Hatred by Willard Gaylin (best manga ereader txt) 📗

Americans have volunteered in every war for high-risk duties, but America could never have recruited a specific group of suicide bombers to hurl themselves at the enemy. Such volunteers would not have been at hand. More significant, the American public would never have understood or condoned their sacrifice. The waves of Americans who stormed the beaches in Normandy or hacked their way to the heights of Iwo Jima may have seemed to be involved in the same kind of suicidal assaults as the Japanese suicide bombers, but they were not. The intentions of the Japanese were to die in the service of their emperor, their country, and their religion. The Americans were prepared to die while hoping that they would survive. These contrary motivations reveal that the two seemingly similar activities are almost diametrically antithetical actions.

In making this comparison, I am not attributing a higher moral standing to one value over the other. Obviously, I have my values, but they have no relevance here. This analogy is not for the purposes of ascribing moral superiority or inferiority; I am not prepared here to call one behavior sick and the other healthy. The juxtaposition is presented to demonstrate that individual actions can be completely understood only within the culture from which they emerge. Nonetheless, I will make the case that some cultures are morally corrupt.

As a practicing psychiatrist, I am always aware of the specific culture in which a person is raised. Family values (in themselves influenced by culture) and the larger culture acting together shape the emerging conscience of the growing child. I obviously must attend to environmental influences in treating patients. When I do, I have to take into account the degree to which certain types of behavior are aberrant only by the standards of the society at large. Certain beliefs and conduct that are perfectly normal in one culture are signs of neurosis in another. This is equally true for subcultures in a diverse community like the United States. The psychiatrist who does not recognize these differences does a disservice to his patient. He may unfairly view something as neurotic that is perfectly normal in the subculture in which the patient was raised. Certainly a committed Mormon boy from a small town in Utah who practiced sexual abstinence until marriage should be viewed differently from the thirty-two-year-old virgin raised by bohemian parents in Greenwich Village. I respect the validity of such cultural differences. Like differences as to sexual conduct, subcultures nurture diverse attitudes toward aggression and paranoia. In order to understand the actions of an individual—to ascribe meaning, to appreciate motive, even to place proper value judgment on behavior—one must take into account the differing cultural directives that influenced it.

Cultural observation and generalization are risky but legitimate and necessary tools in sociological and psychological investigations. Here, rather than attempting my own defense of cultural generalizations, I will quote Primo Levi, who was himself profoundly victimized by such generalizations, yet became a penetrating student of them.

I agree with you: it is dangerous, wrong, to speak about the “Germans,” or any other people, as of a single undifferentiated entity, and include all individuals in one judgment. And yet I don’t think I would deny that there exists a spirit of each people (otherwise it would not be a people), a Deutschtum, an Italianita, an Hispanidad: they are the sums of traditions, customs, history, language, and culture. Whoever does not feel within himself this spirit, which is national in the best sense of the word, not only does not belong to his own people but is not part of human civilization. Therefore, while I consider insensate the syllogism, “All Italians are passionate; you are Italian; therefore you are passionate,” I do however believe it legitimate, within certain limits, to expect from Italians taken as a whole, or from Germans, or other nations, one specific, collective behavior rather than another. There will certainly be individual exceptions, but a prudent, probabilistic forecast is in my opinion possible.64

Some profound differences in moral values among different cultures are justifiably a matter of opinion and open to debate. Whether abortion, therapeutic cloning, arranged marriage, capital punishment, paternalism—on all of which I have strong opinions—are wrong or right is a proper area for legitimate differences. Decent people can disagree on many important issues without conceding the ethical ground. But there are not “two sides to every question.” With many questions there is only one morally acceptable opinion. There are values that transcend cultural directives and that must always be honored. Immoral behavior cannot be exonerated on the grounds that it was influenced by an immoral culture. He who subscribes to the values of a culture of evil is by definition evil. The white Boers who ruled South Africa were products of their environment. But apartheid was an evil practice, and the fact that Boers were raised in a racist environment does not exempt their racist actions from condemnation.

We consider actions to be a product of an autonomous individual, even while acknowledging the power exerted by the culture on that individual during his formative years. We may be sympathetic to the individual, while still loathing his behavior. We do not have to subscribe to moral relativism. We can insist that there are universal goods and evils that transcend cultural differences.

Violation of those universal values must not be tolerated on the basis of “cultural diversity.” Slavery is wrong always. Racial and religious persecution, child abuse, the subjugation of women, torture, gratuitous cruelty (to people or animals), rape, and pederasty—to list but some—are never justifiable. Were a culture to espouse these values, we would then be perfectly free—morally obligated, I would say—to condemn it as pathological or evil.

We have a significant list of characteristics that by general agreement allow us to define a culture of hatred. The prime example in modern