Once we discovered our mistake, we spent most of our long trip home talking about this situation and how destructive it was to us. But I didn’t want to give up my anger. I wanted to get even somehow. But after that we began praying about it, praying for something to change. His presence was ruining our relationship with the rest of my family. Maybe that was his intention.
About two years after we were married, after ending our religious odyssey, we had to attend another family event. We were both dreading it. Tania knew what it would do to me. We went, and he was his usual self—but I had changed. I saw him differently. Afterward Tania and I got into the car and we both started crying. We actually felt bad for him. I was sort of startled by that; I was ready for anger. But it had suddenly become obvious to me how much pain he was in. Whether or not he was the instigator, it was clear he was suffering far more than I was. It was sort of a miracle. Something important inside me had changed. I had let my anger go. I don’t know if I would have been able to forgive him; he didn’t ask for that and I never offered, but he had lost whatever power he had once held over me.
While I can’t prove it, I know that it was my faith that allowed me to deal with him in a new way. For me, the key was accepting that there was something better for me if I was brave enough to pursue it. In a sense I was fortunate; I had hit bottom both with my drinking and afterward with my life. I don’t know if I could have survived if I hadn’t made changes; there wasn’t a lot of questioning with boldness going on. For me it was a matter of survival.
I’ve been incredibly fortunate; the faith that I’ve found has been both religious and secular in nature. I’ve had the support of my church, and I’ve also been able to beat an addiction without it. Having a church or synagogue or mosque that lays out a path for you probably makes it easier; it provides someplace inside yourself to find a shelter. Religion isn’t required to beat an addiction, but faith is.
Have any people in history placed more faith in the future than our Founding Fathers? These men literally risked their lives in what most people of that time would have considered foolhardy at the least and suicide at the most. Just stop for a second here and try to imagine what they had to believe was possible—and not just believe it but have such faith that it would happen that they were willing to bet their lives on it. The idea that a loosely hung-together federation of very different types of people, with little financial or military support, could come together to defeat the greatest military power on earth was ludicrous. How would any sane person believe that?
All those men had was their faith, a belief that it was possible. For some of them that faith was based in their religious beliefs, but not for all of them. Thomas Paine, for example, whose pamphlet Common Sense provided the intellectual basis for revolting against Great Britain, did not believe that God would somehow protect the righteous cause. Paine was a monotheist; he firmly believed in the existence of one God, but he disdained organized religion. “I believe in the equality of man,” he wrote in The Age of Reason, “and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy. . . .
“My own mind is my own church. . . . I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.”
Thomas Paine’s faith was not religiously based. He didn’t put his fate in the hand of God but rather in his fellow man. He believed in the essential goodness of man and understood what had to be done for men to be free, and he had the courage to move forward with it. As he wrote in The Rights of Man, “The World is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.”
Having taken so-called leaps of faith made it a lot easier for me to believe, to trust, to have faith that breaking away from my outrage would lead to something better. What I’m asking people to do is made much harder by the reality that not only haven’t you reached bottom, you’re actually pretty happy with what you’re doing. What I hope you are seeing is that the country has reached bottom. We don’t stand for very much anymore. We’re too busy fighting each other over things that will make little difference, to focus on those battles that will determine the future of this country. Asking me to provide some evidence that what I am saying is true, that this country is in trouble and we need to do something about it, before you make the leap is a profession of a lack of faith. It doesn’t require any faith to move forward when you’re certain of the outcome.
Whether it comes from God, your belief in God, or your personal beliefs, faith is essential. Without that hope, I don’t know whether I could have gotten up off the floor of my living room. Without it, maybe I would have killed myself, because I’d made too many mistakes, I’d created problems that seemed insurmountable. But there was that reservoir inside me that gave me hope. I’m not asking you to believe in my religious faith, I’m not asking you to go to church or rely on any religious teachings; I am asking you to find that place inside yourself that allows you to find the courage to overcome this addiction.
People have told me to forget it, that this kind of plea won’t work. It’s too idealistic or simple. I’ve been told that people have become accustomed to using their political outrage to channel their emotions, that they can take out all the frustrations of their daily life on people they don’t know, and do it without any consequences. No one wants to come together, they tell me; they like feeling good about pounding the other side. And they will never give that up for some sort of vague fears about the future of the country.
But I have faith that the American people are much better than that. And I have seen that faith transform me and many others. And I know what is possible.
