The earnestness of Love Your Enemies shines through on every page. Arthur Brooks, the past president of the American Enterprise Institute and a newly minted Harvard professor, surveys the bitterness and vitriol of American life and pens a how-to manual on steering back toward charity. One could almost say “Christian” charity, in light of the book's title. While there is much wisdom in this volume, and while the impulse to heal our divisions is clearly necessary, Love Your Enemies doesn't quite hit the mark. The sentiments are right — eschew contempt, watch out for confirmation bias, beware the disinhibition of mobs (including Twitter mobs), and never dehumanize your ideological opponents. And yet, this book, part self-help manual, part social commentary, doesn't quite deliver on the promise of the title.
Love Your Enemies reflects the concern about our national polarization found in other recent conservative books such as Them, by Ben Sasse, and Alienated America, by Tim Carney. Brooks refines the familiar “ideological silo” analysis by borrowing from marital therapy. Marriage counselors, Brooks notes, can predict with 94 percent accuracy which couples are headed for divorce court just by watching the pairs interact for an hour. When husbands and wives display contempt through sarcasm, hostile humor, sneers, and especially eye-rolling, the marriage is usually doomed. He distinguishes between anger, which can be righteous, and contempt, which is almost always fatal:
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.”
Such studies have been challenged vis-à-vis marriage counseling, but the point may still hold for countries. In a self-governing nation, mutual contempt of the kind we are currently stoking can only lead to ruin:
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?
Our civic life, particularly at the presidential level, is a riot of scorn. On one side, we have Hillary Clinton describing Trump's voters in these terms: “You know, you didn't like black people getting rights; you don't like women, you know, getting jobs; you don't want to, you know, see that Indian American succeeding more than you are.” And then there's President Trump, proclaiming that Democrats are truly bad human beings and that the press is the “enemy of the people.” And those are his printable remarks. What Brooks calls the “outrage industrial complex” — cable news, social media, and entertainment — feeds this mutual hostility and profits handsomely by it. For the rest of us, this diet of disdain is like acid eating away at the bonds of community.
