For a question that goes right to the heart of many of the modern world’s very real problems, very few people are asking it, and even fewer are trying to get to the bottom of it.
Why do we hate?
Jim Mohr of Gonzaga University is developing a new academic field of hate studies to probe questions as fundamental as why the Nazis hated the Jews, because he believes the question of hate has never been thoroughly studied.
It seems simple, but science demands a testable theory to attempt to explain why we hate. The result is important, because we can’t approach fixing the problem if we don’t understand it first.
Some radical Muslims hate Christians and all other non-Muslims, while some radical Christians hate all non-Christians.
And that conflict is at the root of so many problems it’s hard to overestimate its impact. More than 3,000 people felt its impact on Sept. 11, 2001, and since then, its impact has spread exponentially in America’s military response to those attacks.
According to Mohr, there’s not even a single, agreed-upon definition of hate, which complicates the study while highlighting the need for it.
If we understand why one human hates another, we might be able to get to the ground level of fixing the problems that have made nation war against nation since the beginning of recorded history.
It seems ironic that at the root of a study of hate is the hope of love — or at least peace.
But it is a valid hope nonetheless, and one that deserves support.
We hope something positive comes out of it for the whole of humanity.
