David Brooks Explores the Amazing Power of Truly Seeing Others

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Collin Hansen
I don’t quite know how to describe David Brooks new book How to know a person the art of seeing others deeply, and being deeply seen published by Random House. In one sense, the premise is quite simple. Just as the title suggests, we learned from David How to know a person invites us to become illuminators, who make others feel seen and significant through curiosity and charity. By contrast, diminishers make others feel small through assumptions and stereotypes, all while drawing attention to themselves. In another sense, the book makes me wonder why we don’t talk more about such an important subject, this constant practice of relating to one another, we can learn the wonders of physics and details, geography, details of geography, so we can compete on Jeopardy. And yet, we may never really learn how to love and to be loved. David writes, quote, as a society, we have failed to teach the skills and cultivate the inclination to treat each other with kindness, generosity, and respect. David Brooks is a New York, New York Times columnist and writer for The Atlantic, and a Best Selling Author of books such as the second mountain, and The Road to Character. He’s also a generous and repeated guest here on gospel bound. And his latest book, you’ll find wisdom about what’s most important in life. David writes, quote, wisdom is knowing about people. Wisdom is the ability to see deeply into who people are, and how they should move in the complex situations of life. So David joins me now to discuss what the Bible means by knowing why he writes more about culture than politics, how suffering helps us empathize, and more. David, welcome back to gospel bound.

David Brooks
It’s good to be back with you, Colin, thank you for having me.

Collin Hansen
Now, David, you have written many best selling books. But what do you think it is? It is about this book that seems to have caught on so deeply? And so broadly with readers?

David Brooks
Yeah, I have to say, my book came out on October 24. And when October 7 tapped, and I thought, well, that’s just going to bury my book, I’ll never, nobody will ever be paying attention. And indeed, a lot of media interviews got canceled as everyone focused their attention on the Middle East. But it turned out that people it made people hungrier for the book, because the book is about the nuts and bolts the details of how do you build a friendship? How do you get to know somebody walk people through in very practical ways, from the first moment you gaze on someone all the way through serious things like kind of conversations with somebody who’s suffering from depression, who disagrees with you. So it’s really nuts and bolts. And it turned out the atmosphere had grown even more vicious and hostile in the United States. And so people seized on the book, as maybe a recipe for how we can make life a little more pleasant. And so sometimes when you publish a book, you’re getting attention for it. It’s like pushing a boulder up the hill. But this time, it was like pushing a boulder down a hill, I had to give it a slide to show up and people were hungry for it. So I was, I mean, I’m very sad for the world, what’s happened over the last 10 years. But so often in the media, what’s bad for the world is good for the journalist.

Collin Hansen
True truth statement there from one journalist to another. Now, there is so much about this book that is uplifting, things that will be very interesting along the themes of what we do here at gospel bound, where we keep looking until we see God working. And I would love for you to tell us more about pastor Jimmy Terrell, I love what you wrote about him. I’m going to quote it here, that he is trying to see them with Jesus’s Eyes, eyes that lavish love on the meek and lowly, the marginalized and those in pain, and on every living person. When Jimmy sees a person he comes in with the belief that this person is so important that Jesus was willing to die for their sake. As a result, Jimmy is going to greet people with respect and reverence. That’s how he’s always greeted me and quote, just love to hear more, David about what makes Jimmy a model for how to know a person. Yeah, this

David Brooks
is in the chapter on that first encounter that first casting of attention. And so I was in a diner in Waco, Texas, and I’m having breakfast with a lady named Lou Dorsey. and Mrs. Dorsey was a 93 year old lady had been a teacher. And she presents herself to me as this strict disciplinarian sort of a tough, intimidating woman. And I was little like, whoa, I’m a little scared of her. And so Jimmy Terrell, who has a church in Waco or had one quote, church under the bridge, which serves the homeless, and they used to meet in a highway overpass under the bridge under a highway where the homeless are, and it’s a beautiful church of homeless people. I’ve been there several times and they it’s really really served the homeless. So Jimmy walks into the diner he sees mrs. is me and Mrs. Dorsey there. And he comes over to us he grabs Mrs. Dorsey by the shoulders, and he shakes her way harder than you should ever shake a 93 year old. And he says to her, Mrs. Dorsey, you’re the best, you’re the best. I love you, I love you. And that strict disciplinarian lady I’ve been talking to turns into a bright eyed, shining nine year old girl. And so by casting a certain sort of attention, he brought out a different version of her. And the lesson is the kind of attention you cast creates the kind of person who will greet who will encounter you. And as you read that Jimmy sees every everybody he sees, he sees made an image of God, this person is made have been forgotten, I’m looking into the face of God. And, you know, you can be Christian or not Christian. But seeing everybody you meet with that level of reverence and respect, is an absolute precondition for seeing them well. And it shows the power of attention. Attention is a moral act. If you see the world with, with, if you look for danger, you’re gonna find threat. If you look for things that are criticism, you’re gonna find people messing up. But if you look with the eyes of love, you’re gonna see people doing the best they can. And so Simone Bay, this mystical writer and World War Two said that attention is the ultimate moral act, the way we attend to the world is how we show up in the world. And her great student, Iris Murdoch, the philosopher novelist, said, you know, our we normally look at the world with self centered eyes, the world is something for me to use. But our goal she writes, is to cast a just in loving attention on the world. Just so we’re we’re discriminating but we’re loving. And she says we can grow by by just grow by looking. And I think that power of attention is really at the core of Iris Murdoch’s philosophy and cmon, these philosophy. And as I was reading about it, I remember years ago, when I first encountered it, I ran across an interview that Mother Teresa gave to Dan Rather. And Dan Rather said, Does what do you? What do you say to God when you pray? And Mother Teresa says, Well, I don’t really say anything, I just listen. And then Dan Rather says, Well, what is God saying to you when you pray? And she says, No, he’s not saying anything to me. He’s just listening. And that idea of to have God and us listening to each other, in sort of a mystical encounter. I mean, it’s a very beautiful idea.

