License to Hate

Dostoevsky was a deeply moral man. So are many of his characters, at least in their own eyes. Yet they murder, contemplate murder, poison other people’s minds, and destroy themselves and others. Raskolnikov, Ivan Karamazov, Stavrogin, Kirillov…

Dostoevsky was forever asking what makes people who possess a moral conscience commit godless acts. Ideology? Nihilism? Loss of faith?

In Demons, the writer Karmazinov suggests that the easiest way to win over a Russian is to offer him the “right to dishonor.” Pyotr Verkhovensky repeats this observation to Stavrogin, who greets it with enthusiasm.

The temptation to dishonor is powerful, but so is our inner morality. Once individuals are given permission to overstep their moral boundaries, however, they can go remarkably far.

I would modify Dostoevsky’s insight slightly. In modern times, the concept of honor is no longer taken particularly seriously. It belongs to novels, not everyday life.

But something else remains very much a part of everyday life: the “right to hate.” The license to hate.

More than dishonor, we love to hate. As Byron observed in Don Juan:
“Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure;
Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.”

Indeed.

Yet we also know that hatred is wrong. Hatred is a sin. Consequently, anyone who can persuade people that their hatred is justified, even righteous, can lead them very far.

Hitler and Nazi Germany immediately come to mind. Hitler gave Germans a license to hate: the British and French for the humiliations of the Treaty of Versailles, the Russians and communists, and, above all, the Jews. Hatred became not merely permissible but a patriotic virtue. And millions followed him.

Since then, Germans and other Europeans have supposedly learned their lesson. Nationalism, xenophobia, and hatred of one’s neighbors are bad. That is what children are taught in school.

But has politics really changed so much since Hitler’s time?

If our neighbors across the border can no longer be openly hated, perhaps we can find someone else to hate. The bad guys. The aggressors. The invaders. The colonialists. Preferably somewhere beyond our immediate borders.

I remember reading an interview with a German who welcomed NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. Germany, he suggested, was finally fighting on the right side of history.

But of course. Once you are on the right side of history, almost anything can be justified.

And so parts of the Western political and media establishment have found convenient targets: Russians, Serbs, and sometimes Orthodox Christians more broadly. Political condemnation can easily turn into something more indiscriminate. Entire peoples become suspect because they have supposedly been assigned to the wrong side of history.

We have our license to hate, and everything is fine again.

Consider the selective treatment of nationalism. Western politicians have often been willing to celebrate Croatian, Bosniak, and Albanian nationalism while condemning its Serbian counterpart. They denounce Russian nationalism while overlooking the openly neo-Nazi rhetoric and symbolism of some Ukrainian nationalist movements.

The point is not that all nationalist movements are identical. They are not. The point is that the moral standards used to judge them often depend on whose side they are on.

Of course, there have always been dissidents in the West, people who are rightly skeptical of establishment narratives, official propaganda, and political manipulation.

But are they necessarily any better? Have they escaped the temptation of hatred?

Not really.

They, too, have their own licenses to hate.

The political establishment may despise anti-vaxxers, while anti-vaxxers return the hostility with equal enthusiasm. Each camp regards its own anger as justified and the other side’s as evidence of ignorance or malice.

Something similar happens in debates over Israel and Palestine. Some critics of the Western establishment turn their anger against Israel while romanticizing Palestinian nationalism, even when its most radical factions embrace explicitly eliminationist rhetoric. Meanwhile, defenders of Israel may excuse hateful rhetoric among extremists on their own side.

Different causes, different flags, different justifications. But the same temptation.

Of course, any competent dialectician will explain that there is nationalism and nationalism, racism and racism, justified anger and unjustified anger.

And there is some truth in that. Context matters. Circumstances matter. Anger at injustice is not the same as hatred of an entire people.

But precisely here lies the danger. Righteous anger can become a convenient excuse for self-righteous hatred. The line between the two is crossed whenever we stop condemning actions and begin condemning people simply for who they are.

Hatred remains hatred, regardless of who authorizes it. And the demagogues who encourage it trade in the same rotten currency as the establishment scoundrels they claim to oppose.

Modern politics, then, remains very much the politics of hatred.
It is no longer bread and circuses. It is bread and hatred.

Some of Dostoevsky’s characters eventually discover a way out of this moral trap. Raskolnikov, for example, begins to find it through love. By the end of Crime and Punishment, his attachment to Sonya opens the possibility of a different life, one no longer governed by the destructive logic that once justified murder.

His moral rebirth is only beginning. But at least he has discovered that there is another way.

How many readers of Dostoevsky, however, are prepared to follow Raskolnikov along that difficult path?

And how many find it easier to follow Pyotr Verkhovensky, who understood perfectly well how to manipulate people by giving them permission to abandon their moral restraints?