by Glen Pearson

Famed scientist Stephen Hawking is speaking out more and more these on the human condition as opposed to his usual scientific interests. A case in point was his response to a questioner in California, who asked what human shortcoming he would like to change, if he could. His answer was unequivocal: “The human failing I would most like to change is aggression. It may have had survival advantage in caveman days … but now it threatens to destroy us all.”

Given the carnage that occurred in Paris, California, Florida, and now Bangladesh and Iraq, we get a hint of what Hawking was talking about. The subject of “hate” in its various manifestations – hate speech, racial hatred, religious and political hate, hate crimes, or in the case of Orlando, homophobic hate – continues to encroach into our consciousness, not just through international crimes, but domestic behavior.

We were supposed to have collectively emerged by such subterranean impulses in the modern West, but given the dangerous support for the extremes of Donald Trump or the anonymity of Twitter, we appear headed in the wrong direction.

Elie Wiesel, famed poet laureate and Holocaust survivor, who died sadly just last week, worried over what has become of modern civilization’s tolerance of inhumanity:

“Why hate? Why yield to its sombre and implacable force for which, locked on itself, manifests its will to destroy for reasons that bring embarrassment and despair to the human condition? What good may derive from hatred? Is there, can there be nobility in its realm?”

So much psychological research has been spent on understanding hatred – its motives and reasonings – that it has become all too familiar. More troubling still has become modern humanity’s toleration of it. We are shocked by it, induced to tears or anger at the sight of carnage as in Paris or Orlando, and yet we somehow underperform in our pressure on the political order, the media, or even the courts. We are increasingly just seeing it as a scary but expected fact of life.

Hatred’s role in history has essentially been to reduce people to animals. The closer hatred got to power, in the likes of a Hitler or Syria’s Assad, the more humanity was diminished to a place of horror and shame. We understand that easily enough. But how, in our modern cities, presidential politics, or even social media, does it gain such a foothold in our midst. We decry censorship and yet tolerate the humiliation of individuals or groups by words run amok. We insist on civil rights even when they are abused to a degree that introduces our darkest motives. We pride ourselves in our collective tolerance of gay marriage or LGBT rights and yet refuse to introduce an age of true enlightenment that makes us more refined in both thought and deed.

In truth, most of us find hatred beyond understanding. We witness the result of it, but have never been moved by it. And yet millions of us have been affected by its key characteristic: the personal pain caused by exclusion, of abuse, feelings of second class, or the inability to have a wrong righted. Most violators haven’t hated easily by nature, but by suffering on the margins of life. Such conditions, tolerated long enough, can even incite groups of people to gross acts of hatred that shames civilization for generations.

In a world where a few have so much while the majority endures crippling conditions, anger is bound to erupt. We can stiffen jail sentences, regulate gun ownership, even attempt to banish the criminals, but we most often fail to alter the desperate conditions of humanity endured in much of the world and even here at home. By refusing to comprehend mental illness or effectively fund programs designed to bring those suffering back to wellness, we avoid what really needs to be done to reduce hatred. By permitting people to remain mired in poverty we permit the conditions of exclusion and deprivation to grow to the point of resentment, anger, and, yes, hatred.

There are millions of such stories. The solution to most of them is to create a world of opportunity for all and not just for those fortunate enough to live in freedom or fairness. It’s not so much about money as it is about tolerance and justice. It demands action on the physical abuse of women in our neighbourhoods at the same time as it demands something be done about the travesties of ISIS. It doubles down on social media trolling at home, just as it seeks to capture the stalkers and kidnappers of the missing girls in Nigeria. Until we learn how such things dovetail together, our world can never be effectively healed.