Hatred, it seems, is the new currency of politics. So it might sound deliberately perverse to argue that love is at the heart of the problem. But there is a strong case to be made that the root cause of today’s toxic culture is love — and our two opposing understandings of it.

Back in 1930, the protestant Swedish theologian Anders Nygren wrote his highly influential Agape and Eros, proposing that these two terms represented contrasting and even contradictory expressions. Nygren suggested that Eros was an ego-centric and acquisitive kind of love, a love that puts the needs of the lover at the centre of the picture. Eros, he contended, is a spiritualised form of self-interest.

Agape, by contrast, is a love that shows no partiality. It is a love of humanity in general; irrespective of where people come from, what skin colour they have, how they make love, what religion they are. It is disinterested and impartial.

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So what’s wrong with this? A strong theological contrast to the view of Nygren can be found in the work of the Jewish theologian and philosopher Michael Wyschogrod — not someone at the forefront of the cultural zeitgeist perhaps, but bear with me. For Wyschogrod, all love, properly speaking, is the concrete love of one person for another. There is, he contends, no such thing as love in general. All love is partial and specific — it is Eros. (This, for instance, is why he thinks it is perfectly justifiable that the God of the Bible has a very special — indeed preferential — love for the Jewish people.)

Undifferentiated love, he writes, “does not meet the individual in his individuality, but sees him as a member of a species, whether that species be the working class, the poor, those created in the image of God, or whatnot… In the name of these abstractions men have committed the most heinous crimes against real, concrete, existing human beings.” Love, then, is intrinsically partial. For Agape lovers, love makes us all equal. For Eros lovers, it really doesn’t.

What does this mean in practice? Well, I have a very partial love of my children. I have their photo on my phone, rather than one of some random human. The love I have for them is highly specific. They are not avatars for some generalised love of humanity. They are absolutely not fungible, just as one dollar bill is exchangeable for any other.

So here is the opposition between Agape and Eros: Agape love believes that love proceeds from the general to the specific; Eros love believes that it proceeds from the specific to the general. Joy Division had it right: love will tear us apart.

Certainly both forms of love may struggle to reach out too far from their original expression: Agape loves the general category of human beings, but often finds it difficult to express its love of the singular, individual human life, worrying that too much investment in one specific person distorts its universal mission. It can be nervous of the passionate intensity generated by specific bonds.

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By contrast, Eros can all too easily become trapped in a domestic or nationalistic frame, failing to reach out beyond the narrowly specific. “Flag shaggers” is the derogatory phrase de jour; a recognition that love of country can have overly erotic, and thus overly partial, connotations. What us nationalists see as love, they see as hate.

But this charge of not being able to properly love is also what us Eros lovers think of Agape lovers: their love is not carnal enough, too abstract, lacking in passion. We are deeply divided by what we think of as love. It is Romanticism vs the Enlightenment endlessly replayed.

Consider, for example, the extreme Agapeism of someone like the philosopher Peter Singer and his argument about the moral claims that animals have over us:

“… the racist violates the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of members of his own race. Similarly, the speciesist allows the interests of his own species to override the greater interests of members of other species. The pattern is the same in each case.”

Singer believes that our moral lives should be guided by a generosity to life in general. In his utilitarian calculus, the interests of all human life — and indeed non-human — life has to be weighed on the basis of an equal consideration of interests, broadly determined as the capacity to feel pain and appreciate happiness. And Singer is interesting because he seeks to live his life quite rigorously by these standards.

I once, rather facetiously, asked Singer how he could justify buying Christmas presents for his children, given that such gifts are obviously an expression of his partiality. His answer, in effect, was that we are all fallen creatures. For the extreme Agapeist, Eros love is a kind of secular sin, albeit an understandable one. We seemed to exist on entirely different moral planets.

But while many of us instinctively fall into one of these categories, I wonder whether this way of describing contrasting approaches to our moral and political lives isn’t just the cause of so much hatred, but also contains the basis for a kind of natural sympathy. After all, the Eros lover knows that they must reach out further than their partiality; hence the oft-mentioned dictum that charity begins at home but doesn’t end there.

