Are we paying attention?

A few weeks back, a tweeted picture of a boy in a red hat and an older Native American man exploded into a national story. It went on to become fodder for all sides involved in a culture war that certainly appears to be worsening. If you saw the picture, you undoubtedly had some sort of knee-jerk reaction, which would have most likely been telling about where you stand on a host of other political and cultural issues. Political discourse has always been tenuous, but today, it feels different. It feels religious. It’s as if a collective, societal psychosis — perpetuated by callouts, clicks, and retweets — has infected the spirit of America, and nuance, tolerance and the benefit of the doubt are increasingly endangered.

If you’re anything like me, your head may be spinning trying to make sense of how we got ‘here.’ What part of the story are we in? How did it get so bad, and in what ways have I been pulled into the whirlpool of tribalism? Conversations unpacking this current climate are helpful and necessary, as the ‘here’ is vastly complicated and worthy to be understood. But there’s more going on. What do our conditioned responses reveal about our inner lives? As someone interested in the business of the soul — that is, the intimately connected dynamics of the emotional, psychological, and spiritual — there is a far deeper actor at play, that nefariously encourages the claiming of moral authority in the face of distressing emotional states. In other words, we need to be right. We need to be certain. There is safety in those things, and the driver of this reflex is contempt.

A traditional definition of contempt frames the idea as the feeling that a person or thing is beneath consideration, worthless, and deserving of scorn. Demonstrations of this are easy to see in our culture wars, and we have the catch phrases to prove it. “Lock her up.” “Check his birth certificate.” “Build the wall.” “A vote for Trump is a vote for racism,” and the list goes on. The brilliant Dan Allender explains contempt as “judgements against others, as a way of splitting off, relieving the complexity of living in a very complex world.”

Splitting off. Relieving. These are words of retreat and safety.

Allender’s words paint a picture of a largely unconscious endeavor, in which we try to escape the master emotion of shame. We do this by doubling down on what we need to be true, to keep intact the status quo we have orchestrated (probably with the help of others). To be clear, this doesn’t imply there are no moral convictions worth fighting for, nor nothing to tussle about intellectually. Please hear me. Grave injustices remain in our world today, and we should engage those in restorative ways, with passion and fervor. But I can’t think of a context where contempt for the other would be useful in any way. Rather, what our country desperately needs is to be gracious in our disagreements, even the most passionate ones. Contempt requires ignoring the humanity of an “adversary” so we can then protect ourselves from our own hurt. In many ways, it is a marker of distress in our own lives, that must be paid attention to, in the same way a fever is indicative of an infection.

It is hard work to confront our contempt for the other (i.e persons, places, things or ideas). It forces us to take a look at our own lives and interrogate our anger. The longer we go without doing this, the further invested we become in our own safety, and the doubling down continues. I’ve heard it said, that you can’t truly hate someone if you knew their story. Maybe that means contempt cannot thrive in both proximity and relationship with the other. In my work as a therapist, i’ve met many individuals whom have lived seemingly “reckless” lives, chaulk full of questionable choices. Their politics, sexuality, ideology, financial choices and general worldview may be quite different from mine, but their life stories matter. The narcissist, the borderline, the addict, the apathetic; they are all worthy of being understood.

Contempt for the other can be intoxicating. If it didn’t feel good, we would not be doing it correctly. It gives us some semblance of certainty, albeit, manufactured. But the truth is that it is a current that has swept our footing out from under us, and we are actually flailing about, doing our best to find some control. It feels safe, but we certainly are not. In writing these words, I am reminded of my contempt for the other. Am I paying attention? Am I willing to interrogate my discontent, uncertainty, and fear? For the sake of the spirit of America, for the sake of our own soul, we must.