#290: On Criticism vs. Hate

If you care deeply about issues, about people, you will come to a point frequently where your frustration just boils up. You see something that you perceive as unjust, or you see something that collides with your values. You see something that you think collides with what humanity should be about, what we all should be about.

I understand that feeling. We all understand that feeling, I would assume. Unless you’re a psychopath, you understand that feeling.

So, how do we prevent our feelings from boiling over and becoming something unproductive or even dangerous?

Freedom and Responsibility

If you live in a free society, you have every right to speak your opinion — and hopefully you live in a free society, and hopefully your society will remain free.

This freedom, though, gives you responsibility. I’m not saying you should limit your speech, but you should think of your speech as a tool. It is a tool to influence society. It is a tool that is part of what political theorists call the public sphere.

The public sphere used to be limited to the elites — those who could read or write, those who had public influence. And so if you know anything about theory, you will have heard the name Habermas. He talks about the transformation of the public sphere.

You being here listening to someone on YouTube, me being on YouTube — this is an attempt to create a new public sphere. But public spheres can be powerful, can also be irrelevant, depending on how much influence they have. But they are all part of us exercising our democratic duty as citizens, as human beings, to make society better.

The Nature of Criticism

Part of that is criticism. When we see something we don’t like, when we see something that shouldn’t be happening, it is our right and our duty to criticize.

We may be selective in what we criticize because we as individuals don’t always care about all issues. And even if we do, we may not always have the facts either. Sometimes it’s okay to not say anything because issues are complicated.

But across all issues, no matter how complex they are, there’s one continuous element of thinking that we should all probably practice. And this is the differentiation between criticism and hate.

Criticism has to be precise. Criticism has to directly point to an issue. And you can also criticize without coming up with a solution. Sometimes people dismiss criticism by saying, “Well, what would you do?” Well, you know, sometimes we need people recognizing there’s a problem without automatically having the solution. These are two different skill sets.

So if I find something to be wrong and I criticize something, then I don’t necessarily have the responsibility to also come with a solution. However, my criticism should probably be framed in a way that allows for a solution, that doesn’t make the issue worse.

Concrete Examples

Russia and Ukraine

So now let’s stop the generalities and go into concreteness.

I frequently criticize Russian politics towards Ukraine, the Russian attack against Ukraine, which can be considered as having genocidal components. But my criticism is aimed mainly at Vladimir Putin, the people he works with, and those parts of Russian society that enable this kind of war — those parts of Russian society and decision-making that are actively involved in this outrageous activity.

I do believe that ordinary Russians also have a duty to speak out. But I also, having grown up in Soviet communism in East Germany, I know how it feels to live in a completely controlling environment and under a regime of fear, under a totalitarian government, which is what Russia is becoming or has already become.

You have a duty to speak out, but you also have the right to protect yourself and others. And oftentimes dictatorial regimes don’t come necessarily for you only, but for your family. So this is where it becomes even more critical. They may threaten you. You may say, “Well, I’ll take this risk,” but they will also threaten your family. Can you take the risk for those people? No.

So, if ordinary Russians are fearful and don’t speak out and just hide behind, “Oh, I’m not political” — I know all these excuses. This means you’re too afraid to say something because the regime has created a situation where any criticism of it would endanger yourself and your loved ones.

And there is a point at which you as a human being have a right to say, “I’m out of this.” You don’t have a right to bow out when, after Putin falls — which he will — when you can bow out of restructuring your society. You will have to take some sort of responsibility, even without being personally guilty. Now there’s this difference between citizen or civic responsibility without personal guilt.

So it’s okay to criticize what the Russian government is doing. To then also demonize all Russians or all of Russian culture? That’s wrong. That’s overstepping. That is too much. You can say there are parts within Russian culture that may have been hyper-nationalist, that may have promoted this behavior, but that’s group-level thinking that all cultures share.

You can be a German nationalist without becoming a Nazi. You can care deeply about your country without saying it should dominate the entire world, it should eliminate everybody who is not German. So this distinction is important — again, this precision.

Israel and Palestine

Another example: On October 7th, Hamas brutally attacked Israel, and Israel continues to respond to this attack, trying to defeat Hamas.

Is Israel doing everything right? No. If you look at Israeli public opinion, many Israelis don’t think so. And those are people who know what’s going on.