Likewise, even extreme Agapeists like Singer appreciate the call to love in the singular, even if they don’t quite know how to square it with their wider philosophy. Few would now subscribe to the Marxist desire to abolish the family — not because they believe in allegedly right-wing family values, but because the family, in all its Eros partiality, is still the place where many of us learn what love means.

We are, after all, more invested in other expressions of love than those which define our core political commitments. Radicals who want to love the whole world can still say “forsaking all others” at their marriages, without a feeling of contradiction. Similarly, when I shout En-ger-land enthusiastically at the telly, I can be expressing partiality without the presumption of absolute superiority.

Many Remainers can and do love their country. Leavers can and do love people beyond it. The human heart is often the root of political division. But it might also be the place where we best understand each other too.

A similar trick was pulled off five years ago with the launch of Stop Funding Hate. It seems such a reasonable demand, doesn’t it? Who wants to fund hate? Everyone is against “hate”, aren’t they? But of course, the detail lies in exactly how you define it.

In the case of Stop Funding Hate the answer is straightforward. For this group, “hate” is the existence of any media or publication which leans — or can be accused of leaning — anywhere to the right of the political centre. Since its founding the group has targeted a range of conservative-leaning papers and magazines. Its modus operandi is always the same: it identifies a conservative outlet full of “hate”, and then lobbies its advertisers to pull their cash — thus eliminating one of the major revenue streams of the free press.

There are, of course, a number of things wrong with this; the most obvious being its mistaken presumption that to advertise in a magazine or newspaper is to endorse everything contained within its pages. If this is a category error, then it is one that Stop Funding Hate has been very happy to revel in — for the simple reason that it allows them to pursue their deeply political, targeted agenda. It is also, incidentally, a game that anyone with sufficient time and venom can play.

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One could, for instance, set up a group called “Stop Funding Bigotry”, and target any company which advertises in a range of Left-wing papers. We could then pretend that all Left-wing papers are a source of bigotry and that advertising in them constitutes an endorsement of it. As I say, you could do that. But it would be a fairly maniacal way to behave, and inimical to the idea of tolerance or respect for a differing range of views that must exist in a free society.

But even by its own maniacal standards, Stop Funding Hate this week managed to excel itself. In the month running up to the launch of GB News, the group announced that it was planning to target every company that advertised on the channel. Indeed, Stop Funding Hate boasted in advance that it had engaged a crack team of researchers to find out who was advertising with GB News — presumably by tuning in and making a note of each advert during the commercial break.

Within days of the launch, their arduous work had clearly paid off. The group identified a number of advertisers who quickly folded under pressure. Among them was Ikea, which has since announced that it has “safeguards in place to prevent our advertising from appearing on platforms that are not in line with our humanistic values”.

What might those “humanist values” entail? We need only look to Ikea’s French wing for an answer; it has just been fined €1 million and its former CEO given a suspended two-year sentence for hiring private detectives to spy on the private lives of its employees.

Yet by talking about “safeguards” Ikea helped hand an additional victory to Stop Funding Hate. For such a term suggests that material on GB News is not merely “hateful” but also so dangerous as to require a type of safeguarding commonly associated with the language of child protection.

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Yesterday, bosses at Ikea seemed to wake up to the absurdity of such rhetoric; the furniture retailer acknowledged that it “is simply too soon to make an informed decision as to whether advertising there is in line with our advertising policy and brand guidelines”. It was, in effect, an apology without the apology — though encouraging all the same.

It is yet to be seen whether other businesses follow suit. But even if they do, it is crucial we remember the remarkable rapidity with which they caved in to Stop Funding Hate. It was not the first time and it won’t be the last.

And if the past week’s corporate capitulation has taught us anything, it’s that there’s really only one driving factor: Stop Funding Hate’s intention to put out of business not just media organisations that it disagrees with, but those which it fears it could disagree with in the future. There is a name for that: “totalitarian”. If you can’t cope with any dissent — and Stop Funding Hate have consistently shown that they can’t — then you disavow democracy and sacrifice the principles of a free society.

