In Judaism, we have a concept called free-floating hatred. That human beings are prone to project outwards with blame. When they’ve grown up in societies where “the other” is somehow bad and at fault for your suffering, they will go down that lane, because it is a natural human fault. And that’s, I think, why it’s so important to really understand oneself.
— Abby Layton
Abby Layton is one of the many activists who repeatedly bear witness in It Did Happen Here: An Antifascist People’s History. [1]That book, put together by Moe Bowstern, Mic Crenshaw, Alec Dunn, Celina Flores, Julie Perini, and Erin Yanke, consists of testimony from many individuals, including those authors themselves, to the resistance that sprang up against fascist terrorism in Portland, Oregon, during the 1980s and 1990s. During that time, Layton was a member of The Coalition for Human Dignity, a national organization that began elsewhere but participated in the antifascist Portland resistance, as did various other organizations that began elsewhere, including SHARP, “Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice,” whose logo is just below.
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Thoughtfully reading Abby Layton’s lines will give one pause to think. Various questions will arise in the mind of any thoughtful, patient reader. For one thing, one might well ask oneself whence such “free-floating hatred” as Layton mentions in her first line stems. One might also ask whether such hatred always or predomi-nantly involves, as her second line suggests, casting blame and, if it does, whether such blame is inevitably projected outward — that is, upon “others.”
After all, it is far from uncommon to place blame for one’s suffering upon oneself, rather than upon others. We may, to be sure, be all too quick to point the finger of blame when we experience suffering, but often that finger is one we clearly point toward ourselves, saying that the suffering was really “our own fault.” For example, if I suffer a car accident because I am weaving in and out of lanes trying to go faster than the general flow of traffic, and I end up hitting or being hit by some other car in the process, it would not be unusual for me to blame myself, if blame I must, instead of — or at least more than — the other drivers.
Furthermore, whichever way the finger of blame is pointed, whether at others or back at oneself, is the blaming itself a virtue? Or is it a vice? If the latter, then who or what is to blame for our vicious blaming itself?
At any rate, it certainly is important and rewarding to read Layton’s remarks meditatively. One should mull over every line till one has extracted all the juice from it, like a cow chewing its cud.
Only that way of reading anything truly worth reading is itself actually praiseworthy. Every other way of reading is blameworthy.
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Listening not to me but to the Word, it is wise to acknowledge that all is one. — Heraclitus[2]
There is indeed one way of blaming that is blameworthy, and another way of blaming that is praiseworthy. Listening not to me but to reason, we should refrain from placing blame in the first way but fully embrace placing it in the second way.
The blameworthy way of blaming is one that strikes back viciously against whatever has caused some upsetting occurrence. Such blameworthy blaming often just causes more damage in the process of casting blame.
In contrast, the praiseworthy way of blaming locates the problem. So doing, it points to the path one should take in attempting to rectify whatever is at issue.
If I have a traffic accident with another car, it need not be because I am driving recklessly, as in my example from the preceding section of this post. Neither I nor the other driver involved in the accident may be to blame. Instead, the accident may have been caused by an unexpected, not to be anticipated failure of the break-system in either my or the other driver’s vehicle. That break-system would then be to blame for the wreck.
However, that hardly means that I should take the jack-handle out of the trunk of my car and begin to hammer the malfunctioning break-system with it. Not only would that be stupid, but it could also even make things worse. Suppose, for example, that in doing such a stupid thing as hammering the break-system with the jack-handle, the handle at some point flew out of my hands and hit some innocent pedestrian who was unfortunate enough to be walking by at the time. If that were to happen, then I would certainly be to blame for it.
However, were I so to blame, it would also not be praiseworthy for the person I accidentally hit with my jack-handle to pick the handle up and strike me back with it. That would be at least as stupid than my hammering my car’s break-system with the jack-handle in the first place — and more vicious, to boot.
We should all do our best to shift away from any sort of such blameworthy blaming, and shift into praiseworthy blaming instead.
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What is to blame for us coming habitually “to project outwards” what Abby Layton’s Jewish tradition calls our “free-floating hatred.” If she is right to suggest that such projection is to be blamed on the fact that we have “grown up in societies where ‘the other’ is somehow bad and at fault for [our] suffering,” then what needs to be done is in one form or another to work to change — or to leave — that society, rather than just to bad-mouth it.
The same would still apply even in the very unlikely case that it is we ourselves who are to blame for such projections, or at least for succumbing to our society’s blameworthy traditions along such lines. Even if it is finally we ourselves who are to blame, what that means is that we should aim at changing ourselves, not beat ourselves up for being gullible. Such game-changing blaming, and it alone, would be praiseworthy blaming: just so should we blame, and not otherwise.
Note to readers: I shall continue pursuing the thoughts at issue in this post in my next post, to be called “Praiseworthy and Blameworthy Blaming,” set to go up this November 14.
[1]Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2023. My citation from Layton occurs on p. 55 of the book.
[2] My own freely reasoned translation of what I hear in Heraclitus’s remark.