Collin Hansen
Let’s keep along these biblical lines, you observe that in the Bible knowing can involve studying, having sex with showing concern for entering into a covenant with being familiar with or understanding the reputation of, as a good example, the diversity, especially the Hebrew language there. God, of course, is the perfect Knower. He sees perfectly with an objective eye for intricate science, but also with a gracious I have perfect love. You talked about this in the book. I’m wondering other than Jesus, who was the obvious example we referred to earlier, does anybody else stand out to you in Scripture as, as someone who strives to see and know, as God does? Maybe somebody who inspires you in particular? Yeah,

David Brooks
I mean, one of the things the Bible gets, right, and I feel like saying that sentence. In our culture, you know, we’ve erected a barrier between reason and emotion. And this is the Enlightenment idea that I guess we associated with Rene Descartes, the French philosopher. That reason is the opposite of emotion. And that one of the things that if you’re, it’s like a seat or a teeter totter, if you’re going by your motion, you’re not going by reason. And this is an enlightenment invention. And it’s not true. Modern neuroscientists has totally proved this. There’s a guy named Antonio Damasio, who studies people who can’t process emotion. They’ve had brain lesions, and I really can’t feel anything. And these people are not super smart. Mr. Spock’s, they are incapable of leading a normal life. Because what your emotions are their evaluation systems, they tell you what you value and if you can’t assign value to different things, you can’t make a rational decision. And so emotion reasoned, are part of the same process. And being, you know, the Bible understood this perfectly well with all these different concepts of knowing. And Parker Palmer, once wrote a had a great speech. It’s available online if anybody wants to google it called the violence of our knowledge. And he said, We won’t don’t want to look at the world with a dispassionate eye with an objective eye with a systematizing eye where we step back in a lab coat, we want to look at the world with a personal we want to try to know the world personally. We want to try to know a tenderly and so the whole voice the whole biblical metaphysic is based on this much richer conception of of reason. And so when I think of the biblical characters who really seek to know and understand You know, I think they’re all flawed. But you know, David in the Psalms, there’s just a lot he comes immediately to mind. I, Moses is an example of a leader in that he’s, he pushes away leadership, he pushes away the mantle of leadership, he’s described as the most humble person on earth. And I do think utility is the essence of being able to see others because you have to get out of your own way. And one of the things that’s beautiful about Moses, this is the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks used to make this point, that in the in the book of Genesis, the creation of the universe is described in just a few verses. In the book of Exodus, the creation of the tabernacle is hundreds and hundreds of verses to describe the building of this cubit of wood and the whatever it is, it’s all kind of boring to me, but it’s there, and drab is access. Why is it take hundreds of verses. And it’s because that Moses is trying to unify fractious tribes, and to unify fractious people and divided people into two things, they need a common story, which the exodus is the creation of that story. And they need a common project, something to build together. And so the building of the tabernacle is a very sophisticated psychological act of putting the tribes together into a people. And so I’ll give Moses at the tap, had some understanding of human psychology.

Collin Hansen
And he certainly needed all of it with all the different leadership challenges that he faced in multiple directions. David, early in your career, you were known, especially for your political reporting, then you still cover politics regularly in your New York Times column. It does seem though certainly, this is the case with your books you write more often about about culture? How did you make that change? Yeah, I’ve

