Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt

by Arthur C. Brooks

In other words, if you’re on the left, you most likely emphasize redistribution but also believe in merit. And if you’re on the right, you probably emphasize merit but also believe in redistribution. These are different expressions of a shared moral value that is innate in who we are as people.

During his inaugural address as governor of California, Ronald Reagan declared, “We accept without reservation our obligation to help the aged, disabled, and those unfortunates who, through no fault of their own, must depend on their fellow man.”7 And during a 2012 speech to the National Urban League, Barack Obama declared that young people in disadvantaged communities need to stop hanging out and start doing homework, because “America says, ‘we will give you opportunity, but you’ve got to earn your success.’”8

The implication of these findings is both critically important and inescapably clear: nearly all of those who disagree with us are not, as we so often think, immoral; they simply express this morality in different ways.

There is one other area we need to discuss, which, morally, loses pretty much everybody. That’s money. It’s a funny thing in my world of think tanks and academics, especially among economists like me—and very especially among conservative economists: we talk as if money per se had moral salience. It doesn’t.

At this point, someone listening will often argue: “No one can live and support a family on $8 an hour. You don’t think the billionaires who own Wal-Mart can afford to pay a few more dollars per hour? Of course they can.” Who wins this debate? Not me. My interlocutor has made a fairness-and-compassion argument, invoking universal moral values. I made a money argument, which has no moral salience.

The point is this: If you are making an argument about money, you are fighting a losing battle of moral math. You’ve eviscerated your own ability to make moral arguments when you start with money for the sake of money.

Focus on what unites us—our shared values—rather than just our own side’s expression of shared values. When we start with the shared values themselves, we establish common moral ground, which then allows us to talk in a spirit of respect about our disagreement in the most effective way to express these values. Even without agreement, it strikes a blow against contempt.

2. Be wary of manipulative leaders in politics and media who use the moral dimensions where we disagree as a wedge to divide us and fuel contempt.

Furthermore, we should pay closer attention when politicians criticize people on the other side. Are they using our differing moral foundations to justify claims that the other side is worthy of contempt? If so, we owe it to our fellow Americans who disagree with us to recognize and reject this kind of rhetoric.

Haidt and his colleagues found that “in fraternity admissions, fraternity brothers were happy to admit people who were demographically different from themselves, although they avoided candidates who had strong moral or political values that differed either from the group as a whole, or from themselves as individuals.” He also found that in choosing a study partner, most undergraduates did not care about racial differences, “but political/moral differences generally made a candidate less attractive.”17 Haidt’s work is consistent with more recent research that shows the starkest dividing line in America today is not race, religion, or economic status, but rather party affiliation.

We should constantly be evaluating whether our particular expression of our moral values is the right one, much less the only legitimate expression of those values. Doing so requires the humility to recognize that none of us has a monopoly on truth. The left favors redistribution; the right, meritocracy. But if we had a completely redistributionist society we’d be the Soviet Union; if we had a complete meritocracy, millions would be starving. There is a sweet spot between the two and we should all be searching together to find it.

For example, he wrote, if hundreds of people were hypothetically asked whether they would give up their seat on a streetcar to a woman from an ostracized ethnic group, many might say no. The problem, LaPiere noted, is that the theoretical woman is different from a “woman of flesh and blood” and the respondent’s “verbal reaction . . . does not involve rising from the seat or stolidly avoiding the hurt eyes of the hypothetical woman and the derogatory stares of other street car occupants.” Presented with a real, live person, he hypothesized, most would probably behave differently than they told researchers they would.

This is the opposite of what people often assume today. The common assumption is that people mouth nonracist ideals and claim to embrace diversity but betray their bigotry, often in subtle ways, when faced with actual people different from themselves.

These days, we frequently hear that most people today have unconscious bias, that they think they don’t discriminate, but in real life they actually do. The LaPiere study supports the opposite idea. People are more hostile to others in the abstract than when they meet them in person. As a rule, theoretical discriminators, when they come face-to-face with an actual person, actually don’t discriminate. It’s much easier to dehumanize the “other” when you don’t see a human face, when someone is reduced to a demographic identity. When you meet actual people and learn a little of their human story, you feel connection—and connection destroys discrimination. The

For most people, empathy and compassion overwhelm prejudice and discrimination. It’s not that prejudice or discrimination don’t exist; they do, and can’t be imagined away. But the key to overcoming prejudice and discrimination is not to double down on what makes people different; rather, it is to undermine prejudice with something more powerful: the empathy and compassion we all naturally feel when interacting with actual people and connecting with them as fellow humans.

