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Elie Wiesel said that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. What, then, is the opposite of hate? The answer, it seems to me, changes when we accuse the person rather than the hate or the hating. In today’s parlance, a hater is not simply someone who hates — or rather, the variety of hate has become narrower and more specific. In politics, there are Hillary haters. Tom Brady recently called an ESPN commentator a “Patriot hater.” Anyone who writes in a forum, like this one, that invites comments is advised to ignore the haters. T-shirts admonishing us, “Don’t Be a Hater,” abound.
According to Urban Dictionary, a hater is “a person that simply cannot be happy for another person’s success,” or possibly an “overused word that people like to use just because someone else expresses a dislike for a certain individual.” Ah, there’s the rub. However freely we may confess to hating some things (anchovies, Nazis), no one wants to be a hater. I cannot find who first coined the catchy phrase “Don’t be a hater, be a celebrator!” but it’s precisely the kind of facile advice that leaves its audience no choice.
As I’m using it here, hater undoubtedly came of age with the Internet, where vitriol thrives amongst anonymity, and brave individuals like Malala Yousafzai are the objects of not only nasty barbs but actual, sometimes quite explicit death threats. One cannot escape the sense that the people typing such venom are hateful people, people who hate not because they have a specific reason or an instinctive feeling of repugnance (Nazis, anchovies), but because destroying others, particularly those with high profiles, is in their nature.
But here we encounter a problem. Accusing someone of being a hater is easy. It depends not on something specific they have done but on who they essentially are. When Tom Brady calls Mark Brunell, the ESPN commentator, a hater, he is responding to Brunell’s statement, “I don’t believe there’s an equipment manager in the NFL who on his own initiative would deflate a ball without his starting quarterback’s approval. I just didn’t believe what Tom Brady had to say.” That statement is an expression of Brunell’s lack of belief, backed up by his experience and a certain amount of evidence. To call Brunell a hater is not a defense; it’s an attempt to change the subject by attacking Brunell himself. In a subtler and more general way, The Atlantic’s headline “Among the Hillary Haters” implicitly lumps all those who criticize Hillary Clinton into a mass of jealous, spiteful scandalmongers. This blanket judgment does a disservice not only to those who may have genuine criticisms of Clinton, but also to those who are trying to make an informed decision about Clinton’s experience and qualifications — an attempt that requires sifting sharp but reasoned attacks from dirt-digging and trolling.
Finally, while “Don’t be a hater, be a celebrator” is catchy, it suggests that we should celebrate everything, including those causes, ideologies, and people we find odious. I would prefer that hater be contrasted with lover, even if indifference is love’s true opposite. To be a lover is not simply to be enamored of another individual. It can mean to guide one’s life by what one loves. Doing so almost necessarily means expressing strong objections to people and ideologies that cause injury to what we love, be it justice, the planet, the game of football, or our children. Simplistic perhaps. But not hateful.
