February 8, 2004
Elections get reflected in the language. Remember "It's morning in America?" How about "the vision thing"? Or "It's the economy, stupid?" "Soccer moms," anyone? "Nascar dads" had a bit of a run this time, though they haven't made a big linguistic splash. Here's another pair of words I bet you've heard before:
"Bush hater."
"Hate" is a funny thing. Here at the University of Maryland, there's been a lot of hand wringing lately about bad fan behavior at basketball games. Fans wear T-shirts that say "F*ck Duke!" People in the crowd yell nasty epithets at opposing team members and sometimes they even throw things that could really hurt someone. Sports bring that sort of thing out in people. We've all heard someone say something like "I HATE the Cowboys!" (or the Yankees or the Raiders) and watched their veins bulge. You'd almost think that having blood enemies was an honest-to-goodness human need. Maybe sports provide a relatively safe outlet for this human quirk, though on the other hand, bad behavior by sports fans sometimes literally costs lives. Politics is like that too. It's a form of war, and we take it very personally. But there's also something oddly impersonal about it. The same center that those basketball fans hate when he's on the other team is they guy they'd all love if he'd been on "our" team instead of "theirs." The sentiment would be equally artificial in both cases. Most fans don't really know the players they love or hate. The same, of course, goes for politics.
Not that he has any reason to care, but there's a lot that George Bush and I disagree about and some of it makes me angry. But then, I have good friends I sometimes disagree with and sometimes I get mad at them too. That doesn't mean I hate them. I don't think I have any serious reason to think that George Bush is mean, crazed or morally vicious. I'm perfectly willing to believe that if I actually spent time around him, I'd end up liking him in spite of myself. Some things about the president's public persona raise my hackles, but so what? I can think of plenty of people I found annoying when I only knew them from a distance but whose tics stopped bothering me once I actually met them up close. No doubt some people have had the same reaction to me or even to you.
"Bush hater" is this cycle's mot du jour, but last time around, Clinton's name stood where Bush's stands. If you aren't even tempted to hate President Bush but couldn't stand Bill Clinton, I'd suggest that pretty much all I've said should fit that case for you.
In a way, this is all completely banal, but underneath it there's a serious issue. When we frame our disagreements in terms like "hate", we're not very good at hearing what the other side has to say. I'm a liberal by instinct and by party affiliation, but I've tried to develop a discipline. When I read the op-ed page, I don't just read the people I'm pretty sure I'll agree with. I read the "other side" as well. Sometimes I get riled. Sometimes I hear something I didn't expect to hear. And sometimes I find myself having to stop and think about things I would simply have taken for granted if I'd let my knee-jerk biases dictate what I read. The problems that politics deals with are complicated. It's not even remotely likely that one side is entirely right or wrong. But if we think about our political adversaries in caricature and let ourselves think we really hate them, we're simply making it harder for ourselves to think.
The cognitive psychologist Jonathan Baron has a useful phrase that guides a lot of his research: active open-mindedness. An actively open-minded person is someone who consciously searches for arguments and evidence that oppose her views. Baron gives an example (for more, go to http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron/ and scroll down to the link for "Myside bias in thinking about abortion".) The student newspaper at his university ran an op-ed piece on abortion with the following line: "If gove rnment rules against abortion, it will be acting contrary to one of the basic rights of Americans the right to make decisions for oneself." Whatever we should think about abortion, whoever wrote this line wasn't practicing active open-mindedness. If they were, they would have noticed: the other side sees abortion as equivalent to murder. But the government doesn't interfere with our right to make decisions by having laws against homicide.
Maybe abortion isn't murder. For the moment, that's not the point. But by not even asking what the other side would think, the editorialist ended up blind to the most obvious objection.
The connection to our theme should be clear. If you decide you hate people you disagree with, it's a lot less likely that you'll make any real effort to look for the gaps they can see in your own reasoning. If you care about the truth, you're shooting yourself in your mind's left (or right...) foot.
I have a sort of political fantasy. It's that someone with the money and time to do it well will start up an opinion journal that culls the best articles from the left and the right and puts them together in one place. It would also include a healthy serving of point/counterpoint essays where smart people who disagree look carefully at each other's views. Don't know about you, but I'd be a charter subscriber.
So I don't hate George Bush. Quite apart from the fact that hate is, well, hateful, I don't do myself any intellectual good by indulging that sentiment. But I do have some advice for the president. A while back, he told us that he doesn't read the papers. Instead, he gets his information from "unbiased" sources: his own advisors. Mr. President: that's a very bad recipe for active open-mindedness. Do yourself and everyone else a favor: cast your net a little wider.