Why We Hate: Understanding the Roots of Human Conflict

Abstract

In the Preface to Why We Hate, its author, the prolific philosopher of biology Michael Ruse, notes that there is a paradox that has never left him since he was a child raised as a Quaker in the 1940s: If we are social beings, how can we be so hateful to each other? The goal of his book is to put an end to this paradox with the help of discoveries and reinterpretations from the past two decades that show why ‘despite the efforts of conservative politicians, hatred is not the inevitable fate of humankind’ (p. 259). Ruse argues that sociability is our essence as shaped by Darwinian selection, while hatred and its perfidious effects are primarily produced by psychological maladaptations—simply put, hatred emerges from the ‘stone age mind’ housed in our ‘modern skulls’. Thus, sociability and hatred are not the two faces of a human nature wrongly believed to be Janus-like. Sociability and hatred do not need to coexist. And, for Ruse, there was a time—the pre-agricultural time—in which they did not.