Why the big idea behind ‘love trumps hate’ works

At anti-Trump rallies across the US in the days following his inauguration in January, the slogan "love trumps hate" was much in evidence.

This simple phrase captures much of the spirit of the opposition to the likes of US President Donald Trump and other right-wing, nationalistic forces that appear to be on the rise across the world.

The sentiment is firmly rooted in the Buddhist philosophy that "hatred never ceases by hatred but by love alone is healed. This is an ancient and eternal law."

All humans know intuitively that hatred and violence are something to be avoided. There is a reason why so many books and films have been dedicated to capturing the horrors of the Holocaust or the massacres in Rwanda or the drug trade in South America. The subtext is always "let’s not go there again".

And if such universal laws are too airy-fairy for the rationalists, there is a numbers-based argument. The global peace index, which seeks to quantify peace and its benefits in 163 states and territories across the world, calculates that over the past 10 years, the world is getting less peaceful — and this has direct economic costs.

The 2016 index estimates that violence costs 13.3% of global GDP each year, which is equivalent to about $13.6-trillion, or $5 per person per day. They base these numbers on data on internal security spending, losses from crime and interpersonal violence, military spending and losses from conflict, including peacekeeping costs.

If the human costs of violence and hatred are not enough, these sobering numbers should have world leaders at the negotiating table, trying to figure out a way to make the world more peaceful instead of preaching division and distrust from their positions of privilege and power. In the meantime, there is much that every person can do to build a more peaceful world.

We can take to the streets — and already are. The protest marches across the world after Trump’s inauguration were unprecedented (and easily dwarfed the numbers who turned out to support the inauguration the day before), as were 2016’s climate marches.

At the same time, we need to guard against joining in our hearts with the hatred that we seek to repudiate.

Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela have already shown us the power of righteous anger leading to civil disobedience and peaceful protest as a means to achieve a more just and peaceful world. Men and women everywhere are now following in their footsteps.

At the same time, we need to guard against joining in our hearts with the hatred that we seek to repudiate. Otherwise, we will have lost before we even get started. So we have to do something much more difficult than just protest. We have to protest with appreciation and respect for our opponent — with, dare we say, love.

This is hard for human beings to do. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that human nature, while intrinsically moral, is also intrinsically moralistic, critical and judgmental.

This means it is all too easy to demonise people who see the world through a different moral lens than us and to set ourselves up in rancid opposition to them. If nothing else, Trump’s style of politics exploits this principle beautifully and thrives on stirring up hatred and disunion.

A more practical and realistic culture, Haidt believes, would work to accept and accommodate our natural moral differences rather than seek to eradicate them. Ultimately, he argues, those differences should be objects of appreciation and curiosity, not anger.

We need to start with a sense of shared humanity. There is a bit of a bigot in everyone.

The path to peace starts inside with a sense of reconciliation towards ourselves and our less salubrious side.

The spiritual leader Ram Das famously has a picture of Hitler on his altar because, he says, if he can come to see Hitler as divine then he knows he has reached the point where he no longer has to meditate.

There are tools available to the millions of men and women who also want to walk this path. As much as there is a surge in hate-driven politics in the world today, there is an equally massive movement towards the realisation of a more compassionate world.

Perhaps the biggest expression of this in the West is through the work of mindfulness popularised by Dr Jon Kabat Zinn, who pioneered the mindfulness-based stress-reduction programme at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1970s. It has since gone mainstream.

Three years ago, mindfulness was featured on the cover of Time magazine, putting it on a footing with the alt-right, whose poster child Steve Bannon graced the cover more recently.

According to veteran mindfulness teacher Dr Bob Stahl of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, there is mounting evidence of the powerful effects of mindfulness on helping humans to live more easily with pain and stress.

"The indications are that it can promote health, slow down ageing and even dial back on racist tendencies," he says. "The science behind mindfulness is based on the neuroplasticity of the brain … we can change the structure of our brain, and hence our thoughts and behaviours, through focusing our attention in a particular way."

Never before has there been such a convergence of mainstream science and meditation practice to fuel a movement towards co-operation and peace. This, combined with the amazing connectivity of the world, means that despite many frightening and unpleasant events, there is hope that peace and compassion can win out.

Stahl, who will be teaching in SA in March on the science and practice of mindfulness and compassion, says that cultivating mindfulness allows ordinary people a deeper understanding of the mind and the world in which they live.

"It is really an invitation to each and every human being to choose the path they would like to walk and build the world they would like to build," he says.

• Dr Whitesman is director and chairman of the Institute for Mindfulness SA