The death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg has by all accounts exacerbated the deep divides in our country and culture.  But the vitriol has not buried all that can be said and should be remembered about Justice Ginsberg.  Among the worthy memories of a remarkable life have been not a few stories of her friendship with Justice Anton Scalia whose death four yeas ago was also an occasion for political maneuvering and partisan animosity.

Ginsberg and Scalia were often on opposite sides of the opinions of the court, she writing scathing dissents of opinions written by Scalia and he returning the favor when she wrote for the majority.  Scalia famously said of Ginsberg, “She likes opera, and she’s a very nice person. What’s not to like? Except her views on the law.” And Ginsberg of Scalia, “I disagreed with most of what he said, but I loved the way he said it.”

Ginsberg was asked to write the forward to a collection of Scalia’s speeches published after his death. She wrote, “If our friendship encourages others to appreciate that some very good people have ideas with which we disagree, and that, despite differences, people of goodwill can pull together for the well-being of the institutions we serve and our country, I will be overjoyed, as I am confident Justice Scalia would be.”

The stories of the friendship are worth telling and hearing in and of themselves. They contain no formula for ending what Harvard professor Arthur Brooks calls our “culture of contempt.”  They do, however, remind us that there is a still more excellent way than the way of contempt.

Brooks believes that the cultural and political crisis we face is not just a crisis of intolerance or incivility, as intolerant and uncivil as we can be, but of contempt. He uses an old definition from a Nineteenth Century philosopher who said contempt is “the unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another.”

We don’t disagree with one another, we don’t fight for what we believe, we treat those who disagree, those who take different positions, as altogether worthless.  It’s not to say that Leninists and fascists don’t exist or that their actions should be tolerated or their views endorsed.  It is to say that just because someone disagrees with you they are not necessarily a Leninist or a fascist.  They probably are not.

We are addicted to contempt, Brooks says. Rage is our drug. But maybe hope is not lost. “While we are addicted to contempt, we at the same time hate it, just as addicts hate the drugs that are ruining their lives.” Brooks wrote eighteen months ago in a New York Times piece.

How do we kick the addiction?  Brooks has written a book whose title points to an old cure: Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt

All of this has got me thinking. Who do I hold in contempt, for surely I do?

And how might love, how might friendship, how might what Justices Ginsberg and Scalia found wean me from an addiction to contempt?

A couple of thoughts:  I think I have experienced something of a Scalia-Ginsberg friendship from time to time. One of the joys of being a part of my former denomination was the opportunity to forge friendships across deep, very deep, theological divides. (And nothing disappoints so much as the animosities that too often thrive among otherwise like-minded Christians.) How might I seek such friendships in this new season of life?

Friends in Langhorne may remember a Thursday night class from a couple of years ago. “Across the Great Divide,” we called it.  In the class we talked a lot about rage and our addiction to it.  I want to revisit some of what we said.  Friends in Auburn, I am eager for a Sunday morning class beginning in November.  We are going to dig into some New Testament texts, gospel and epistle, that speak of contempt and its destructive ways and that will point us to the person and the power that will help restore us to sanity.

In the meantime, how does contempt – that utter devaluing of those with whom you disagree – tempt you, attack you, control you? How might you say no when tempted by contempt?

Jesus once told a parable to “some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt.” I wonder what he said.