Love Ain't All You Need

By Crispin Sartwell

As well befits a master Yoga teacher, my wife's, a beatific soul, recently had his class meditate on the following apothegm: "It is love that connects us to all other beings in the universe." The saying is sweet, though it suffers from a certain overexposure. I am not a beatific soul, and I tell you: It's hate that unites us to all other beings in the universe.

I attribute this insight to the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. He developed a cosmology of conflict, and said "War is the father and king of all." The world he described from this point of view - born in a continual mutual destruction of elements - was strikingly similar to our world. Among the Greeks, the cosmology of love was represented by Parmenides, and it had, one admits, more unity than Heraclitus's world. So unified was it that, since everything was so attracted to everything else, voids, gaps, and even time did not exist. Parmenides described the universe as a single jampacked sphere in which all motion and change were impossible. Interesting. But patently not the world we're living in.

People who love one another no doubt achieve a certain unity. But so do people who hate each other. They come to resemble one another in innumerable ways. Even as they are driven apart by hatred, they are united in hatred. Israelis and Palestinians have merged into a single unified system of mutual terror in which each becomes equivalent to the other; every day they are more the same.

Cultures become themselves by a consciousness of their enemies. They are united in proportion as they are at war with someone else. We are what we are not: Arabs, gays, Jews, heathens, women, savages, Negroes, weirdos. We are defined together by what we exclude, and this is as true on the playground as on the global stage.

Any old dog can love you, but it takes a real human being to hate you with the obsessive focus and enduring, almost inanimate commitment that characterizes our species: with apologies to any latinists that may still exist, homo abominens.

Left to their own devices, most peoples entirely dehumanize their enemies. The names in their own languages of many American Indian tribes, for example, mean simply, "the human beings." The ancient Chinese and Romans referred to everyone not themselves as "barbarians": ravening, inarticulate animals to be feared and destroyed. That judgment expressed Roman and Chinese unity, was the conceptual center of their existence as single cultures.

On the other hand, the ways cultures flow into one another are also by and large through their conflicts. The great race movements that have led to the world's current ethnic configuration were born of war: Rome attributed its own founding to conquering Trojans, while Huns, Visigoths, Mongols, Turks, and Englishmen have raced round the world expunging and interbreeding with whoever was there already. In many cases, indeed, they came because they were displaced by conflict in the first place. Today, though the wars continue, global commerce destroys and joins local cultures; it annihilates them by uniting them.

Religions are surely founded and held together by their exclusions, and invariably condemn those that don't agree with them as heretics and pagans, frequently putting them to the sword for their own good. And even the religion of love, Christianity, was founded by a man who said "The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth" (Matthew 13: 41). The church father Tertullian said the reward of the blessed would be to witness the torment of the damned. That idea was a crystallization of Christian unity: the blessed need the damned.

Proponents of globalization and radical Islamists, capitalists and communists, Democrats and Republicans, the beautiful and the ugly, the normal and the weird, the white and the black, the hetero and the homo: they are bound together in systems of conceptual dependency in which one is inconceivable without the other, in which each lends the other shape and gives it whatever unity it may possess.

The evils of the world - its oppressions, its murders, it genocides - have been fueled by the hatred that unifies. But then, so has the resistance, and I don't think you can or ought to love those that crush, starve, humiliate, or annihilate your kind.

The "uni"verse was born in conflagration, and the conditions of life amount to a series of explosions. We are part of this universe, and are exploding right along with it in our own peculiar way.

Without hate, where would you be now?

Crispin Sartwell's latest book is "Extreme Virtue: Truth and Leadership in Five Great American Lives"