A couple of weeks ago I heard two authors interviewed on NPR (National Public Radio, now completely supported by listeners and sponsors) who spoke to our national condition. They spoke from opposite sides, but their analyses of what’s causing our current battle cries dovetailed perfectly.
From center-right is Arthur C. Brooks, who wrote “Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America From the Culture of Contempt” (2019). Brooks is a Washington policy analyst, president of the American Enterprise Institute, columnist for the Washington Post, Harvard Business professor and practicing Catholic. He also plays french horn.
His definition of contempt is what drew my attention in the interview. “Social scientists define contempt as anger mixed with disgust,” he starts. Then, quoting Schopenhouer, said that contempt is “the unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another.” Once we evaluate a person or group as worthless, it’s easier to move toward annihilation. I think that’s the threat many of us currently feel.
Writing before the Jan. 6 insurrection, Brooks was concerned about the hostility we felt toward each other even then. “Are You Sick of Fighting Yet?” he titled his introduction, which opens with a beautiful story about a protest by Black Lives Matter folks at a rally of Trump supporters in 2017 on the National Mall in D.C. Near the breaking point, one of the Trump leaders invited one of the Black leaders to speak to the crowd. Miraculously, the words the black leader found to say turned hostility to appreciation that the concerns each side carried were more similar than different—that they were not enemies out to destroy each other, but humans in common working to protect their concerns.
That was then. Would we try that now? More than water has gone under the bridge, I’m afraid.
The other author I heard interviewed was Joan C. Williams, who has a new book called “Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back” (2025). Williams knows the divide first-hand, having married a man from the working side of the tracks. Born working class myself, I found her description of the left’s ignorance of the real differences between lives of educated white-collar folks and non-college blue collar folks heartening. It’s a divide I carry in myself, having tried to move from one to the other and finding myself straddled somewhere in between.
I’ve only just begun to read her book, but she seems to be inviting the folks on the left to get truly curious about what makes the other side tick. One thing we have to discard is the myth that America is not a class-based society. I was raised with that myth, but it wasn’t hard to see through when I went to college, where so many young men were able to avoid the draft. Where my sentence structures and ways of thinking seemed so inadequate to so many professors. Where statistics and data analysis were almost impossible for me to stomach, given their frequent use in promoting war and economic empire-building. The struggle I wrote about last week is unquestionably a struggle of class, and I believe it will help if we come to recognize that.
Reading further in “Love Your Enemies,” I find some of Brooks’ assessments of liberal values a little thin. But I think his real point is right on: that loving your enemies will result in having fewer of them.
That thought reminded me of a quote by Kenneth Boulding, a Quaker peace activist. He said:
“While loving one’s enemies does not necessarily mean liking them or even approving of them, it always means treating them as fellow human beings… There is nothing in the life of Christ which says one cannot have opponents and even persecutors, but one cannot really have enemies, people whose lives and welfare have a negative value for you.”
His wife, Elise Boulding, added this thought:
“I would like to suggest a new word to replace enemy: ‘stranger’… There is no tribal group that does not have a tradition for dealing with the stranger. Oddly enough, we have lost it in industrial society. Therefore we have enemies. We don’t have rituals for deciding the basis of relationships.”
Whether through arrogant contempt or class ignorance, some of our leaders are driving us to have enemies. We need to stop following them.
Trudy Wischemann is a sometimes less-than-loving peace activist who then feels remorse. Send her your prayers c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247. This column is not a news article but the opinion of the writer and does not reflect the views of Mid Valley Times newspaper.
