“They will never love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate.”

-Edmund Burke

 

Governments and their allies are using the label of ‘hate’ to censor people. The speech they hate they call ‘hate speech’.

Before we start hating on censorship, let’s put aside the ugliness of politics and get straight on hate.

Is there such a thing as just hate?

Is it improper to hate?

Start with liking. One might like baseball, certain types of music, ideas, or personalities. Fervent liking we call love. That fervour is acceptable, even celebrated. Likings and loves constitute the joy of life—the love of life itself.

What about things that work systematically against the things we like or love? We dislike them, mildly or fervently. Fervent disliking is hate or hatred.

Edmund Burke wrote: “They will never love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate.” He saw that if some things are worthy of love, other things must be worthy of hate. Things that work systematically against what is loveworthy are hateworthy.

Wikitionary defines hateworthy as: Worthy of being hated, detestable, despicable.

Tamping down your own expression of hate

Love and hate are counterparts. There is a symmetry between them. Yet there are differences in the way love and hate should be felt and expressed. Not everything about love and hate is symmetric.

Adam Smith distinguished between ‘social passions’ and ‘unsocial passions.’ Social passions express feelings toward other people that are positive. Unsocial passions express feelings that are negative. The two sets of passion differ in their bounds of propriety: we should be more restrained when expressing hate and other unsocial passions.

There are several reasons to keep hate more restrained. People love to be loved and hate to be hated. Love directs praise, while hatred directs blame. People love to be praised and hate to be blamed.

Another reason to restrain your hatred is that hate divides the sympathies of the spectator. The spectator’s sympathies are divided between the one who expresses hate and the one who is hated. The division is unpleasant and difficult for the bystander.

Another reason to restrain hate is that conflict can escalate, and damage is especially painful. Smith taught that, when we consider the upsides and downsides of human existence, the downsides can go down far deeper than the upsides can ever go up. Losses loom larger than gains. We should act to avoid losses more than to attain new gains.

Those are good reasons to tamp down your feelings of hatred. Smith lamented that in years of scarcity some people blame merchants, “who becomes the object of their hatred and indignation.”

Hate has its place

But Smith did not conclude that you should reduce your hate to zero. Like Burke, he saw that hatred is a necessary and organic part of any coherent system of morals. The same is true of other unsocial passions—indignation, resentment, and even revenge. We often justly blame people for excess in such passions, but sometimes people show a deficiency in such passions.

Indeed, nature has implanted, Smith says, the terrors of merited punishment “as the great safe-guards of the association of mankind, to protect the weak, curb the violent, and to chastise the guilty.” Smith wrote of “just indignation” and a “noble and generous resentment.”

The sentiments of disliking and hate call us to stand up for the people we love, the traditions we love, the beliefs we love. To stand up against the things that, we believe, work against the loveworthy. The sentiments of disliking and hate are moral signals of our responsibility, motivating us to stand up for what we believe is right. Without hate there can be no righteousness.

And without hate there can be no conviction. Hannah Arendt wrote: “The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.”

Hate on ‘hate’ censorship

If the censorship were to claim to oppose all hate, it would be self-contradictory. The 1960s television show Get Smart! spoofed strange fads. In one episode, the comical Maxwell Smart questioned the leader of an organisation. The leader explained: “We’re a hate group… We hate hate.”

But the censorship does not refrain from hating. They have convictions. They are haters, just like the rest of us.

Just as “misinformation” is a stratagem of censorship, “hate speech” is a stratagem. The real question is: who decides what is hateworthy? And how shall a diverse society explore what is loveworthy and what is hateworthy?

When “hate” itself becomes the crime, the rule of law goes out the window, for how are judges and juries to divine the motives and sentiments of one’s breast? As Adam Smith put it, “every court of judicature would become a real inquisition.” The legal philosopher Heidi Hurd made many of these points in her great article “Why Liberals Should Hate ‘Hate Crime Legislation’.”

James Madison wrote about a society of imperfect men: “As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.” 

How shall domestic peace be maintained when, in the pursuit of happiness, any two of us differ in our estimations of what is loveworthy and what is hateworthy? Respect and the freedom of expression is the right way. Not censorship.

 

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Daniel Klein is professor of economics and JIN Chair at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He is the author of Smithian Morals and Central Notions of Smithian Liberalism and has offered a fuller discussion of hate.