One of the enduring images from Sept. 11 is a face. It is a photograph of Mohamed Atta, the apparent leader of the terrorists, staring stone-faced into the camera with sharklike eyes from beyond the grave.
It is a face of hatred.
It's a face that Robert Sternberg, a Yale University psychology professor and the president-elect of the American Psychological Association, has been studying in places like Rwanda, Serbia --- and the United States.
Sternberg has researched hatred on both an individual and a group level. He will share his results during a free lecture titled "Terrorism, Massacres and Genocides: A Duplex Theory of Hate" at Emory University on Thursday.
The 7:30 p.m. lecture, to be given in Emory's Cannon Chapel, is also personal. The 52-year-old Sternberg lost family in the Holocaust. His mother, Lillian, an Austrian refugee, was spared only because her eyes were blue.
"Hate is part of my background," he says. "It's something I've tried to understand."
During a telephone interview, Sternberg talked about the dynamics of hatred.
Q: What surprised you the most during your research into hatred? A: The most surprising thing I found is how prevalent it is and how many kids are brought up to be haters. In many places today, bringing up kids to hate is not looked on as a failure. It's looked on as a success.
Q: What are the elements of hatred? A: The first is negation of intimacy. Negation is when you look at someone with the feeling that you would have for a cockroach or a rat. You just couldn't conceive of the possibility of any human contact.
When leaders or parents try to foment hate, one of the things they try to do is negate intimacy. They'll say, "Since these things aren't human, it doesn't matter what you do to them." It's how you can kill people in the World Trade Center. The idea is to create stories of them as subhuman and therefore there's nothing wrong with hating them.
The second component is passion. Passion is also a component of love. You not only view them as subhuman, you feel that passionately. In order to get people to act on hate, dictators or government leaders try to instill passions. The story they use is, "You've been wronged. If you don't kill them, they'll kill you." They introduce the idea of threat.
The third component is commitment, that is, you begin to think about ways in which it's OK to act on these designs. When you get all three of these components together, you have a dangerous situation.
Q: How can what happened in Rwanda take place? People who were neighbors, some friends, murdered people they had known closely for years. A: What happened there is simmering hate. It's sort of like having a tinderbox that's ready to be set off. If you're brought up in a society where you're taught that the Tutsis were lording over the Hutus, what you learn from the time you're young is that these people wronged us and, as a result, we never got what we should have gotten.
Then if you get cynical leaders, whether it's Milosevic in Serbia or people in Rwanda, they teach that it's payback time. Then they start telling people that this is the right thing and, moreover, if you don't act, you're a collaborator. They change the way you think, they dehumanize the enemy and they incite you to act.
It could happen anywhere. It's happened in the U.S. with the KKK, the American Nazi Party and these ultra-right militias.
Q: How can someone like Mohamed Atta, the leader of the Sept. 11 terrorists, live in this country for years but maintain his ability to hate U.S. citizens? A: You have to be totally indoctrinated into it and believe that they don't matter and you're doing the right thing. There's a whole cognitive side. If you're a martyr, you're going to heaven and you're going to get 72 virgins. There's a whole set of religious beliefs that lead you to believe it's right.
What's scary is that people are taught that this is the right way to believe and churches have supported them. Right now, some of the most vicious haters are religious extremists. . . . There's no religion that's been immune to this.
Q: What can people do to stop hatred? A: One of the things you can do is to teach people what it is. You can recognize it in yourself. The second thing you need to do is teach people wisdom. You can't be wise and be a hater. If you look at people like Gandhi or Martin Luther King, there were so many people who treated them very poorly, but they didn't turn around and hate the people who treated them poorly. They realized that it would be better for everyone else to work together for the common good.
Q: Could you see a day when hatred isn't such a serious problem? A: It's possible but I don't think it's on the horizon. In order not to have it, you have to have people who don't want it. The problem is that there are people who profit from it.
Copyright 2002 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution