Humility in the Age of Cancel Culture

In a special episode of The Bulletin, Christianity Today’s senior director of CT Media, Mike Cosper, interviewed New York Times columnist Frank Bruni about his book The Age of Grievance. Where polarization has split churches, families, and friendships, Bruni suggests that the root of this polarization is grievance, an animating impulse in our culture that focuses on scarcity instead of abundance. This conversation offers a way forward for Americans or anyone who looks at the culture and wants something better.

Mike Cosper: There was one element in the book that I was a little surprised by, and I’m curious for your thoughts on this.

A notion that’s missing from the book is the idea of forgiveness. And I don’t mean that in a religious sense but in the interpersonal sense, in the cultural sense. I remember years ago reading Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition. She makes the claim at one point where she says we can’t have a culture without forgiveness.

She says vengeance encloses both the doer and the sufferer in this relentless automatism of action, which will never come to an end. In contrast, forgiving is the only reaction which doesn’t merely react but acts anew and unexpectedly. And the idea is that forgiveness is this moment where we can start fresh.

I’m curious: Is there a role for forgiveness in our culture to do the constructive kind of things you talk about in the book to move things forward? 

Frank Bruni: I do think there’s a role for forgiveness.

It’s one of the things we must work our way back toward. It’s the opposite of cancel culture. In various passages, I do talk about how we must get away from this tendency to judge people too quickly. In the last chapter of the book, the concept I explored at great length is humility. I think forgiveness and humility are more than kissing cousins. I think they’re conjoined twins. 

MC: I love the idea of how we carry ourselves into forgiveness. In public conversations—whether it’s online or face to face—when we think about our politics, can we carry ourselves, our positions, our convictions in a way that we’re humble enough about them that we don’t have to react so viciously when we encounter an idea that’s different than our own?

That comes back to the fundamental issue—maybe it’s a shrinking appetite. Certainly, it’s a shrinking space for a kind of vision of pluralism. It seems you’re saying we must try to carve out this space that says we have to live in a world where people are fundamentally opposed to many things that you might think and believe. We still must find a way to live at peace with them. We don’t talk or think like that; the tendency is to think in terms of winning and losing. 

FB: There are even aspects, I think, of modern child rearing. Certain economic groups send the message that you deserve a world precisely to your liking. You deserve a world purged of offense and insult.

It’s not an accident that Jonathan Haidt and his coauthor titled their book about this The Coddling of the American Mind. They were talking about a generation of students being led to believe that they should never encounter anything that unsettles them or complicates their lives. 

When I talk about humility, what I mean, in part, is recognizing that we do not get circumstances that are always exactly to our liking. Other people’s dissenting views have as much right to exposure and discussion and oxygen as yours do. 

We have somehow come to a political culture right now where people believe the minute we say, “Maybe you have a point,” we’ve lost the argument. We have too many actors in our politics and outside of our politics who think that impassioned equals virtuous, everything is overwrought, everything is all or nothing; and in fact, they end up doing damage to their own cause as they also do damage to the fabric of public life and the fabric of our culture.

MC: In the church, we often talk about first-order and second-order issues. First-order convictions are things like the Nicene Creed, the Apostles’ Creed—our fundamental sets of convictions. And then second-order issues are the things that divide Christians from one another, like the way we think about baptism or church polity or women in leadership versus men in leadership.

One of the things that is frightening in our moment is the way infighting in the church over second-order issues is rising to a first-order level. We are becoming a people who are saying, “This is the hill I must die on.”

FB: Whether it’s in churches or other segments of society, we really don’t seem to value and recognize the importance of coming to some sort of truce and having the collective peace that we used to. In some ways, it’s individualism run amok.

We’ve not only evolved into being a surprisingly and depressingly pessimistic people, but we’ve also turned into a surprisingly and depressingly narcissistic society. As I said, we don’t get circumstances that conform exactly to our liking. At no point in our lives should we be told to expect that.

We should be told to absolutely work toward justice. While we’re doing that, we also have to recognize dissenting opinions and not automatically see those people as evil. 

Often, if you  met them and talked to them, you would understand there’s a life story. There are reasons why they believe what they believe, but we’ve become extremely and toxically individualistic. In most cases, the price of waging this fight within the church or the public square is not worth it.

MC: You give a lot of space toward the end of the book to some visions for how we solve this. A lot of it comes to education, and the two things that struck me were the way you talked about civic education and the way you talk about media literacy, which I think is a huge issue in our moment.

The underlying question that I found myself asking after reading it is, Are you optimistic that solutions like that could be adopted and work? Could those kinds of things really be transformative? And what does a road map for that kind of transformation look like? 

FB: I don’t think those two things can save us on their own in and of themselves, but I think that they can be part of a much longer recipe of getting to a healthier place as a country.

What’s so difficult about this is we have the tools to improve in all the ways we need. But one of the daunting things about it is it’s not just one thing. It is political reforms coupled with educational reforms coupled with spiritual investigation coupled with a whole lot more.

But I do think that it should not be that difficult to do something. One thing I do with my students at the university level is talk about where they get their information. We talk about what they’ve bookmarked, who they followed, what they like. And then we discuss where that has led them.

Some questions I ask them include:

1. Did you set that up intentionally, or did you make a couple of decisions and then the algorithms kicked in?
2. Does your media diet represent what you really intended? 
3. Is it aligned with your values? And if the answer is “not exactly,” how about taking a moment right now and rearranging the pieces a little bit?

I’ve had this conversation with every class of students I’ve taught. It needs to begin when they’re much younger, and I think it needs to happen at the kitchen table as well as in the classroom. If we’re going to solve this, we all must look at how we behave in our private lives. We must ask if we are living as we would like other people to live, if we’re modeling the behavior to which we want young people to aspire. 

Frank Bruni has been a journalist for more than three decades, including more than 25 years at The New York Times as op-ed columnist, White House correspondent, Rome bureau chief, and chief restaurant critic.

Mike Cosper is the senior director of CT Media, host of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, and cohost of The Bulletin.

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