36
* * *
Line upon Line
If my starting offer is “I get to rob, beat, enslave, and kill you and your kind, but you don’t get to rob, beat, enslave, or kill me or my kind,” I can’t expect you to agree to the deal or third parties to ratify it, because there’s no good reason that I should get privileges just because I’m me and you’re not. Nor are we likely to agree to the deal “I get to rob, beat, enslave, and kill you and your kind, and you get to rob, beat, enslave, and kill me and my kind,” despite its symmetry, because the advantages either of us might get in harming the other are massively outweighed by the disadvantages we would suffer in being harmed (yet another implication of the Law of Entropy: harms are easier to inflict and have larger effects than benefits). We’d be wiser to negotiate a social contract that puts us in a positive-sum game: neither gets to harm the other, and both are encouraged to help the other.
—Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
To begin bringing our country together, we have to find those things on which most of us can agree. For example, I think most of us agree that America has always served as a symbol of freedom and hope for a better future. Go ahead, nod your head. Then I think we agree that most Americans are good and decent people, who, given the opportunity, will do the right thing. And most of you will agree that there are sensible solutions to the problems we are facing now and will face in the future—and that what is preventing us from solving those problems is those people on the other side. This problem could be solved if those people just accepted reality. It’s the opposition with their lack of knowledge that makes me crazy. . . .
Well, you get the idea. The seventh and eighth steps in AA are “Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them” and “Made direct amends to such people whenever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.” Basically, look at those people who have suffered because of your behavior and try to make peace with them.
Let me make a big statement here: In a lot of the situations
we’re shouting at each other about, there is no easily determined right and wrong. And more important than that, it doesn’t matter. Nothing you do or say on social media is going to make an actual difference; it isn’t going to solve a problem or resolve an issue. But what it will do is cause mutually destructive outrage. While you’ve been expressing your anger, outrage, and frustration at the inability of the other side to understand reason, so have the people you’ve been fighting with; in a lot of instances that’s why you got so angry in the first place. And here’s something else: It’s possible you are 100 percent right. Every word you say may be absolutely true, and by disagreeing with that the other guy is just provoking you. You may just be responding to the crazy things the other side is saying. But as much as you don’t want to admit it, the other side may not be completely crazy.
It doesn’t matter. The other side is not your enemy. We are all in this together, and you have to find a way of admitting to yourself that neither side is right all the time, and, hard as it is to believe, there may be times when they are right and you’re wrong. Finding the highest truth is your goal.
Let’s assume you’re a good person. I assume that about all of my audience. And let’s also assume that you are both a patriotic American and a person of religious faith. And, as best you can, you follow the tenets of both the Bill of Rights and the Bible. In fact, when you look at both of them, you realize that in most ways they complement each other.
But there is a problem: According to Matthew 22:36–39, Jesus said that the two most important Commandments of all were “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” I know you really try to do that; you try hard to love your neighbors and treat them with respect, but there is this one person at work who doesn’t believe a word of this. In fact, this person doesn’t share any of your beliefs and instead does everything possible to provoke you. You’re even pretty sure he was the person who took that chocolate bar you left in the office fridge. So here’s the question: If he doesn’t believe any of this, why is he entitled to the benefits of that Second Commandment?
Because this is about you. If you believe, as I do, that the level of mutual outrage in this country is destroying this country, you’ll take a deep breath and make a really difficult admission: It’s possible you’re wrong about a few things. Even if he did take that chocolate bar!
I have a friend who tells this story: At the height of the anti–Vietnam War movement, he was walking through New York’s Grand Central Terminal when he saw a well-dressed commuter, briefcase in hand, standing in front of two protesters and screaming at them. He was furious; he called them traitors and Communists, he accused them of siding with the enemy, he said soldiers were dying because of their actions. He went on and on, and when he finally quieted down, one of the young protestors looked at him and said calmly, “Have you ever considered the consequences if you’re wrong?”
And my friend, who was actually against the war, was stunned to realize that he hadn’t done that either. He was so certain the war was unnecessary and unjust that the possibility that he might be wrong had never occurred to him. Until that moment, which he never forgot, he had just sort of assumed that people who believed differently than he did actually knew on some level they were wrong, but for their own reasons didn’t want to admit it. The fact that he knew what was right was so obvious to him that it didn’t seem possible that any intelligent human being could believe the opposite and think they were right. What came with that was the realization that the screaming commuter believed just as strongly that the war was right and that supporting it was his patriotic duty as my friend believed that it was wrong—and he couldn’t understand how anyone could believe the opposite. It was a life-changing encounter for my friend.
I understand your desire to fight back. But we must not become what we say we are against.
