IN DEFENCE OF HATE

'Oh witches, poverty, hate - I have confided my treasures to you!’

Rimbaud, A Season in Hell

Hate is as natural a human emotion as love, anger, fear, lust, joy or envy. Whether or not it's an admirable or desirable one is irrelevant. It can only be eliminated (or submerged) by fundamentally restricting our right to be human. 

Yet everywhere in our democracies, we see new laws trying to redefine what makes us human. On gender, global warming, race, immigration, the approach is identical. Discussion is allowed within undefined subjective limits, but opposition or straying beyond those is made synonymous with hatred. Needless to say, directly applying this approach to literature would completely destroy it as an art form. But singling out hatred as a societal taboo will anyway undermine one of the most important inspirations writers have. The ‘be kind’/smiley face approach is deadening to artistic freedom.

For centuries, English law correctly concerned itself only with the illegality of making specific threats or incitements of physical violence. Moving from that to policing general ‘hate’ expression is a disaster, since what counts as ‘hateful’ in general expression is subjective and not something that a free society should define. Philip K Dick type laws pre-empting online hatred (for example, in Canada) can be linked with ‘woke’ attempts to recreate humanity, especially the idea that asserting fundamental biological identity is hateful, whereas recognising someone's self-proclaimed gender identity is a legal requirement. And very shortly, Starmer's government will be following this lead, with the Home Secretary urging police forces to ramp up recording of 'hateful but legal expression'.

Why wouldn't people hate this stance? It's likely the proponents of tyrannical legislation know that response is inevitable. As many have argued, they need to prevent debate because they know their position is utterly indefensible. Small wonder they draw that conclusion. But they're actively seeking to provoke, to flush out the largely fictitious 'far right' haters they claim threaten society. And now they've achieved this, the real free-speech clampdown can begin.

All this is perhaps obvious. My position is that - allowing for the the Common Law restrictions on threats and incitement - hate has to be accepted and sometimes welcomed. Let's be honest! It's inspired some of the greatest art and without it, we'd probably have had almost no human progress. On its own, hatred is a limiting, negative and exhausting thing. But as a component of other drives, it's often essential. Sadly, warfare itself - whilst cruelly destructive - has always been a huge catalyst for human invention. Would we have had antibiotics, jet engines or nuclear power without WW2? 

As for art, some of the greatest writers were enormous haters. Obvious first-rankers are Shakespeare, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, Celine, Orwell. Not just hate-driven of course. And what about Caravaggio? He produced his greatest paintings whilst literally on the run for murder. Shakespeare's most memorable characters are usually driven by it - Macbeth, Iago and Edmund being superb examples. 

It's hardly been discussed how Starmer's approach to free speech will affect creative literature. Presumably the progressive elite now running things see a future of sunlit uplands, freed from hatred, racism, inequality, global warming, transphobia, you name it. The job of literature will be to remind us of Tories in top hats, illicit cake parties and the Bullingdon club. The disgraced pre-revolutionary past that Winston recounted to a wheezing old geezer, in the prole pub of 1984…

What I’m discussing now comes under the broader term ‘freedom of expression’. After the ‘Lady Chatterley trial’ of 1960, it’s blithely assumed there is no censorship in literature, and certainly not for questions of ‘public interest’ or ‘morality’. The very idea seems absurd!

But aren’t we already in a climate of de facto censorship? Because I’m not arguing that this government will specifically target literature. It won’t need to. The existing climate (especially in publishing and education) of 'trigger warnings' and ‘sensitivity readers’ will now elide with the specific criminalising of 'hate', so that transgressive literature attacking progressivism is simply never seen. Indeed, that’s largely the case already.

Writers are increasingly complaining about ‘sensitivity readers’ in publishing houses demanding editorial changes to their work. Recent examples include mainstream progressive figures like Anthony Horwitz (My clash with sensitivity readers) or Kate Clanchy (The book that tore publishing apart). But one look at the sort of anodyne literature being promoted in schools and universities, then winning prizes, shows the job’s already half-done: Worthy texts ‘exploring identity in a multicultural society’; ‘challenging the racism inherent in our culture’ and ‘offering a welcome antidote to the insularity of Brexit and Farage.’

The Free Speech Union are holding a webinar on this issue: DOES PUBLISHING HAVE A FREE SPEECH PROBLEM? But the wider question - of the self-censorship and orthodoxy being promoted in nascent writers - seems to me the most terrifying thing, above all for the narrow range of literature now seen to get published and promoted. The question isn’t would Dostoevsky get published now but could our culture produce such a writer?

Because the best example of what I’m discussing is by that greatest of novelists, in Devils. His horrific but compelling character of Stavrogin – a maniacal revolutionary student, devoured by ideology – is guilty of a prolonged and terrifying act of child-abuse, detailed in a confessional chapter which is very often removed from the novel. It leads to the heart-rending suicide of an 11-year-old girl. But censoring this horror completely destroys the purpose of this character. So would ‘sensitivity or trigger warnings’.

In fact, Dostoevsky’s entire body of work is a wonderful resource, as an artistic exploration of how totalising ideologies and obsessions capture and corrupt individuals, then entire societies. Written prophetically in the mid to late-19th century yet foreshadowing the horrors of the 20th-century, in Russia and worldwide. His warnings are just as applicable to the insane excesses of ‘Progressivism’ we’re now mired in. He was especially farsighted in his suspicion of credentialism and the folly of uncritically following ‘intellectuals’. Needless to say, assessing his writing through the narrowest of Overton windows would destroy it. 

Devils should be required reading for anyone dismayed by where we are. This greatest of writers could see how intellectualism, elite arrogance and hatred of the ‘masses’, asserted through lofty claims of the opposite, would play out. Just as with Dickens (from whom he otherwise much differs) the individual is everything. They must never be sacrificed for ‘the greater good’ or any other airy ideological claim.

Moving closer to home, Dickens' novels overflow with preachy ‘liberal’ figures who are in truth selfish authoritarian hypocrites, exploiting the vulnerable – especially children. His message is that ‘progress’ counts for nothing when it ignores the sanctity and essential freedoms of individual life. And that many who claim to be progressive are in fact callous, selfish and dangerous frauds. This doesn’t imply progress is impossible or undesirable, but we need to be endlessly wary of those who claim they and their beliefs embody it, demanding others accept their moral authority and actions as ‘progressives’, however idiotic, cruel and incoherent they are.

And how about film, the greatest art form of modern times? The three best 1970s British films (all 1971) are Get Carter, A Clockwork Orange and Straw Dogs - all explorations of hate and its expression through ‘mindless’ violence. Not just of that, but without hatred they'd be nothing. They're not celebrations of the emotion, but any honest viewer should admit that the nihilistic violence is enjoyable and artistically essential. Probably the greatest film of the decade - Taxi Driver - is an exploration of corrosive hatred and redemption, through violence. No one could claim it’s advocating this, but nor can it be claimed this isn’t the film’s central idea.  

Teaching English at A-level, I found both Easton Ellis' American Psycho and Celine's Journey to the End of the Night worked superbly, as novels. Both are frenzied and hate-filled, but (in differing ways) use this to create great pieces of literature. It's true that the former provoked parental complaints, but I found explaining the serious purpose (and Ellis' use of factual accounts) satisfied them. And needless to say, most pupils found the progressive equivalents - books like The Colour Purple or Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit - dull and obviously preaching what students already constantly hear. There's no challenge in them; they effectively say nothing.  

No doubt these views may provoke hatred! As long as that's genuine and not performative outrage, I'd welcome it.