Love Your Enemies

How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt

Arthur C. Brooks

• Publisher: Broadside e-books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780062883773
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Conservatism & Liberalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

To get ahead today, you have to be a jerk, right?

Divisive politicians. Screaming heads on television. Angry campus activists. Twitter trolls. Today in America, there is an "outrage industrial complex" that prospers by setting American against American, creatinga "culture of contempt"—the habit of seeing people who disagree with us not as merely incorrect, but as worthless and defective. Maybe, like more than nine out of ten Americans, you dislike it. But hey, either you play along, or you'll be left behind, right?

Wrong.

In Love Your Enemies, social scientist and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller From Strength to Strength Arthur C. Brooks shows that abuse and outrage are notthe rightformula for lasting success. Brooks blends cutting-edge behavioral research, ancient wisdom, and a decade of experience leading one of America's top policy think tanks in a work thatoffers a better way to lead basedon bridging divides and mending relationships.

Brooks' prescriptions are unconventional. To bring America together, we shouldn't try to agree more. There is no need for mushy moderation, because disagreement is the secret to excellence. Civility and tolerance shouldn't be our goals, because they are hopelessly low standards. And our feelings toward our foes are irrelevant; what matters is how we choose to act.

Love Your Enemies offers a clear strategy for victory for a new generation of leaders. It is a rallying cry for people hoping for a new era of American progress. Most of all, it is a roadmap to arrive at the happiness that comes when we choose to love one another, despite our differences.

Chapter 1
The Culture of Contempt

The year was 2006. I was a professor at Syracuse University, and I had just released my first commercial book, Who Really Cares. It was about charitable giving—about the people in America who give the most to charity, broken down by categories such as politics and religion.

Sounds like a real page-turner, doesn’t it? Frankly, I didn’t expect it to get much attention. I would have been happy if it had sold a couple thousand copies. Why? My past work had consisted mostly of dense academic journal articles with blood-pumping titles like “Genetic Algorithms and Public Economics” and “Contingent Valuation and the Winner’s Curse in Internet Art Auctions.” Who Really Cares was a little more interesting, but not much. I published the book, and waited for the phone to not ring.

Instead, it rang. And rang. As sometimes happens with academic books, it hit the popular zeitgeist in just the right way. For whatever reason, it was a hot news story that some people gave a lot to charity and some didn’t, and my book appeared to explain why. A few famous people talked about the book, and before I knew it, I was on TV and the book started selling hundreds of copies a day.

Weirdest of all for me, total strangers began to reach out. I quickly got used to e-mails from people I had never met, pouring out intimate details of their lives, because, I learned, when people read a whole book by you, they feel that they know you. Moreover, if they don’t like the book, they don’t like you.

One afternoon a couple of weeks after the book came out, I got an e-mail from a man in Texas that began “Dear Professor Brooks: You are a fraud.” Tough start. But my Texan correspondent didn’t stop there. His e-mail was about five thousand words long, criticizing in vitriolic detail every chapter in the book and informing me of my numerous inadequacies as a researcher and person. It took me twenty minutes just to get through his screed.

OK now, put yourself in my position. What would you do at this point? Here are three options:

• Option 1. Ignore him. He’s just some random guy, right? Why waste my time, even if he wasted his lambasting my book, chapter and verse?
• Option 2. Insult him. Say, “Get a life, man. Don’t you have something better to do than reach out and bother a stranger?”
• Option 3. Destroy him. Pick out three or four of his most glaring, idiotic errors and throw them in his face, adding, “Hey, blockhead, if you don’t know economics, best not to embarrass yourself in front of a professional economist.”

More and more, these three alternatives (or a combination of them) are the only ones we feel are available to us in modern ideological conflicts. Few other options come to mind when we’re confronted with disagreement. Notice that they all grow from the same root: contempt. They all express the view that my interlocutor is unworthy of my consideration.

Each option will provoke a different response, but what they all have in common is that they foreclose the possibility of a productive discussion. They basically guarantee permanent enmity. You might note that he started it. True—although you could probably say I started it by writing the book. Either way, just as the rejoinder “he started it” never cut any ice for me when my kids were little and fighting in the back seat of the car, it has no moral weight here, where our goal is to undercut the culture of contempt.

Later, I’ll tell you which of the three options—ignore, insult, or destroy—I chose in responding to my Texan correspondent. But before I do so, we have a trip to make through the science and philosophy of contempt.

In 2014, researchers at Northwestern University, Boston College, and the University of Melbourne published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a prestigious academic journal.1 The subject was human conflict due to “motive attribution asymmetry”—the phenomenon of assuming that your ideology is based in love, while your opponent’s ideology is based in hate.

