Book review: Hatred by Berit Brogaard

Content note: in this review, I discuss transphobia, transmisogyny, suicide, racism, and sexual assault.

In her 2020 book Hatred: Understanding our Most Dangerous Emotion, Berit Brogaard presents a complex but not comprehensive analysis of the emotion of hatred. The book argues for a number of different points, but not in a way that I find particularly compelling or convincing. Brogaard makes three core arguments:

1. Hatred can come in dehumanising and critical forms, and the critical form of hatred should be fostered because it reinforces social norms while the dehumanising form of hatred should be avoided.
2. Dehumanising hatred is ultimately the result of the ‘dark personalities’ of people who are intrinsically predisposed to hate.
3. Hatred is defined by an antipathy towards percieved ‘dark traits’ of the target of the hatred that are seen to have contributed to immoral actions on the part of the target.

Brogaard concludes by making a final argument about how hate speech ought to be defined on the basis of her observations, but I’m not particularly interested in engaging with it because I don’t think that her position–that hate speech needs to be defined on the basis of hateful intent or reckless disregard for others’ rights–is well-justified by the rest of the book.

I should probably start with my personal position on hatred: I don’t think that most people see themselves as hateful and I don’t think that malevolence is usually a driver of any action, even despicable ones. I read Hatred because I wanted to get a perspective on it from someone who did not necessarily see it that way. However, I was somewhat taken aback by Brogaard’s simultaneous insistence that group hatred is never necessary and thorough demarcation of an out-group of people with ‘dark personalities’ and personality disorders who were the ultimate root of all dehumanising hatred and mass atrocity. The phrase which came to mind was ‘are those people in the room with us?’ Brogaard has nothing in particular to say to anyone with what she sees as a dark or disordered personality, but a lot to say about them, and I find this distinctly uncomfortable. Would Brogaard oppose hatred towards this group of people or would it be ‘critical hatred’–hatred in the service of reinforcing positive group norms, hatred which is defined by an opposition to its target’s malevolence? I am not actually sure, because while Brogaard is very clear in saying that hatred of groups is irrational and never justified, she also builds a case for understanding this group as not only intrinsically prone to malevolence but the actual root of evil in the world.

I am also dubious of Brogaard’s presentation of ‘critical hatred’ as a justifiable form of the emotion. To start with, critical hatred has the capacity to be rational, Brogaard argues, while dehumanising hatred never does. Brogaard’s definition of an ‘irrational’ emotion is a little bit strange to me: the rationality of an emotion hinges on whether it causes problems for ‘functioning optimally’. I am not convinced that everyone who dehumanises others is prevented from functioning by their emotions. I feel like this is the sort of statement that requires some examples of what it would mean to function non-optimally. I also think that what sort of social norms one would deem worthy of protecting through hatred is not something that everyone can easily agree upon. What norms are considered worth upholding differs across cultures and individuals. Who gets to decide whether hatred is rational or not? Trying to enable ‘critical hatred’ feels like a recipe for furthering socially-acceptable and emotionally sustainable forms of discrimination.

I think that a major oversight in Brogaard’s discussion of group hatred is the ease (or lack thereof) of separating actions from groups. People who hate groups often frame their hatred as hatred for an action or trait, which under Brogaard’s framing can be considered justifiable. Brogaard would argue that this is an error of attribution. Her discussion of transmisogyny is an example of this: Brogaard argues that more widespread adoption of transphobic rhetoric in feminist and queer communities is a result of people failing to recognise the root of such rhetoric as misogyny rather than feminist principles. However, this more or less depends on Brogaard’s broader argument that hateful rhetoric is initiated by a few people with ‘dark personalities’ and picked up by the broader population through shifts in group norms. I don’t really disagree that a small group of vocal people can have an outsized effect on the broader culture. But I also think that Brogaard fails to account for the emotional basis for this broader population of people to take on discriminatory viewpoints. In particular, Brogaard does not engage with fear and worry. I think this is because positioning Brogaard’s human nexuses of hatred as potentially fearful or worried is too humanising. This ultimately makes sense: the logical conclusion of Brogaard’s arguments is that it is good to hate the people who hate.