A common criticism of this kind of argument is that, in fact, people cannot identify with historically oppressed people and have no right even to try. For example, because I am white and not an immigrant, the argument goes, I can neither understand the experiences of nor say I can relate to historically marginalized people—including the Chinese couple in LaPiere’s study. Under this kind of thinking, it is immaterial that I have met many immigrants and know lots of people of Chinese origin (in fact, my wife is the former and my daughter is the latter). Because of my personal demographic identity and lack of “lived experience,” some would say, I should shut up. It’s true that my socioeconomic, cultural, political, racial, and religious background is not the same as others’, and there are ways in which my understanding of those who are different from me is limited. However, none of that is an argument for keeping quiet and walling ourselves off. On the contrary, it’s an argument for more radical diversity, in which we obliterate the “what” distinctions and strive to understand the shared moral “why” of our lives as brothers and sisters.

“I think people are not only not building bridges anymore, I think they’re blowing them up and then taking hard stances,” john tells me. “Breaking” occurs “when people claim themselves in opposition to another group, and the other group’s a categorical evil.” Much like contempt, breaking is not a passive act.

breaking is “affirmatively attacking ‘the other.’ And . . . as we break in a serious way, we actually define ourselves by our breaking. And so I define myself by the groups I hate.” To my ear, this is an amazingly trenchant description of the dark side of identity politics.

Much like breaking, othering creates a hard line between “us” and “them” by making any kind of difference—whether skin color, socioeconomic status, political views, or anything else—a dividing line. The danger of othering, says john, is that we end up making caricatures of others because we never come into contact with them—and once we go down that road, he cautions, “we’re not a long way from doing all kinds of terrible things to each other.”

In the most serious cases, some pay the ultimate price for bridging. john reminds me that, during the Rwandan genocide, some Hutus who refused to kill their Tutsi neighbors were themselves killed by members of their own group for a lack of loyalty. Bridging, like warm-heartedness, takes courage.

Psychologists have consistently shown that virtually everyone falls prey to “confirmation bias,” a propensity to believe evidence in support of prior beliefs and to reject evidence that contradicts these beliefs. In other words, if you think an increase in the minimum wage won’t destroy any jobs, then hard data I present to you that say otherwise will just look self-interested. You’ll question my motives sooner than your own beliefs. On politically contentious topics, the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber call this “myside bias.”3 They show in their research that people are remarkably good at finding the weaknesses in others’ arguments but terrible at seeing the weaknesses in their own.

When people ask, “Are you on my wavelength?” they usually mean it as a metaphor. Uri Hasson’s brain imaging shows that this isn’t just a metaphor; it’s a real physiological phenomenon. You can literally get on the same wavelength as other people by telling a story. The fact that our brain activity moves in lockstep during storytelling is one of the best secrets to deeply understanding others. Unifying leaders, take note. Start your next speech with a personal story.

Thus it turns out that, just maybe, my effort to bring people together who disagree isn’t an exercise in futility after all. I was just doing it wrong, relying on cold facts instead of human stories. When we tell stories, our brains unite, giving us the chance to at least understand one another, whether we ultimately agree or disagree. We can break down prejudice and division—we can defeat myside bias and induce openness, if not agreement—two brains at a time.

His advice was to remember this one little inequality: 1>10,000,000. Maybe you’re thinking my brother is really bad at math. Here’s what he meant: When you are talking about people, ten million is a statistic; one person is a story, and stories win when you are trying to get people to support a cause.

Therefore, if we want to unite the country, we know what we each need to do: give people more oxytocin and more brain-to-brain coupling. Tell more stories.

As every tyrant knows, dehumanization—or as social scientists sometimes call it, deindividuation—destroys empathy and compassion and makes possible the most horrific predations.