If you feel that the Israeli government is doing things they shouldn’t be doing, then that is a perfectly legitimate position to take — a position shared with many people around the world.

If you delegitimize Israel’s very existence, that is going a step too far. Israel is defending itself against an attack. And Israel is the traditional homeland of the Jewish people. They’ve been expelled from everywhere else, even before the foundation of the state of Israel.

The position that Israel has a right to exist, that Israel is a legitimate homeland of the Jewish people, is called Zionism. That’s all it means.

The position that all Jews are the problem, all Jews are to blame for what is happening right now, and that Zionists are the problem — that is called antisemitism.

If your criticism of Israeli politics right now leads you to an anti-Zionist position, leads you to blame ordinary people who are not even Israeli citizens, who may just be Jewish people living outside of Israel — if you lay blame on Jewish people in general or people supporting the existence of the state of Israel, then this is called antisemitism. It’s the oldest documented form of hatred towards a group of people.

Hamas committed the atrocities back then. Hamas is still responsible for a lot of suffering in Gaza. Hamas leaders, those who survive, are still holding hostages, and they’re certainly doing things to make the situation escalate further, to tarnish Israel’s reputation. Now, Israel is also doing its part to contribute to that.

Hamas has had full control over Gaza after Israel de-occupied it. Gaza was no longer occupied. And by the way, there are two neighbors to Gaza: Israel and Egypt. People tend to not understand that.

But even though Hamas dominates or dominated Gaza doesn’t mean that everybody in Gaza is a Hamas supporter. Hamas also doesn’t speak for all Palestinians and certainly doesn’t speak for all of Islam.

So if your criticism of Hamas — which is in itself a successor of the Nazi-adjacent Muslim Brotherhood (read up on it — the Mufti of Jerusalem back then trying to be friends with Hitler, wanting to continue the Holocaust in the Middle East; that’s where Hamas comes from) — but this doesn’t mean they speak for all of Palestine. And whatever Islam Hamas is claiming to speak for doesn’t speak for all of Islam either.

I’ve seen some people who, in their protectiveness over what Israel feels they have to do, now lash out against all of Islam. I am not a fan of radical religious fundamentalism. And we need to distinguish between Islam and extremist variants of Islam, sometimes called Islamic fascism or Islamofascism — whatever ISIS is doing or the Taliban are doing — just as we need to distinguish between Christianity and Christian extremism.

The Importance of Precision

Why do we need to distinguish? We need to counter the narrative that only the extremist version, the fundamentalist, or however you may call it — that the most extreme versions of an idea, of a religion, of a nation, of something is the truest form. That is not true.

There’s a tendency in human thinking to think you have this idea, and if you just execute this to the fullest, most literal, most all-encompassing, then it must be the truest representation of that idea. But this isn’t true.

We need to, in our criticism, be precise, and we cannot be led astray by the extremists.

Do we support democracy always? What form of democracy? There are variants of democracy, like in ancient Athens or classical Athens rather, where there was no separation of powers or hardly anything, and it didn’t work. So when we say we support democracy, we need to be precise about what we say.

Do we support capitalism? What do we define as capitalism? Supply and demand, accepting that this is kind of a law of nature — some people call that already capitalism. But I would be precise in my criticism. Maybe what we are talking about when we criticize capitalism, we criticize extreme focus on short-term maximization of stockholder interests, of shareholder interests. There’s a different form of capitalism than if you have a company that maximizes its own existence over time, which means you have to honor your customers, you make sure your products are safe and good to use, and stuff like that.

So your criticism of capitalism may be a criticism of short-term materialist gain and how that is destroying in many ways communities and capitalism itself.

Conclusion

So there are plenty of examples I’ve just given. There could be many more. But we just need to be mindful of the dividing line between criticism and hatred.

And if we sacrifice precision for an all-out attack against a group of people or ideas or religions or anything, and assume everybody in that other group is extreme, and the truest representation of an idea is the most extreme reading of that idea, then we make common cause with those extremists, with those extreme versions. And then we don’t honestly represent the complexity and diversity of human nature, of human beings.

No one is just one thing. No one should be punished for who they are. No one should be punished for things that are dear to them, unless they contribute to hurting others and limit the rights of others.

Now, there’s probably more to be said about all of this, but I think that gets to the gist of it.

[This was originally posted to YouTube as a video. Following is a slightly abbreviated transcript, preserving the oral style of the video.]