So what is to be done? One possible solution would be to play in the game Stop Funding Hate is showcasing. In that world, a small group of us would single out Stop Funding Hate, pointing out that it is a hate-group — because it hates the free press, among much else. We could then go a step further, and target any and every company that has ever cooperated with such a hateful group. We could lobby, petition and harass them, while stressing that Stop Funding Hate is racist, homophobic, sexist, misogynistic and much more. At this stage, facts or details needn’t matter, for the winds of righteousness would be beneath our wings.

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We might then add that, as a hate-group, Stop Funding Hate seems to be propelled by racism and sexism. Since the initial team who are presenting shows on GB News appears to be notably more ethnically diverse, and with a better gender balance than any competitor channel, we could say that there can really be only one reason why Stop Funding Hate is trying to rid them of their salaries. And that is a desire to return women to the drudgery of household chores and ethnic minorities to the era of Jim Crow laws.

Would these claims be outrageous? Certainly. Would they have any basis in fact? Only if you allow hysterics and catastrophists the right to decide that their interpretation of events is reality. But that is what Stop Funding Hate has been doing. It would be an irrational and blinkered approach — yet it is the logical extension of the world that this vicious hate group has chosen to instigate.

So I remember being surprised when, after falling out of touch, I found he had turned into a hardcore libertarian, of the requiring-driving-licences-is-infringing-my-freedom type. But people go through phases. I was sure it wouldn’t last.

Indeed, John’s views did change. He popped up on Twitter in around 2016, suddenly a huge fan (and emulator) of Milo Yiannopoulos and his flamboyant brand of Right-wing trolling. Grimly fascinated, I checked his page every so often, and over the years watched him become more and more extreme, until there was no further he could go. He was a slavish fan of Donald Trump, before getting disillusioned and attacking the President for “betraying” his supporters. Having previously flirted with the alt-Right, he went all the way, making and posting anti-Islam jokes, then anti-Semitic memes, then straight-up White Nationalist propaganda. Eventually, Twitter banned his account. He seems now to have disappeared (though could easily still be posting under an anonymous account).

John’s journey from milquetoast liberal to foaming-at-the-mouth Neo-Nazi genuinely disturbed me. His profile didn’t fit that of the stereotypical online troll: he wasn’t some asocial basement-dweller who couldn’t make it in the real world. He came to mind as I was reading a new book by Cardiff University’s Professor of Criminology, Matthew Williams. The subtitle of The Science of Hate is “how prejudice becomes hate and what we can do to stop it”. Was there something inherent to John’s brain or psyche that made him a prime candidate for the slide into extremism? Or would the kind of internet radicalisation he clearly received have the same effect on any of us?

After describing his own awful experience of being assaulted by homophobic thugs in London, Williams presents other horrific hate crimes, such as the 2016 stabbing attack at a disability care home in Japan which left 19 dead and many more injured (the perpetrator faces the death penalty). He then digs into the research from psychology, neuroscience, and elsewhere to try to explain the fear-anger-hate-suffering conveyor belt.

The trouble is, a lot of that research just isn’t very good. Although he is at times sceptical of results from neuroscience — the brain is an absurdly complex organ and our best attempts to understand it are as yet pretty primitive — Williams lets his guard down for a whole host of dodgy-looking or now-debunked studies. We hear, for instance, about a study where white people’s brain “fear centres” lit up in a scanner when they were looking at a black person’s face — but only while they were listening to N.W.A. and not Slipknot. This is a silly study for several reasons, not least that it had a mere 23 participants and has never been replicated.

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We also hear about the “Macbeth Effect”, where people made to remember one of their past immoral deeds were more likely to think of cleaning-related words on a verbal test and were more likely to wash their hands as they left the lab (just as the eponymous queen washed out the damned spot). It hasn’t held up well in follow-up research, and might not really exist — but you wouldn’t know that from Williams’s treatment of it.

