Please enjoy my first assignment, exploring a literary text and connecting it to a larger societal impact.
Hate is a strong word, and the history of its implications on society is even stronger. Many analyze hatred as institutionalized into nature and human interaction, such as author William Hazlitt. This perspective argues we constantly thrive off of violence, division, and exclusion, often without realizing it. Hazlitt’s 19th-century view is particularly interesting to glance through the lens of modern times and the problems we face, namely the rapidly deteriorating timeframe to save our planet from climate change. The world faces it’s most existential challenge ever as a result of our own self-destruction. This is at a time when the world is extremely divided and our differences can feel much greater than our similarities. Considering Hazlitt’s assertion that hatred is deeply entrenched into human nature, will hatred deter us from overcoming timely existential crises? Or, is hatred and its implications necessary to serve as a vehicle to action?
To fully grasp our future, the past must first be understood. Hazlitt illustrates how unconscious we can be of hate’s presence through his relationship with a spider nearby. Hazlitt explains that while “I bear the creature no ill-will, but still I hate the very sight of it,” he still does not kill the intruder, a common reaction to encountering a spider (Hazlitt 1). While Hazlitt removes his hatred from his actions, he still doesn’t question why he despises the creature, or more importantly, how natural it is to otherize and villainize different species just for existing in the natural world. From killing pests to how “Animals torment and worry one another without mercy, […] everyone reads the accidents and offences in a newspaper as the cream of the jest: a whole town runs to be present at a fire, and the spectator by no means exults to see it extinguished,” conflict and hostility lurk everywhere (Hazlitt 1). Hazlitt connects this hate with many roots including personal insecurity and how entertaining instability is. Regardless of the cause, some evil intention seems inevitable in human nature.
The fact that our planet’s destruction has been largely ignored until recent times shows just how powerful hatred can be. Climate change is the direct manifestation of humans being intrinsically self-destructive: killing the very world we rely on to survive. Not just the world itself, but the other species that inhabit it. Almost one million species are at risk of extinction, an exponentially higher rate for species like poison dart frogs who once flourished (Kolbert 17). There is no question this is a direct result of human’s impact on the planet. Our natural overconsumption and self-centeredness are an existential threat to the world, but another threat is just as great: our inability to fix this. Growing division, nationalism, and polarization are all choking political systems and creating gridlock in government globally. The current lack of compromise and abundance of partisan politics in the American government and world highlights how divisiveness is stopping us from solving timely matters like global warming. This trickles to the public just as well, particularly in America. Recent data reveals climate change as the most politically polarizing issue among Republicans and Democrats (Milman 1). While Democrats rank climate change the third most important issue to solve, Republicans put it last, the largest discrepancy in rankings (Milman).
That divisiveness is a direct result of human’s natural hate and instability: we otherize disagreeing parties so much we cannot work together, despite the fact that our inability to work together is dooming future generations to die.
The rhetoric surrounding climate change is obviously far more complicated than Hazlitt’s theory, but his ideas show up in a broad range of issues. Gun violence, immigration, and education reform are issues in dire need of solutions that have been delayed and delayed for years due to our inability to find bipartisan fixes. Around the world, tensions between the elite and the working-class are escalating, many argue the same is true of racial tensions. Still, history has not been settled quite yet. Hatred could very easily be turned into solutions, as Hazlitt explains that “Nature seems (the more we look into it) made up of antipathies: without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action. Life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions, of men” (Hazlitt 1). Without hatred, we would never truly feel the intense spirit we associate with it. Hatred fuels many to act, as it is a motivator for people, a fire burning inside of them. It’s possible that our hatred could be the thing that unites us in finally overcoming our differences, as hatred is certainly the biggest similarity we all share.
While the world seems more divided than ever, hope should not be completely lost. Pressing matters such as climate change flash gleams of promise for the future and may ultimately end up uniting us. One global study found nearly 90% of the world believes climate change is real and at least partly triggered by human activity (Smith 1). Still, the inequalities of climate change and how it impacts the wealthy vs the poor and the West vs the East changes this equation. Simply put, the “impacts, while immense, aren’t shared evenly around the world, and the solutions will affect some nations more than others” (Harder 1). Until the effects of climate change equally affect the world, our chances of overcoming it are slim. Even more detrimental, these disproportionate impacts will drive hatred and divide further as humans compete to exist in a collapsing world.
Existential crises such as climate change will alter hatred in a new way, and the results will be extremely interesting to watch. Hatred is one of the only consistent factors in human nature. Hate serves to push action and deter it from occurring successfully. While the cause of climate change may not be solely based on hatred, it has catalyzed the crisis into a lethal state, and doomed future generations to death. The cycle of hatred and existential crises is never-ending, with each inflaming the other. Perhaps the world’s greatest challenge yet will shift hatred, but as long as our tumultuous human nature proceeds, our solution to ending hatred will become extinction.
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