On a much smaller scale today, dehumanization characterizes the rhetoric of leaders who treat with contempt immigrants, poor people, or simply those on the other political side. Be on the lookout for dehumanization in everyday life. You will start to see it. For example, perhaps your favorite newspaper pundit refers to certain people as pigs. The point is to destroy your empathy for the object of his or her derision through dehumanization. Perhaps that seems like no big deal, but make no mistake: You are being manipulated to hate a fellow human being.

For us as individuals, if the problem is deindividuation online, then the solution is reindividuation. If you are as appalled as I am by the coarsening of public discourse, then remove yourself from the angry crowd and reclaim your individual story. Repudiate anonymity and be yourself online. Make a commitment today to never be anonymous or say anything anonymously. As you repudiate your own anonymity, also make a commitment never to engage with others when they are anonymous online.

However, it’s not just other people’s stories we need to seek out and share. You and I need to tell our own as well. The telling begins with the short story of your life’s mission, the “why” behind what you do and what you believe, not just your political or other demographic identities. Can you tell me a story that states your life’s purpose in twenty seconds or less? How about ten? Being able to do so will affect the way you behave and the way others behave toward you. If you want more unity with other people and you want to create more unity among those around you, you have to get comfortable telling your story, quickly and compellingly. Here’s a practical tip to start telling your story: write it down in twelve words or less. Sounds impossible, right?

By the way, want to know mine? “A lucky man, dedicated to lifting others up and bringing them together.” Finally—no cowbell.

Does an embrace of fierce competition mean we want to win by any means necessary? Not at all. Take the teams Real Madrid and FC Barcelona, two of the greatest soccer clubs in the world and bitter rivals going back to the 1930s. Their matches are some of the most-followed regular sporting events in the world; indeed, all over Spain and Latin America (and in my house in Maryland), life practically stops when they play. Every soccer fan has an opinion on this rivalry, which has strong political dimensions in a country riven by separatism and struggling with a history of political repression. Fans of each club would pay good money to see their side win. But what happens if Barcelona’s star player goes down with a blown-out knee? Do Madrid’s fans cheer his season-ending injury? No, they mostly fall silent. Why? Because Madrid fans want to beat Barcelona through excellence, not injury—and vice versa.

However, while rules provide structure and an even playing field for competition, they do not enforce themselves. This means that rules-based competition first requires us to come together around voluntarily agreed-upon principles. Red Sox and Yankee fans don’t see eye to eye on much, especially with a few beers in them, but both will tell you a pitch down the middle is a strike, a pitch into the stands is a ball, and a pitch at a batter’s head is grounds for ejection. If the Yankees applied one set of rules to themselves but enforced a different set of rules for their opponents, genuine competition would be impossible.

Indeed, the percentage of the population living in starvation-level poverty around the world has fallen by more than four-fifths over the last fifty years.12 This amounts to some two billion people lifted from extreme poverty due to the global spread of free enterprise. No other economic system has a remotely similar track record. This is not a political statement; quite the contrary. As no less an avowed progressive than President Barack Obama put it in a 2015 public conversation we had together at Georgetown University, the “free market is the greatest producer of wealth in history—it has lifted billions of people out of poverty.”13

In other words, Mill believed that to develop excellent ideas, we need competing ideas. That is why it is so dangerous when powerful actors work not to win the competition of ideas, but instead to shut it down—by narrowing acceptable discourse, squashing protest, silencing opposing viewpoints, and saying people of opposing opinions are stupid or evil. That is what is happening in our politics today, when one 2016 presidential candidate accuses the other of promoting the policy preferences of “a paranoid fringe” and the other’s rejoinder is to call the first candidate a criminal and “the worst (and biggest) loser of all time.”21 In neither case is there any engagement with the actual substance of the policies in question. Rather, these are both attempts to shut the competition of ideas down by delegitimizing an ideological opponent—and his or her supporters—as out of touch, deviant, or incompetent.

This is not just unfair. It is unwise, because competition propels progress. We need Republicans and Democrats to argue fiercely over the best ways to combat poverty, reduce dependency, and give more Americans the opportunity to achieve the happiness of earned success. We need conservatives and liberals to fight vigorously over the best ways to protect our national security while also preserving our individual liberties. We need the left and the right to debate energetically the best ways to improve education so that the next generation has the tools to pursue and achieve the American Dream.

