Political peacemaking as a public health intervention

In America today, it’s easy to segment unique challenges facing the country into different silos: “Here’s the mental health crisis” and “here’s the economic crisis” and “here’s the crisis of political hatred.”
But, of course, none of this is so cleanly separate at all — with each of these cultural wildfires stoking and aggravating the other. In this final installation of our 10-part series leading up to the election in partnership with “A Braver Way” podcast and KUOW, Seattle’s NPR news station, we bring together insights from the final episodes that effectively make a case for the value of political peacemaking/depolarization as something far beyond merely helping people “get through a contentious election season” or “learn how to navigate political differences at Thanksgiving.”
According to many indicators, the prevailing level of anger, fear and despair in America is affecting our well-being in other ways, including our basic mental and emotional health. One friend told me her depression symptoms noticeably lightened after getting a chance to openly share her political worries and concerns with neighbors who didn’t necessarily agree, but who showed genuine care for her.
Doesn’t it make sense there’s a connection, though? If it’s true you “can’t love your country if you hate half the people in it,” according to Democratic Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland, then it’s equally hard to love life day-by-day with that much venom in your system.
If this heightened level of acrimony and agitation in our country is really affecting our emotional health and well-being on some level, then imagine for a moment: What would a public health intervention strategically targeting these same sources of angst look like?
It’s worth noting that a wide variety of organizations have taken seriously this very possibility, with Braver Angels the most prominent in a burgeoning “domestic peacemaking” movement in America (take a peak at the sea of logos forming the “Listen First Coalition” to get a sense).
Short of summarizing how these many disparate efforts are working together to promote peace in America, we highlight below a few relevant, practical observations from the final pre-election weeks of “A Braver Way” podcast. Each summarizes another proactive step any one of us can take to reduce, prevent and counteract sociopolitical toxins in our own hearts and homes.
For those trying to “follow election news without losing your mind,” it can be helpful to reduce the overall amount of mass media for sure. Mónica Guzmán admits, “If you were to look over my shoulder while I was reading the news 10 years ago, it’d be like 20 times more time than I’m spending now. And I think that’s been helpful.” At the same time, the podcast host of “A Braver Way” encourages people to resist the temptation to go to the opposite extreme and simply ignore everything that’s going on — learning instead how to stay informed without “fueling polarizing flames” in yourself or others.
In Guzmán’s recent conversation with Isaac Saul, this long-time national politics reporter encourages people to notice how different news content makes them feel, while paying attention to how any given report is constructed. “If you read for 12 paragraphs and it’s just Democrats trashing something Republicans did, and then there’s two sentences about how Republicans responded,” Saul says, “you’re reading something that’s constructed in a way to inflame partisan tensions or that’s only giving you half the story.”
“Media is not just news and information,” Guzmán adds, in a point that should be obvious, but isn’t. “Media is influencing how we think, what we think of other people, what we think about our relationship to our country.”
It can be helpful to go to the original source of the story, Saul suggests — or even better, to proactively seek out counter perspectives. “If you are reading a story that is like about the Springfield, Ohio, controversy where Haitian migrants were ‘eating pets,’” and you respond with shock, “I can’t believe what’s happening,” Saul suggests searching the opposite headline: “Haitian migrants are not eating pets in Springfield.”
“Very intentionally engage the counter to the view that you are (presented). I do that all the time,” says this seasoned editor of Tangle News. “If I’m reading a story that’s about whether Israel should respond in X, Y, Z way, and I find the story really convincing, I will intentionally search for stuff that is the countervailing view to that perspective, just to balance out my own view or to challenge it.”
“Sometimes I’ll read the other thing and go, ‘Oh no, the original story I read is way more convincing, and this is not a compelling argument,’” Saul reflects. “But oftentimes I’ll be very moved by the other piece in a way that kind of draws me back towards the center.”
We can all be tempted to “trust maybe too much” and other times “trust maybe too little” in our interactions with different media sources, says Guzmán. “What is the right level of trust is probably one of the key questions” for people navigating our chaotic information ecosystem today.
April Lawson, “A Braver Way” podcast participant, recalls spending time in China with its high level of carefully controlled censorship — and being struck by a Chinese young adult saying, “We’re actually better media consumers than Americans, because we know that we’re being manipulated. And so we read everything with a lens of this group wants us to believe this.”
Many conservatives in America have come to share that critical tendency today, Lawson suggests, doing “a good job with skepticism” — perhaps more so than some other progressive Americans who, in her estimation, are more likely to say, “look at this large institution, which produced these numbers. That is what is trustworthy” (without always acknowledging that “even institutions have incentives”).
At the same time, some conservatives have narrowed who they trust to only a small set of voices, concluding, “The only person who I should listen to at all, who’s not giving me fake news, is this person.” In that way, conservatives can take the skepticism too far, Lawson argues, when she believes a better goal is to “listen to all the perspectives.”
It’s easy for any of us to assume that our news consumption is a “search for truth.” Yet Guzmán describes times when she’s found herself in “a rabbit hole chasing more information, more commentary about something outrageous that’s been going on” — and eventually realizing that her goal in these voracious moments of consuming news was not always simply “to learn more about the situation, or to inform myself more.”
Rather, she admits to a sense of wanting to “see the people who I think are at fault” getting confronted. “Just give me that. Give me that.”
“It’s feeding something in me,” she realizes in retrospect. That kind of recognition takes humility, points out Lawson. “Because you have to notice that you’re doing something that’s maybe not ideal.” Although challenging to “say this out loud,” Guzmán adds, “I think this is not an uncommon experience.”
“Everybody thinks the next election will determine the future of human civilization,” American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Yuval Levin told former Judge Thomas Griffith recently, in a comment cited in “A Braver Way” and the Deseret News. “I think a lot of Americans now approach politics with the sense that … if we get this one wrong, it’s all over.”
“Why is this the moment when we’ve become persuaded that the stakes are absolute, and the fight has to be total?” Levin asks — going on to argue that “whoever wins the next election is going to have a very narrow majority and basically not be able to do anything.”
Faith traditions across the ages have agreed that truth does something positive inside us — liberating, sanctifying, teaching, and edifying people in a direction of more light, peace and joy. Yet very often, people who seem most convinced that they’ve discovered a larger truth being ignored by the masses can be full of anger, fear and despair.
“When you have a really well-rounded view or well-rounded perspectives on an issue,” suggests Saul by contrast, “almost always the issue is going to be more nuanced than you think, which probably is going to make you hyperventilate a little bit less about it.”
Hope can feel to many like a “simple soft sounding thing that seems so light and fluffy next to the big issues of our day,” Guzmán says — pointing out that amid so many weighty concerns “to even talk about hope right now can feel cute, distracting, but mostly so naive.”
She cites Greta Thunberg, the famous climate activist, who once said, “I don’t want your hope. I want you to panic.”
Yet in response to Judge Griffith’s question: “Yuval, what keeps you up at night?” Levin shares his worry specifically about “the shortage of hope in our public life.”
“Hope is not the sense that things are gonna be fine,” this scholar quickly clarifies — differentiating it from rosy optimism, just as much as dark pessimism. “Hope says things are up to us, and they could be good if we are good.” While suggesting this attribute has “defined the American character” in many moments of crisis in the nation’s history, Levin expresses concern that this same kind of hope is largely “absent now” among many in the nation.
“There is not nearly enough hope, certainly among the young. There’s not enough hope in our politics.”
Insisting that calamity is an inevitable next step, Levin goes on to argue, can become “an escape from responsibility.”
“Letting any hope drain out of us,” Guzmán agrees, “isn’t a practical response to the future we imagine, but (instead) a way of avoiding our responsibility to build the future … with our fellow citizens who disagree with us, even if that’s sometimes painful, even if it’s laced occasionally with hot displeasure.”
“And to build it not just when elections go our way, but every day, all the time.”
Even responsibility can be overdone, however — with April Lawson speaking about her own tendency to feel responsibility for anything she reads about in the news. “One of the reasons that I don’t read that much news is because I feel like I should fix it. … And so it’s exhausting to read about all the problems because I’m like, I’m not doing enough.”
Discerning what we can do — how to serve, donate, vote, and pray — can still be encouraging. “I am only one, but I am one,” Christian author Edward Everett Hale famously wrote. “I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do.”
In that same sense, Guzmán asks, “What if hope isn’t naive at all, but empowering?”
Guzmán goes on to quote journalist Amanda Ripley, who summarizes more than 30 years of research in positive psychology by saying, “Hope is more like a muscle than an emotion. It’s a cognitive skill, one that helps people reject the status quo and visualize a better way.”
Guzmán encourages listeners to step back for a moment and look at the “big picture for a minute” enough so to ask themselves, “What if hope actually is everything?”
In contrast with what renowned psychologist John Bowlby called in 1976 the “anger of despair,” there is another kind of frustration that is healthier and constructive — more of a righteous indignation and ferocious desire to see a better world.
Bowlby calls this the “anger of hope,” which can be “fierce” as we are motivated by imagining something better. He describes this as a “strongly rooted affection laced occasionally with hot displeasure.”
By contrast, “the anger of despair is something else entirely,” Guzmán says: “a deep running resentment” that Bowlby says can too often become a “cold malice of hatred.”
In a speech to college students in Dallas several years ago, then-presidential candidate Evan McMullin told attendees, “disagreement about policy issues is fine—even passionate differences. This ought to be welcomed in our country—the idea that we can grapple with these differences together.”
He then said, with rising emotion, “but there are some things we must not disagree about …” going on to touch on each of America’s founding ideals: truth, equality, justice, freedom. However much we may still disagree on how to best pursue these ideals, they still hold a potential to draw us together as fellow citizens.
“Whoever any of us wants to win, none of us wants our almost 250 year old Republic to lose the next election,” Guzmán summarizes. “So that’s a start” — especially if we can be open to exploring with curiosity some of the many “visualizations of a stronger, healthier society from countless hearts and minds.”
“No matter who wins this election, how do we make sure our democratic republic won’t lose?” Guzmán says again, posing a question she’s brought up repeatedly throughout this podcast season.
“For some of you, this may sound kind of circular,” she adds. “We make sure our democratic republic won’t lose by making sure the other side won’t win. Which, hey, makes a lot of sense when you know what’s going to make or break us going forward and (believe) that your side, whatever it is, best represents it.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Guzmán says. “But one of these two sides will lose the next election. That’s how democratic things work.” So then, “If the losing side happens to be your side, no matter how hard you fought to prevent that, do you want to stumble out of the election not just defeated but in despair?” Do you want to believe “that what is core to our country will 100% fail if the other side wins?”
Avoiding that kind of emotional hole depends on being grounded in something higher or deeper — better and stronger — than simply the outcome of an election. What is that for you?
One byproduct of technological advancements is that media is being consumed more and more on a “one to one level,” Guzmán notes. “It’s me and my smartphone, and the only conversation that’s happening as I’m consuming it is with myself.”
That makes critical scrutiny of the conversation itself hard to come by — especially compared with another era, she says, when a few people would sit around a television, with “maybe somebody reacting to something and someone else going, ‘What do you mean, Junior, what is that face about?’”
Although we call it “social media” because of so many voices present, Guzmán points out that in practice, most consumers of social media are sitting alone reacting to projections of other people’s lives (“Most people don’t even put their real picture up anymore”).
That means “we’re mostly talking to ourselves,” she concludes. This woman who’s spent years engaging personally across the political divide, then shares from her own experience, “We get to truth through each other,” far more than simply consuming more media content.
The Deseret News-Braver Way partnership series: