The Inheritance of Enemies

A meditation on memory, loyalty, and the wounds we refuse to pass on.

It is a strange thing to be born with enemies.

Before a child has spoken his first word, before he has broken a promise or kept one, there may already be people whom he is expected to despise. He has never met them. They have never wronged him. Yet he may learn their names in the same years that he learns the names of his grandparents, and with almost as little opportunity to question why they belong in his life.

These are our people. Those are not.

This is what they did to us.

This is why you must never trust them.

Perhaps the story is true. Perhaps something terrible was done. A family driven from its home. A people humiliated. Someone murdered whose absence has never ceased to be felt. We should not begin by assuming that an inherited hatred was invented from nothing. There may be a real wound beneath it, and we do not become wise by telling the wounded that their pain is inconvenient.

But there is still a question to be asked.

What, precisely, are we asking the child to inherit?

The knowledge of what happened? The duty to recognise it should it happen again? The courage to resist it?

Or the obligation to find someone upon whom the pain may be spent?

These are not the same inheritance.

People are usually people wherever we find them. They eat, worry, work, quarrel, and hope. A man beneath another flag may lie awake wondering whether he has been a good husband. His wife may worry about their son. Somewhere in their home there may be a chair that nobody has quite become accustomed to seeing empty.

None of this makes them good people by itself. A cruel man may love his children. A person capable of tenderness at home may still support terrible things beyond it. Our common humanity does not acquit us of our conduct.

But neither does a foreign name convict us.

I may have good reason to oppose a government, resist an ideology, or defend myself against another man. Some differences matter greatly. There are things I should not tolerate merely because someone has called them a tradition, and there are forms of peace that amount to little more than the wounded being instructed to remain quiet.

I need not surrender my judgement in order to recognise another person’s humanity.

I must, however, exercise it.

Who has done what? Who is continuing the wrong? What must be prevented, and what must be put right?

These questions require more work than hatred does. Hatred is satisfied much sooner. It hears a name, recognises an accent, sees a flag, and considers the matter settled.

I should be reluctant to call that judgement.

History does not become harmless merely because it becomes old.

The people who committed a wrong may be dead while the consequences remain very much alive. A family may still be without its home. A community may still live beneath arrangements imposed upon it. An advantage may pass down one line of descendants while the cost of providing it passes down another.

It would be convenient for the comfortable to declare that everyone must now forget.

Convenience is not justice.

To refuse inherited hatred is not to refuse the work of repair. Nor does the absence of personal guilt mean that I can have no present responsibility. If I knowingly preserve an injustice because it benefits me, I am no longer merely the descendant of someone who did wrong. I am making a choice of my own.

But that is what must be judged: the choice, the conduct, the wrong that continues.

Not the blood.

A man does not become guilty of his grandfather’s crime merely by being born. And an innocent child does not need my forgiveness for something he never did.

There is nothing in him for me to forgive.

I do not dishonour my fathers if I do not teach my children to hate the children of my fathers’ enemies.

I may preserve their names. I may tell the truth about what they endured. I may honour their courage, mourn what was taken from them, and defend whatever worthy thing they struggled to preserve.

None of this requires me to appoint an enemy for a child who has not yet learned what enmity means.

My father’s suffering deserves to be understood. It does not follow that every conclusion he drew from that suffering deserves to govern the lives of people he never met.

He was a man.

He may have been a brave man. A loving man. A man who endured things that I can scarcely imagine. But neither courage nor suffering makes a person incapable of error.

I can love him without pretending otherwise.

Indeed, what sort of honour requires me to cease thinking? If I must preserve a mistake because it was his mistake, then I am not merely remembering my father. I am making him an authority from whom no appeal is permitted.

I would not claim such authority over my own children.

Why should I grant it to the dead?

There is a harder question still.

Suppose my father really would have wanted his grandchildren to die fighting the grandchildren of his enemies. Not because those grandchildren posed a present threat. Not because something precious could be preserved in no other way. But because the quarrel must continue, and peace would offend the memory of what he suffered.

Was that the wish of a good father?

I do not think it was.

Whatever good there may have been in him, in that wish he placed the survival of his hatred above the lives of his descendants. He asked the living to keep his wound open, and offered their children as the means of doing so.

I need not condemn his whole life to refuse that demand.

Perhaps grief had narrowed his world until he could no longer imagine anything beyond the struggle. Perhaps he had lost so much that peace seemed like an agreement that the loss had not mattered. I can try to understand this. I can feel compassion for the man who could no longer distinguish an end to the fighting from a betrayal of the dead.

But understanding the demand does not oblige me to obey it.

There are things worth risking our lives to defend. The immortality of a family’s hatred is not one of them.

