You Have to be Taught to Hate
In the sunny romp that is the musical South Pacific, a stern message can be found with respect to racism. Part of that message is that one can be racist without knowing it. The point is, if you haven’t ever thought about it, you probably are full of racist ideas, beliefs, and feelings.
One reason for this is clear: Racism has been a significant aspect of public policy leading to private life since at least the failures of the two English civil wars in the 17th century. The stage had been set by other European states, but with encouragement from the Dutch, the English hit the ball “out of the park,” not simply with respect to racism, but also with the implementation of economic policies that were purposively presumptive and unfair. They couldn’t resolve their problems, so they elected to export them to the rest of the world. This pernicious policy mix has been referred to as the “Lockean Heartland” approach. Faltering as it is, the LH mix has driven public policy around the world for hundreds of years.
Your education was gauged to support such norms. They are embedded in our politics and our society. I should say, societies. In spite of the English/European onslaught in recent times, there are still hundreds of these in existence, thousands of years old. One result is that societies of the world are not so very social as they once were.
You may have seen the collective Hosanna shout of the English with the finding of the Sutton Hoo and other artifacts on the east coast of the country. These, they have come to understand, date back to the 6th century CE, about a millenia-and-a-half. That is fine and good. Even now, however, we see furtive efforts to form old connections and in that region of the world — but these is very, very late in any respect with respect to the history of civilization.
They had ways of working in and through and with the “other”. Those societies that did this survived and thrived; those who did not suffered from their isolation. This capacity to adapt lent resilience to them, which allowed them to exist and prosper over time. The “other” represents other people, other traditions, other histories. The societies and their traditions are not hundreds of year old, but tens of thousands of years old — many of these continuous within such a span.
People get all concerned about time — deciding to weigh religious stories favorably against geological and geophysical realities. Imagine the scriptorian, sitting on a million-year-old rock, deciding that the Earth is 6,000 years old. Under such a scenario, the 600 CE framework of the English makes sense — that would work for the windup for modern times, lifting mankind from sticks and stones and notorious warlords smacking people down left and right if not enslaving them to make remembrances of themselves.
Time, as we now know from physicists and others, is highly fungible and cyclical, subject to loops and byways. If this were not true, our beloved GPS systems would immediately crash and burn. There are constant adjustments to the satellites in question and in other similar systems and networks to account for relativity. Ancient scriptures themselves warn of such. What we know of time now has much to do with this spinning orb, of which there are many more.
For over a hundred years, knowledge of the very old has been building up as archaeologists and linguists and subject matter experts have worked through several generations in translation of up to about a half million documents and records found in the form of clay tablets. These come principally from what is now known as Southern Iraq. Many more of such tablets await translation, by observation it is widely understood that there are many more tablets and other artifacts in the dry ground awaiting discovery. The work has taken place on side as well as on the campuses of the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago, Berkeley, UCLA, Heidelberg University, Cornell University, Cambridge University, and a few other places of learning and erudition.
Findings have coalesced around several factors. First, archaeologists and linguists soon learned that they needed to work in companionship with experts in the various fields covered in the tables. As to subjects, the tablets tended toward and dense and the complex. They reflect peoples that were not simple, nor were they simplistic. They left not only words, but many numbers, as they displayed what has been called an obsession with record-keeping.
Some readers of the Bible believe the Creation of the earth took six 24-hour days. Others refer to Peter’s statement “that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Pet. 3:8) as evidence that the Creation may have taken 6,000 years.
Latter-day Saints have additional information that allows a third view — that each “day” of the Creation was of unspecified duration and that the Creation of the earth took place during an unknown length of time. Abraham stresses that day is synonymous with time. For example, Abraham 4:8 summarizes the second creative period by stating that “this was the second time that they called night and day.” This usage is consistent with ancient Hebrew. The Hebrew word YOM, often translated day, can also mean “time” or “period.” In other words, the term translated day in Genesis could be appropriately read as “period.” Thomas R. Valletta (Liahona, March 1998, https://tinyurl.com/52hfm67k)
So, if a day is a thousand years, based on that metric, how long is 6,000 years of such days? One of our unadjusted years is 365 days of our time, adjusted for the 1/1000 ratio, one celestial year becomes 365,000 adjusted years based on our track. What happens to 6,000 of those? We end up with 2,190,000,000 of our years filling up 6,000 celestial ones (which is to say, 2.19 billion of our years). That is a good long time. This compares in scope with the 4.54 billion years of Earth history referenced by geologists (https://tinyurl.com/pzen5wx6).
Of course, one could ask if you believe what Peter had to say on the matter. He wasn’t like Paul, who wrote letters left and right. He was surely careful about the messages he would leave.
