Royal Commission hatred is childish

By Andrew Hamilton
Eureka Street
June 10, 2015

http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=43767#.VXgCqM9Viko

In my early years of secondary school there was a very fine footballer in the senior team of another school. I had never met him, but hated him with a passion. For me he was the embodiment of evil: came from a snobs school, had a non Anglo-Irish name, represented the wrongs inflicted on Ireland, ran rings around our team, and was a filthy player.

I later recognised that he was an unassuming young man who was scrupulously fair in his play. But that was later. In boyhood hatred created its object out of all the prejudices that lay to hand.

This memory returned in recent weeks when reading of the constant booing and vilification of Adam Goodes, and reading some of the opinion pieces on the Ballarat sexual abuse.

Goodes, already marked as the enemy by rival tribes, either because of his high skills or his fearless representation of an unpopular cause, became invested with racial prejudices, suspicions of unfairness, and imputations of self-righteousness, and so a target for hatred. He is no longer a person but a representative of evil, and so what can you do but boo and execrate?

Unless, of course, he joins your tribe.

Tribal hatred in football in Australia is unattractive, but pretty harmless. Supporters generally don it when they go to the ground and divest themselves of it when they leave. But they always reveal something of themselves in their conduct.

What the Royal Commission laid out in Ballaarat was horrifying and aborrent.

On display were the scale of abuse, the extent of the suffering of victims and their families, the failure of church authorities and others at the time to attend to it or stop it, with the only result of their actions being to perpetuate and spread it, and the inadequacy of the perpetrators to comprehend, acknowledge or be moved by the destruction they had caused.

For reporters it must have been hard to write dispassionately of what they heard, but they generally succeeded. Most of the comment pieces, too, were considered.

In some dealing with Gerald Ridsdale, however, I was struck by the hatred displayed. Writers described him variously as a piece of excreta and as knowingly dishonest. They expressed the hope that he would rot in hell. A man whose evidence was marked by a lack of affect was invested with qualities of evil that came from elsewhere.

This kind of hatred in the case of something as abhorrent and destructive as sexual abuse of children is understandable. But can hatred be a proper response to anything? To those with a Christian background aphorisms will come to mind. 'Hate the sin, but not the sinner.' And, 'Do good to those who hate you.'

But these are exhortations not to hate, not explanations of why it might be inappropriate. A better starting point for reflection may be our response when we witness expressions of hatred. We see it less as bad than as out of place. We turn away from it as we might at the sight of a naked guest at a wedding reception. Our response is one of pity, not of condemnation.

Turning away reflects our sense that hatred separates us from society.

It short circuits the process by which we form ourselves as human beings. We are shaped by language, by engaging with others, testing what we have thought of ourselves and how we behave by how we are seen in the eyes of those to whom we speak. We come to recognise that others live with the consequences of our actions, just as we must live with the consequences of others' actions.

The quality of society depends on the conversation we have with others and on our inner response to the questions they put to us about ourselves. This of course is a largely intuitive process, recognisable in children as well as in adults.

Hatred short circuits this process. It assumes that our identity is given by birth, by class or race, or by our individual choice, not through relationships. We do not need to look into the eyes of the person whom we hate, nor listen to the questions they might put to us.

In the incidents with which I began they might include such questions as, 'And you, how do you respond when people show contempt for you because of your race or skin? What have you sacrificed in order to develop your skills? When have you shown courage?'

'And you, how have you handled sexual frustration? How have you dealt with those you have hurt or betrayed? How have you tried to set right the consequences of your actions?'

When we attend to questions like this we may be in a position to address the evils we find in the world. We shall recognise their complexity and our own part in them. Hatred avoids questions by trying to obliterate those whose lives pose them to us. Hatred is murderous. It is also childish. When we see it in adults, we rightly turn our faces away.