de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 0:00 This is Episode 36 of ethics and culture cast from the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. Welcome to Episode 36 of "Ethics and Culture Cast" from Notre Dame's de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. I'm Ken Hallenius the communications specialist at the Center. In this episode, we sit down with Arthur Brooks, the former president of the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of "Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt." We talk about the importance of freedom of speech on college campuses, the role of American Catholics throughout history, and the importance of willing the good of the other as other. Let's sit down for this week's conversation. Well, Arthur Brooks, thank you very much for coming to be with us. Arthur Brooks 1:06 Thank you. It's great to be with you here at Notre Dame. I love this place. It's, as a Catholic, South Bend, Indiana, it's kind of like a Muslim doing the Hajj to Mecca. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 1:18 Yeah. Except we let everybody in. And you know, you don't you don't have to Arthur Brooks 1:23 Even non-Catholics. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 1:24 Even non-Catholics. Arthur Brooks 1:24 On a case by case basis. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 1:28 Love it. Tell me a story. Tell me a little bit about you, about where you're from, about your life to this point. Arthur Brooks 1:35 I'm a musician. That was what I did, from the time I was a little kid. That's all I've ever thought, that's all I ever thought about doing. I grew up in Seattle, Washington to a family of artists and academics. My father was a college professor. My mother was a painter and an amateur violinist and pianist. And from the youngest days, they told me I was going to be a classical musician. So when I was five years old, I took up the piano and violin at four violin piano at five, and the French horn when I was eight and that really stuck. I was good at it and all I wanted to do was to be the greatest French horn player in the world. And which, is a weird thing, right, but America is a great country. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 2:13 Right? To be president or French horn player. Arthur Brooks 2:15 Yeah, exactly. And and I grew up doing that; dreaming about when I could make my living as a classical musician with the greatest orchestras in the world and, and I was led to something entirely different by the greatest composer in the world. Here's the twist in the story. The greatest composer who ever lived, in my view, I mean, reasonable people disagree, is Johann Sebastian Bach. He lived from 1685 to 1750, he published more than 1000 pieces of music, he had 20 kids. That's... de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 2:44 He lived a full life. Arthur Brooks 2:45 He was productive. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 2:46 Yeah. Arthur Brooks 2:47 And, and when I was, I was as a professional musician. I mean, I had left college when I was 19. I made it through about 10 months of college, I went on the road playing as a professional musician, you know, living my dream and I was listening to my favorite composer and I read this biography of Bach. And he was asked about this minor biography lost in posterity this point. Why do you write music? And I'm super interested in this right? And because you know, I'm all about music and Bach's answer was that the aim and final end of music is nothing less than the glorification of God and the refreshment of the soul. And I asked myself, could I say that? Could I say that? Is that my, that's Bach's story? Is that my story? It wasn't my story. I was not glorifying God. I was not refreshing the souls of others, I didn't think. And so I went in search of some way that I could answer like Bach answered, and I wound up leaving music and becoming an economist. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 3:44 Um, I'd say that's the twist in the story. Arthur Brooks 3:47 That's the twist in the story. I went and got my PhD. I left music. I taught at Syracuse for 10 years. I ran a think tank in DC for 10 years, and now I'm a professor at Harvard, using leadership and I'm working as a social scientist, but still in my heart, a musician. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 4:01 Do you still play? Arthur Brooks 4:02 No, I don't play. I listen all the time. And there's a movie out that's playing on Netflix right now called "The Pursuit." And in that movie, some documentary filmmakers followed me around the world for three years, I would just happen to be on the concert stage in Barcelona where I made my living for a long time. And they ambushed me because filmmakers are, you know, fortunately, you know, my pants stayed on and through the entire movie I watched. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 4:26 Okay, well, that's good. Arthur Brooks 4:26 That's really good. I mean, it's, it's it's a family picture. But they put a French horn in my hands and I played it for the first time in 20 years. I gotta say it's pretty bad. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 4:37 Well, I'm not gonna ambush you, I promise, you know, like, like I tell people all the time: I'm not Mike Wallace. Arthur Brooks 4:42 Yeah, I got it. I appreciate that. Thank you guys for not barbecuing me. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 4:48 So for the past 10 years, you were the president of the American Enterprise Institute. Arthur Brooks 4:52 Yeah, a think tank in DC dedicated to public policy, everything from national security to education policy to tax to everything in between. One of the oldest think tanks in the world. It has been around for 80 years. And the first major international think tank dedicated to principles of the free enterprise system and American leadership. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 5:08 And that very much grew out of your professional researches as an academic, kind of getting involved with AEI. Arthur Brooks 5:15 Yeah, for sure. So when I was teaching at Syracuse, one of the key issues that I wanted to tackle was why had poverty gotten so much better since I was a kid. I mean, most people, even those listening to us, they have a terrific social conscience and they believe in you know, the social justice mission of the gospel, like I, you do really strongly, but they don't recognize that there's been a lot of progress, we have a tendency to think that everything's gotten worse. That the poor are poorer than they've been and then that's completely upside down and wrong. Since I was a kid, 2 billion people have been pulled out of starvation-level poverty, to be for the first time in human history, the percentage of the world's population living on $1 a day or less, obviously, adjusted for inflation, has declined by 80%. Since you and I were kids, and you gotta ask yourself, what the heck happened? And if you can't explain it then you can't replicate it. And if we're going to work for social justice around the world, then we're not doing our job on understanding this. So I went digging as an economist and what actually did that and I became persuaded that the reason for this incredible decline in world poverty was basically five forces. Number one is globalization, the globalization of values, the globalization of ideas. The second was free trade. So particularly, after 1980, free trade started to spread around the world making goods and services cheaper, creating opening markets for people making it possible for people to earn this success. Third was property rights and the rule of law which are spreading around the world. People are basically throwing off their chains. They were looking at Americans and saying, I want to live like that. I want their freedom and I want their stuff. And the way that you get that is by overthrowing the jerk in the, you know, the Chief Executive Office who's saying that, you know, what's yours is mine. So property rights and the rule of law authentically sort of spread around the world. And last, quite frankly, was the culture of American style, entrepreneurship. It was we can, this can be done, and we can do it. And you know and the explosion of the means of communication around the world that was not perfect because you know, the sort of McDonald's Coca Cola culture going around the world has had some deleterious impacts, none of us would deny that. I mean, not to cast aspersions on McDonald's or Coca Cola. But the whole idea of the sort of cheapening culture and and not all that is good, because it's not protected the beauty of indigenous cultures, as well as we could, of course, there's cost. But there's so many good things about that as well, where people are actually able to see what can be done they've and they've demanded, people have demanded freedom. That was a really incredible gift to the world. By the way, that wasn't just an American gift to the world that was to a very large extent the gift of American Catholics to the world. And this is an important thing for those of us who are listening to us and are interested what's going at Notre Dame need to understand. American Catholicism is the Catholicism of the outsiders moving to a place where individuals really have a great deal of autonomy. And so there was this weird alchemy of religion, an ancient religion, the one true Church, of community, of love as instantiated by our Savior, brought to a country where the individual has a lot of autonomy and where there's a lot of expectation for you to build your own life. At the same time, the Catholics that came here were not of landed gentry, were not of the Empire, but rather were the ambitious riffraff. That combination of ingredients meant that American Catholicism was the best exemplar not of radical individualism, but of the blend of individualism, with community--of ambition with family. And that understanding has been such an incredible gift to the world. That's why Notre Dame can and should be, and I believe will be, the most important higher education institution in the world. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 8:55 Let's just stop the interview there. That's good. Lots of things are bubbling up, thinking about Notre Dame... We even say, you know, it's a microcosm of the Universal Church. Arthur Brooks 9:07 Yes. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 9:07 And especially the church in the United States of America. Arthur Brooks 9:09 Absolutely. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 9:10 You know, because of course here... Arthur Brooks 9:11 American Catholicism is here. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 9:12 It's, yeah, for everybody from the far ultra, you know, to use political terms, left all the way to the ultra-right, you know, and, and everywhere in between. And then even this, certainly the, the ethnic makeup, you know, I mean, we're the Fighting Irish, started, you know, it's what we're known as. But of course, it's a French religious order that is post revolution. You know, post French Revolution, all these sorts of things. Arthur Brooks 9:37 Brother Andre is on the wall but. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 9:40 Exactly! You know, and so, yeah, there's a lot going on here, and to be a, you know, a top tier Research Institution as well. Arthur Brooks 9:49 That's right. And then it's important to remember. You know, when people are here in South Bend, Indiana, it's easy to forget how much leverage that South Bend can have over the whole country and indeed the world. The world runs on ideas today. I mean the economy of ideas is paramount in progress – and in decline in a lot of cases. I mean ideas are King, and this is an idea institution and so the extent that at Notre Dame, you, students, the faculty, the staff understand that that this is the apostolate of Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame, it runs on ideas. You know, it's interesting, you know, when you look at the work of, when you look at the writings of St. Paul, or you look at the greatest evangelists and the work of the saints, they're always really good at their job and they always did something else and so the apostolate...This is you know, the sanctification of ordinary work requires that you become excellent at what you do, truly, such that you have a magnetism and that is ultimately your apostolate. Your apostolate has to run on a vocational fuel, right? And the vocational fuel of the University of Notre Dame is ideas, where ideas are literally the most important fuel for progress in the world. That's why this place is so important. And so it's easy to get to lose sight of that when you're in South Bend, Indiana. To get it. But to remember that this place has an incredibly important apostolic role for the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, for Higher Ed in general, and indeed for the worldwide body of Christian believers. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 11:29 Makes me think a lot about, you know, the grand debates about freedom of speech on campus particularly. You know, the importance of having various voices, you know, whether that be somebody, and not shutting them down, not you know, de-platforming people, you know, and you talk a lot about this in your book, "Love Your Enemies." Arthur Brooks 11:48 For sure. I talked about the campus wars, but just in general. I mean, we're in, when ideas are the fuel for progress, then then there's going to be a lot of battles about which ideas are permissible. You know, you notice that people get a lot more bent out of shape about ideas than they did in the past. Because ideas are this resource. That's one of the reasons that we see the kind of political dynamics that we see today and the polarization that we see today. And that's why we see that there are a lot of people who don't want other ideas to be shared, that think that ideas are dangerous and that speech becomes a kind of violence. That's become quite common on college campuses really not so much here at Notre Dame but in a lot of college campuses around the country and indeed around the world. And so I think it's important that Notre Dame continue to resist that. The free speech absolutism is really really important and again, you know, this is the American Catholic advantage where we can we actually understand something that a lot of our Catholic brothers and sisters in Europe would never get, you know, where you know, where the state religion says there's certain things you can say and certain things you can't, no state religion, all voluntary, right? Free market for souls man. And so in a place like this, it's very, very important to be an exemplar of the radical freedom of speech for something you hear something that you think is wrong, bad, even dangerous, the answer is not less than that the answer is more speech. It's like flood the zone with ideas. And and in so doing, we can have the confidence that our own apostolate will be supreme and magnetic. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 13:28 And you talk about the idea of not silencing them, because that allows that idea never to go unchecked. That allows that this idea that may be – not offensive, but actually what would you say, a dangerous idea? You have to interact with it so that you can not necessarily convert the heart of the person saying it, but so that the idea itself can be addressed. Arthur Brooks 13:51 It's just it just leads to mediocrity. You know, if excellence comes from the interchange of ideas, remember that the world was brought forward by this cultural globalization, about the free trade and property rights including free trade ideas and and this culture of entrepreneurship free enterprise. Well that requires that people exchange all the time and people and people challenge each other and and when you when you shut down any conversation when you make it impermissible to talk about any particular topic, well then those who don't hear it for the first time, they get weak. You know, one of the reasons, I mean the things that, I mean I'm on college campuses all the time, every week I go to a different college campus--now that I'm back in academia. And I go to places that don't have a culture of the free exchange of ideas and you know, the people are, it's just mediocrity. You know, their ideas have largely gone unchallenged and so you can basically knock them over with a feather. Well, that's no good. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 14:47 Right. Arthur Brooks 14:47 I don't want that de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 14:48 And they don't think critically, analyze what you're offering either, in that in that moment. Arthur Brooks 14:53 No and they don't think they should have to because speech is violence in a certain way. So I'm really impressed that Notre Dame hasn't fallen prey to this I hope that this university continues to stand strong for these, not just the ideal of the University Notre Dame, but this is an American ideal. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 15:09 Well, now you mentioned you just started this summer at Harvard University. Arthur Brooks 15:13 Yeah. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 15:14 You have a joint appointment at the Kennedy School and at the Harvard Business School. So what will you be teaching there in Cambridge? And who are your students. Unknown Speaker 15:21 So I'm actually, Yeah, so I'm only teaching graduate students to begin with. At some point I'll wind up teaching students at the college. But right now I'm teaching Masters of Public Policy students at the Kennedy School in the core, which is to say the required curriculum for these masters students. I'm with some colleagues, I'm designing a class this fall that starts in October. It's a half semester course on tools of democratic leadership. And basically what it is, for me, it's all the stuff that I wish I had known when I took over as a chief executive but didn't. And so it's a lot of social science. They'll they'll read a lot of academic journal articles, but feeding into very practical tools of how the vision and resources, the execution, and the accountability, how people can become better leaders when they're young, middle aged, old, whenever. And, and it's going to be a practical course, that tools-based course. And then in the in the spring I'm creating a brand new course at the Harvard Business School called "Leadership and Happiness." Happiness and love are my research beat as a social scientist and I mean that sounds sort of squishy and hippie and I have been incredibly accused of being a hippie in the past. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 15:31 You're the shortest-haired hippie I've ever met. Arthur Brooks 16:27 Well that's, I got no hair man, like if I had hair it'd be it'd be down to my shoulders and it would be a thing to behold, trust me. But I got none, I got none of that. So, but the you know, when it's it sounds like you know, we're strumming guitars in here but you know, but love and happiness are a hard edged thing. Aquinas, he defined love is "to will the good of the other." And that's, I mean, that's a real deal. That's razor sharp. It's not any feelings there at all that he's talking about at least, that's Aristotelian, and so when you do work like that you can actually understand how the practical implications of it. And it's the most practical implication I could possibly put together by saying, look, if you're going to be the most effective leader in business and government and the nonprofit sector or for that matter in your community and your family, you have a responsibility to be a person with joy in your life, or you're going to have spillover negative impacts on others, and you have a responsibility to lead other people to pursue their own happiness, most effectively. This is a course in seven weeks that teaches you how to do that. And and it's it's going to be fun, as I said, you know, it's nothing more than a, it's a brand new course. It's an elective course for the MBA students at Harvard Business School, and, you know, I threw it up in the catalog and see if anybody likes it. And seven people are on the waiting list for every spot in the class. Yeah. So I have 60, I have 60 spots in the class and I had about 400 people sign up. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 17:53 Wow. You, you just mentioned you know, Thomas Aquinas's definition of... Arthur Brooks 18:00 Love. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 18:00 Love. And in your book you actually talked about, is it Michael Novak who modified that? And added "love is willing the good of the other *as other*." And I about drove off the road as I was listening to that because that is something that I thought about a lot. And this idea of, it's not just willing, your good so that I can get something better out of you. That's utilitarian, that. But it's, it's because I want you to be happy too and I want you to be not, not happy, but I want I want the best for you, and your flourishing as you. You know. Arthur Brooks 18:36 That's right. That's right. It's a beautiful thing and Michael Novak who, maybe a lot of people listening to us know who he is, but some don't. Michael Novak was a Catholic philosopher and theologian. He passed away just a couple of years ago. He was, he taught early in his career at Syracuse, like me, but it was way before I was there. And then he came to the American Enterprise Institute and when I became president of AEI, in 2009, he was a scholar there. Later he went to Ave Maria University in Florida, and we were both on the board of Ave together. So he's had a big influence on me. And that, you know, he's done fundamental work and really important work all throughout his career. But that was for me? That's funny and you're judged by who knows, after we die, how people going to judge your most impactful thing, I think it was two words. It was those two words that he added to Thomas Aquinas, "will the good of the other *as other*." And what I would ask people to do, who are listening to us today is to reflect on that. To reflect on, on the loves in my life. And when you have a disordered relationship with somebody almost always it's because you're not willing to go to the other person as that person. And to write it down, because actually takes a little, it's complicated enough that you've got to write it down and look at the words a little bit and then to take a few notes on some of the relationships in your life and ways that you can truly love another person as that person. And two will their authentic good. And it'll, I'm telling you, it'll change your relationships. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 20:06 Yeah. You mentioned before we started recording that this book, which is "Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt," you mentioned that this book was as much for you as it was for your readers. Arthur Brooks 20:19 Yeah, for sure. I mean it. Yeah, I wrote this book while I was president of AEI. It came out in March before I left, but I've been working on it for the past few years. Normally, the way that I write a book is I don't have an idea and then write the book and go talk about the book. And when I was president of AEI, I was doing 175 speeches a year and, and raising $50 million a year. So my job was like, running for senate and never getting elected, basically. But I'm talking about ideas all the time. And so the ideas that I can't get away from that are hunting me are what I wind up writing a book about. So I will have talked about something thousands of times before I actually put pen to paper. That's how I think better, how I understand the clarity of my thought, and when I'm more coherent. And so I had been thinking about this all the way through this process of political polarization. And I had a couple of experiences that led me to want to write a book called "Love Your Enemies." The first was that I, I read, I just read this academic journal article, which is, you know what I do for fun. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture Nerd! Arthur Brooks Fun guy, man. And in 2014, there were these guys, psychologists at Northwestern who wrote a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, on something called motive attribution asymmetry. And that's the phenomenon in which I believe I'm motivated by love but you're motivated by hatred. And so there's, and you think the same thing, motive attribution asymmetry. And you can, most conflict, intractable conflict in the world is because two sides are, each believe that they're motivated by love and the other side by hatred, and so therefore, they can't deal with each other. Now, that's based on a cognitive error. You can't both be right. I mean, both of us can't be both motivated by love and motivated by hatred. So one or both of us is wrong. And in virtually all the cases, we understand that both sides are wrong. But the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, for example, is largely a problem of motive attribution asymmetry. But these guys, the reason this caught this paper caught my eye from 2014 is that he found that for the very first time since we've been keeping records that the level of motivation, motive attribution asymmetry is the same between Democrats and Republicans in America as it is between Palestinians and Israelis. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 20:19 Wow. Arthur Brooks 22:23 Yeah. So and it's really, this was really haunting me, man. It was just rolling around my head. And then I started having experiences that made it clear what that meant. I was giving a talk at a rally, big conservative rally in New Hampshire. And I said in the middle of my talk, I stopped and I said, Look, my friends, I'm getting some applause lines here for what I'm saying that you perceived to be really conservative stuff and that's fine. But I want you to remember the people who are not here because they're not comfortable, their political progressives. And, and I want you to remember that they're not stupid. They're not evil. These are people who simply disagree with you and me on public policy. And they're Americans. And this lady calls out, "I think they're stupid and evil." And and that was an applause line. And I thought to myself, that's motive attribution asymmetry. I don't ever want to fall prey to that. Why? Because number one is incredibly impractical. Nobody in history has ever been persuaded through insults. You know, it's like, wow, it's true. I am a moron. It never happens, right? de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 23:32 How can I make myself better now that you mentioned that? Arthur Brooks Yeah, I know. It's like, thank you for pointing that out. The error of my ways and how stupid I am. That's needed. So so it's an impractical approach, and it hardens opposition, but it's also morally really problematic and that should be an immediately apparent to every single one of us as Catholics. What do we want when people disagree with us? Think about all the people out there that are hostile to the things that are important to us, to our faith, to the meaning of Life, all the stuff that we hold dear that we're willing to argue about, that we're willing to sacrifice for, right? Those people who disagree with us and who are American citizens. Anybody in the world that are our brothers and sisters, what do you want? Do you want to hurt them? No? Do you want to exile them? Do you want to sneak into their house and do something bad to them at night? Do you want to have them arrested cause of their views? Like no, of course not. What do you want? You want them to think and act differently? So how's your hate working out for that, man? How much, how much you getting done with that? It's, not to mention the fact that every single person listening to us today has people that they love with whom they disagree politically. And when somebody says those things, they're insulting your mom, or your sister, they're insulting somebody that you love. It's, it is incredibly practical and moral and decent to take the advice of our Savior in Matthew 5:44 and to love our enemies because in so doing, we destroy the illusion that the person was our enemy in the first place. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture This is very much a book about inherent human dignity. Arthur Brooks Yeah, it is about human dignity. Dignity is to be worthy of respect. We as Christians, as Catholics, we believe that dignity is radically equal between all people. Why? Because God is worthy of respect. You're made in God's image. So therefore you're worthy of respect. Every single person is equally made in God's image. So every single person is equally worthy of respect. And to be really respected, is to have dignity. That's the quality of human dignity. That's, you know, QED. That's the proof. Right? The problem is, that not everybody has an equal sense of their own human dignity. And so the opportunity for us as apostolic Catholics, is to help people understand their radically equal human dignity. And the way that you do that is by helping them understand that they're necessary in the lives of the rest of us and so I've dedicated my work to making people needed. And it's changed how I approach policy. It's changed how I approach politics. It's changed how I approach the way that I deal with everything from the homeless to people who disagree with me politically to my students to my own kids. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture It's, I mean, this is the pro life message at its core, when we're doing it right. This is the pro life message. Everybody is, has equal human dignity. And is needed. Arthur Brooks Has equal human dignity. Yeah, about it's about equal human dignity. For sure, for sure, exactly right, exactly right, everybody is necessary. Now there are a lot of cases where people are incapacitated in such a way or not sentient in a way that they can understand their equal human dignity whether they're in a persistent vegetative state or they're preborn. But that doesn't mean that we don't have an obligation. No, forget the obligation, that we don't have this incredible opportunity--this exciting adventure, of bringing that neededness to every human life. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture They too are loved and created in the image and likeness of God. Arthur Brooks Exactly right. Loved by God, the original likeness of God and loved by us, loved by us. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture We've talked a lot, you know, and found the points of intersection with faith here. And in your book you you talked about, you know, working with the Dalai Lama and asking him and him giving you the response that the only way out is to practice warm heartedness. Arthur Brooks 27:23 Yeah. