Lifestyle Contempt is Not Academic
America’s growing political polarization has divided families, workplaces, schools, and friend groups. These social worlds traditionally force us to bridge differing lifestyles and practice tolerance as a lived reality.
I fear we are losing this ability rapidly in the 21st century due to our American brand of noncommittal, hyper-individualistic lifestyle fragmentation, especially lifestyle fragmentation among educated adults. Americans are not even committed to our lifestyles for that long (in a culture of personal growth and constant adaptation). And yet, we are overly proud of all our transient lifestyle choices, a pride born of deep insecurity.
Is this the best fitness activity to become the very best version of myself?
Here are some examples of lifestyle fragmentation with a dark potential to divide:
The fitness geeks we mocked for years are now our buddies after our first major heart attack.
The Mike and Molly crowd we grew up with and ‘left’ by going to law school.
The foodie whose close friends are curated to be equally discerning
Americans have invented an incredible number of new ways to look down on others and show contempt (for not joining us). Some of us struggle to meet anyone we can not condescend to for some lifestyle choice they’ve made. Even Baron Grey of Downton Abbey would be exhausted by it all.
When the Baron tells you to lighten up, you have a real problem.
Petty lifestyle condescension quickly becomes contempt when we lack proper social coordination and cross-cutting social connections (e.g., church, Elks Lodge). Recently, I wrote an entire book on how our everyday lives work against the latter—a massive set-up for civil conflict of any kind.
Arthur Brooks wrote a perceptive piece right before the pandemic accelerated our social disconnection in new ways. In this piece, he discusses psychological research on “motive attribution asymmetry.” Psychologists define it as:
— the assumption that your ideology is based in love, while your opponent’s is based in hate —
Needless to say, this is a marriage-killing situation. Contempt is the muriatic acid of marriage, love, and any strong social bond.
Yet, showing contempt for any manner of lifestyle ‘we don’t like’ is incredibly common in our country. Perhaps you disagree. I see that too many social elites are seeking happiness through lifestyle differentiation and performance. And, often, they show contempt for the outcomes of divergent lifestyles of others. Many of our chosen lifestyles have a dark, oppositional foe - aggressive fitness culture versus being a lazy fatass like Uncle Jack.
“What a lazy fatass…” is a modern form of elitist contempt based on an urban lifestyle segment. I was once in an office full of people who spewed this contempt under their breath. And more.
Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 Presidential election mainly because of her off-hand “deplorables” comment aimed at the uneducated American masses. This is what casual contempt looks like, and it deleted more than enough voters for Trump to win the Electoral College (even without foreign social media interferences).
Yes, contempt in American life often flows along class lines, but the most dangerous is the contempt of the upper middle class for the middle class. This contempt used to be based on educational attainment but has morphed into a mass rejection of the entire lifestyle matrix of ordinary Americans - how much they exercise, what they read, the media they consume, etc.
Here is Professor Brooks challenging us to acknowledge the contempt within -
People often say that our problem in America today is incivility or intolerance. This is incorrect. Motive attribution asymmetry leads to something far worse: contempt, which is a noxious brew of anger and disgust. And not just contempt for other people’s ideas, but also for other people. In the words of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, contempt is “the unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another.1
Until I did research in India across all social classes in my late 20s and then market research across America in my 30s, I harbored lots of un-self-aware contempt for most Americans. I still struggle with these attitudes because they are deeply ingrained.
I have written elsewhere about America’s Real Elite Problem, contributing to the country’s dangerous, simmering stew of interpersonal and intergroup contempt. The contempt problem in America is much more profound than Brooks’ discussion of political polarization.
It’s a blade-sharp contempt flowing from professional elites to other wealthy people who are not well-educated professionals and high achievers. These are the folks, like me, who Trump most angrily opposes—the post-graduate degree-holding professional elite. We are an incredibly, disproportionately large minority of the country now. We can isolate ourselves in a way that was just impossible in my grandfather’s generation (born 1900-1920).
And many of us have been spewing contempt at less well-educated rich people like Trump for decades, to be brutally honest. Look at Obama’s 2011 teasing of Trump at the White House Press Conference.
Contempt often motivates an angry response.
And contempt will motivate an insane response if the target is already mentally unwell and living a life of petty, adolescent grievance stroking.
I’ve seen this in workplaces and Home-Owner’s Association fights I’ve been caught up in. If you accidentally contemn a bully who believes he is your equal, watch out.
Contempt is virtually impossible to resolve at the relationship level. Marriages consumed by contempt rarely heal. The individuals need to separate and heal by themselves before moving on.
But intergroup contempt at scale can also ignite a civil war. Consider Rwanda, a country ruled by an ethnic Tutsi minority and placed in authority over an invented nation-state by its former Belgian rulers. These were not ethnic groups historically living in an agreed-upon social status hierarchy; they were neighboring tribes who formed beyond the realm of complex social structures. Contempt between social groups who do not agree that they exist in a status hierarchy can cause explosive instability in any society. Rwanda certainly exploded in 1994. Educated, middle-class Hutus did unspeakable things to their lifelong Tutsi neighbors, not from some dark-skinned savagery but from simmering human resentment at long-held Tutsi elite contempt, which the social order had neither addressed through reconciliation nor acknowledged.
One of the most interesting aspects of Indian society in the late 1990s was local elites' remarkable tolerance of wildly different lifestyles and community members. While some may have been disgusted or disapproved of the collective behavior of other castes or low-ranking social groups, there was a sense that “it’s what they do.” You don’t interfere or make snide comments.
I call it “quiet condescension.” It is very different from open contempt.
Quiet condescension is typical of ancient feudal societies, where subordinate individuals do not question their place in the social order very much. I witnessed the broad tolerance of elites’ quiet condescension everywhere in India. For example, it was common for educated social elites in a local community to attend a working-class or ‘lower’ caste person’s wedding but never, ever socialize with them or have dinner in their home. And when they condescended to be wedding guests, they were very civil, polite, and generous. They did not smirk or make snide comments under their breath.
Indians can handle this kind of ancient interactional subtlety - quiet condescension -within an agreed-upon status hierarchy because the belief that all people are equal is not indigenous (even though it is growing in popularity among educated and upwardly mobile people).
America’s problem with contempt is that we have an elite divided by lifestyle (My Pillow Guy vs. Professor Brooks), much like Rwanda’s urban middle class was divided by a lingering Hutu-Tutsi ethnic boundary. Arthur Brooks’ portion of the elite engages in loud condescension toward the rest of America. Or, at best, they avoid them at all costs. They avoid marrying them, befriending them, etc.
I shudder to think how social media ranting may have poured acid on the entire country by allowing the brutal contempt of left-leaning educated elites to get way too much reach. And vice versa.
There is no inevitable reason why a corporate attorney can not civilly interact with a plumber and respect what they do for a living without judging them for not trying to become a project manager with a laptop. In the history of human complex societies, this specific historical form of contempt is just weird.
Instead of functional, quiet condescension, in which we publicly respect the social contributions of others in lifestyles we deem less prestigious, we ignore them or, worse, show open, Hillary Clinton-style contempt.
I’m from northern New England, so my instinct is not giddy optimism. I fear it may be too late for America because we missed the signs of intra-elite contempt in the 1990s. We had a chance to nip this in the bud.
Instead, as did I, too many highly educated people focused on curating lifestyle worlds that won’t matter in a broad civil conflict.
We will look like fools.
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