On a Fake Quote: What's Love (or Hate) Got To Do With It?

I am very tired, and have gotten very little sleep lately. Part of that was due to last night, which was one of the more joyful and hopeful moments I have seen in years, even if I didn't go outside like everyone else. I have longer thoughts coming in the Huffington Post (just finished filing new blog), but I want to say something about the fake quote circulating on Facebook:

"I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that."

While the sentiments might seem superficially reasonable, a closer reading betrays a misunderstanding of human conflict--violent or nonviolent.

War doesn't happen because of some kind of pure and abstract hatred. This quote conjures up the stereotypical image, spread by Balkan Ghosts and other books, of two tribes with "ancient hatreds" that control their minds. While primal violence and enmity is important, but to see conflict through the prism of "hate"--sustained by hate and somehow eroded by an equally vague "love" is simply bizarre. War is fundamentally about politics. Conflicts are fought for political objectives, even if those objectives might seem irrational to anyone except the one who sets them.

Adolf Hitler may have hated Jews and practically anyone who wasn't Adolf Hitler, but he has a very specific (if insane) political vision that was internally consistent and a set of political-military tactics to achieve it. Of course this "vision" was genocidal, paranoid, and utterly repugnant, but if he was driven solely by abstract hate he would have remained a failed artist of no consequence rather than a mass murderer whose quest to depopulate every town from the Polish border to Siberia was backed by the murderous organs of a totalitarian great power state. This is "rationality"--even if it is a kind that we find difficult to accept. Quite similarly, Osama Bin Laden had an internally consistent (but clock cuckoo) political vision and he also used brutal violence to try to achieve it.

If we accept Clausewitz's claim that war is "politics by other means," we have to also accept that there are no "irrational" conflicts. Perhaps the actors involved have miscalculated the relative efficacy of violence, as the Palestinians did when their return to violence in 2000 led to the IDF's stage-by-stage demolition of the Palestinian Authority. But to imply that actors are simply driven by positive or negative emotions is to insult their intelligence and autonomy.

Conflict exists on a spectrum of complete nonviolence to nuclear warfare. It's a basic fact of human existence, and how actors choose to achieve their gains is often situationally dependent. We all have goals, and often times they conflict with those of other people. Political realists from Machiavelli to Pareto share an assumption that politics is at heart a form of power over people--hence we often turn to politics to increase privileges, right perceived injustices, capture scarce resources, or spread our own systems of belief. Since politics determines the distribution of power, it is a basic part of our lives no matter whether we religiously watch C-SPAN or indulge the apathy that heavy does of American domestic politics often seems to cultivate.

So to return to the quote, whether or not you meet hatred with hatred or hatred with love really matters little because such terms are really too general to meaningfully describe the political reasons why people conflict. Sometimes those political visions are flexible and can be modified to fit reality if actors judge that the price of continued violence is too high, or actors can realize that their goals are best met through cooperation rather than conflict. F.W. De Klerk and the South Africans, in the end, judged that they could not maintain apartheid in perpetuity and the political vision outlined by Nelson Mandela of the African National Congress was acceptable to them. In short, you use the method most appropriate for your policy and most acceptable to your own system of morality.

It is no wonder that Martin Luther King Jr. never uttered such words, as he was probably the only major strategic and operational leader of non-violent struggle who truly understood strategy. For example, Martin Luther King Jr. simply didn't wake up and decide that he wanted to eradicate prejudice. He realized that an entrenched Southern oligarchy was using an interlocking system of legal prejudice, extralegal violence and intimidation, and paramilitary power to maintain a system of privilege built on the backs of African-Americans. Realizing that this system was the enemy's "center of gravity," the common spirit that bound it all together, King Jr. elected to challenge it not with love and flowers--but nonviolent action carefully designed to accomplish his policy. Like Mandela, King Jr. (with a little unintentional help from the more militant Malcolm X and plenty of help from the at times adversarial Lyndon Baines Johnson) demonstrated to elites that the system could not be maintained and forced them to reach an accommodation.

Bin Laden was never looking for an accommodation or a compromise. Like Lenin and Robspierre before him, he was looking to overthrow the ancien regime and put everyone associated with it to the guillotine. His fanaticism and willingness to hurt innocents knew no bounds, and we can only guess at what horrors might have ensued if he actually succeeded in his mad quest to impose his own political order on the Middle East. So in the end a Navy SEAL addressed the "root cause" of Bin Laden's grievances by putting a bullet through his temple.

The longer we go on believing in the message of this quote, that only love can vanquish evil, the longer we set ourselves up for tragedy. Love did not stop the Japanese rampage through China, love did not end slavery in the American South, and love did not stop Napoleon's attempt to dominate Europe.

