The Misanthrope's Corner.(William Hazlitt's essay "On the Pleasure of Hating")(Brief Article)(Column)

I haven't checked what are laughably called college curricula lately, but it's a sure bet that English departments, if they still exist, do not require students to read the works of William Hazlitt. Not only is he white, male, and dead, but he wrote an essay that could prove fatal to the American balancing act our colleges are sworn to uphold. It's called "On the Pleasure of Hating."

Hazlitt (1778-1830) was an intense, eternally irritable intellectual who lived in an age that clashed with his sour temperament. The early 19th century was sunk in the tender emotions of the Romantic era. Writers like Wordsworth had come to regret their earlier enthusiasm for the French Revolution ("Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive . . .") and its violence. Reaction set in, and ideology was replaced by a gauzy veneration of nature and beauty, love and nostalgia, as well as a major switch in the body fluid of record: Blood was out; tears were in.

It was enough to make a cultural commentator gag, and Hazlitt did just that. He decided that his contemporaries on the British literary scene were not mean enough, and, like the Michael Douglas character in Wall Street who declared that greed is good, he gave the nod to hatred.

"Without something to hate," he wrote in his notorious essay, "we should lose the very spring of thought and action." By this yardstick, Americans have already passed our use-by date, because we keep draining the spring. Show us a perfectly good, satisfying hatred and we immediately shoot it down.

Should we hate Middle Eastern terrorists? No, because if we allow ourselves to hate them we might start hating people who look like them, and then people who look something like them, and before you know it, we will be taken over by blue-eyed, blond-haired Aryan Supermen who hate everybody.

Should we hate pedophile priests? No, because that might activate dormant hatred of Catholics, which might revive Know-Nothingism, which might end in an auto-da-fe, which might set a precedent for hatred of other religions, which might in turn lead to hatred of Islam, which would make it okay to hate Middle Eastern terrorists. This is America's most popular board game; every throw of the dice takes you back to square one.

What about hating John Walker Lindh? Hating traitors has a long and honorable history, but whenever a member of a traditionally hate-able category comes along we stick an "alleged" in front of him; it covers him from head to foot like those ancient Greek shields used in phalanx formations, so that anyone who hates him before he is proven guilty is accused of hating Our Way of Life. If you think you can hate him after he's been proven guilty, guess again: Hating after "closure" time makes you a hate-aholic.