from the UK Guardian 10th February 2001

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on enmity - by AC Grayling

In response to George W Bush's determination to enhance America's missile capability, Russia's president, Vladimir Putin this week increased his efforts to build an anti-American diplomatic coalition. It now includes China, North Korea and Iran. He also announced that Russia will upgrade its own armoury. One wonders whether they both desire the cold war's return because it is simpler to have enemies than to try to manage the far more complicated matter of making and keeping friends.

As this week's event also show, the politics of enmity drive history in the Middle East, where peace efforts seem hopeless because of the region's vast conflicting reservoirs of bitterness and anger. War is much the easier option in such circumstances. people there as everywhere find it more satisfying to strike out, to hurt their enemies, to vent rage by kicking and killing, than to master themselves and think beyond enmity to a future without it. It takes so much clarity and courage to be a peacemaker that it is unsurprising how few such there are.

To hate one's enemies is to  dissipate one's energies in wholly negative ways. Enmity is a response to perceived injury or threat, and it is compounded of resentment and anger, hostility and dislike, all of which can become obsessions, parasitising one's peace of mind away. To hate or despise an enemy is therefore to award him a victory over oneself, at least in these respects. some say there can be compensations, agreeing with Euripides that "there is nothing so pleasant as the sight of an old enemy on hard times". But this ungenerous sentiment scarcely makes the preceding acid diet worthwhile, and the enemy might never descend to hard times anyway.

In war the combatants are often less embittered against the official enemy than the non-combatant population at home, because they see that their opposite numbers suffer as they do, and respect their courage and endurance. One can thus have enemies without feeling enmity towards them. The non-combatants at home, because they are powerlessly subjected to bombing or the deprivations of wartime, are less likely to be forgiving of those who cause them this discomfort, and  unforgivingness is a fruitful maintainer of enmity.

The obvious counsel of perfection is not to have enemies if one can avoid doing so. But if one acquire them despite everything they might as well be turned to good account. 'A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends', Gracian remarked, and a major reason is that their judgments about oneself are likely to be nearer the truth than one's own self-perceptions. "It is your enemies who keep you straight," Edgar Watson Howe wrote; "for real use, one active sneering enemy is worth two ordinary friends." The insight is as old as it is valuable: Antisthenes, contemporary of Socrates, advised his disciples to heed their enemies, "for they are the first to discover your errors."

As it is a mistake not to recognise an enemy's value, so it is a mistake to underestimate him. A French proverb tells us that there is no such thing as a little enemy. The feeblest-seeming foe can be a greater danger than one who, because he has power and position to forfeit if his enmity undoes him, is proportionately more circumspect. Driving an enemy to the last resource of desperation is dangerous too; leaving him an escape route is a measure of safety for oneself.

Tennyson thought that one could never be a good friend unless one had made a foe. The idea is that the capacity to stand up for a friend implies a capacity to oppose others when principle and loyalty demand - and to have principles and loyalties is to invite enmity. But that is not an inevitability. there are people whose integrity make it difficult to dislike them even though they stand in one's way. The next best thing to being such a person is having such an enemy, given the good he might do you.