LETTER: Tribalism, Contempt Don't Have To Lead Discourse In Dearborn County

Following a controversy around political flags in Hidden Valley, one resident asks neighbors to steer clear of verbal warfare.

Eric Kranz. Photo provided.

As I was missing yet another three foot birdie putt on the ninth hole at Hidden Valley last week I received a text from a friend letting me know that Cincinnati news vans were hanging out in front of the POA meeting. I had heard some rumblings about Trump flags and campaign signage that had turned into heated social media debates (are there any reasoned and mild social media debates?) and since the Brewers had the night off I decided to go check it out. At first I was thrilled when I walked into the room. So much civic engagement! It was standing room only and all of the attendees waited politely as the board went through its standard business. Then the board opened the floor to public comments. Immediately folks started hyperbolically describing each side of the issue which left me slightly confused since the board, to this point, had not made a single statement about any course of action it was planning to take (or not take). I left after about twenty minutes of public comments dizzy and a little disheartened at the way my neighbors were ready (and seemingly eager) to enter verbal combat. While a lot of words were said, there was zero discussion. I’m honestly still not totally sure what the fight was about…

It just so happened that at the same time I began to read Arthur C. Brooks’ new book Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt. It’s rare a book so perfectly fits into a specific chronology of events. There could not have been a more appropriate time for me to pick it up. The key point in the book is that contempt destroys.

• “Anyone who can’t tell the difference between an ordinary Bernie Sanders supporter and a Stalinist revolutionary, or between Donald Trump’s average voter and a Nazi, is either willfully ignorant or needs to get out of the house more. Today, our public discourse is shockingly hyperbolic in ascribing historically murderous ideologies to the tens of millions of ordinary Americans with whom we strongly disagree. Just because you disagree with something doesn’t mean it’s hate speech or the person saying it is a deviant.” -Arthur Brooks, Love Your Enemies

Not only does contempt cause us to dehumanize the other but it also forces us to give up a little bit of our humanity in order to embrace that bitter rejection of the “wrong team.” We live in an era of straw men and bad faith arguments, of closed ears and open mouths, of vacuous sloganeering without substance. There are a multitude of reasons for this descent into madness (horserace politics, shorter attention spans, winner-take-all politics and the catastrophizing of all public policy decisions to name a few) and many came into play to fuel the Hidden Valley debate. It’s easy to get caught up in it, I certainly have in the past, but at the conclusion of the book Brooks calls on the reader to make an attempt to do something about it. To try and improve public discourse in some marginal way. That spurred me a little bit and got me thinking about how I can have a positive impact.

To put the cherry on top of this serendipitous sequence, I listened to the book (studies have shown that audio books stimulate the same brain functions as words on a page so don’t let anyone tell you listening to books is cheating) on my way to and from a conference in Indianapolis on building better communities. The key point that stuck with me is that we must undertake every project asking “how will this impact our children.” In other words, will what we are trying to achieve make this a better community for future generations. I don’t generally appreciate “think of the children” moral panics but in this instance, when talking about creating a culture we can be proud of, it makes sense. We want to build a community that our kids will want to come back to, start a family in and build successful careers in. How does treating our neighbors with contempt help us achieve this vision?

We can’t change the national discourse overnight. I accept that. But what we don’t need to accept is that the national default language of tribalism and contempt has to be the default in Dearborn County. As we enter local politics season I hope that we can learn from a situation that really spun out of control and start making a real effort to treat people with kindness and engage in good faith disagreements, as opposed to entrenched verbal warfare. The people that run for local office all want to make their community a better place. They all want to do good and serve others. Maybe their idea of “good” and “help” differ from yours but that doesn’t make them bad. It doesn’t even necessarily make them wrong. Listening to ideas different from yours isn’t dangerous or treasonous, often it’s the best way to strengthen your own understanding of a position you hold dear! No one wins in an argument, but everyone benefits from intelligent debate.