Dignity in Identity, Mindfulness in Speech
By Asma T. Uddin
We all have a sense for what civil dialogue looks like, but what are the mechanics for making it work?
Believing in God puts you in relation with the rest of His children. But what kind of relation and how that relation is forged remain the questions for us to explore.
“When I feel contempt, what should I do?” Scholar Arthur Brooks once asked a Buddhist leader.
“Show warm-heartedness,” the Buddhist leader said.
“What if I don’t feel warm-hearted?” Brooks pressed.
“Fake it,” the man replied.
In other words, attitude follows action. Choose the action and the feeling will follow. If you want to feel gratitude, act more grateful. And if you want to battle the culture of contempt, face contempt with warm-heartedness. Courage and choice precede the change of heart. Relatedly, Christian pastor Timothy Keller said, “Forgiveness is practiced before felt, not felt before practiced.”
We have to break our habit of contempt by reprogramming the part of our brain that seeks an enemy around every corner, that anticipates conflict before peace has even had a chance. “Put something else in its place,” Brooks says, “substitute a better behavior for a bad one. When you feel contempt rising up in front of you and you want to respond, increase the space between the stimulus and your response.”
This isn’t only a Buddhist teaching. Jesus meant something similar when imploring his followers to “love your enemies” (Matthew 5:44). The Qur’an speaks a kindred wisdom: “Repel evil with good, and your enemy will become like an intimate friend.” (41:34). Enlightenment philosophy has a complementary concept: act in such a way that you treat humanity never as a means but always as an end.
In today’s polarized world we need to be aware of the forces and structures that pit identity against identity. Social scientists call this practice mindfulness — when your mind fully attends to what is happening around you, lending full presence to the moment without overreacting to surroundings — and it can minimize speech and thought patterns that condition us to demonize people outside our group. To have a mindful approach to social life, though, we have to first understand the mechanics of polarization. Here are the basics:
Group identity. This explains many of our current woes. Our group is the in-group and those outside our group are the out-group. Our attachment to our group is so significant that loyalty has shown to boost self-esteem. On the flipside, studies indicate that if we’re isolated from our group for whatever reason, the stigma acts on us psychologically and also triggers a physical assault on our body. What this means in practice is that, even evolutionarily, humans are programmed to signal their allegiance to their tribe as a way of avoiding this loneliness and stress that comes with being cast out.
Intergroup bias. While it’s natural, and not harmful, for groups to favor their own, things get much more complicated when the in-group experiences strong emotions. Stronger emotions include things like feeling that the out-group is moving against you: an out-group seen as threatening may elicit fear and hostile actions.
Political group identity. Allegiance to our political tribes is no different than the usual intergroup competition. Elections are pure team rivalry. What matters more than anything is that our group wins. Which means Americans are driven more by making sure the other team loses — that is, by what they oppose — rather than what they support. For example, a 2016 Pew study found that a “deeper affection” for the Republican Party increased voting much less than “very unfavorable views” of the Democratic Party. Among Americans highly engaged in politics, this disparity became even starker — the more they hated the other side, the more likely they were to donate money to their own party. This is why politicians focus so much of their messaging on generating fear and hatred of the other party.
Tribalism and learning. This tribalism affects how we interpret and respond to information. Our desire for our group to win makes us less interested in finding the right answer to a particular question or debate and more interested in locating and shaping the information that will help us win the argument. As the writer Ezra Klein put it, “Perhaps humans reason for purposes other than finding the truth—purposes like increasing their standing in their community or ensuring they don’t find themselves exiled by the leaders of their tribe.” It’s not the same as inventing a conflict, but it’s fairly close to it. We have a certain idea about our opponents and our brain prefers not to revise that idea.
We are wired to sort ourselves into groups, but there’s nothing natural about the way politicians and pundits manipulate our group identities to further divide us. Being aware of these mechanics of polarization can help us decide that “enough is enough.” It’s a strategy of mindfulness: If we are mindful of how the superstructure of polarization stokes our emotions, we can make better decisions about whether any given issue is worth being angry over or not.
For example, one tactic employed by professional and amateur pundits alike, especially on social media, is what philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke call “moral grandstanding.” It’s extreme, flamboyant rhetoric designed to make the speaker look moral and outraged. While some grandstanders making claims about human rights might be sincere, in many cases flourishing rhetoric on politicized issues is more about status-seeking than reasoned argument — and that makes it harder for us as a society to engage in arguments in good faith.
The moral grandstanders might stir hatred within us, but we have to respond with warm-heartedness — even if at first we are faking it. Mindfulness means being intentional about our responses, even if those responses might seem non-instinctual. To love our enemies and actively “repel evil with good” saves us from being an unwitting instrument of others.
Let us hold onto our distinctiveness, even as we let go of our prejudices. To build connections across difference we must learn how to listen, have hard conversations, and be more curious than defensive. An openness to seeing other people as people is what makes real change possible.
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Asma T. Uddin is a lawyer, scholar, and author specializing in U.S. and international religious freedom. She also writes and speaks on American Muslims and gender.
[This essay is part of a series called Positive Faith in Public Life]
[This essay is adapted from Asma T. Uddin’s recent book The Politics of Vulnerability: How to Heal Muslim-Christian Relations in a Post-Christian America and from a talk she gave in June 2021 on “Religious Identity and Dignity in America” at the BYU Religious Freedom Annual Review]
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