writing and virtue

I spent yesterday at a masterclass on writing for postgraduates in the humanities. A stimulating day, hearing from a number of academics who write for broader audiences than just those within their field. One of the speakers got me thinking about the importance of hatred in thinking and writing. He argued that (among other motivations) most of us are driven by a hatred of a particular approach to our subject. While this hatred is important and valuable as a motivation, it must not infect our writing, which has to be (his word!) 'lovely'.
Interesting! I realised that I do indeed hate (quite passionately) a particular, long-standing approach to Methodist history which to my mind has flattened an entirely fascinating religious culture into a bland, respectable, deathly boring set of theological propositions. And I am certainly driven by that hatred to write about early Methodism in a way that will somehow rescue it from that fate. The question is, do I embrace that hatred or regard it with suspicion? After all, I don't hate the people who've written the books I detest - I meet them at conferences and they are kind and delightful people. But hatred of an intellectual approach does spawn a lack of respect for people, an arrogance about my own ideas, a sneering attitude towards particular schools of thought. And that doesn't seem very virtuous!