One of the more reprehensible ideas about trans women that I have personally encountered is the idea that trans women are particularly likely to sexually assault others–over and above any other group of people. Brogaard’s conceptualisation of hatred can’t really accomodate this, because it’s about a fear of something that trans women are percieved to do. People who subscribe to this idea would argue that they don’t hate trans women, they hate sexual assault, and the exclusion of trans women from women’s spaces is a proportional measure to prevent sexual assault. This conclusion can only be reached through the weaponisation of poorly measured statistics and a wilful acceptance of the idea that it’s okay to discriminate against an entire group of people because a few people with a shared characteristic have committed violence. But I have met people who hold this viewpoint who are certainly not prevented from living their lives because of the emotional component of this philosophy. Additionally, from their perspective they are pushing for a social norm of preventing sexual assault. Adopting Brogaard’s conception of ‘critical hatred’ allows for further sanitisation of these ideas. Their proponents would no longer have to claim that they were not being hateful: rather, they would be hating for the greater good.

I also think that the pathologisation of dehumanising hatred is not as helpful as it might seem. Brogaard is effectively arguing that the root of evil in the world is clinical and subclinical personality disorders. While I accept that there are some traits a person can have that can affect them and others around them in a profoundly negative way, I find the implications of the idea that there is a group of people who are predisposed to hatred in such a manner that it can be defined using a checklist to be deeply problematic. It seems as though Brogaard thinks that if these people did not exist then hatred and atrocities would not occur, because the rest of us simply do not think in the ways required to start to dehumanise others. I think this is a dangerous conception for two reasons. Firstly, the ultimate conclusion is that we need to eradicate such personality traits. Brogaard presents doing as being equivalent with killing the original person and replacing them with someone new. Under that logic, it doesn’t seem like much of a leap between accepting that a person’s personality must be changed and accepting that a person must be killed because of their personality. Secondly, it prevents everyone who reads it who does not see themselves as having a ‘dark personality’ (and therefore a moral duty to, it seems, kill themselves in at least a metaphorical sense) from perceiving themselves as capable of harbouring destructive sentiments or emotions.

Advices and Queries #31 asks Quakers to ‘search out whatever in your own way of life may contain the seeds of war’ and I personally think that this advice can extend to the seeds of hatred. I don’t think that experiencing hatred makes people bad. I think that it’s about what you do about it rather than what you feel. I think that doing something terrible because of hatred or contempt is not intrinsically worse than doing something terrible because you feel fear or worry. I would imagine that there are many people who have what Brogaard presents as ‘dark personality traits’ who do recognise that those traits can be seeds of hatred. I think that there are many people who don’t have these ‘dark personality traits’ who are equally capable of feeling these emotions and doing terrible things. I think that if we all learn to recognise what within us can grow into hate then we can all try to do better. I think Brogaard’s view of the world as presented in Hatred is fundamentally quite pessimistic and uninterested in what is good in each person, and because of this cannot present a compelling argument for any particular response to hate.

I would like to make one final remark on Hatred: it has a fundamentally strange approach to racism. A significant portion of Hatred is dedicated to discussing racism. Anti-Black racism and antisemitism are both given as examples of unjustifiable group discrimination. However, Brogaard also makes the assertion that Ashkenazi Jewish people have higher IQs and are therefore smarter, which accounts for what white supremacists see as unjustified Jewish success. Using this notion uncritically is odd because it seems that Brogaard accepts supremacist logic and race science when it is not aligned with outwardly hateful sentiment. It also undermines Brogaard’s ability to dismiss racist talking points when they are about other ethnic groups because the same studies that these statistics about Ashkenazi Jewish people’s intelligence come from are also used to say that other ethnic groups are intrinsically less intelligent. There are a number of non-genetic reasons that different ethnic groups perform on average differently on IQ tests, and not considering this simply affirms racism. Hatred cannot see the discrimination inherent to its own arguments because Brogaard does not see it as connected to hate. It is a crystal-clear example of the flaws in this book’s perspective.