Hugh McLachlan: It's hard to recognise the faces of hatred

We've been swept along by a tide of comfortable 'isms' but closer scrutiny reveals that our wisdom may have missed the mark entirely

IN RELATION to terrorism and to violence associated directly and indirectly with Old Firm football matches, people often assume that the problems are caused by hatred, prejudice and bigotry. Thus, with regard to terrorism, David Cameron says that he wants to combat extremism and, with regard to football-related crime, Alex Salmond says that he wants to combat sectarianism. However, on the face of things, it seems unlikely that policies against extremism and sectarianism are justifiable or appropriate.

There is nothing wrong with extremism as such. Some extreme views are true. Some extreme attitudes and emotions are quite appropriate. There is no necessary association between extremism and violent behaviour or extremism and unreasonableness. People who are, say, fanatics or are violent are not always extremists. Similarly, extremists are not always fanatical or violent.

In this regard, Hannah Arendt's book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is relevant and chilling. Non-extreme, non-fanatical people can do profoundly wicked and violent things. So she seems to establish. What, if anything, distinguished Eichmann, a major implementer of the Holocaust, from other people was not that he had a particular hatred of Jews. According to Arendt, he did not. He seemed, rather, to lack empathic imagination and restraint. He seemed blind to the consequences of his actions and the enormity of their immorality.

James VI and I was not a particularly war-like, violent or despotic king. Nonetheless, many of his views would seem to be extreme, bigoted and prejudiced. For instance, he had a theory to explain why, as he thought, most witches were female: "The reason is easy, for as that sex is frailer than men is, so it is easier to be entrapped in these gross snares of the Devil, as was over-well proved to be true by the Serpent's deceiving of Eva at the beginning, which makes him homelier with that sex ever since".

He thought that smoking is "… a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless".

His views on smoking were no less extreme and speculative than his views on witchcraft. He provides no evidence for them. Relevant evidence was available only much later. Nonetheless, fortuitously, not all his views on smoking are false. It would have been folly to suppress James's extreme views on the grounds that they were extreme.Unfortunately, we cannot always tell in advance what extreme views are true and what extreme attitudes are appropriate.

Sectarian violence is wrong because it is violence, not because it is sectarian. Sectarian non-violent behaviour is not necessarily any less desirable than non-sectarian non-violent behaviour.

Sectarianism, like, for instance, nationalism, can have good effects as well as bad ones. It is not in itself good or bad - it all depends on its manifestations and their context. Scottish fans used to behave badly, now they behave well. However, nationalist fervour for the team and against the opposition does not seem to have diminished. Antagonism to sectarianism as such would seem misdirected. For instance, there was a sectarian impulse behind the traditional and characteristically Scottish policy of mass literacy and universal education. The proponents of the Reformation in Scotland wanted to have a school in every parish and an English translation of the Bible in every church so that everyone could work out his or her own salvation before God for him or herself. This manifestation of sectarianism hardly seems to be something of which we should be ashamed or something to which the state should have been opposed.

The celebrated German sociologist Max Weber said that sociological explanations must be "adequate at the level of meaning" and "at the level of causality". By this, he meant that they must give an account of the phenomenon in question that is plausible in terms of the motives of the social actors involved and that is systematically backed up by evidence.

Popular accounts of the phenomenon of violence related to Old Firm games in terms of hatred and sectarianism fail to meet these criteria. They are not plausible in terms of the suggested motivation and they lack systematic evidence. Snippets of statistics about, for instance, arrests and reports of domestic violence at particular times and places do not constitute proper systematic evidence. We need to analyse data about football matches and their aftermath in general and data about violence in general. We need to know, for instance, what proportion of sectarian and of non-sectarian people commit violent crimes. We need to know, for instance, what proportion of the population at large, of football fans in general, and of Old Firm fans in particular, are sectarian.

The recorded numbers of arrests and of domestic abuse noted as being reported to the police do not necessarily give an accurate reflection of the numbers of actual instances of violent behaviour or of domestic abuse. Not all of those who are arrested actually commit violent acts. Not all those who commit violent acts get arrested.If more people are arrested at a particular time or place, this might come about because there were more police on duty then or because those who were on duty were deployed differently or were, for whatever reason, more vigilant with regard to the attempted detection and prevention of particular sorts of offences.

At least in principle, it might seem to be possible to quantify instances of violent criminal behaviour. However, it is far from obvious that we could similarly define and measure levels of "sectarianism".

Whether or not they hate each other, most fans at Old Firm games do not assault each other. Similarly, in the aftermath of games, it is comparatively rare for rival fans to assault each other. It needs to be proved that when there is violent behaviour between rival fans, the fans involved hate each other particularly and that their level of hatred is the cause of their violence. Such people might be more gratuitously violent than the rest of us rather than more filled with hatred. Perhaps they have less self-restraint or less empathy rather than more hatred than other people.

Often, violence that is related directly or indirectly to football matches is not meted out to rival supporters particularly. For instance, in the standard sorts of football riots of my youth, enraged fans would hurl heavy glass beer bottles towards the pitch. They would land on the heads of their fellow fans and, sometimes, on the roofs of the invalid cars that were parked in the running track to allow their drivers access to the game. Such football violence did not seem like a manifestation of hatred towards the rival team or fans.

Similarly, if, after an Old Firm game, a man assaults his partner or wife, it is not obvious that this is a manifestation of hatred against his rival team or rival fans. Curious though it seems to the rest of us, it might not even be a manifestation of hatred against his wife or partner. Empirical investigation of such particular instances would be required in order to settle the matter.

We require systematic research and study from sociologists and other social scientists before we are in a position to say with any justified confidence what the causes of terrorism and of other sorts of public and domestic violence actually are.

Even if we knew what the causes of such violent actions and behaviour are, there might be no major novel policies that we could wisely adopt. It might be the case that the sort of measures that would eliminate the risk of such crimes could not prevail in the sort of society that we would want to live in.

• Hugh McLachlan is Professor of Applied Philosophy in the School of Law and Social Sciences at Glasgow Caledonian University