Ode to Hate

The Criminalisation of Human Emotion

“Love and Hate” (2016) by Elena DeRosa

Speaking at a crime conference organised by Northumbria University, earlier this year, Professor Kyriakos Kostaglou listed items that may now be regarded by the police as hateful. Mahatma Ghandi, Jesus of Nazareth, cows milk, classical music, chess, punctuality, grammar, Bob the Builder, the suffragette flag, the definition of “woman” and Mary Poppins are all on the list. Eventual failure by the British police to distinguish “A Spoon Full of Sugar” from the Horst-Wessel will be the inevitable consequence of social architects working from a paradigm which regards expressions of hate in the same way that Mao viewed a fondness for Mozart.

This bonkers fetishising of a single human emotion is doomed to failure. The more immediate concern is that the endless stigmatising of a legitimate feeling will prove the catalyst for something far more toxic. By way of comparison, the measures put in place by the government to protect its population from Covid have recently been linked to a fatal spike in Hepatitis C amongst children who, under normal conditions, would have acquired immunity through the organic rough and tumble of exposure to a host of playground viruses. Hate works in a similar way; it’s healthy for the population to be exposed to a regular, low level dose.

Perhaps the utility of hate explains why it has as many antecedents in human anthropology as love. You can’t turn a page in the Old Testament without stumbling across speech that celebrates the smiting of a cheekbone and The Psalms read like an IRA songbook. And most of those who tout Islam as a religion of peace would not know the Koran from a Waldorf salad. “Whoever maintains that it is not Islam as such that justifies violence must know that he or she stands in direct opposition to the prevailing reading of the founding texts” says Mohamed Charfi, author of Islam et Liberté. The New Testament favours loving one’s enemies rather than driving them through with a  tent peg, but even there, hate is seen as a virtue. “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple,” says Jesus. Done right, hate is much a route to salvation as baptism.

Sins enumerated by the thirteenth century saint, Thomas Aquinas, are expressions of unequivocal selfishness. Pride, envy, avarice, wrath, lust, gluttony and sloth serve only the hosts destruction, which is why they are known as the Seven Deadly Sins. Hate, on the other hand, can drive the passions of men to acts of extraordinary heroism. General Patton’s address to the 3rd Army is an example of noble hate speech:

Now, I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He ​won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country… We're not just going to shoot the bastards. We're going to cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We're going to murder those lousy Hun bastards by the bushel. The Nazis are the enemy. Wade into them. Spill their blood. Shoot them in the belly. When you put your hand into a bunch of goo that a moment before was your best friend's face, you'll know what to do.

Girding the loins for righteous war is by no means the only justification for hate speech. Sometimes, it can be done just for fun. For example, our national game of football is superior to anything offered by the Americans as British supporters forsake the tumbling acrobatics of cheerleaders for the deeply enjoyable ritual of hurling abuse at each other. There is nothing noble about singing. “Your teeth are offside”to Luis Suarez but neither has it led to an epidemic of footballers getting their faces smashed in any more than Shakespeare’s mockery of three inch fools lead to a dwarf genocide. As the US poet, Ogden Nash, observed, “Hating, my boy, is an art.”

The pale faced loons at The College of Policing will never admit that the relationship between words and violence is unsound as it has sunk too many costs into the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc. It would be a Gerald Ratner moment for the burgeoning industry to admit that a meme of  Gary Lineker reimagined as Black Hitler is less likely to lead to violence than a lunchtime pint at Weatherspoons.  The Ponzi scheme would crumble.

In order to protect the hate-cleansing industry from further scrutiny by The Court of Appeal, The College of  Policing has recently amended its guidance, throwing us a sop by advising police to cease recording hate that is part of public, political debate.  This is doubtless joyous news to the merry few who live life in the Oxford Union but for the rest of us, it is a case of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book being replaced with Colonel Gadaffi’s Little Green one.

Nothing will remedy the guidance until The College of Policing abandons its baseline definition of  hate. This includes: ill-will, ill-feeling, antagonism and dislike.  This definition remains so absurdly wide that a lesbian may be recorded on a hate register for expressing a strong dislike for the penis on the basis that genital bigotry is morally akin to racism. If this sounds like an outlandish example, please note that a man expressing the view that Tom Daly’s knitting resembled a cock warmer was recorded as hate by Hampshire Constabulary. Honestly, it makes those who see Jesus in a slice of toast appear sane.

The mission to eradicate “antagonism” is especially alarming given that entire judicial and parliamentary systems are based on it.  Much of the hate is ritualised through enforced politeness but ad hominem blows remain as essential to the the playbook as the slamming of the door in Black Rod’s face.  The Speaker shouts Order! Order! to manage hate, not remove it. And the gap of two sword lengths between opposing benches is maintained because controlled hate remains central to our libertarian system. That’s why Fair Cop used the hashtag #SayYesToHate in response to the absurd messaging of our police.  If the police eradicate hate, they eradicate democracy.