I’m returning to something I wrote about a couple of days ago, Tolerance as she is Actually Practiced. This is essentially an American phenomenon in the sense that America has always been a singing, dancing parody of enlightenment thought, but I bet what I’m saying goes for England, too (witness Blur, c. 2003: “Being British isn’t about hate, it’s about disgust. We’re all….disgusting).
Freud tells us that love is actually the last thing anyone should expect us to feel for our neighbors. This isn’t really a psychoanalytic insight so much as a “home truth” that belongs to the body of faux-sage folk anthropology (so ably analyzed by Sahlins in The Western Illusion of Human Nature) that makes man out to be a wolf who needs to be saved from himself (really, from his other) by the state. But the fact that this version of human nature is socially constructed doesn’t mean you can’t build a society around it.
We’re living that dream, pretty much, except that in this mediated world of ours we can pick from any number of neighbors to hate. When Nina Simone sang “you don’t have to live next to me, just give me my equality,” these words still made sense; now, everybody lives next to everybody, and everyone hates his neighbor. I don’t think this is something that anybody wanted, but spend five minutes on Twitter or near a television set and you’ll know that it’s true. Hate links us together and helps us imagine our community, which, in the American case, is always an “us” that includes a “them.” Hate, too, is a social glue.
But is “hate” the right word to describe these arrangements? Almost nobody self-describes as a hater, after all, not even actual nazis. People usually frame their relationship to a hated other in terms of injustice, particularly in terms of an unjust distribution: the other is getting more than his fair share of something of which we, ourselves, have been unjustly deprived. Another name for the animus that drives such claims is envy. You can recognize envy at work whenever a justice-claim of the sort just described doesn’t respond to factual arguments about the good whose distribution is in question.
An example: rural whites think that they can’t get a job because all the jobs have gone to inner-city blacks. You can remind people who think this that urban blacks have been unemployed at a higher rate than rural whites for the past forty years, and that the disparity is growing, as much as you want. You can show them a piece of paper with numbers on it. None of that will change their mind.
That’s because what they really are is envious. Envy, when you come down to it, is all about pleasure: you envy someone because you think that they’re having a better time than you are. That claim is by nature irrefutable, but it’s also one we’re inclined to regard as morally vicious. All this nonsense about unemployment is only a cover to hide the envy that lies at the heart of rural white “economic anxieties,” not just from the rest of us, but from rural whites themselves. When envy comes out in the open, we call it hate.
In America, “tolerance” mostly means the cultivation of this state of affairs by people who benefit from the appearance of political engagement that envy generates. Almost nobody fights for anymore for the essential things, true equality and the cancellation of “free-market” economics that this would entail. Neither major political party even aims at anything worth calling a common good. Both of them thrive on, and take their cues from, a groundswell of invidious sentiment. Envy animates a body politic that we would otherwise have to recognize as a corpse.
What, then? An end to tolerance? Of course not, if the alternative is a return to the killing fields of the Jim Crow South or (following Michea’s line of argument) of the 17th-century wars of religion. But suppose we can get past tolerance going in the other direction?