We say “civilization” in the singular, but there are many of these. The old ones have commonalities, as emerge in the old histories. The point is that societies had been well-developed long before the 6th century CE events that point to beginnings of Englishness. There weren’t dark ages because there had not been times of great knowledge, but that such knowledge had been lost, if not everywhere, certainly on the periphery, which is where England was.
The LH approach is by its very definition unstable. In a process-driven world, it tries to render everything static. It tries to preserve social standing and wealth. As an example, they promoted the idea of entail, which tries the preserve the wealth, standing, and property of one man (yes, man, in every misogynistic, personalistic, paternalistic way) forever. The land could not even be bought or sold. You know the story if you have ever read or watched the works of Jane Austen or their derivatives.
Things are not static. Process lies at the base of everything. People get hung up on climate change, for example, but it is much more involved than that. We live in a world where everything changes. Nature goes through cycles, as do social conditions. Get used to it. This includes your encounters with the “other”. With experience, you see that the basis for thriving and surviving these waves and cycles. As examples, think of bicycle-riding, surfing, and skiing. None of these can be carried out in an armchair, but as demonstrated by the fictional Archie Bunker, hatred and wishful thinking can.
When I was in high school in a town in Utah, in the American west, we had a most unusual and enlightening day at the school. As I came to my social studies class, there was a black man named Bernard Bradley. He was a defensive back for the Utah State football team and he had been invited by our teacher — I think, Larry Haslam — to talk to us about racism. He started out the session with a bang by informing us that we were all racists, simply by virtue of the fact that we were all white — Caucasian, to be more specific.
He was right on that score, we all were of that ilk. One classmate, a young woman whose identity I do not recall, said, “How can I be racist when you are the first black person I have ever seen.” He said that we were racist because we were a part of a racist system and that one way or another, if we didn’t do anything about it, that racism would come out. Interestingly, I recall seeing him there all day, from class to class, making his case.
Regardless of what people thought of what he said then, I did indeed find myself as an instrument of some decidedly racist behavior. This came with very strongly-worded social provisos. It wasn’t until many years later that the organization in question admitted the problem and took steps to correct it. I am trying to be more careful and more caring.
Social systems matter. Indeed, sociality matters. I for one see a progressive demise of LH and its pernicious prerogatives. It is an ugly and a tortuous process, with considerable risk. This could flip on us. As I found out in my case, there is a way out. We need to understand behavior patterns and how they can be helpful as well as harmful. We need to focus on the real problem — fear of the “other” — which racism is one expression of.
I was fortunate in this regard because my parents were exemplary. My father was a university professor and engineer. He often brought students to our home from all over the world for dinners and other activities. These were mostly from India, Iran, and Taiwan. We got to know them well, along with the stories and situations of their families. Later, when I was in college, I formed a close relationship with a young student from Iran. At Utah State, at any one point in time, there were hundreds of foreign students, many if not most of them from Iran. When I think of Iran, I think of all those friends and classmates, Samuel Huntington and his “clash of civilizations” notwithstanding. Among other things, I think of waiting with those students in the middle of many nights at the computer center, waiting for printouts from the mainframe computers, to correct them and resubmit the then “high tech” cards for another run.
My mother was the “craft lady” at the local park when I was young, where all of the kids in town, or at least that part of the town called the Island, would come on summer afternoons to make craft items and have fun together. It was at what is now called Merlin Olsen Central Park in Logan, Utah. In the course of that activity, she was witness to all kinds of activities and adventures at the park. Many would come to stay — perhaps pitching a tent or finding a corner to occupy. The caretaker of the park, a man named Joe Friedly, would shuss them away at the end of the day and as often as not, they would end up in our back yard, tent and all. If they were in need, my mother attended to them, often using our little red wagon to bring things from the local neighborhood store. We got some stories, too. We got a good deal of “other”, but never had any kind of incident. Often they were young people out for an adventure in the American west. It wasn’t as though she would do it with just anyone.
I remember traveling with our family and camping all across North America in those days — times of better camaraderie among people in general. Fear of the “other” was not so much a thing. I remember one night in particular — a similar experience to many, at the Lake Louise campground in Alberta, with the aurora borealis flashing above during the night. The campground was a virtual town for a night, with friendly campers from everywhere. People met and talked, food was shared, connections were made. I don’t remember the group being racially diverse, but it was definitely a place where the “other” did not play into the picture among the people involved.
If you have to be taught to hate, the natural state would be absent that condition. In our times, there is less evidence of idyllic towns for a night among strangers from across a continent if not the globe. Do we have to be taught to not hate now? How does this work? Do we need interventions or are their important missing incentives?
We should find out. The alternative is to try to hunker down in a place where there is no “other”. How would that be? Where would that be?