love and that not everyone experiences it.

Sure, maybe there’s a tragedy in your life, like maybe your parents got divorced. But your father spends every other weekend visiting you and your brother, focusing on the two of you, playing with you, listening to you. You even start to appreciate it when he lectures or corrects you because it reminds you that, unlike the fathers of your friends, he is with you. He thinks you and your brother are worth spending time with.

When your life is like this, you take love for granted. It is simply part of the air you breathe.

Love Is the Why

Who, in our lives, has loved us? Where have we experienced that sense of being heard, seen, known, cherished?

Maybe it wasn’t from a parent or guardian that we felt such love, but perhaps a teacher gave us that gift, or a counselor, a rabbi, or an angel. Wherever it comes from, love heals the pain of rejection and shame. Even the best parents and guardians hurt their children sometimes, which is not a terrible thing. To feel compassion and empathy for others, we must suffer some. If all we know is care and privilege, we can become intolerable.

Even so, love should be the first thing we know. It should be what we wake to, what we go to sleep with, what we feel in our hearts and understand in our heads. A friend once told me that, though she still had scars from a childhood of abuse, she survived as well as she did because of God. For as long as she could remember, she felt God with her, cherishing her. That made all the difference.

Love Is the Why

Love heals. It protects us from life’s wounds. It reminds us we are sacred. And, as Gerald May writes, it is “the why of life, why we are functioning at all.” [1] Without love, our bodies might survive, but we will be dead inside.

So love is the why. It’s also the what and the how. Love endures, and it saves. Though love accepts us completely, it also encourages us to become better. It holds out promise, yet forgives us if we fail to fulfill that promise. No matter who we are or what we’ve done, love welcomes us and soothes the bruising of our souls. We may be hideous or frightening, yet love stands firm, offering us deep kinship and transforming joy. No matter how twisted or broken we might be, if we can take in the love of the universe, we will be made whole.

A World Built on Contempt

But not everyone thinks love is the answer.

In today’s polarized world, for instance, there is so little trust of the “enemy” camp that we prefer angry rhetoric to respectful negotiation, and we sure don’t want to collaborate with our foes. In such a climate, to talk of love seems ridiculous.

Last year, Arthur C Brooks wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times about “motive attribution asymmetry.” This is the belief that our side is “driven by benevolence” while the other side “is evil and motivated by hatred.” [2] When we think this way, Brooks tells us, we end up feeling contempt not only for the ideas of the other side, but also for them as people. Then we feel justified in lampooning, ridiculing, and condemning them.

And it’s not just the right wing who are doing this. The Dirtbag Left, as epitomized by the podcast, Chapo Trap House, gladly slings vitriol, using harsh humor to scorn those who disagree with their revolutionary agenda.

The Lure of Ridicule

Sure, they’re funny. At least hundreds of thousands of people think they are. Similarly, that many people are tickled when our president mocks someone who isn’t them, or with whom they don’t identify.

Now it’s true that taking ourselves too seriously is obnoxious, but is belittling others the answer? Besides, the ones who are most contemptuous tend to feel the most offended when they, themselves, are made the butt of the joke.

Not all of Chapo’s humor is cruel, though. Some of it is witty and even self-deprecating. Besides, it’s not a bad thing for us to acknowledge the silliness in our earnest attempts to create utopia or enforce political correctness. In this climate of intolerance on both the right and the left, we can feel nervous that we’ll be chastised for a slip that is unforgivable to someone, and it feels good to rail about that to someone who commiserates.

Disdain Hurts

But using the tactics of disdain and intolerance in our attempt to win political change is misguided. Hatred doesn’t change people, nor does it motivate them to forge new paths or invest in a real democracy.