This is not to say that love is weak---love is one of the most powerful things imaginable, and anyone who has experienced it or has had the pleasure of giving it to others understands that. Hate is, at least for me, the most draining thing imaginable and something I try to avoid at all costs.

But neither love or hate are policies, strategies, or tactics. They're only emotions and ideal categories. They are not instrumental devices that we use to get what we want. So let's stop pretending that they are causal forces, that somehow rejoicing in the end of a mass murderer is going to conjure up more hate which in turn leads to more conflict.

Update: Thanks all for the RTs. I did make an error when I said that King never said all of the words described--as some sleuthing has discovered, only the first sentence was made up. The larger point about King's use of strategy reflects the record--even if it is not really a part of how he is seen in popular history.

Comments

[YN2(SW) H. Lucien Gauthier III]

That is some of the most inspired writing I've read in a long time. Well said.

[Freddie]

Uh, actually, King only didn't utter the first sentence, and DID say, in Strength to Love, "no one should rejoice at the death or defeat of a human being." Perhaps you should reconsider your bullshit appropriation.

[A.E.]

Freddie, my point re: King was about the sentiment of love being enough and the stereotypical (and sanitized) image of him that we're taught in elementary school that drains his radicalism and proto-militancy from the text.

[A.E.]

I updated the post, however, with a link to yours.

[Stav]

Why is anyone foolish enough to fall for anything from McArdle (I did too). Of course she is wrong. Except for the introductory sentence the quote is from MLK: http://goo.gl/IUD3R

[dryruminant]

lol at mlk's "protomilitancy"

[A.E.]

See above, which Freddie already corrected.

[Gelisius]

Actually, MLK did say this:

Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

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[Martha]

This is VERY well written and backed up by historical and relevant examples! Not sure I agree that F.W. De Klerk found anything acceptable...more like he and his cronies were forced into an "agreement." Otherwise, I loved it, and I have shared your post with many people...especially those posting the modified King Jr. quote.
On a second note...not sure if you read Politico.com...but this one was barely tolerable... http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0511/54124.html#ixzz1LEzrwloC
I am so sick of people saying that because we got Osama, we should pull out of the other arenas we are fighting in...le dumb!

[atheist]

Sure, wars aren't caused by pure hatred. People use violence because they see some advantage in it, and they will have logical reasons. But behind the logic and the advantage there's emotion.

[Jdovey]

I really enjoyed your thoughtful post. Forgive the following; I haven't slept for two days and I worry that I am unable to adequately or eloquently express my thoughts. Nevertheless, there's power in the moment, and like all things on the internet, the time and relevance of this post will soon be past.. So I should reply now, and sleep later.

I agree with many of your observations, but in order to understand the power of Dr. King's words we can't limit the concept of hate to an illogical, driving force. Likewise, the love he spoke of is not a cowardly, simpering, sentimental thing but a stubborn refusal to move when you are in the way of injustice, among many other things. The love he speaks of goes hand in hand with the idea of political action. Silence and inaction are just as bad as "hate," so love must mean standing up for what we think is right. It means standing up, getting in the way, being loud, refusing to comply with or tacitly allow the status quo to continue.

People like Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden are given power because many people go along with it. If enough people had spoken up against Hitler from the beginning, he would have had no opportunity to advance his conflict. So regardless of political agenda, wars are allowed to be fought because we allow them to be fought, if you'll forgive the redundancy. I do not believe that any population on earth is predisposed to agree with ideas like Hitler's or bin Laden's.

Whether or not the political motivations are rational is irrelevant. Unjust objectives are unsustainable, and rational, just objectives require a positive force in order to create meaningful change. The advantages of violence are temporal and do not solve underlying problems: killing Osama bin Ladin is a self-satisfying act of revenge. We may have stopped one force of incredible, awful pain and violence, but in doing so with the means we used, we have fanned the fires of hate in many, many others. If killing one violent man results in the creation of ten other violent men, was it worth it? What is our political motivation as a nation? To advance the concept of freedom? To end terrorism? We have to attack the ideas of the man, not the man himself. A man can be stopped without being killed. We have to examine the structure and underlying forces which create "hate," and seek to destroy those instead. Part of this means seeking to understand the enemies as human beings (and, by the way, as something other than enemies). If there is something in our culture which is so offensive as to incite acts of terrorism, could it hurt to reflect upon ourselves? I think it might be more meaningful if every person believed that the change has to begin within themselves.
Another Dr. King quote, this time from Beyond Vietnam, 1967,

"Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition."

Please, continue to debate this issue, and don't stop there. If you disagree, say so, and explain.

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Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

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