Irshad Manji, a bestselling author and founder of the Moral Courage Project at the University of Southern California, has a new book: Don’t Label Me: An Incredible Conversation for Divided Times. It is structured as a series of conversations with Lily, a.k.a. Lil, her blind, older rescue dog.
Three weeks after Donald Trump took office, my friend Jim and I went out for ice cream. We sat in the car, talking about the Muslim travel ban and polishing off our trashy soft serves. I’d been wanting to discuss how annoyed I felt with him. His blanket condemnations of Barack Obama bugged the bejeezus out of me. Was he a racist, pure and simple?
If my question comes off as dense, Lil, I ask it because Jim’s complicated.
On the one hand, Jim radiates civic virtue. Among other volunteer gigs, he works with a local group that houses low-income families, immigrant and not. In fact, he’s counseling the group to respect those families, to stop seeing them as charity cases and start viewing them as agents of change.
On the other hand, Jim sprays bile at Obama—actually, at all Democrats. I don’t know what he’d do without them. If I bring up Trump’s latest lie, Jim mechanically fires back, “What about Hillary?” Partisans of every cause share the “what-about” reflex. But no practitioner of what-aboutism has perfected it quite like the Soviet Union.
For decades, it’s what Moscow mouthed whenever reporters investigated human rights abuses in the U.S.S.R. “What about racial segregation in America?” the Kremlin’s flunkies regurgitated as a way to deflect accountability. What-aboutism solves exactly nothing. It only sharpens the claws of negative polarization. In its grip, we’re obsessed with crushing Them instead of improving Us.
I was busting to hold the mirror up to Jim. Knowing that he labels Barack Obama a socialist and therefore a treasonist, I put it to Jim point-blank: “Do you realize that your addiction to what-aboutism is more socialist than anything Obama ever did?”
Crickets, Lil. Ice cream in my right hand, I curled my left hand into a fist, lightly punched Jim on the arm, and risked a rather brusque question. “Who’s undermining American democracy more: Russian trolls or patriots like you?”
“What about liberals?” Jim replied without irony. “You’re right,” I attested. “Liberals push the ‘what-about’ button all the time. And I say so all the time. But you don’t say it about your side. Why not?”
Jim bit into his cone and stared out the windshield. “Bad habit.” That’s it? I thought to myself. Bad habit? Bullshit. But you’ve taught me, Lil, that to love someone is to learn from them.
So I took inspiration from Jim’s claptrap. I began researching why so many good people tumble into the quicksand of Us versus Them.
I began researching why so many good people tumble into the quicksand of Us versus Them.
It turns out that there’s a ton of truth to Jim’s “bad habit” jive.
The human brain plays a habit-forming trick that dates back to our time as hunter-gatherers. When people slaughtered their prey, circuits in their brains lit up to give them the momentary feeling of being rewarded. Get this, Lil: Those same brain circuits are activated whenever we’re agreed with. Recent research shows that if we’re validated in our beliefs, we experience the fleeting exhilaration of victory.
Exhilaration can be addictive. The more we feel it, the more we crave it. The more we crave it, the more we go after it again. And again.
Apply this scientific insight to Jim. Hearing his opinions repeated and applauded has a chemical impact. It makes him feel good. What an impetus to wall himself off, take refuge in his chest-thumping tribe, and defeat those who threaten the tribe’s preconceptions.
Now apply this to all human beings. Our biology guides us toward the easy pleasures, so even highly educated people scamper into pods of purity, where they can bask in emotional warmth. That’s how those of us who advocate the opposite of conformity—namely, diversity—too often end up creating conformist platoons.
That’s how we succumb to the seduction of labels. That’s how we unintentionally practice exclusion camouflaged as inclusion.
Above all, that’s how we mirror Donald Trump. On the campaign trail, Trump announced, “The only important thing is the unification of the people because the other people don’t mean anything.” Wait, what? Asinine. But if we leave diversity to our most base instincts, we become that. Labeling Trump supporters instead of understanding some of them lures us to a Trumpian result: We unify ourselves and brush off “the other people” because they “don’t mean anything.”
Labeling Trump supporters instead of understanding some of them lures us to a Trumpian result: We unify ourselves and brush off “the other people” because they “don’t mean anything.”
