The problem with hating haters
After a church minister reports anti-hate campaign as a hate crime, Joseph Webster suggests a new approach
The Scottish Government and One Scotland have launched a controversial new campaign to tackle hate crime. The campaign takes the form of a series of open letters written to various imagined haters – Dear Racists, Dear Transphobes, and so on – warning them not to hate.
The most controversial letter comes close to labelling all religious preachers as bigots: “Dear Bigots, division seems to be what you believe in. We don’t want your religious hate on our buses, on our streets and in our communities. We don’t want you spreading your intolerance. That’s why if we see or hear your hate, we’re reporting you. End of sermon. Yours, Scotland.” The Rev David Robertson, a prominent Christian minister, has responded by reporting the anti-hate campaign to the Scottish Justice Secretary as a hate crime.
Other letters in the campaign contain similarly ironic elements to this pan-critical “end of sermon” jibe. The “Dear homophobes” letter, for example, reads “we have a phobia of your behaviour” and concludes with the threat “you should be worried”. What are we to make of this? Is it OK to hate those whom you suspect of hate? David Cameron seemed broadly sympathetic to the idea of hating haters, when, writing in the Telegraph about “Islamist extremism” he proclaimed “we must be more intolerant of intolerance”. Similarly, the famous political theorist William Connolly wrote in 2005 that when pluralism finds itself threatened, “a militant assemblage of pluralists ... must coalesce to resist such an onslaught”. Connolly calls us to fight fire with fire. But where might this lead?
For a number of years, I have been conducting research on the Orange Order and loyalism in Scotland – a project which led me to observe the casual sectarianism found within the Orange Social Club scene,
as well as passionately hate-filled chanting during Old Firm matches.
One of my main research questions has been why do people love to hate? One answer is that hating makes haters feel good. Orangemen who tell unprintably sectarian stories or Rangers fans who chant unprintably sectarian lyrics do so because such words offer a powerful sense of what the anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner called “communitas”, that is, the joy of collective belonging. What some (but certainly not all) of my Orange and Rangers-loving informants show us is the “dark side” of communitas. Here, the joy of Protestant belonging is partly borne out of a hatred of the Catholic ‘other’. Importantly, such hate is almost always a twoway street, as Old Firm Celtic fans amply demonstrated, for example, when they hung inflatable sex dolls from nooses which had been draped in Orange collarettes and Rangers scarves.
Yet, this dark side of communitas is far more pervasive and socially acceptable than most people have the stomach to admit. The real reason why the idea of the ‘90-minute bigot’ is misleading, then, is because it unjustifiably confines bigotry to football fans – a mistake made in the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act that rightly contributed to its downfall. Clearly, most football fans, like most religious preachers, are not bigots. Does this mean that bigotry and hate do not exist? No, it doesn’t mean this at all. Just this week, it was reported that new Home Office data showed a 40 per cent increase in religiously motivated hate crimes recorded by police in England and Wales between 2016-17 and 2017-18.
My point is that bigotry and hate cannot be confined to football culture, because the seeds of hate are virtually everywhere. It isn’t even accurate to confine hate to those guilty of religious bigotry, disablism, homophobia, racism, or transphobia. Indeed, the ugly truth of communitas is that hating haters makes many politically progressive individuals feel good, and for precisely the same reasons that hate is so attractive to those on the populist right. Remember Hillary Clinton’s infamous quip about “the basket of deplorables”? The laughter and applause her words provoked stand as an apt example of how collectively deriding those we define as somehow ‘opposite’ to us feels good.
Applying this analysis to Scotland’s “Dear Bigots” campaign is uncomfortable but insightful. By conflating those who give sermons with those who spout religious hate, secular progressives find their collective belonging joyfully affirmed. Importantly, this affirmation is bolstered by the identification of a range of hated ‘others’ – not just ‘bigots’, but also ‘disablists’, ‘homophobes’, ‘racists’ and ‘transphobes’. Allowing their righteous anger to burn against those they deem to be insufficiently loving, Scotland’s “militant assemblage of pluralists” seem to have been given explicit permission to rise up and resist.
But if my research on dark side of communitas tells us anything, it is that stated aims and underlying motivations don’t easily align. Thus, while the aims of the “Dear Bigots” campaign may appear laudable, the motivations of the campaign are unlikely to be pure.
Until the socially progressive among us are willing to forgo the collective joy of hating haters, such campaigns are likely to sow further division, rather than spread any real love. Perhaps fighting fire with fire is always dangerous? Regardless, an anthropological willingness to listen to and understand ‘the other’ – no matter how hateful we assume they are – surely offers a more helpful alternative.