And we hear, similarly uncritically, about the Implicit Association Test, which is widely used to identify unconscious biases in the lab and at work. Williams informs us that people’s culturally-shaped automatic preferences for one race or another on this computer-based test can predict prejudiced behaviour (which might include, he says, voting for McCain rather than Obama in 2008). But a review of all the data from 2019 showed that changing people’s implicit attitudes appears to have little-to-no overall effect on their explicit views or behaviours.

And so on. Williams does cover some better studies on prejudice and hate, but The Science of Hate — and perhaps by extension, the science of hate — is shot through with veins of low-quality, unconvincing research. If so many of our attempts to apply scientific methods to understand prejudice fail so badly — and yet are still written up by one of the UK’s foremost authorities on hate as if they explain a great deal about our behaviour — we’re in trouble.

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In the past year, we’ve seen with greater clarity than ever before that we can’t always rely on published scientific research. The problem is not confined to medical studies, like those of Covid-19. The patchwork of highly-variable studies cited by Williams reminds us that, wherever we turn, scientific literature fails to provide us with a sure footing.

This is partly a result of the perverse incentives that pervade science: the pressure that so many scientists feel to publish more and more research, with flashier and flashier results, regardless of how solid or robust that research is. Williams could’ve shown a few more doubts about the studies he cites, but the problem goes beyond him: we should be able to rely on the contents of the scientific literature to help us understand the big questions — it has, after all, been through the peer-review filter. But alas, peer-review fails so often that it’s no longer a reliable signal of quality — if it ever was one.

Interestingly, by the end of his book, Williams appears, at least partially, to agree. “There is no getting away from the reality”, he writes, “that predicting the behaviour of individuals is an imprecise science, full of known unknowns, and unknown unknowns”. Quite. But he then assures us that in the book he’s relying on solid, “state-of-the-art” science — a statement that, given the studies I mentioned above, rings rather hollow.

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Having given those caveats, Williams goes on to offer advice on how we might prevent and deal with hate before it gets out of hand. One of the more specific ideas is based on so-called “Terror Management Theory”, a concept from psychology stating that reminders of mortality will tend to make people want to defend their worldview — and maybe lash out at those who are different. On this basis, Williams suggests that to reduce hate we should educate children to better cope with death. But (you guessed it), Terror Management Theory has come under serious fire in recent years when large-scale attempts to replicate its basic tenets failed.

So much for that. What about Williams’s other solutions? They include: questioning our instinctive, stereotyped thoughts about other people; putting ourselves in other people’s shoes; bursting our filter bubbles; and always reporting incidents of hate that we encounter. These are good ideas. They’re also common sense. A scientific study is hardly going to conclude that reinforcing our stereotypes is the best way to reduce prejudice. But, as Williams notes, most of these solutions will only work on “suitably motivated people”. Try telling the aforementioned John to put himself in the shoes of the Muslims he’s berating online. Try telling him to emerge from his filter bubble when he believes that a worldwide Jewish conspiracy controls the internet.

Of course, a list of common-sense ideas for dealing with hate doesn’t hurt, but one does worry that the “scientific” framing ultimately devalues the science itself. If you were always going to come up with those same recommendations, but pretend (or convince yourself) that you arrived at them through scientific investigation, it raises some fairly serious questions about the point of all that research. It risks reducing science to a mere prop: something that can be used to buttress pre-existing beliefs and commitments, but which you’d never really think of using to question them. This “conclusions first, research later” approach is, of course, a long way from the ultra-sceptical, disinterested ideal of science.

There’s a clichéd way to title an academic paper that begins with “Towards…”. “Towards a dynamic theory of strategy”. “Towards controlling of a pandemic”. It’s intended, I think, to emphasise that the research is far from final, and is merely a stepping-stone on the way to a larger theory or a more solid answer. Perhaps Williams’s book should have been titled Towards a Science of Hate, since — on the basis of the research he cites — there is not, yet, any solid scientific explanation for what goes so tragically wrong for people like John.