The instinct to hurt those with whom one disagrees

To those of us old enough to remember the before-times, these "woke" times feel different because we never saw that instinct to hurt manifest in political discourse. Back then, live and let live was the fundamental assumption that enabled Western politics. Today, for all too many, it is not: literally, politics has become, for millions, live and let die. That is the honest feeling of the woman in the hospital reception room, the woman in the bus in the airport, and they find themselves today in a culture in which that feeling is openly and easily expressible. Similarly in kind (although of course not in degree), the students in my department are operating in a culture where organizing against a person in an institution in which he has earned every right to participate seemingly requires no pause for thought.

And that is the problem. It is not so much that the psychopathological instinct to hurt one's opponents exists: it is that it has become normalized; it has become accepted. People voice it without fear or shame. It is so normal, and so accepted, that it has buried in large swathes of our population the most basic and formerly ubiquitous moral sentiments.

That this single phenomenon – aninstinct to hurt those with whom one disagrees – is the sine qua non of what ails us is obvious when written down.

So why bother writing it down?

Because this week a man died on its account. So this week, we are faced with what this instinct means; what it produces; and where it ultimately leads.

Distilling it to its simplest and shortest expression is a prerequisite to seeing it in all its guises, wherever it prevails, with whatever political views it may be associated with. Eight words are as simple and short as I can make them. These are eight words that differentiate those who live and let live from those who live and let die. They can help us, therefore, distinguish those with whom we can share a political culture from those with whom we cannot.

I have always been skeptical of those who try to blame the violent and malicious actions of individuals (and all actions, ultimately are actions of individuals) on their political or cultural opponents for allegedly "creating the environment" for those actions. The world is so much more complex than that. It always seemed to me that such accusations were themselves willful acts of polarization and division of the very same sort as the accuser pins on his opponents: a kind of fake, hypocritical moralism.

But in the West today, a clear fact must be squarely faced.

The will to hurt those who disagree is a singular psychological, moral, and pathological phenomenon. Just as surely as it is manifest by Charlie's murderer, it is manifest by those who state their hope that such violence will be done (like the woman in the airport in Reykjavik), those who exclaim their contentment that such violence has been done (like the woman in the hospital and millions like her on social media today), or those who do whatever more limited harm they can to someone in their community with whom they have a political disagreement.

In other times and places, political assassinations have occurred as cultural anomalies, not obviously reflective of the zeitgeist or historical moment, and certainly not approved of by some significant minority of the population. But Charlie's murder does not feel like that. On the contrary, it feels like a direct manifestation of a psychopathological instinct that no longer raises enough eyebrows or is met with sufficient morally courageous resistance wherever it appears.

Some time ago, I wrote about this cultural shift in more philosophical terms, suggesting that what counts as morality today has ceased to be something personal – the integrity of a person, or the standards of behavior to which she holds herself; rather, it has become something positional – what one says or believes rather than what one does; the reasons one gives for one's behavior rather than the standards of that behavior.

I believe today, with a heart as heavy as it has ever been, that I was right about all of that. I am writing here only to add that underlying this sweeping moral and cultural change that we have been living through are the instincts – the psychology – of certain people who are responsible in small ways and large, and being allowed by the rest of us to get away with it.