As scholars at the University of Pennsylvania have found across a group of some 1,600 leaders, “boundary spanning”—bridging ideological divides—helps us understand the views of those who disagree with us while simultaneously improving our ability to defend our own beliefs.24

The Harvard Business Review has dispensed this simple piece of advice: “Hire people who disagree with you.”

This is not just about leaders, however. Want to be a more persuasive person? To make sure your ideas are well grounded and you don’t get wiped out in a debate? The way to do it is not to hang around where everyone agrees, your ideas are never challenged, and people who disagree with you are shouted down. Nor to watch exclusively a television channel that tells you only what you already know and that the other side are knaves and fools. Nor to curate your social media in such a way that it only feeds your outrage about your opponents. These things will make your ideas weak and mediocre, not strong and secure.

Imagine if the U.S. Olympic Team decided that team sports were bad for self-esteem, that painful training to improve skills was harmful, and that being exposed to competitors would make the athletes feel unsafe. Ridiculous, of course. Unfortunately, in too many cases today, we are doing something akin to this in universities, and a new generation of American leaders is being taught that a competition of ideas is dangerous and unacceptable; that it is acceptable to shut down the competition if the other side’s ideas make students uncomfortable. This trend doesn’t just defy the principles of excellence; it also flies in the face of one of the great intellectual and moral epiphanies of our time—that human diversity is beneficial per se.

One of the study’s authors, Professor Philip E. Tetlock of the University of Pennsylvania, put it to me more bluntly. Expecting trustworthy results on politically charged topics from an “ideologically incestuous community,” he explained, is “downright delusional.”

too many in the next generation of leaders are learning to despise and ostracize, rather than understand and engage, those with whom they disagree.

30 To that end, as Adams’s phrasing later enshrined in the Massachusetts Constitution put it, the government is “instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity and happiness of the people; and not for the profit, honor or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men.”31

We may disagree—we should disagree—over how best to achieve safety, prosperity, and happiness for the most people, and we should compete over the best way to help all people build better lives. To do so, however, we must maintain the shared objectives and moral core around which a true competition of ideas should radiate.

And even if some ideas are beyond the pale, it is always worth confronting them with the best arguments, and without contempt—if our objective is to win over people who are undecided, and we care about the quality of our own character.

What I am not proud of is our increasing resistance to competing ideas, right here at home in our politics, in media, and on campuses. So how do we solve it? We need leaders who—while holding their own opinions—tolerate others’, because they recognize that iron sharpens iron ideologically; that diversity in all forms is where our strength and unity are to be found. Actually, that’s still not good enough. As I said at the outset, tolerance and civility are too low a standard for a great country based on competitive excellence. You need to be grateful for the other side, just as you should be grateful for having more than one team in your favorite sports league and more than one brand of ice cream at the supermarket.

We have decided together as Americans to set laws and social norms to make this possible, recognizing that we don’t want to suppress the other side’s ideas any more than we want them to suppress ours. We are grateful for our freedoms, and so we are grateful for their freedoms.

Virtuous Aristotelian friendship centered on loving our country and respectful disagreement is what we need in America. If you’ve got a better way to help poor people, I want to hear it. If I don’t think it’s a good enough way to help poor people, I’m going after your argument with everything I’ve got. You actually can’t exercise the Aristotelian virtue adequately unless there’s disagreement. The highest expression of this Aristotelian ideal is that two people totally disagree on a substantive thing but are willing to debate each other on it, precisely because they both care so much about the underlying issue on which they agree. That’s when America is absolutely at its best.

If you are committed to better disagreement, you generally need a wider circle of friends, which is easier said than done. That means going places outside your traditional circles and making the effort to get to know people with different values in a deep way. This is hard, not just because you have to find them, but also because you have to listen. (Our society has become pretty incompetent when it comes to listening.) If you stay on Facebook reading angry articles about the other side, you’ll never get there.

The point of disagreement—if disagreement is to make us better and draw us together—is never winning. It certainly isn’t to attack someone else. It is to enrich the discussion, test out your point of view in a respectful way, and persuade someone you care about.

Here’s the practical reason: almost no one is ever insulted into agreement.