Can Haters Learn Not to Hate? Neuroscience, The "Fitra", and the Sultan and the Saint

UPF’s Emmy-nominated Sultan and the Saint film describes how the meeting between St. Francis of Assisi and the Sultan of Egypt during the height of the Crusades became a catalyst for Christian-Muslim peace.?It showed how fear and dehumanizing rhetoric can flip the hate switch in our brains and drive us to violence. It also showed how two people overcame that hatred around them to find common ground and respect for each other.?

When we produced the docudrama film, audiences expected to hear historians, but were surprised at how we incorporated the perspective of neuroscience.

WHY NEUROSCIENCE ?

As Director Alex Kronemer explained, “We didn’t want to limit the film to retelling the history of the Crusades and how they ended. We hoped instead to inform that story with a deeper understanding of how the brain, if misled by its own defensive structures, can motivate people to hate others, especially when seduced by fear and stereotypes. To explore the point, we introduced the perspective of neuroscience in the film.”

One such on-camera commentator is Emile Bruneau, who was a visiting scholar at UPenn. In the film Dr. Bruneau draws on the findings of Development Psychology to point out how children have a natural tendency “towards empathy with others. That is, they have the underpinnings of an inherent morality. It is this that helps a society remain together.”

CONTRASTING THE FITRA AND DEHUMANIZATION

Islamic Scholar and former ISNA President Imam Mohamed Magid agrees. “This notion that children are inherently good is consistent with the idea of the fitra in Islamic theology, the spiritual nature of human beings that has the capacity to recognize God’s oneness and mercy. It’s the environment they are surrounded by that changes this.” In the “environment” we might include victims of violence, political propagandists, exploitation, and extremists, and those who profit from large-scale conflict.

As Burneau goes on to say, “A lot of our basic moral prohibitions against harming others are predicated on the idea that ‘the other’ person is a human. But if you dehumanize him or his whole group, our instinctive moral prohibitions no longer prevent us from harming them.”

Picking up this thread, he adds that, “The first move in the extremist playbook, whether you are talking about the past or present, is to dehumanize anyone they disagree with, even if it’s someone who nominally shares their faith. We know that many of the victims of the Christian Crusader armies were other Christians who disagreed with them.

Likewise, Magid points out that for groups like ISIS their primary victims are everyday Muslims around the world, who denounce their barbaric message.

Bruneau describes this dehumanization as a “binary-instinct”, the tendency to categorize people as “us” and “them”.

The human brain seems to “choose up sides” when fear is activated. Bruneau explains this mechanism clearly, saying that fear can induce a “kind of moral disengagement,” which extremists play on to “get one group of humans to harm or even kill another group of humans.”

BREAKING THE CYCLE

So, how does hate end? How do we break the cycle of blind violence?

The story of “The Sultan and the Saint” offers an example. As Executive Producer Michael Wolfe points out,” In Francis, we see a man willing to take risks, who moves against the popular opinion that “the enemy” is inhuman and can’t be reasoned with. He crosses the battle lines of the Crusades and meets with the Sultan Al-Malik Al-Kamil and his court, sharing his own devotion to God while respecting theirs.”

He enters the Muslim camp not knowing what to expect; as he was told at best that Muslims could not be trusted, and at worst that they were heathens.

The Sultan’s act of compassion, feeding the Crusader army when he could have mounted a final attack, had the same affect.

“Francis re-humanized Muslims in the eyes of his own fellow Christians.” Wolfe points out. He also proved to the Crusade’s military leaders that it was possible to interact respectfully and rationally with Muslims. Some in the Crusader camp differed with him, but many others agreed, and the long run the arc of history bent in his direction. The same Sultan that Francis visited was the very man who subsequently signed the first lasting treaty in the Crusades, heralding the beginning of the end of the longest conflict on record between the realms of Christianity and Islam.”

This is the sort of outcome Bruneau indicates when he says that, “you can directly challenge the stigma of dehumanization, by showing people examples from the ‘out group’ of others who display the same positive characteristics they define as human.”

“In other words,” Kronemer adds, “reach out to people and compete in as many good deeds as you can, and share these stories of human goodness to encourage others.”

?REMEMBERING BRUNEAU: PRACTICING WHAT HE PREACHED

Emile Bruneau firmly believed that people who learned how to hate could also learn how not to hate. As a scientist, he made it his life’s work to study the human brain to help create lasting and effective conflict resolution strategies.?Toward this end, he founded the Peace and Conflict Neuroscience Lab in 2015 and later became the lead scientist of the Beyond Conflict Innovation Lab.

Sadly, Bruneau passed away in September 2020 after 20 months of battling aggressive brain cancer. Still, his research on neuropsychology to help us understand hate and how to undo indoctrinated biases, as well as his efforts to promote peace and conflict transformation, continue to live on.

?As we concluded in the film, “Angry, dehumanizing words sparked violence today as before… The road to peace runs through the common humanity that we all share.”

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