We all know what’s right—it’s what we believe. So accepting the fact that someone can believe exactly the opposite of what you believe and be just as positive that he or she is right about it as you are is not the easiest thing to do. But admitting that you might be wrong is even harder. And there are reasons for that: Researchers have found that our political beliefs tend to get entwined with our personal identities; in other words, we become what we believe, so an attack on our political positions is perceived by our brain as an attack on our self, and the brain has been conditioned to fight that type of attack. “The brain’s primary responsibility is to take care of the body, to protect the body,” explained USC psychologist Jonas Kaplan. “The psychological self is the brain’s extension of that. When our self feels attacked, our [brain is] going to bring to bear the same defenses that it has for protecting the body.” Meaning our party affiliation has become a personal statement; it represents our values probably more strongly than at any other time at least since the Civil War. And as the two parties have grown farther apart, our party loyalty has hardened. It’s reached the point where many of us see members of the opposition party not just as people we disagree with but rather as the enemy, and we react to them as we would to anything that poses a danger to us.
One of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do was stand in front of a camera and admit that maybe, possibly, I wasn’t completely right. It was both an intellectual and an emotional challenge.
I know it was hard for my audience to believe that I would admit that. Me? Being wrong? How could that be? I’m the guy who provides guidance. My whole job is explaining things to you. I had studied the issues, I had collected a big pile of facts, I spoke clearly and succinctly and laid it out point by point. I was a proud member of the so-called vast right-wing conspiracy—or, as I always believed, the good guys. I heard all the nasty names the left-wing media called President George W. Bush, and I defended him as they made fun of him. I was furious about that. I thought so much of their criticism was in response to the Clinton impeachment. They were more interested in getting even than concerned about the safety of the country. When we invaded Iraq, most people on the left were against it. Not me. Whether or not Saddam had WMDs, I believed he was supporting terrorists, and we had an obligation to stop him. The liberals were screaming that we shouldn’t get involved, we shouldn’t be nation-building, and there was no indication the Iraqi people had the will to be free. How insulting, I thought; everybody wants to be free.
So we went in and I was cheering on the sidelines. Whoa, what a mistake. It turned out you can’t force democracy on anybody else; the Iraqi people didn’t understand it or even want it. It was similar to a mother forcing her child to eat broccoli “because it’s good for you!” And as the reality of the situation became obvious, I either had to continue to defend the president or admit that I was wrong. Unlike many politicians, I had too much respect for the American people to pretend I had taken a different position.
Admitting you’re wrong is one of the hardest things for human beings to do. We’re not built for it. When Galileo claimed that the earth revolved around the sun, church leaders were so outraged that in 1633 they charged him with heresy for “having believed and held the doctrine (which is false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures) that the sun is the center of the world, and that it does not move from east to west, and that the earth does move, and is not the center of the world.” It didn’t matter that scientists had concluded years earlier that the earth was not the center of the universe. The truth was not politically practical. Galileo spent the remainder of his life under house arrest. It took the church three hundred years—three centuries—to finally admit it was wrong.
It didn’t take me nearly that long. But I also saw what was happening. The pendulum was swinging back; Obama got elected by offering hope and change. Many of us on the right were proud of America breaking a foolish and outdated race barrier, but we were concerned about his Marxist upbringing, radical friend
s, and something we had never before seen from a U.S. president or could even identify by name—his postmodern attitude about the West and American exceptionalism. We went after him as the left had gone after Bush. With great challenges facing us—most important, we were in the middle of a terribly draining war that was costing thousands of American lives and billions of dollars—we were reduced to petty partisan arguments. Our elected officials in Washington were doing everything possible to distract us with nonsense. And people like me were enabling them. I had a responsibility to the several million people who listened to me every day to be honest. And that meant admitting I had been wrong.
I’ll tell you what I learned once I started my crusade to bring America together again: Even more difficult than admitting you might be wrong is accepting the opinions of other people without anger or hostility. That’s where people like me come in: “Unfortunately,” wrote Edward Wasserman, professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University, “mainstream media have made a fortune teaching people the wrong ways to talk to each other, offering up Jerry Springer, Crossfire, Bill O’Reilly. People understandably conclude rage is the political vernacular, that this is how public ideas are talked about. It isn’t.”
Although we’re focusing primarily on political issues, the expression of outrage certainly isn’t limited to that. If you want to generate anger, just go online and type in something like, I don’t think Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player in history. Or, Hot Tub Time Machine is the funniest move in the last fifty years! Then wait for the response. I promise you, it won’t be pretty.