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 givingâabout 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, doesnât it? Frankly, I didnât 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 âGenetic Algorithms and Public Economicsâ and âContingent Valuation and the Winnerâs Curse in Internet Art Auctions.â 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 didnât, 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 donât like the book, they donât 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 âDear Professor Brooks: You are a fraud.â Tough start. But my Texan correspondent didnât 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. Heâs 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, âGet a life, man. Donât you have something better to do than reach out and bother a stranger?â
- Option 3. Destroy him. Pick out three or four of his most glaring, idiotic errors and throw them in his face, adding, âHey, blockhead, if you donât know economics, best not to embarrass yourself in front of a professional economist.â
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 weâre 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. Trueâalthough you could probably say I started it by writing the book. Either way, just as the rejoinder âhe started itâ 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, Iâll tell you which of the three optionsâignore, insult, or destroyâI 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 âmotive attribution asymmetryââthe phenomenon of assuming that your ideology is based in love, while your opponentâs 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, âpolitical 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.â
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 canât 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 âangry.â I wish this were true, because anger tends to be self-limiting. It is an emotion that occurs when we want to change someoneâs 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 youâve 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 doesnât lead to anger, because it doesnât 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, âI care about this,â contempt says, âYou disgust me. You are beneath caring about.â
Once I asked a psychologist friend about the root of violent conflict. He told me it was âcontempt that is poorly hidden.â 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. Heâll ask each couple to tell their storyâhow they met and courted, their highs and lows as a couple, and how their marriage has changed over the yearsâbefore 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? Itâs not from the anger that the couples express. Gottman confirms that anger doesnât predict separation or divorce.5 The biggest warning signs, he explains, are indicators of contempt. These include sarcasm, sneering, hostile humor, andâworst of allâeye-rolling. These little acts effectively say âYou are worthlessâ 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, Gottmanâan ebullient, happy personâbecomes somber.
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 canât come to a solution with someone who holds you in contempt or for whom you have contempt.
Contempt is impractical and bad...