Essay: The Anatomy of Hate

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The international conference on hate seemed a bravely ambitious proposition. Elie Wiesel's idea was to assemble the forces of charisma and rationality in Oslo, to focus their light for three days, and thus force the darkness to recede a little.

It was Wiesel's moral authority that brought together Vaclav Havel and Nelson Mandela; Jimmy Carter and Francois Mitterrand; the authors Gunter Grass and Nadine Gordimer; Chai Ling and Li Lu, leaders of the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square -- an astonishing collection of Nobel prizewinners, professors, rectors, saints. A man could not make his way through the SAS Scandinavia Hotel in Oslo without ricocheting off one paragon or another. Such saturations of virtue and celebrity gave me a jolt of anxiety: this is a perfect target for a bomb. But the choice of Oslo was canny. Norway has its immunities.

Hate is difficult to discuss. The mind resists it. The subject is amorphous, disorderly, malignant. Presiding over the Oslo conference, Elie Wiesel controlled a red light on the podium that he used to warn a speaker when his time was up (even Carter got red-lighted). It was as if hatred is intellectually and morally such a dangerous, unmanageable mess, such a monster, that Wiesel, the kindest of men, had to police the dialogue like an anxious warden. He said he had nightmares about the red light.

While wondering vaguely why hatred is not one of the Seven Deadly Sins (Is it covered under Wrath?) and why the Old Testament is so full of hate, I ; stared at the back of Nelson Mandela's head as he sat at the conference table -- a nimbus of television light around his charcoal hair, the man enveloped in utter stillness, the most thorough self-possession I have ever beheld. Does 27 years in prison make a man so calm? As I listened to Gunter Grass (a stolid German with some huge gravity pulling him earthward) discussing the Nazis, my mind drifted to Vaclav Havel, who I decided is an alert woodland creature. Jimmy Carter shines with a likable sweetness, but he is tougher than you may think.

What is hate? A "black sun," as Wiesel wrote? The image may give hate too much of a strange literary prestige. Black sun. White whale. Whatever. The reason the subject is hard to discuss is that hate is simultaneously a mystery and a moron. It seems either too profound to understand or too shallow and stupid to bear much analysis -- a cretin with a club, violent, repulsive, irrational, a black intoxication, an accomplice of death.