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 27:24 What, what role does faith play? And is it, is it required that people be people of faith in order to help us work our way out of this? Arthur Brooks 27:35 It's a good question. And I don't know the answer. I mean, I do know that for me, I need my faith to put one foot in front of the other every day. And part of that is because of the, it revealed to me that this is the core of who I am as a person. It's, that said I know a lot of wonderful people with fantastic ethics, who are making the world a better place, who don't have my faith or don't have any faith at all. And and I have to say, God works through people in all different sorts of ways. It has to be the case. Norman Podhoretz one time, you know, the great intellectual, the great conservative intellectual, wrote a book once where he talked about how, you know, God's sense of humor led atheist Marxists to found the modern state of Israel. I mean, God can work with wherever he wants, man. I mean, God gets to do that. But for me, the work that I'm going to get done is part and parcel of who I am as a person and who I am as a person is, Arthur Brooks is a Roman Catholic. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 28:40 Semina verbi – the seeds of the word, you know, these little kind of that that small, still small voice in our hearts. Whatever it may be. Arthur Brooks And for me, that's just this incredible adventure. You know, and I talked to young people, my, you know, my kids, my students, anybody. It's one of the things that I encourage people to do, is to see your life as a startup. You know, because what is a startup is something where you don't know what the resources are at hand. You have faith that you can have explosive rewards, one of these little tiny seeds. And the startup of your life requires, it requires a sense of adventure. And the adventure, the greatest adventure of my life is the expansion of my my religious faith. I mean, I'm 55 years old and I'm just getting started. I can't even imagine, you know, maybe I get five years more--I mean, we die young in my family--or maybe we get 40 more years, but one way or the other, the rest of my life every day is going to be this big adventure. And it's largely because I'm just plumbing the depths of you know, what God wants for my life and who God is and looking for the face of, of, of the Savior and those around me, and in bringing that as magnetically as I possibly can to other people, and lifting them up and bringing them together. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture Do you have hope? Is there cause for hope that we can get ourselves out of this culture of contempt? Arthur Brooks 30:05 So the "culture of contempt" is a term of art that I put together for this last book that said, it's not that we're angry with each other. Anger is a hot cognition. It says, I care about what you think and I want you to change. Contempt, takes anger, mixes it with disgust and turns it ice cold, says I don't care about you. I don't care about what you think because you and what you think are worthless. It's the conviction of the other worthlessness of another person according to Arthur Schopenhauer, you know, who died in 1860--the great philosopher. Contempt is the relationship killer. Overt signs of contempt are the best predictor of divorce. Eye-rolling, sarcastic humor, derision, dismissal. If you want an enemy, treat a person with contempt. Roll your eyes when somebody says something. You know the co-worker who always does that and just, you can't get over it. That's that's what we do in politics. So the culture of contempt in American politics is not one of political anger or just bitterness because we disagree with each other is that we treat each other with that kind of contempt. I believe that we absolutely can get out of that. But we have to recognize it for what it is. And all of us have to work those of us who who want to fight against that, who are dedicated to a better America, where we are brothers and sisters and we treat each other with--forget civility because civility is a complete garbage standard. "My wife and I are civil to each other." Well, you need counseling. Yeah, we're but where we treat each other with love, which is the only standard to which we should be held. I mean, that's that the Bible is clear on this, but your heart is clear on this too. The only way that we can do that is by on purpose fighting against the enemy, which is contempt. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 31:43 Well, that's hard to disagree with. Arthur Brooks, thank you so much for being with us. And thanks for coming and sharing your message here at Notre Dame. And on all the college campuses that you travel to as well. Arthur Brooks 31:55 Thanks a lot. God bless you and God bless your listeners and go Irish. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 32:05 Thank you to Arthur Brooks. You will find links to his book and to his documentary film "The Pursuit" in the show notes. Subscribe to Ethics and Culture Cast so that you can always get the latest episodes by visiting ethicscenter.nd.edu/podcast. We would love your feedback. Please review the show on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you get your podcasts and email your suggestions to cecpodcast@nd.edu. Our theme music is "I Dunno" by grapes, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license. We'll see you next time on Ethics and Culture Cast. Until then, make good decisions. Transcribed by https://otter.ai