The Age of Grievance by Frank Bruni

A church member recommended this book to me. She texted a link with the message, “This book makes me think of your sermons! I think you would appreciate it.” I’m always happy to receive book recommendations, and in this case I know Frank Bruni’s writing from his pieces in the New York Times Opinion pages. It doesn’t surprise me that his thinking and mine align. I got a copy from the library and read it in a few days once it came in.

The premise is that we have entered a cultural phase defined by anger and are convinced that the cause of our hurt lies outside ourselves. Our relationships beyond our own circles then, whether political or social, are polluted by a sense that others are the enemy: not just wrong, but irredeemably wrong, not to be trusted, and out to get me. To protect ourselves from these threats, the aggrieved populace withdraws into hyper-partisanship, into communities of like-minded people, and into information systems like cable news and social media, where previously held viewpoints are affirmed and amplified rather than moderated. It makes business senses for cable news and social media companies to keep their audiences enflamed, which increases engagement with their sites and advertisers. And for a politician looking to stay in office, playing up partisan anger is a better strategy for re-election than solving the nation’s problems.

None of this is new, as Bruni points out in a historical chapter, Chapter Three, “Grievance Now versus Grievance Then.” But he points out that grievance as a style and grievance as a tactic belonged more to the left back in the 1990s, back when being “politically correct” was the thing. The right made fun of the left back then for being aggrieved at the smallest slights. Both sides do it now with equal flagrance. The early chapters relate more accusations of the right. Later chapters, (see Chapter Seven, “The Oppression Olympics”) give the left their due. Bruni is profligate in his examples from all points of our current culture. He doesn’t have to look far.

One of my criticisms of the book is that for the first several chapters Bruni simply lets the examples multiply. Perhaps he feels some readers will need to have the title of his book proved to them. But few of the stories he told were new to me, of course I read his column regularly and much of the material is lifted from his previous writing. The observation that folks are angry, and feeling victimized, and that our culture currently rewards angry folks and victims, is a given for me. I kept saying, “Yes, and…” and waiting for the why and what to do. Bruni’s research, though, is comprehensive. He has brought together nearly every story I can remember making news in the last several years, as well as quoting from a wide number of articles and books, often followed up with interviews with the authors.

For the why, Bruni, identifies two main causes. Income disparity is the subject of Chapter Five. Social Media is the villain in Chapter Six.

As for the what to do about it, Bruni gives both a series of practical solutions in Chapter Nine, and a theological answer in his final chapter, Chapter Ten.

The practical solutions grow from the common soil of making connections across our current divides. My congregant is correct; I do preach about this all the time. Under the heading “Fixing Congress” Bruni recommends changing the incentives of Congress to encourage bipartisanship, by creating norms that help make conflict productive, having non-partisan commissions redraw district boundaries, and fixing the primary system through jungle primaries and ranked choice voting. Under “Fixing Our Political Culture” he lifts up the examples of Governors of one party leading states highly representative of the opposite party and how their focus on real life issues in their states rather than partisan idealogy has made them popular and kept them in office. He also suggests a form of national service. Under “Fixing Cities and Towns” he recommends creating public policy that brings people physically together, such as open spaces like parks, and in adjusting zoning laws. He mentions the positive possibility of remote work breaking down the current sorting that puts so many highly paid professional and tech jobs in a few coastal cities and abandoning industrial work to the center. Under “Fixing Employment and Education” he encourages eliminating college degree requirements for jobs where they aren’t justified, and in education he looks for more civic education and for history curricula that teaches national pride and hope, rather than shame and despair. Under “Fixing Social Media” he advocates for transparency and regulation, for changing the current law that protects social media companies from responsibility for user posts, and for changing incentives so that moderate voices appreciated by a spectrum of people are amplified, rather than the most highly emotional charged voices. And, he supports banning users younger than sixteen from social media entirely.

Many of Bruni’s practical solutions reminded me of Pete Buttigieg’s book, Trust. Buttigieg also recommends national service for instance. Buttigieg’s theological solution is in the title of his book: rebuilding trust in one another, trust in our institutions, trust in the future. Bruni’s theological solution comes in his final chapter, “The Antidote.” For Bruni the antidote is humility.

Not the cause of grievance, but the gasoline that gives it energy, is a sense of self-righteousness. We are so certain that we’re right, and that sense is so amplified by clustering into spaces where everyone shares and praises our view and confirms our opinions, that we are convinced folks who disagree with us aren’t merely wrong but must be sinisterly working against us, against our goals, and against our values. Humility then, would work against that self-righteousness. “What if I’m wrong?” Humble people can learn something from dissenting voices. Humble people can listen. Humble people curious. Humility asks us to step down from a position of perfection, which implies that my suffering is always caused by injustices in the system or in evil people working against me, and admits that maybe I have some personal work to do and perhaps some of my suffering could be relieved by changes I could make for myself. It’s a powerful idea. And it does sound a lot like my preaching.

Bruni breaks down his humility chapter into sections again, as he did in the previous solutions chapter. He writes, “We Need Humility from Our Political Leaders” which would work against demagoguery and toward liberal democracy. “Humility from Journalists” argues for better objectivity from news writers. In “Humility from Activists” he quotes Evan Wolfson one of the leaders on the push for marriage equality. “I don’t want to disparage shouting and demands–everything has its place…. But I used to say, ‘Yes, there’s demanding, but there’s also asking’… and one is not the enemy of the other. People don’t like to be accused, people don’t like being condemned, people don’t like being alienated. It’s a matter of conversation and persuasion.” Which comes from humility.

Bruni ends with, “We Need Humility from Ourselves”. His final example is from the show Ted Lasso, who starts as a broken man hired for a job where he’s expected to fail, “and whose humble response is to try his hopeful best to turn all of that around” (p. 262). Bruni writes, “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 what Eboo Patel, the founder and president of Interfaith America, wrote in his 2022 book, We Need to Build: ‘People are endlessly complex and fascinating. You can never tell simply from someone’s group identity how they will experience the world, or know from their experience what conclusions they will draw.” (p. 261).

Amen. I couldn’t have said it better myself.