How intellectual humility will take us from The Era of Outrage to The Great Mellowing.
You see a lot on the four-hour drive from Wilson, Wyoming to Bozeman, Montana. It offers up so many forms of beauty, I found myself wanting to pull over and applaud more than once. For the opening stretch though, I mostly stared at a flag strapped to the back of an 18-wheeler ahead of me. “Fuck Biden,” it said in red, white, and blue.
I wondered how much the flag cost. (They sell a 3ft x 5ft on Amazon and Etsy for about $10 but this one was easily 20ft x 30ft.) I wondered if there were parents on this road dodging questions about its message from young readers in backseat boosters. I wondered about the outrage one must court and nurture to stretch such a thing across the back of one’s vehicle, spraying vitriol clear across golden valleys. Though I edged out across the double yellow lines many times to see the road ahead, the truck was unpassable. I would have been risking my life to move around it.
While I waited for a second lane to appear, I felt the familiar pricks of my own outrage surface. Who raised you? Where did you come from? What are you thinking?
By the time I got home, my only conclusion was that outrage is making a beautiful country ugly and pushing all of us into an inescapable cycle of tension, fury, and exhaustion. But why? And what hope have we of mellowing?
__________
There’s a lot to be outraged by; recycling that isn’t actually getting recycled, pre-emptive election deniers, the price of gas that we know we shouldn’t be using anyway because it’s ruining the atmosphere and it sends some of our money to countries that would have our way of life dissolved. There are lost retainers and “scratch disk full” messages, the recurring medical bill for a procedure you didn’t have, the cracked screen of your new cell phone winking at you each morning, families whose college loans are being forgiven after you sacrificed creature comforts to pay off yours. Not to mention the very present possibility that we are on the verge of, or effectively already in, World War 3.
Also, outrage feels good, for a while. “Maddiction,” as Dr. Jeremy Sherman calls it, is the addiction to the exhilarating exoneration we feel when the purity of outrage overcomes us. But what happens after the exhilaration? It’s sort of like an emotional bender. We trade a short-lived manufactured high for organ damage, self-doubt, and exhaustion on multiple levels.
And outrage is evolutionarily advantageous. When angry people bargain, they win. As a study at UCSB showed, because the cost of dealing with another person’s anger is perceived as high, angry negotiators often get their way.
Perhaps the biggest problem with outrage is that it can act as interpersonal super glue, helping us identify with a group and, this is the unfortunate kicker, make the group more extreme. Daryl Van Tongeren, a leading researcher on the science of humility, says “Group polarization is the tendency for like-minded groups to become more extreme when discussing issues on which they agree.” When a member of our inner circle expresses outrage, research shows we take the commentary up a notch. If you say he was a monster, I’ll say he was the devil incarnate. We ratchet up our language and intensity to show alignment and so we are not “outdone by others in the group.” And thus begins what I think of as the great narrowing of our perspectives, our social circles, and our potential. Not to mention the kind of rumination that keeps you up all night fantasizing about clever ways you could have verbally destroyed your ideological opponent.
__________
If outrage is energizing, addictive, and advantageous, if it helps us bond with our besties, how might we transition from The Era of Outrage to The Great Mellowing?
Enter intellectual humility, which is, simply put, knowing our knowledge has limitations. Once we get that, assuming we can remember it when next we encounter a person, place, or billowing flag that triggers our outrage, we are protected. Knowing our knowledge is limited allows — maybe even forces — new mindsets to take hold. As Amanda Ripley, author of High Conflict, put it to me, “You can’t be curious when you’re judging. You can’t judge when you’re curious.” As Van Tongeren said, “Know yourself, check yourself, go beyond yourself.”
That means asking: What does this person know, from life experience and alternative (but equally legitimate) sources, that I do not? Where are my biases? What assumptions have I made?
One bias we might have is “now-ism,” which is when one thinks everything is as bad as it could ever be right now. People like Nicholas Kristof repeatedly remind us it is definitely not — and remembering that might return us to a state of curiosity rather than outrage.
Another assumption we might have is “all or nothing-ism,” as in, “she grew up Catholic so she must be pro-life, which means she’s a Trump voter, an election denier, and an anti-democratic madwoman.” My mom goes to mass every day. She votes Republican and while she is fairly sure she would not have terminated a surprise pregnancy, the pro-life position hits her Barry Goldwater-ears as government overreach, and, surprise, the storming of the Capitol on January 6 made her sick.
__________
Another thing we rarely make the time to understand is how people came to their beliefs and what parts of their lives and livelihoods seem to be dependent on maintaining those beliefs. Dismantling is sometimes dangerous, putting us at risk of being cast out of our dearest associations.
As it turns out, the same questions that emerged in disgust on my road trip — Who raised you? Where did you come from? What are you thinking? — are weirdly handy here. I’ve interviewed a couple hundred people for my podcast and PBS show and, when the intent is discovery rather than confirming a hot take, I can attest that talking about parents, childhoods, and the formation of our earliest convictions will set a new table that both parties would be glad to sit at.
We either court and nurture outrage, for any number of the predictable rewards listed above, or we court and nurture intellectual humility, for what I would say is a set of greater, more substantial rewards: Personal growth. Functional communities. National security. And the kind of sleep that lets you wake up and engage productively with the people we share the world with.
Kelly Corrigan is the host of Tell Me More on PBS and the podcast Kelly Corrigan Wonders, and the author of five bestselling books.
