Hating your neighbor
Irecently attended a portion of the second annual “Eradicate Hate” summit in Pittsburgh. It was organized by superlawyer and super-citizen Laura Ellsworth and by the indispensable Mark Nordenberg, the Chancellor Emeritus of the University of Pittsburgh and the chair of Pitt’s Institute of Politics. It is a particular response to the Tree of Life shootings, but also a generalized response to the cultural, societal and spiritual maladies of this moment in our collective lives.
Many Americans are finding it increasingly difficult to love their neighbors.
It’s a big and difficult topic. Really, we are talking about organized, political and social hate. And it is a huge and complicated job taking it on — trying to understand its various manifestations and how to answer them.
The summit is unique, ambitious and brave.
For me, the biggest takeaway is also the biggest complication. It is the “throughline” that connects antisemitism, holocaust denial, racism, white nationalism and anti-democratic reactionism (which can and currently is tipping into an American fascism).
One of the things I admire about the conference is that, across the board, in scores of panels and break-out sessions as well as keynotes and plenary sessions, the attempt is to understand and then combat, and not just to deplore and condemn.
We have to understand what draws a young man to one of the extremist groups, not just revile him.
And as one expert on the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys said, their backs can be broken by legal and financial means, but a new group, or groups, will simply grow up to replace them — if we do not combat their ideologies and slogans with persuasion, ideas and facts.
At the end of World War II, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower insisted that as many military personnel, politicians and historians as possible tour the Nazi death camps. He knew, somehow, that there would be denial, based not only on antisemitism, but the sheer human incapacity to take in the full horror.
If you can take a denier to the United States Holocaust Museum, in Washington, you may turn him around.
In short, empathy and education can reach many whose minds have been poisoned.
The writer David Brooks made this point recently about the new and far American right: Demonization has not worked. Criminalization has not worked. We have to try engagement and dialogue.
There is no point pretending this will be easy.
There is another aspect to education that would help. It is that we have to do a better job of teaching two subjects — history and civics — in our schools. We really don’t teach civics at all any more. So young citizens don’t understand fundamentals like freedom of speech and expression, due process of law and minority rights. Forget about federalism or how a bill becomes law.
Ironically, the legal immigrants whom the ant-democratic right hates must learn about our system as a condition of citizenship.
And I fear that we teach history with virtually no rigor. We teach a kind of benign political correctness because we don’t want to upset our kids. So they really don’t know what happened in Nazi Germany or how Hitler came to power. Italian fascism is almost completely unknown to most American college freshmen.
We have long been an ahistorical country, and it is catching up to us.
Second, we are not a reading country. We are a watching, talking, consuming country.
We need to be a truly literate country. For only if we are readers are we truly thinkers, capable of reflection, intellectual growth and change, both as individuals and as groups.
I was very moved by Mr. Nordenberg’s interview with Diane Samuels and Henry Reese, who have devoted the last two decades of their lives to giving refuge to writers from across the globe. To protect writers is to protect readers. Your right to read is my right to write. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists there were at least 293 journalists in jail around the world at the end of 2021 — imprisoned for seeking to write the truth. Twenty-four were killed for the same crime. Eighteen more died suspiciously.
How to resist the peculiar hatred of ideas and writers? How to stop the banning of books and free expression by the word? Ms. Samuels and Mr. Reese quoted their friend Salman Rushdie, whom they were with when he was attacked. (Mr. Reese was also injured.) Keep on. Keep writing and reading. Do not be silent. Show that intimidation does not work. Show that censorship fails.
Third, and this is not a modern problem, but goes all the way back to the Enlightenment: Ideology is a pretend religion. Human beings need intellectual structures for making sense of life and the world. When they don’t have that, they make it up. Men without God create gods in their images and from their own ranks. And everything and anything becomes justifiable.
I read somewhere recently that King Charles is an admirer of Islam and that he is a huge critic of caricaturing it. Good for him.
We need a revival of mature and genuine religion — all faiths. We need to support sincere faith of all kinds. We need to do this if we are to restore to our society the two things an open and democratic society must have — acceptance that no one group or party or cause can win every battle and mutual respect. I can’t hate my neighbor for what he thinks. If I do, he ceases to become my neighbor and becomes my enemy.