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Regarding the polarization and incivility of American politics today, I have been reading a great book, Love Your Enemies: how decent people can save America from the culture of contempt, by Arthur C. Brooks. I would highlight what Brooks call the Culture of Contempt (Brooks, 2019).
Dostoevsky has the saintly character Zossima warn his readers to avoid contempt, both of others and of yourself (Dostoevsky, 1990). Contempt is anger mixed with disgust. Contempt tells your interlocutor that you consider them unworthy of your time or concern, foreclosing any chance of coming to understand each other better and maybe learning from each other. Brooks points to research on motive attribution asymmetry – assuming that your ideology is not only right but based on love, and your interlocutor’s ideology is stupid, evil and based on hate. Obviously, some ideologies are based on hate and hatred is a powerful human motive. We deceive ourselves, however, when we assume too much. Research shows that the level of motive attribution asymmetry among Republicans and Democrats today is similar to that between Israelis and Palestinians. We are setting ourselves up for pernicious leaders who want to tap into hatred as a motive and manipulate it for what they imagine is their good…but in reality it does NOT lead them to happiness. Treating others with contempt causes us to release stress hormones (cortisol and adrenaline), causing us to live under significant, unnecessary stress.
Contempt -mixing anger with disgust – also ruins the usefulness anger can have. As Brooks points out, anger by itself is self-limiting and often constructive. Research shows that anger’s purpose is not to drive others away; it is to remove problematic elements in relationships and hence bring people together. We get angry because we see that things are not as they should be, and we passionately want to set things right. Anger says you care about setting things right, contempt says that you want to destroy the other person or group. Don’t give in to contempt.
As someone who has studied self-deception, I cannot help seeing a connection between the self-deceptive mechanism of splitting and the four biblical names for Satan above. First, instead of letting you look at your interlocutor as a fellow human being worthy of love, The Scatterer gets you to set up false images of them as all-good or all-bad, and encourages you to your attention to the all bad. [Evil is parasitic on good – we should pay more attention to the good]. The all-bad distortion of your interlocutor is now easy to accuse of being unworthy of respect or love. But that distorted image is a lie, whose father is the devil. Finally, the murderer from the beginning can use that distorted image to motivate the murder of that person or group. Splitting is thought to be the basic self-deceptive mechanism, on which others are based.
If you happen to be a Christian or fan of C.S. Lewis, may I remind you of Lewis’ warning that, if Christianity is true, and we are going to live forever, then the individual homo sapiens we interact with every day are more important than our political agendas:
“It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor.
The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken.
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.
All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.
It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.
There are no ordinary people.
You have never talked to a mere mortal.
Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat.
But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.
This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn.
We must play.
But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.
And our charity must be real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.
Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses”(Lewis, 1949).
Brooks, A. (2019). Love Your enemies: how decent people can save America from the culture of contempt. Harper Collins: New York.
Dostoevsky, F. (1990). The Brothers Karamazov. Vintage: London.
Lewis, C. (1949). The Weight of Glory. HarperOne.
Updated: Feb 28, 2023
Thank you for visiting my site! If you want an introduction to narcissism, I suggest you read What is Narcissism?. For an application of one philosophical account of self-deception, see Self-Deception and Peck’s Analysis of Evil, and perhaps my response to commentaries on this paper On Studying Evil. Self-Deception: Science moves the discussion onto a scientific footing by discussing two evolutionary theories of self-deception, and Self-Deception: Religion asks what religion may have to offer about self-deception. Feel free to ask questions or contribute your thoughts.
In light of the way we conduct political discourse these days, I would like to draw special attention to the self-deceptive mechanism of splitting. It is often considered the basic self-deceptive mechanism on which most others are based, and is prominent in narcissistic and borderline personality disorders. I think it bears a striking resemblance to the four biblical names for the devil pointed out by Bishop Barron:
1. Ho-satana: the scatterer, who breaks apart things meant to go together. When you split you images of people or groups into all good or all bad, rather than
2. Ho-diabolos: the accuser. Now that you got your all-evil image of a person or group, it is natural to make accusations against that false image of the other person or group, as
3. The Father of All Lies wants you to, and then:
4. The Murderer from the Beginning can use these lies to justify you in destroying others.
This, it seems to me, is how the far right becomes unable to distinguish between Bernie Sanders and Joseph Stalin, or the far left between Ronald Reagan and Adolph Hitler.