Love of Enemies: The Challenge Not to Dehumanize

"Love your enemies?" What could be more ridiculous than that? More contrary to nature? Even without buying into Carl Jung's theory of archetypes, we can all agree, I think, that hard-wired in the mind of every person are the opposites of friend-enemy, good-bad, love-hate. Love implies a tendency to move toward, hate to move away from. We move toward good things, away from bad. A near-synonym of hate is fear. We are unlikely to love people we fear.

The obvious reason for this is survival. Love for enemies, in the sense of moving toward them, can be deadly. You don't smooch with a cobra--or with anything else, for that matter, that is likely to take offense and damage you. Love of enemies is, in this obvious sense, suicidal idiocy.

So how are we to take Jesus' command in Matthew 5:44 to love our enemies? To begin with, we might take it as a cryptic, provocative aphorism like much of the Sermon on the Mount. It's a mystery, not a rule. "If your right eye offends you, pluck it out," says Matthew 5:29, but there weren't many one-eyed disciples. 

         Love can't mean cuddling with cobras. Neither is it a completely abstract thing, divorced from all practice. Three verses in Matthew 5, apply it in practice. In reference to an enemy soldier's power to force a Jew to carry his equipment, Jesus says that if forced to carry for a mile, offer a second mile. If an enemy sues to take your shirt, offer your coat as well (Matthew 5: 40-41). Like the command to forgive 490 times (Matthew 18:21-22), these may be provocative hyperboles, but whatever sensible limits we impose on the command to love enemies, it must have some consequences.

An obvious minimum is to not dehumanize human enemies. It is contrafactual to imagine that that members of our species are vermin rather than people who might, under different circumstances, be beloved neighbors. Obviously, in the midst of battle, soldiers try to kill enemies. Otherwise, they're simply in the wrong place. In combat, seeing enemies as evils to be exterminated may be an essential convention of a hellish game without which both armies should pack up and go home. But the attitude spills over into other contexts. Even stateside, American veterans call Iraqi fighters Bad Guys. But any reasonable application of American values might, I think, locate more Badness in a technologically advanced foreign invader than in a volunteer defending his homeland. 

Of course, the all-too-human habit is to believe that we are good because our own nation, gang, or culture tells us we are; therefore, you are bad if you oppose us. Tribal consensus validates us. Still, dehumanizing members of another tribe simply just because it fights your tribe is counterfactual and unjust. Merely recognizing the fact that they human, not vermin, sets a low bar but follows from Jesus' command.

Atrocities happen when people are dehumanized. The Nazis described Jews as disease-bearing vermin. In Rwanda twenty-eight years ago, "hordes of members of the Hutu ethnic majority, armed with machetes, spears, nail-studded boards, and other rudimentary weapons, moved house to house in villages, hunting for Tutsis, the second largest of Rwanda's three ethnic groups" (Ndahiro). A million Rwandans died. This horror followed years of the Hutu government's describing Tutsis as "cockroaches" or "snakes." The trigger came when a semi-official radio station called for the day "when the people rise up and don't want you Tutsi anymore" (Ndahiro). Tutsis were no longer human, they had no rights, deserved no consideration. They were vermin. This dangerous trick of language has a history from bloody People's revolutions to Trump's calling Hispanic gangs "animals."

In America, political parties have been increasing dehumanizing each other, understanding their political "enemies" as less than "my fellow Americans." Unlike senators from opposite sides of the aisle who, I'm told, used to discuss their differences over dinner, we shun political opponents as not worth listening to, subhumanly stupid if not downright evil.

Before the 2020 election, A. P. Landry studied dehumanization of each other by Democrats and Republicans using a innovative measure developed by Nour Kteily. It asked people to rate how "evolved" people were using the "Ascent of Man" chart of human evolution, starting with the silhouette of an ape and progressing through five stages to the silhouette of a modern man. The ends of the chart were numbered one to a hundred, and partisans were asked to rate the opposing party (See illustration at top).

           "Dehumanization was pervasive on both sides of the aisle," Landry reports, "and on average, American partisans rated the other side as 42 points less than human." In a followup, Landry found that both parties imagined the other party held an even lower estimation of their own humanity, but their own low ratings weren't reprisals. Even after learning that the opposition devalued them less than they imagined, both parties continued to rate the opposition as barely half human. Landry suggest that we should "challenge it when we encounter dehumanizing language used by others, especially among those on our side as we are often more receptive to the opinions of 'our own'." This may be all we can do to forestall the end of civil discourse. 