It doesn’t make us feel better, either. Oh, sure, fighting can be invigorating. We feel powerful when we ridicule someone, especially when we’re witty about it and our fans give us a laugh. But in the end, being a bully just increases our stress, and angry derision causes anxiety, depression, helplessness, and sadness one’s victims. [3]

Besides, when we resort to hateful rhetoric with some idea that we’re improving the world, we’re lying to ourselves. We’re really just trying to shore up bruised egos or ease our anxiety. When we pretend that name-calling is political commentary, we’re engaging in what Jeet Heer calls “dominance politics.” Whether on the left or the right, when we make fun of people, we’re not trying to create a better world; we’re trying to assert our dominance. [3]

For some people, that’s good enough. People are angry, and for good reason. Our society is becoming more unfair all the time, with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer and no end in sight. Sometimes anger is a reasonable response to an unreasonable situation. It’s not that anger itself is bad. What’s important here is what we do with our anger.

Grounded in Love

Anger, left to flourish, destroys. When channeled into constructive action, anger can right wrongs and repair relationships. But it can only do this if it is grounded in love.

So what do we mean by love?

Love is an experience, an emotion, an action, a seeing, a breathing, a hoping, a knowing, a forgetting, a forgiving, and more. Love means seeing the other for who she really is, holding another’s pain without flinching, and releasing the other when it is time for him to go.

If we love, we realize we don’t own our beloved, so we have no right to demand allegiance or obedience, though we may be sad when we lose that love or when we see our beloved hurt herself or others. Yet if we try to protect her from life’s consequences, we’re not loving; we’re interfering, suffocating, controlling.

Unlike hate and anger, love isn’t about domination. It’s about the connections we make, about generosity of spirit. Love doesn’t always yield. While kind, firm, and patient, it can also be brave, strong, passionate, and sometimes wise enough to set boundaries.

The Creative Power of Love

Maybe the problem is we think love is weak and makes us vulnerable, and God forbid we should be vulnerable. Yet love isn’t passive and sweet. It isn’t love that makes the sycophant to yield to the tyrant, nor the wife submit to her abusive husband. The mob boss’s lackeys are probably motivated by greed and envy, and the wife might wonder how she will survive if she leaves her marriage, but what causes us to relinquish our integrity and our freedom, to say “yes” to hatred, is not love, but fear.

What if, instead, we learned to love? If we understood we were beloved, and if we shared that love with those around us, what a world we could create.

Which is probably the biggest difference between acting out of hatred versus out of love. Love creates; hate destroys.

The Fear of Love

Of course, when we create something, we risk losing it. It can take years, decades, even centuries to build something of value, and that something can be destroyed in moments. How discouraging.

But what would you do instead? Leave behind you nothing but rubble?

If the fear of loss keeps us from creating, we won’t have any homes, or political systems, or relationships, or families, or businesses, or gardens, or hope. Life will cease to have meaning. It will cease to bring us joy. We will never experience the satisfaction that comes of making something of value.

It’s not as if any of us were meant to live forever. People die, and the things we create die, too. Houses, operas, motorcycles, and political systems all die out. Even if we manage to pull ourselves out of this cycle of contempt and ridicule and find a way to build a better society, we won’t solve all our problems, and we sure won’t solve them forever.

All Is Impermanent

There’s never been a society without flaws, nor a family that wasn’t dysfunctional in some way. We try our best, and we may figure out how to increase our happiness and encourage love, but nothing we do will be perfect. Given our human propensity to make perfection the enemy of the good, we will point out all the problems and laugh at all the weaknesses. We will forget that it takes respect and cooperation to get things done. Time after time, we forget. So we end up leaving problems for our children and grandchildren, and they solve the problems we left and create some of their own, and so it goes.

No solution works forever. Nothing lasts. Nothing. Impermanence isn’t some New Age talking point. It’s a fact. In spite of all our political ideals, our rallies and marches, our movements and revolutions, and in spite of the utopias we try to build, our best efforts – and our worst – will fade away.

