You can have no influence over those for whom you have undying contempt. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Recently, I had the privilege to speak to a group of college students who were being honored for their academic achievements. When I began my banquet address by telling them that I wanted to speak about motive attribution asymmetry, you can imagine the looks on their faces. Say, what? Motive what?

A big term, a big mouthful. Until a few weeks ago, I had never heard this term and would have responded with similar skepticism. And then I read an article in The New York Times by Arthur Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute and a public policy scholar. In “Our Culture of Contempt,” Brooks claims that Americans are suffering from motive attribution asymmetry, the assumption that your ideology is driven by love, while your opponents’ is driven by hate.

Brooks cites a 2014 study in which researchers discovered that the average Republican and Democrat suffer from a level of motive attribution asymmetry comparable to that of Palestinians and Israelis. In a nation more divided than at any time since the Civil War, this discovery shouldn’t surprise us.

Years ago, when I was teaching a high school English class, a group of juniors and I were discussing potential issues for their upcoming argumentative essays. In the discussion that ensued, two girls engaged in a passionate debate over one of the issues for the better part of the class period. Their classmates looked on, sorely amazed at the intensity of their debate. When the bell rang, one of the girls hung back, waiting for her peers to exit. Then she pulled me aside and, in hushed tones said, Mrs. Vesely, I don’t think we should talk about things like this again, do you? She didn’t wait for my response. Honestly, I don’t think she expected or wanted one.

She had a point: this had been uncomfortable. Friends disagreed. Friends raised their voices in rebuttal. Friends left the room in righteous indignation. And this, she argued, was not good. Her conclusion was that we shouldn’t have discussions like this in the future.

Like the conclusion my student reached, Brooks claims it is tempting to argue that we should disagree less. But this is wrong, he says. We should seek ways to disagree better. This was the message I brought to my high school class on the day following the great debate. I told them that we should learn how to argue with conviction—but conviction tempered with empathy and understanding for those who held views contrary to our own. We should learn to disagree better.

When we disagree badly, Brooks believes that the tragic consequence of this is contempt. In the words of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, contempt is the unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another. Incivility and intolerance are bad, Brooks argues, but contempt is the real cancer. If you are convicted that your opponents are worthless, you believe you have the moral high-ground. And from this moral high-ground, your contempt often makes compromise and persuasion nearly impossible. Adding insult to injury, the by-product of your contempt is often hate-speech that is intended to rally your own troops and to reinforce the belief that while you motivated by love, your opponents are motivated solely by hate. I agree with Brooks when he writes that no one has ever been hated into agreement. 

I don’t imagine that there is a single individual who has not been cast as an opponent driven by hate at some point in his or her life. Several years ago, I was verbally accosted—via an hour-long telephone call—for a position on tolerance I had presented to a group of teachers. In my presentation, I argued for a better definition of tolerance, one that countered the definition that had become culturally popular. I proposed that genuine tolerance meant that we respectfully acknowledge and consider—not necessarily accept—views that were contrary to our own. I argued that we couldn’t expect our students to accept opposing views, for these students came from diverse cultural, political, socioeconomic, and spiritual backgrounds. To expect them to accept opposing views would be asking them to abandon their own. We could—and should—however, expect our students to honestly listen to and consider such opposing views and to treat those who held them with respect.

The gentleman who called me disagreed. In no uncertain terms, he told me that teachers must teach tolerance, which means acceptance. After nearly an hour, he concluded with demands that I retract my definition of tolerance, and then he hung up. Stunned, I sat in my office replaying the phone call. I realized that there was never any point at which I was being heard. Before he even picked up the phone, he had already determined that I was a person driven solely by hate. This was motive attribution asymmetry at it best—or worst. 

And this was contempt, up close and personal. The initial contempt he dished out was ideological, but this escalated into contempt that was acutely personal. Samuel Johnson writes,

Contempt is a kind of gangrene which, if it seizes one part of a character, corrupts all the rest by degrees.

I’d be the first to admit that all too often, contempt feels pretty darn good. To be contemptuous of another person, group, or ideology seats you squarely in the good guy corner. You and your people think, speak, and act in love. Your enemies can be clear targets for contempt because they think, speak, and act in hate. It’s often easier to rest in the moral indignation of contempt for others. It’s an emotionally and morally heady feeling to be in the right, when others are in the wrong. And when contempt seizes one part of you, like cancer, it can corrupt all the rest.

I also like to win arguments. I like the way that a strong rebuttal makes my nerve endings quiver and my blood thicken. I love the scenes in legal films when a passionate prosecutor or defense attorney makes such a compelling argument that the jury has nothing to do but accept it. Trial over, justice served. But I admit that my own compulsion for argument has often come with a price. The fact that this price has been contempt is not one that I’m proud of. I’ve gone for the kill, so to speak, in arguments with ideological opponents. And momentarily, it felt remarkable. In bed at night, however, it often felt petty and wrong.

Writing about motive attribution asymmetry in a 2014 article in The Guardian, Oliver Burkeman claims that you don’t need to like your opponents, and you certainly don’t have to agree with their positions, in order to look at them the way you’d like them to look at you. If you were to consider your opponents as those who are also driven by love—albeit love for different ideas and people—this would make the potential for compromise and genuine persuasion more likely. It would also make it more likely that you may have to consider the merit of their causes, for people driven by love are generally those with worthy causes.

As I concluded my banquet address, I challenged the college students to lead us towards a better way: better ways of disagreeing, better consideration of our opponents and their motives, and better, less contemptuous living. This is a personal challenge for me, as well. It goes without saying that our nation could do without the level and type of contempt we’re experiencing now. American journalist H. L. Menken writes that the only cure for contempt is counter-contempt. And as with so many things, counter-contempt begins first in the lives of single individuals. Like me and you.