It's certainly good to compensate in this way, to catch ourselves when we speak or act inhumanely. But religious "love" of enemies implies something else, a change of heart. The call is not only to control language that casts enemies as subhuman--that depersonalizes them because they are threats--but to uproot the impulse with a deeper transformation. Not degrading enemies is one thing. Not wanting to is another, a moral goal in Buddhism as well as Christianity.

Thich Nhat Hanh defines the Buddhist virtue of compassion as "the intention and capacity to relieve and transform suffering and lighten sorrows" (p. 172). Compassion refuses to punish suffering with more suffering. The bodhisattva (or central spiritual figure) of compassion is Avalokiteshvara, to whom is credited with one of the most revered Buddhist texts, the Heart Sutra. This short lesson makes a series of paradoxical statements, beginning with, "Form is emptiness, emptiness is form." Emptiness can also be translated "boundlessness." 

The sutra teaches that separate things ("forms") are empty of intrinsic separate existence. Their identities are continuously blurred as they interpenetrate in a web of causes and effects like ripples in time and space. Things act on other things and are simultaneously acted on by them. They are changed by what they change, continuously becoming what they were not in a complex dance of sharing and losing their thingness. This openness to change is called emptiness. The emptiness of things does not negate or stand outside of them, but is how they exist. By being open to cause-effect, forms such as ourselves come into being and evolve into not-ourselves. Formlessness interpenetrates form. Nothing exists on its own, and there is no beginning or end. In the words of Zen teacher Zoketu Norman Fischer, "we are all of us one great flashing, fleeting, floating being . . . . one immense ocean of being in which there is no separation" (pp. 63-64).

This understanding of the world, called interdependent co-arising, is described by Thich Nhat Hanh as "the foundation of all Buddhist study and practice" (p. 221). Full realization of it is said to lead to nirvana, along with perfect compassion and the end of suffering. Interdependent co-arising seems to agree with the world of experience. I can't deny its reasonable claim. That said, I can't begin to grasp its full implications. Fully realizing independent co-arising, joyful as Buddhist masters tell us this is, brings crashing down all of the certainties of my everyday life, including my ordinary sense of existing as myself. Independent co-arising subverts the ego.

Another certainty that falls is the belief that, hurting my enemy, I don't hurt myself. As Leadbelly sang, "We're in the same boat, brother, and if you shake one end, you're gonna rock the other." Norman Fischer, a Buddhist teacher, puts it this way, "Life itself is compassion. My compassionate caring for you is like my hand pulling a thorn out of my foot--of course the hand does this! It understands without thinking that hands and feet are part of the same body" (p. 63).

Of course, in an unenlightened world, violence is inevitable. Sometimes suffering is needed to protect the (relatively) innocent from the (relatively) guilty. But compassion refuses to see the victims of righteous violence as anything less than extensions of our own humanity, nor is their suffering irrelevant. Christianity teaches that our enemies, no less than our family and friends, are images of God. 

The two religions use different visions but reach the same conclusion. We are all united, whether in a net of independent co-arising or in a communion of souls in the image of a loving God. Seeing this requires a change in the ordinary heart. Love of enemies isn't normal, but when the impulse to dehumanize is muted, we acquire the power to recognize a loving kinship even with people who threaten us and our ideals. An open heart reveals to us the world as it really is without the blinders of alienation and fear. 

We'll never all agree or understand each other, but we can refuse to exclude others from the human family. Discord and sufferings multiply when we deny other people's humanity and degrade them to objects for our use. "When others are seen this way," Stephen Freeman writes, "only power matters. Every human being is seen as a challenge or a threat, a competitor. Friends become very few, and enemies multiply. Civil discourse becomes impossible" (p. 92).

References

Fischer, Norman. "The Wisdom That Cures Our Ills." Lion's Roar, July 2021.

Freeman, Stephen. Everywhere Present: Christianity in a One-Storey Universe. Ancient Faith, 2010.

Landry, Alexander. "Dehumanization is Threatening Democracy." Character and Content, October 13, 2021. Accessed online, January 12, 2022. https://www.spsp.org/news-center/blog/landry-dehumanization-democracy-threat

Ndahiro, Kennedy. "In Rwanda, We Know All About Dehumanizing Language." The Atlantic, April 13, 2019. Accessed online, January 12, 2022. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/rwanda-shows-how-hateful-speech-leads-violence/587041/ 

Thich Nhat Hahn. The Heart of Buddha's Teaching. Harmony, 2015.