The International Day for Countering Hate Speech (18 June) is very recent. It was first celebrated in 2022 in response to the recent spread of hateful language in politics and social life in many parts of the world. People have always used hostile and vituperative language, of course, in their homes and in public at football matches, in election campaigns, and in the street. But it has also met with disapproval in schools, in polite society and in public meetings. It has also often been made a criminal offence.
Those inhibitions and boundaries, however, have now been weakened. In society there is more tolerance of the spontaneous expression of feelings, even when they are hateful. In parliaments politicians are relentlessly hostile to one another. They often attack one another personally. In some sections of the print media, too, people are targeted and their views treated with contempt in repeated stories and comments. Most recently the social media have become a cauldron of hate in which people are boiled alive in words designed to destroy. An unguarded remark can be met with a wave of abuse, usually anonymous. Even people who are accused of using hate speech are its object as their critics try to cancel them.
That should lead us to ask what we should treasure in speech and why. It is not enough to curse the darkness. We should also light candles to honour courteous speech. St Augustine, a penetrating observer of human behaviour, once said as an aside, ‘Of course, the only reason we speak is to make one another better’. The remark sounds absurd – so often we don’t have that in mind at all when we speak. But on reflection we might see the truth in it. We do speak to make one another better informed, in better spirits, to better see the truth, to be better as persons and to help shape a better community. Speech is not simply about ourselves and what we want to say. It is about our relationship with others, and through them with our whole society.
Hate speech does not make the people it is directed against better. Nor does it make us better when we indulge in it. We may get something off our chest, but we also separate ourselves from people and from society. Even if we are anonymous in our hateful words we close ourselves off from people. We also hurt the target of our hatred. To be hated affects our self-confidence and our trust in others. It can be wounding even for people with long experience in public debate. It makes us suspicious and tempts us to draw away from other people. For young people it can be doubly destructive because it taps into their uncertainty about themselves and their tentativeness in building trusting and friendly relationships. It also weakens society because it tempts us to divide society into friends and enemies and to be suspicious of difference. We begin to test ideas by whether they agree with our own, not by whether they are trueful or false.
What can we do about hate talk? The best starting point is to hate the speech, but to be compassionate to the people who engage in it. It is not a sign of strength but of weakness. If we do this, we shall be ready to draw people to a better way.