Word: oslo
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Hate is difficult to discuss. The mind resists it. The subject is amorphous, disorderly, malignant. Presiding over the Oslo conference, Elie Wiesel controlled a red light on the podium that he used to warn a speaker when his time was up (even Carter got red-lighted). It was as if hatred is intellectually and morally such a dangerous, unmanageable mess, such a monster, that Wiesel, the kindest of men, had to police the dialogue like an anxious warden. He said he had nightmares about the red light...
...delegates in Oslo were virtue's choir, of course, and they sang beautifully. If there was a hater among them, he kept his secret and did not stain the refulgence. Virtually the only controversy organized itself in a division between objectivists and subjectivists. The subjectivists (poets and moralists) looked for the seeds of hatred within the human heart. The objectivists (economists, historians, lawyers) dismissed such vaporings and located the causes of hatred in the conditions of peoples' lives. "Hard, visible circumstance defines reality," said John Kenneth Galbraith. In the past 45 years, he pointed out, no one has been killed...
What is the antidote? Education. Law. Justice. Charity. Love. I came at last to think that the subject in Oslo was not exactly hate, but on the dark side, evil, and on the other, hope. Havel said he is neither an optimist nor a pessimist: "I just carry hope in my heart. Hope is not a feeling of certainty, that everything ends well. Hope is just a feeling that life and work have a meaning." Hope is the thing with feathers. Or the thing in diapers...
...trajectory from Oslo ended a day or so later in the New York City subway station where a tourist was murdered. The sociopaths who killed him did not hate him. Not at all. They wanted money to go dancing at Roseland. That blank, murderous absence of hate holds terrors that did not come up in Oslo...
Elie Wiesel assembled an astonishing collection of political, intellectual and moral leaders in Oslo to talk about hate. The subject remains an ugly mystery...