Pluralism Vs Plural Hate

The legend goes that P.G.Wodehouse, who had had his stint in a Nazi concentration camp, was asked if he hated the Nazis. Wodehouse's answer, was:

"I don't hate in the plural."

It's one of those quotes that have a power to go through our defenses. But to understand the enormity of it, one needs to know the background! For Wodehouse at the age of almost sixty, was forced to stay in the Nazi concentration camps (the so called internment-centers), when the French town where he was living with his wife, was captured by the Germans. While still in captivity, Wodehouse wrote and recorded five talks that described his experiences as an internee, which were broadcasted on Berlin radio. The talks were quintessential Wodehouse, so subtle that the subtlety was lost on most of his British fans. Few heard what he actually said, the mere fact that in the middle of war, he made speeches from German radio raised a storm. Wodehouse was accused of conspiring with Germans -- selling out to them for his freedom. He was a target of a large smear campaign in Britain, and the affair had long lasting repercussions, possibly delaying his knighthood by several years. It all must have been pretty tormenting for Wodehouse. It is so much easy to take a recourse to mass-hate, in such situations. But Plum refused to cave in to that temptation.

Sometimes I think that world needs to make that quote into its motto. We don't hate in the plural. For the world has seen infinite human right disasters because of mass hate. To an outsider, it might look like we just love to hate in the plural. From the Jewish Holocaust to Israeli excesses in the Gaza strip; from the bloody partition of India to genocide in Rwanda; from ethnic cleansing of minorities from many Muslim countries to Christianity's conquests; from recent Hindu backlash in Gujarat (India) to LTTE's terrorism in Sri Lanka: the root cause is the same -- mass hate. Rather, the politics of mass hate -- creating a faceless enemy belonging to a certain creed/caste/race or even ideology, and reducing large number of diverse, innocent populations into hated groups. Once us Vs. them lines are drawn in such black and white terms, human disasters are inevitable.

I don't want to go into who is right, who is wrong. What I want to talk about is the obsession to club individuals together based on certain arbitrary defining characteristic, and reduce them into a token. So we have Capitalists and communists hating each other, we have Hindus and Muslims hating each other, we have Americans being hated for their government's foreign policies (resulting into 9/11)... It doesn't stop there. Horrible crimes again innocents are justified in the name of retaliation, revenge, or reactions. Such justification of acts of violence against innocents masses is made possible only by mass-hate. This obsession to define individuals just as members of group has made this world into a terribly insecure place. That is where Wodehouse's uncanny genius comes into picture.

In six simple words, he expressed the essence of humanism. There is a deep, fundamental recognition underlying those words, that each individual believes in what s/he believes based on that person's background, exposure, influences, logical abilities (or the lack of them), experiences, etc. An Individual is first a unique human being, and then part of some ethnic, religious, or idealogical group. That is why we need to evaluate each individual as an individual primarily. The moment we stop doing that, we lose something precious. The biggest casualty of the hate in the plural is the across the board dialog which is so essential for any pluralistic society. In the absence of such dialog, conflicts get out of hand. Ideas from the (perceived) opposite camp are summarily rejected, without even a cursory look. Even human relationships are affected by idealogical loyalties.

There are obvious advantages of this thinking about individuals as part of the group. And so are there advantages of mass-hating. It's so much easier to target innocent, helpless people in the opposite camp, than to actually target the real culprits. It's so much easier to accept that all XXX behave this way and all YYY behave that way than to identify why a certain X or a certain Y behaved in a certain way. It's so much easier to avoid the deeper issues, deeper causes of conflicts. But these are advantages, that a mature society would do without! It's high time we grow out of this hating in the plural obsession. For pluralism cannot thrive in the politics of mass-hate.