Don’t tell me, Lil. It’s a false equivalence to compare Us to Them. We have brains. Consider this a mixed blessing.
Typically, human beings submit to the ancient part of our brains rather than exercising the more evolved regions of our brains. In doing so, we kowtow to our Us against Them impulses. At that point—and with apologies to the lovely state of Louisiana—diversity congeals like spoiled gumbo. The layer called “Us” separates from the goop it leaves behind. Although “our” layer may be foodier, chewier, more substantial than “their” layer, both layers have turned gnarly.
Please give me a minute to retch. Better now. I don’t want to insult your intelligence, Lil. There’s no single cause for any single act. Nothing that humans do can be demystified by studying the brain on its own. Alongside it churns an intricate mix of genes, hormones, environment, and culture. But the brain is the last tunnel traveled by these different influences.
It’s the “final common pathway,” according to the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky. Hilariously, he observes that researchers of the brain unconsciously cave to the brain’s knack for grouping: They classify themselves into ever-more specialized fields and reach ever-narrower conclusions. These cerebral professionals somewhat ape the loyalists of any political party.
How’s that for hope, Lil?
Throughout the world, more and more people are choosing to use their brains mindlessly. As in tribally. To be accurate here, Sapolsky doesn’t believe we choose anything. He says that human beings have zero free will because in the final analysis, our biology dictates our behavior. But then how do we explain “consciousness”—which psychologist Timothy Wilson defines as “that wonderful ability to reflect, ponder and choose”?
And don’t people demonstrate that we can choose to override the brain’s either-or instinct? Aren’t populists demonstrating that we can also choose not to? If America literally were a gumbo casserole, Lil, then at this moment I wouldn’t feed you a spoonful of your country no matter how much you begged.
I certainly do care about your appetite, honey. It’s entirely understandable that you don’t want gumbo going to waste. Polarization jeopardizes your pleasure. I feel you.
What am I going to do about it? No, my love, I alone can’t fix it. Any solution will be an array of tiny solutions, which means a lot of hands on deck. But I can testify that we won’t solve Us against Them strictly by sloganeering at Them. In a polarized society, truth dies in part because of Us.
I confess, Lily, that Jim might never be changed by my conversations with him. Or that, if he is changed, he might drift in a direction that disappoints me. It’s possible that Jim will become more savage about political correctness, whose manipulation he despises down to his fingernails. Possible, too, that he’ll become even more oblivious to the manipulation that he construes as information—courtesy of the far-right’s multimedia rage machine.
But I can tell you this: If Jim pulls himself out of the Us-against-Them quagmire, it won’t be because I tore into him with verifiable facts. It’ll be because I loved him enough to wonder where he’s coming from, and because he trusted that my questions spring from a desire to challenge myself.
If Jim pulls himself out of the Us-against-Them quagmire, it won’t be because I tore into him with verifiable facts. It’ll be because I loved him enough to wonder where he’s coming from.
I must make a second confession. Jim has changed me. Around him, I can’t settle for the vacant thrill of name-calling. May I let you in on a recent development? Jim sent me his rabbi’s sermon about breaking the habits that inflame polarization. He actually took the time to request a written copy. He’s thinking about the privilege we humans give to emotion. He’s thinking about democracy’s need for a better balance between feeling and contemplating.
Well-functioning humans never stop feeling, but more of us could try, like Jim, to think about how much we’re emoting when we argue. Because we’re emoting out of a desire not to do what’s right, but to show we’re right. And yet, all we’re showing is that we resist the very introspection we demand of our opponents.
Sure, we’re human. Empathy for Them is compassion for ourselves. By the by, Lil, without Jim you probably wouldn’t be in my life. I told you that he introduced me to your Mama Laura. Together, they introduced me to the dignity of doggiekind. See? Jim’s “alternative intelligence” paid off at least twice. First, I fell in love with you. Second, a few weeks after you adopted us, Laura and I got married. That day, Jim joined my devoutly Muslim uncle in walking me down the aisle.
Excerpted with permission from Don’t Label Me: An Incredible Conversation for Divided Times, by Irshad Manji, to be published February 26 by St. Martin’s Press. Available for pre-order at us.macmillan.com.