t a lecture given at Syracuse University, Mr. Elie Wiesel made a statement that had a weight that only a person with his history could give it. He remarked that there was no excuse, let alone justification, for hatred.  This was a blanket statement that he made; there was not a single qualification that followed it.  One could hear and feel the sense of astonishment in the audience of some 1500 people.  No doubt I was among them; for I do not much remember what else he said that evening.  But I shall no doubt carry to my grave that one utterance. 

“What”, one might ask, “has any of this to do with the family?” 

My answer is twofold: One is that Mr. Wiesel was surely deeply loved by his parents.  The other is that his parents never taught him to hate; nor did they tolerate sentiments of that kind from him.  Thus, the argument of this entry shall push some of the views presented in The Family and the Political Self much further than I had originally supposed that they could be pushed.

Of course, precisely what made Mr. Wiesel’s utterance so weighty is the very fact that he was a man who had been through the Holocaust.  It has become rather fashionable to hold that having been a victim of sustained evil excuses if not justifies hatred towards members of the group who inflicted the evil.  The individuals hated not themselves have inflicted the evil.  They need only share the racial or ethnic or tribal group membership with those who did. 

Against this backdrop Wiesel’s remark about hatred had an absolutely unnerving poignancy to them.  For all of us in the audience understood immediately we could not possibly excuse, let alone justify, much of the hostility that we have over this and that.

But does parental love at its best protect us against being fertile soil for hatred?  Well, perhaps Elie Wiesel has a witness in history, namely Frederick Douglas.  Douglas’s autobiography is about his moral triumphs rather than his hatred as such for whites. 

Group hatred requires a deep internalization of the other as evil—and not just a passing unfortunate experience.  For all of us have had some unfortunate experience from one person and then another.  Indeed, we have all been harmed by people who belong to the very same group to which we take ourselves to belong and of which we are generally recognized as being a member. 

The point here is that the internalization of a group as evil is not so much based upon experiences as it is upon the values that our parents have instilled in us or an ideology that fully engulfs us.  The proof of this comes from a rather unexpected quarter, namely the reality of rape itself.

No one doubts the depth of the pain of rape.  Yet, there are comparatively few women who sustain a hatred of men on account of having been raped.  And if that single horror does not regularly occasion hatred, then it is rather unlikely that our psychological make-up is such that most other unfortunate experiences will do so.  But on my view, it is easy enough to explain why rape does not typically occasion sustained and abiding hatred of men on the part of women. 

Men are typically valorized in the home and in society, college campuses being the exception rather than the norm.  There is almost no context for the sustained of hatred of men to obtain a purchase upon the lives of women.  Hatred of a group requires not just being hurt by this or that member of a group but a kind of re-conceptualization of the group as vile.  This does not require that the members of the group do anything but only that they exist. 

I have picked the family as the center of this sort of thing for two reasons: (a) children at birth are absolutely oblivious to racial and ethnic differences.  (b) It is an unvarnished truth that a wealth of internalization takes place in a child’s life before she or he ever uttered a word.  Accordingly, much of the internalization has to be through non-verbal behavior in addition to expressions of likes and dislikes or approval and disapproval regarding what goes on around the child.  Indeed, expressions of interest and disinterest make all the difference in the world.

It should not surprise anyone that an awfully lot of hatred is communicated in the privacy of the home.  To be sure, no one ever quite uses the verbal rhetoric of hatred.  But we get the functional equivalent of hate by the time sum up the expressions of approval and disapproval, and by the time we sum up the things that are countenanced as interesting and uninteresting. 

By the time the parents get finish with all of this the result is an emotional imprimatur that is next to impossible for most of us to shake.  If that imprimatur is of the right kind, then nothing even remotely akin to hatred is apt to obtain a purchase upon our lives.  If that imprimatur is of the wrong kind, then it takes next to nothing for hatred to do so. 

Aside from massive ideological situations like Nazi Germany the seeds of sustained hatred are sewn by the family more than any place us.  As I have already indicated, the problem cannot be the paradigmatic bad experience; for rape is such an experience and the rape of women does not intractably lead to the hatred of men.  It never has.   

On the other hand, with the wrong kind of imprimatur in place, it turns out to be true enough that all it takes is a sufficiently bad experience. 

My view, then, is that the moral imprimatur of our lives starts with the family.  And if things go terribly awry there, then fertile soil for group hatred has been put in place.

Let me be clear here.  There are lots of things that can go wrong in the family that have nothing whatsoever to do with paving the way for group hatred.  For families can be dysfunctional in a myriad of ways that make no reference at all to hatred of any form. 

The profoundly interesting point is that families make all the difference in the world in terms of genuine acceptance.  That has to be right.  Hatred has been going on for centuries now and it shows no sign at all of abating.  Hatred has mounted even as the biological evidence of our equal humanity has become all but irrefutable. 

From an evolutionary point of view, the most important difference between a child and an adult is size.  It is we who are adults who make other factors equally relevant.  And that, too, starts in the family. 

Nothing perpetuates moral excellence like a family that is morally excellent.  This we all seem to accept.  The problem, alas, is that we have a symmetry here in that it is equally true that nothing perpetuates evil like the family.  As with truths in general, this latter truth about the family will not disappear because we do not like it or because it makes us uncomfortable.

In a sense much larger than most of us would dare to imagine: We have met the enemy and it is, indeed, us. 

Of course, it is possible to make things better.  That is always possible.  However, that requires one terribly small admission, namely the admission that something is wrong.  And the rush away from objectivity has effectively derailed that.  “It is all good” nowadays.  Not good for the family, not good for the children in the family, and not good for society.  But terribly good for the continuation of evil itself.

Thank You Mr. Wiesel for an inspiration that I never saw coming.