The researchers found that a majority of Republicans and Democrats today suffer from a level of motive attribution asymmetry that is comparable to that of Palestinians and Israelis. In both cases, the two sides think that they are driven by benevolence, while the other side is evil and motivated by hate. Therefore neither side is willing to negotiate or compromise. As a result, the authors found, “political conflict between American Democrats and Republicans and ethnoreligious conflict between Israelis and Palestinians seem intractable, despite the availability of reasonable compromise solutions in both cases.”

Think about what this means: We are headed to the point where achieving bipartisan compromise, on issues from immigration to guns to confirming a Supreme Court justice, is as difficult as achieving Middle East peace. We may not be engaging in daily violence against each other, but we can’t make progress as a society when both sides believe that they are motivated by love while the other side is motivated by hate.

People often characterize the current moment as being “angry.” I wish this were true, because anger tends to be self-limiting. It is an emotion that occurs when we want to change someone’s behavior and believe we can do so. While anger is often perceived as a negative emotion, research shows that its social purpose is not actually to drive others away but rather to remove problematic elements of a relationship and bring people back together.2 Believe it or not, there is little evidence that anger in marriage is correlated with separation or divorce.3

Think about a fight you’ve had with a close friend, sibling, or spouse. If you were upset and got angry, was your goal to push her out of your life entirely? Did you suppose that the person was motivated by her hatred for you? Of course not. Whether anger is the right strategy or not, we get angry because we recognize that things are not as they should be, we want to set them right, and we think we can.

Motive attribution asymmetry doesn’t lead to anger, because it doesn’t make you want to repair the relationship. Believing your foe is motivated by hate leads to something far worse: contempt. While anger seeks to bring someone back into the fold, contempt seeks to exile. It attempts to mock, shame, and permanently exclude from relationships by belittling, humiliating, and ignoring. So while anger says, “I care about this,” contempt says, “You disgust me. You are beneath caring about.”

Once I asked a psychologist friend about the root of violent conflict. He told me it was “contempt that is poorly hidden.” What makes you violent is the perception that you are being held in contempt. This rips families, communities, and whole nations apart. If you want to make a lifelong enemy, show him contempt.

The destructive power of contempt is well documented in the work of the famous social psychologist and relationship expert John Gottman. He is a longtime professor at the University of Washington in Seattle and cofounder with his wife, Julie Schwartz Gottman, of the Gottman Institute, which is dedicated to improving relationships. In his work, Gottman has studied thousands of married couples. He’ll ask each couple to tell their story—how they met and courted, their highs and lows as a couple, and how their marriage has changed over the years—before having them discuss contentious issues.

After watching a couple interact for just one hour, he can predict with 94 percent accuracy whether that couple will divorce within three years.4 How can he tell? It’s not from the anger that the couples express. Gottman confirms that anger doesn’t predict separation or divorce.5 The biggest warning signs, he explains, are indicators of contempt. These include sarcasm, sneering, hostile humor, and—worst of all—eye-rolling. These little acts effectively say “You are worthless” to the one person you should love more than any other. Want to see if a couple will end up in divorce court? Watch them discuss a contentious topic, and see if either partner rolls his or her eyes.

What does all this have to do with American politics? I asked him that. At this question, Gottman—an ebullient, happy person—becomes somber.

There’s been a denigration of respect in the dialogue in this country. It’s always us versus them. . . . We see Republicans thinking they’re better than Democrats, Democrats thinking they’re better than Republicans, people from the coast thinking they’re better than people inland. It goes on and on, and I think it’s very harmful. This “us versus them” is what gets our medial prefrontal cortex—that’s the part of the brain between our eyes—to not respond with understanding and compassion. And that’s not what our country’s about.

The pandemic of contempt in political matters makes it impossible for people of opposing views to work together. Go to YouTube and watch the 2016 presidential debates: they are masterpieces of eye-rolling, sarcasm, and sneering derision. For that matter, listen as politicians at all levels talk about their election opponents, or members of the other party. Increasingly, they describe people unworthy of any kind of consideration, with no legitimate ideas or views. And social media? On any contentious subject, these platforms are contempt machines.

Of course this is self-defeating in a nation in which political competitors must also be collaborators. How likely are you to want to work with someone who has told an audience that you are a fool or a criminal? Would you make a deal with someone who publicly said you are corrupt? How about becoming friends with someone who says your opinions are idiotic? Why would you be willing to compromise politically with such a person? You can resolve problems with someone with whom you disagree, even if you disagree angrily, but you can’t come to a solution with someone who holds you in contempt or for whom you have contempt.

Contempt is impractical and bad...