I’d like to think that our hate will fade away, too, but it doesn’t seem to work that way. As long as there are people, there will be animosity, fear, anger, bitterness, despair, ennui, and hate. And there will be love. Along with everything else, like the hope left in the bottom of Pandora’s box, there will always be love. We humans are stuck with the whole shebang.

Learning to Love

Yet maybe we can learn to enhance the love in the world. Of course, it’s not easy to love. In fact, it’s harder to love someone than to spew vitriol and abuse at him. To love, we must be honest with ourselves and feel the feelings we find inside, even if it hurts. Loving means scouring our hearts and opening ourselves to the world, this ugly, diseased, despotic world. That’s hard work, but it’s worth it, for there’s nothing more amazing than when a deep and abiding love flows through you.

Can everyone open themselves to love?

Once a week, I lead a spirituality group at the hospital. One day, when we were talking about love, a patient said, “Everyone has some good in him.” He maintained that no one is hopeless, and I agree with that. But some people are damaged so deeply, they might never learn to love.

But if anything is going to make that learning possible, it is love. Love can touch everyone and heal everything.

When Love Falls Short

That doesn’t mean I can love everyone in that powerful way. Nor can even the best therapist or physician. It would be great if some technocrat could come up with a machine that zaps us with full-on, unconditional, total acceptance, respect, and love, making us all better.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Getting better is a long process, and we never get better all the way. I believe in a compassion that erodes all shame and fills all emptiness, but I don’t know how to touch everyone who needs touching, and I don’t know how to make people take in that healing love.

That’s how love falls short, at least in this world, in us humans. Love may heal all things, but not everyone is willing to accept it. That’s because love can be scary. When we are wounded, but too ashamed to admit it even to ourselves, love reminds us of the hurts we’re hiding from. That makes love intolerable. That’s why we prefer anger, hatred, dominance, and contempt. When life breaks a person open, love may sneak in, and healing may happen, but though fate or God might be able to enforce such a thing, we mortal humans cannot.

Touch Those Who Can Be Touched

If we can’t reach everyone, we can at least touch those who are ready to be touched. We can love the hearts that are ready to heal, helping them find their way to wholeness and freedom.

Love is powerful, insistent, and willing to risk its life for justice, freedom, kindness, equality, inclusion. Love is the only thing that can stand up to the autocratic authoritarianism that destroys families, wounds souls, and dismantles democracies.

Gregory Boyle, a priest who works with gang members in Los Angeles, tells us that if we want peace, we must have justice. And justice is something that even hate groups claim to want. But it’s not as simple as labeling, condemning, and blaming. In the end, Boyle says, “No kinship, no peace; no kinship, no justice; no kinship, no equality.” [4] And kinship is akin to love. Hate will not bring us the peace, justice, and equality we want. Only love will.

So reach out. We won’t always get it right. Sometimes, we may think a person is ready when she isn’t, or fail to reach out to someone who is. But if we are vigilant in our love, we can make a difference. Allow your love to shine, and it may find its way into a heart you never thought would be open to it.

In faith and fondness,

Barbara

Credits

1. May, Gerald, The Awakened Heart: Opening Yourself to the Love You Need, New York: Harper, 1993, 3.
2. Brooks, Arthur C., “Our Culture of Contempt,” Opinion, The New York Times, March 2, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/02/opinion/sunday/political-polarization.html?fbclid=IwAR222M4-NFLgjCiPjcepaO_QBSnWGcaT9lXQslS4CefgRN1PLA2eoPoSCxQ, accessed 3/12/19.
3. Ibid.
4. Heer, Jeet, “The Dirtbag Left and the Problem with Dominance Politics,” The New Republic, July 19, 2017, https://newrepublic.com/article/143926/dirtbag-left-problem-dominance-politics, accessed 3/6/20.
5. Boyle, Gregory, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship, New York: Simon & Schuster Audio, 2017, Part 10 – Chapter 10 7:40:15-7:40-28

Photo by Caleb Jones on Unsplash

Copyright © 2020 Barbara E. Stevens All Rights Reserved