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These days hate has roughly the same role in popular culture that original sin has in traditional Christian theology. If you want to slap the worst imaginable label on an organization, you call it a hate group. If you want to push a category of discourse straight into the realm of the utterly unacceptable, you call it hate speech. If you’re speaking in public and you want to be sure that everyone in the crowd will beam approval at you, all you have to do is denounce hate.

At the far end of this sort of rhetoric, you get the meretricious slogan used by Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful presidential campaign last year: LOVE TRUMPS HATE. I hope that none of my readers are under the illusion that Clinton’s partisans were primarily motivated by love, except in the sense of Clinton’s love for power and the Democrats’ love for the privileges and payouts they could expect from four more years of control of the White House; and of course Trump and the Republicans were head over heels in love with the same things. The fact that Clinton’s marketing flacks and focus groups thought that the slogan just quoted would have an impact on the election, though, shows just how pervasive the assumption I’m discussing has become in our culture.

what happens when people decide that some common human emotion is evil and harmful and wrong, and decide that the way to make a better world is to get rid of it?

The example I have in mind is the attitude, prevalent in the English-speaking world from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, that sex was the root of all evil.

I know that comparing current attitudes toward hate with Victorian attitudes toward sex will inspire instant pushback from a good many of my readers. After all, sexual desire is natural and normal and healthy, while hate is evil and harmful and wrong, right? Here again, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that people a century and a quarter ago—most likely including your ancestors, dear reader, if they happened to live in the English-speaking world—saw things the other way around. To them, hate was an ordinary emotion that most people had under certain circumstances, but sexual desire was beyond the pale: beastly, horrid, filthy, and so on through an impressive litany of unpleasant adjectives.

Make something forbidden and you make it desirable. Take a normal human emotional state, one that everyone experiences, and make it forbidden, and you guarantee that the desire to violate the taboo will take on overwhelming power. That’s why, after spending their days subject to the pervasive tone policing of contemporary life, in which every utterance gets scrutinized for the least trace of anything that anyone anywhere could conceivably interpret as hateful, so many people in today’s world don internet aliases and go to online forums where they can blurt out absolutely anything

The opposite of one bad idea, after all, is usually another bad idea; the fact that dying of thirst is bad for you doesn’t make drowning good for you; whether we’re talking about sex or anything else, there’s a space somewhere between “not enough” and “too much,” between pathological repression and equally pathological expression, that’s considerably healthier than either of the extremes. I’m going to risk causing my more sensitive readers to clutch their smelling salts and faint on the nearest sofa, in true Victorian style, by suggesting that the same thing’s true of hate.

Hate is like sex; there are certain times, places, and contexts where it’s appropriate, but there are many, many others where it’s not. You can recognize its place in life without having to act it out on every occasion—and in fact, the more conscious you are of its place in life, the more completely you acknowledge it and give it its due, the less likely you are to get blindsided by it. That’s true of sex, and it’s true of hate: what you refuse to acknowledge controls you; what you acknowledge, you can learn to control.

the blind faith that goodness requires amputation is so unquestioned in our time.

Human beings are never going to be perfect, not if perfection means the amputation of some part of human experience, whether the limb that’s being hacked off is our sexual instincts, our aggressive instincts, or any other part of who and what we are.

We can accept our sexuality, whatever that happens to be, and weave it into the pattern of our individual lives and our relationships with other people in ways that uphold the values we cherish and yield as much joy and as little unnecessary pain for as many people as possible. That doesn’t mean always acting out our desires—in some cases, it can mean never acting them out at all

There comes a frustration when you know you're a unique human being who knows some things about the world, but somehow the writing isn't showing that. That's the most maddening thing. That’s the gateway to style, really—to say, "I'm going to accept all those things about me that I normally deny." The way to do that is to see when the prose lights up. If you're writing in a certain mode and the prose is boring, that means you're keeping yourself out of it somehow, whereas when the prose lights up and even you can't help but read your own prose, that means you're letting yourself in.

The working world expects so much of your soul. That’s where our lives are taking place, actually, in the pressure cooker that work makes on our grace.

"I want you to recreate your reading experience. When did you start to love or hate this piece of writing? Go down to the phrase level.” That's actually how it works. If you pick up a book in a bookstore, a book that's gotten a lot of great reviews, written by someone who's one year younger than you, god forbid—you read it, and instantly you're opining about it. That's a really valuable thing for a young writer: what do you really love about prose, and what do you hate about it? It’s maybe the one part of our lives where we get to be so opinionated without being obnoxious.

We have crazily refined micro-opinions about things. That, I think, is the hidden superpower. The pathway to the uniqueness we're talking about is turning down your inner nice guy who’s always trying to like everything. Turn that down, and when you read a bit of prose, watch that little needle flicker. That's where a person's uniqueness lies. If you then make a career of radically honoring those little preferences with every sentence, pretty soon the whole book has your stamp on it, which is ultimately what we're looking for. When I pick up your book, I want you to be there. I want you specifically to be there. And the way you get yourself in there is by those 10,000 micro-choices.

Science and technology are understood to be great because they get you a job, but this very essential human thing of asking, "What are we doing here, and how should I behave?"—that has somehow become considered a bit of an indulgence. And it isn't.

These Russians remind us that a really good story is eternal. That Tolstoy story in the book, “Master and Man,” is about power dynamics. You could easily make that story a commentary about racism, because whatever it is that's actually behind racism, which is power, is totally opened up in that story. I've been trying to think that whatever the pandemic is "teaching" me will come out eventually. It'll come out in some form. It won't be a story about face masks, but somehow it'll be there.

When any person walks into a grocery store, they're basically writing a novel. They see a woman with two little kids, and they make a story up about her, even if they don't realize it. It's called projection. A novel or a short story is not something foreign to us. We do it all the time. We generalize without very much information, and we make assumptions about the world, about, "This is how we stay alive." If we're good at it, we not only stay alive, but we stay alive compassionately, and we become better at being patient with other people. By imagining their circumstances, we make a more spacious universe. That's a skill you have to practice.

if we practice the opposite of it, which I’d argue we practice every time we're on social media about politics—then what we're doing is short-circuiting the process of generous projection. We're projecting hateful caricatures of each other. Obviously that has an effect on our neurology. It makes us more anxious, more nervous, more accusatory, quicker to act.

Now, that moment where I felt drawn to her was every bit as real as the moment where I felt aversion to her. That's a short story. That energy is short-story energy, which is, “I thought I knew her, and I thought I knew what I thought of her. But just by abiding there a little bit, I found out that I was capable of a little bit more.” That's essentially what reading is. It's not a complete antidote, but I think we all could all stand a little more of it. Sometimes you have to act. Sometimes you have to arrest people who go into the Capitol. That's a no-brainer. But even in that process, if you have some fellow feeling for them, you're going to do a better job.

The game is that every time we create a new technology, we’re creating new possibilities, new choices that didn’t exist before. Those choices themselves—even the choice to do harm—are a good, they’re a plus.

We want an economy that’s growing in the second sense: unlimited betterment, unlimited increase in wisdom, and complexity, and choices. I don’t see any limit there. We don’t want an economy that’s just getting fatter and fatter, and bigger and bigger, in terms of its size. Can we imagine such a system? That’s hard, but I don’t think it’s impossible.