If our fathers fought so that we might live, then perhaps living well is not a poor tribute. Perhaps a grandchild growing old in safety is a better monument than another name cut into stone.

And if a father would reject that monument because it did not contain enough suffering, then his descendants may need to be wiser than his pain allowed him to be.

This judgement must also turn towards me.

It would be easy to write sternly about the hatreds of dead men while treating my own anger as something sacred. I, too, may be wronged. I, too, may find that a grievance becomes familiar, then important, then difficult to distinguish from the person I believe myself to be.

I may begin by wanting someone to understand what happened.

Later, I may want them to remain angry about it.

Eventually, their happiness may begin to feel like evidence that they have forgotten.

At that point, I should ask what I am doing to the people I claim to love.

Do I want them to understand my pain, or do I require them to reproduce it? Must they dislike everyone I dislike? Must they refuse a friendship because I could not have imagined it? If they find a way to live without carrying my bitterness, will I be glad for them, or will I accuse them of disloyalty?

I should answer carefully.

Love cannot mean that the people who come after me must remain no freer than I was.

The Clay Man will endeavour to make it such that the pain which entered him from his ancestors stops at him, and is not handed down.

This does not mean that he will forget it. Nor does it mean that he can make himself untouched by what has already touched him.

The clay bears impressions.

He may hear an old name and feel anger before he has had time to examine it. He may discover his father’s suspicion in his own voice. Something said casually at the table may reveal that a judgement he thought was his own had been placed in him long before he was old enough to make it.

The discovery is not pleasant.

But it gives him something to work with.

He can ask whether the warning is still true. Whether the person before him has actually earned his distrust. Whether he is protecting his children from danger, or protecting an old hatred from the possibility that they might question it.

He may not succeed at once. He may speak unfairly and need to correct himself. He may need help carrying what he has received. Strength does not require that every difficult thing be done alone.

His children may see his pain.

That is not the same as being instructed to avenge it.

He can tell them, “This happened, and it hurt us,” without adding, “And therefore these people must hurt as well.”

That distinction may appear small when written on a page. It is not small in the life of a child.

There is work here that can be done in ordinary moments.

When I tell the old story, I can name the people who committed the wrong rather than quietly enlarging the accusation to include everyone who resembles them. I can preserve the facts without decorating them to make the enemy more hateful. If someone from the other side acted with courage or mercy, I can tell that part too.

Their goodness does not diminish our suffering.

It may make the story less convenient. That is a reason to examine the convenience, not to remove the goodness.

And when a child asks why he must hate someone he has never met, I can resist the temptation to punish him for asking a sensible question.

Perhaps he has not yet learned something important about the world.

Perhaps I have carried something too long.

Both possibilities deserve consideration.

I can teach him to love his people without teaching him that other people are beneath him. I can teach him to defend himself without making cruelty a proof of courage. I can give him his history without presenting it as a set of instructions for whom he must one day injure.

He will have difficulties of his own. Life is unlikely to forget to provide them.

I need not manufacture additional ones from the unfinished quarrels of the dead.

There may be no cooperation from the other side.

They may continue to hate us. They may refuse to acknowledge what happened. The apology may never arrive. There may be no reconciliation, no shared account of the past, and no satisfying moment in which everyone agrees that the old wrong has finally been understood.

I cannot make the moral education of my children dependent upon that moment.

I must still protect them from genuine danger. I must still oppose those who would harm them. But the innocence of another person’s child does not depend upon his father first becoming reasonable.

Nor does my duty to remain just disappear because someone else has neglected his.

This is part of the unfairness of being wronged. The injury may arrive without our consent, and still leave us with work to do. We may have to struggle against something we did not choose, simply to avoid passing it to someone who did not choose it either.

The unfairness is real.

So is the child.

I should not become so absorbed in protesting the first that I cease to see the second.

We stand between those who came before us and those who will come after.

There is much worth carrying across that distance. Language. Memory. Craft. Courage. The stories that tell us how our people endured. The tenderness that survived in them despite everything that might have extinguished it.

We need not burn the whole inheritance because part of it is poisoned.

But neither must we drink the poison to prove that we belong.

Let my children know where they came from. Let them understand what was suffered, what was defended, and what remains to be made right. Let them inherit the capacity to recognise an enemy when one truly stands before them.

And let them retain the freedom to recognise when one does not.

If they can make a friend where I could only see a stranger, may I have the sense not to call that a betrayal. If they can lay down a quarrel that I could not, may I be glad that something in our family has become less burdened. If they must correct me, may I leave them the courage to do so.

I owe my fathers remembrance.

I do not owe their hatred immortality.

Let my children be my descendants, not my revenge.

The sins of the father must not be laid upon the shoulders of the son.

Peccata patris umeris filii non sunt imponenda.

— Dr. Stephen D. Jones