While grievance blows our concerns out of proportion, humility puts them in perspective. While grievance reduces the people with whom we disagree to caricature, humility acknowledges that they're every bit as complex as we are — with as much of a stake in creating a more perfect union.
In a course that I'm currently teaching at Duke University, I talk with students about Americans' quickness to take offense these days — about our insistence on seeing ourselves as wronged — and I ask them to keep an eye out for some of the many odd and distressing examples of this. The other week, one of the students came into class with a doozy. The eclipse had just occurred, and she'd spotted a post on X from hours beforehand that said that the rush on and shortage of eclipse glasses marginalized people who didn't plan ahead. It had thousands upon thousands of likes, though I can't know what percentage of the people who responded to it in that fashion saw it as a serious insight and what percentage saw it as satire. I myself can't say with total certainty which it was. But I know that either way, it was a commentary on our cracked culture, which can turn even celestial glory into grievance. That corrosive tendency is the topic of my forthcoming book, "The Age of Grievance," and my guest essay today, adapted from the book, examines one of the causes of this mind-set: We live in profoundly unhumble times. Too many politicians present themselves not as our servants but as our saviors. Too many political actors interpret one group's actual or possible gains as another group's actual or possible losses. And too many of us view any and all events through a self-centric lens: How will this affect me? Or, at least as often, how will this diminish me? We conflate real offenses with imagined ones. We jumble righteous causes with pettier complaints. And what's eclipsed along the way is a humble, mature understanding that we don't get and shouldn't expect a world completely to our liking, that life is a tangle of mercies and disappointments, and that the common good deserves as much consideration as our individual lots. A dose of humility would help illuminate that.
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2024/04/20
Opinion Today: The antidote we need for our age of grievance
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Keep a civil tongue.