Opinion/Brown: As we celebrate July Fourth 'toxic righteousness' poses danger to America
The Fourth of July is coming with all its flags. Our president smiles at the cameras and reassures us America's best days are still ahead of us. But I'm not so sure. We live today in a self-polarizing country. We weaponize each new thing that attracts our attention for the culture wars that have become our obsession.
The Hebrew prophet Micah defined righteousness in the biblical sense 3,000 years ago.
“What does the Lord require of thee,” he asked, “but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly before your God.”
Justice, love, humility and mercy. But toxic righteousness is different. It's tribal. It's angry all the time, a collector of grievances. Both Left and Right find daily reasons to fear and loathe each other. How can you say you love your country if you hate half the people in it?
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Toxic righteousness feeds on grievance. And it's narcissistic. The more wicked you imagine your opponents, the more righteous you get to feel in opposing them. This isn't just honest disagreement about what is best. Where is the dopamine rush in that? Toxic righteousness requires believing the absolute worst things about the people with whom you disagree. That's where the sense of heroism comes from.
It's like living inside a Marvel Comics movie. The villains aren't just wrong, they do evil for evil's sake. They hate everything that is good and holy. They're even after your children, for God's sake. Only if those things are true is opposing them heroic. This is addictive and I believe that as much as pushers hook us on drugs, there is a profit being taken — and power — by hooking us on hatred.
Someone once said that hatred is like taking poison and waiting for the other guy to die. The delicate balance of self-governance that the founders so carefully created can survive the attacks of foreign powers, but it is always vulnerable to citizens who no longer cultivate the personal qualities that make democracy possible.
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At the Republican National Convention of 2016, Newt Gingrich told a reporter, “You run on statistics; we’ll run on emotion — and we'll see who wins.”
This is what the founders were afraid of, enlightened rationality being overwhelmed by public passion.
This is also a time of political scandal. When the evidence appears too damning, we are told to pay no attention because the motivation behind investigating it is political. This is like telling someone, “You just say it's raining because you don't wanna go on the picnic.” Maybe you want to go and maybe you don't — but objectively speaking, either it's raining or it isn't, regardless of how we feel about it.
In politics as in economics, it's the bad guys who want the referees swept from the field — or they want to pick their own. Do it their way and if criminality is being investigated by the other party, it's corruption. If the scandal is in their party, investigation is unnecessary. And always, there’s this anger, this insistence on being the victim of wicked people with wicked intentions. Where liberals have lost compassion for conservatives, this is their problem too.
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In 1630, the Rev. John Winthrop addressed his little congregation of the Plymouth Plantation in a long sermon. “To love and live beloved,” he said, “is the soul’s paradise on earth and in Heaven. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, as members of the same body.”
This we have not done. Quite the opposite. What we are seeing in America today is a failure of love, a massive and tragic and prideful failure.
I know. I have my political opinions and you have yours. But Americans have disagreed since our founding — the very founding we celebrate on the Fourth of July — but we are engaged in the dismal process of undoing and rejecting the intellectual and spiritual underpinnings that made the Great American Experiment work for as long as it has.
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This love I speak of can't be based on desire. We know some people are difficult and we often disagree. This civic love must be based on policy, on the determination to get up every morning and greet each person we meet with a gentle benevolence — agreement or not — Republican and Democrat alike.
This is going to be difficult for us, especially after such a long neglect, but if we don't have a fundamental change of heart, toxic righteousness will tear our country to pieces and we won't even be ashamed of ourselves until it's too late.
Not hearing a single candidate willing to tell you these things, I had no choice but to tell you myself — and confess to you that I’m afraid.
Lawrence Brown is a columnist for the Cape Cod Times. Email him at columnresponse@gmail.com.
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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Opinion: 'Toxic righteousness' threatens to destroy American democracy
