With the college basketball season officially over, I was thinking back to a renewed rivalry this past season that in the end didn’t get much traction: the MU/KU game last fall. That rivalry is in some ways like many others: North Carolina/Duke or Louisville/Kentucky. Except in the case of Missouri and Kansas, historians note an animosity that can be traced back to pre-Civil War days, even violence related to the institution of slavery. It was only a basketball game, but the once-heated rivalry raises
some important lessons for the present moment. Here’s why I say that.
Several weeks back, one of our church members texted me a link to a podcast featuring Arthur Brooks called “How Can We Break Our Addiction to Contempt?” which I forwarded to my clergy colleagues for a discussion over lunch. Two words in the title are crucial: addiction and contempt. He describes the latter as a kind of disgust, the belief that the other isn’t even worth engaging, not even worth being angry at them. As for why we behave that way, that’s where addiction comes in. Like the alcoholic, we engage in a behavior we abhor. Most of us are sick of the divide in our country (93% of us according to Brooks), and yet we perpetuate it, even get an endorphin rush from doing so. That’s addiction.
I eventually ordered Arthur Brooks’s book, Love Your Enemies, first published in 2019. How I missed it back then is anyone’s guess because it is essential reading for us today. The subtitle reads, How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt. As the title of the book suggests, the antidote is love. Brooks cites several noted social psychologists on the topic, but it was advice the author got from the Dalai Lama that I found most helpful. He told Brooks that he begins every day by offering prayers for the Chinese leaders who drove him and his followers into exile, authentic prayers for their welfare. He invited Brooks to recall one of those rare times when he responded not with contempt but with warm-heartedness and how it made him feel, another kind of chemical rush. Now do it again and again, counseled the Dalai Lama.
What caught my attention last fall when KU and MU squared off was how the current student bodies no longer hate each other. Parents, and in some cases, grandparents, had to explain why we don’t like “them.” It makes you wonder what more serious lessons we are unwittingly teaching our kids and grandkids. Brooks admits there can be views held by others that are contemptuous, but no person should be treated with contempt. Such a wise distinction. Early in the book, Brooks quotes the renowned Christian thinker Thomas Aquinas, “To love is to will the good of the others,” a classic definition in many circles. But Brooks then cites a contemporary philosopher who refined the definition. “To love is to will the good of the other as other.” I reread that line several times, trying to let it sink in.
Of course, love of the other as other isn’t just worth pondering. It’s worth living that way, and even if it is exceptionally challenging, it is doable.