David Brooks
always been sort of a cultural determinist. Some people like our technological determinist, I think whatever technology is, that’s what shaped society. And some people are economic determinants that are economic structures, safe society, I think our societies are fundamentally shaped by our norms, by our values, by our unconscious assumptions about what is good, and what is what is to be admired and what has to be sustained. And so I’ve always tried to focus on culture. And I think it’s especially important now because I do think our political problems flow from a cultural phenomenon. And that cultural phenomenon is the distance the spiritual and relational disintegration of society. And so there are a whole bunch of statistics, some of which I’m sure everybody’s familiar with, you know, the rise in depression, the 30% rise in suicide 40, or 50% rise in teenage suicide. But then other things that just are mysterious. The number of people who say they have no close personal friends has gone up fourfold. Since 2000, the number of people not in a romantic relationship has increased by a third, the number of people who say no one knows them, well, it’s 54% of Americans. Since 2000, the number of Americans who rate themselves in the lowest happiness categories was in my 50%. And so these are all just very intimate. It’s about the intimate life of the country, that people are spending more time alone have less good relationships, less good friendships, and they’re sad, where we become sad, or as a country. And when a country becomes meaner, or sad, or becomes meaner, because people we, you know, we are here to be surrounded and have other people look out for us. And when we feel alone, unseen, then we feel under threat, and we lash out. And so to me that this is the fundamental problem in American society right now. And you’re not going to solve our politics, unless you solve the viciousness and isolation within our culture.

Collin Hansen
I certainly believe David in this is a big belief of this podcast that of what you’re talking there about the cultural effects on our politics. It’s downstream from a lot of these changes. And we’ll have we’ll have James Davis and Hunter as a future guest talking about his new book democracy and solidarity. Jonathan Hite has been a repeated guest talking about he’ll be here talking about the anxious generation, Gene 20. With all her research, especially on younger generations in there, on and on and on. These are themes that we come back to repeatedly here, but I don’t think we can emphasize them enough. Because it seems as though we keep skating along the surface of these problems and not digging into what’s really happening underneath. But I certainly think that David that your your cultural reading makes you a more astute political observer and here’s an example from this book. You say quote for people who feel disrespected and unseen politics is a seductive form of social therapy. Politics seem to be a comprehensible moral landscape. We the children of light are facing off against them. I’m the children of darkness, politics seems to offer a sense of belonging. I’m on the barricades with the other members of my tribe. And politics seems to offer in an arena of moral action to be moral in this world. You don’t have to feed the hungry or sit with a widow. This is the idea that you’re you’re categorizing here. You just have to be liberal or conservative. You just have to feel properly enraged at the people you find contemptible. And quote, I’m wondering, David, do you see any hope for escaping this last decades? politicization of everything?

David Brooks
Yeah, I think I do. I’ve, among other things, I’ve founded a nonprofit called weave the social fabric project. And we lift up those who work in the communities where they live. And so these are people like, there’s a guy in Euston and punch Aguilas. And he takes men who have suffered from construction accidents, and are paralyzed. And he gives them wheelchairs and diapers and catheters, he trains them in social work. And so you’ll be in Houston and 25, guys and wheelchairs will roll into your neighborhood to do social work in your neighborhood, they’ll fix your neighborhood up and help you and I wants to punch out, you know, you radiate holiness. And he replied, No, I reflect holiness, which is a good answer. And so we’ve I’ve spent the last really since 2018, traveling around the country, and we go to a town and it could be a big city like New Orleans, it could be a small place like Wilkes, North Carolina, or McCook, Nebraska. And we say who’s trusted here. And immediately people give us names. And often they’re the same names. And so when I go to any town, I find there these people we call Weaver’s, who are repairing the neighborhood they live in, sometimes they’re taking care of the homeless, sometimes they’re helping to tutor a kid. Sometimes it’s more informal, they just have meals together, we ran into a lady who said, I practice aggressive friendship. And so she’s the person in the block who like invites people over as a picnics, aggressive friendship doesn’t have to be some formal thing. And we’ve met a lady in Florida who was helping kids cross the street after Elementary School. And we asked her, do you have time to volunteer in your neighborhood? And she says, No, I have no time. And we said to her, Well, are you getting paid for this? And she said, No, but I hope the kids across the street after school. And so what what do you do on the rest of the day? And she said, Well, on Thursdays, I bring food to the hospital so that people have some nice, nice things to eat. We say do you have time to volunteer in your neighborhood? She says no, I have absolutely no time. And to her that wasn’t volunteering, that was just being a neighbor. And so the hope I have comes from encounters like this in every place in America. And I’m sure all of us listening can think of those people in their communities, who are the weavers. And so I do think there’s a big counter attack on some of the things that are tearing us apart. I also think, and I defer out some I with my friend, Robert Putnam, whose work I tremendously admire, who writes a lot about the, what he calls the the me we me curve, that in 1890s were very individualistic. And then in the 1950s, or 60s, we were more communal. And we made racial progress, we had less polarization, we have more activity in civic life, all sorts of good things happen. And then starting about the mid 60s, we started going back to a more individualistic culture. And I happen to think we’ve had 60 or 70 years of extreme individualism in this country. But we’re beginning to turn it around. And we’re now fighting over what kind of community we want. But at least we’re we’re about I think so many people are valuing community and relationship. Now, we’ve just got to figure out how to build it.

Collin Hansen
Talking here with David Brooks about how to know a person the art of seeing others deeply, and being deeply seen. I think, David, he probably just answered this question, but I’ll give you a chance to expand is another absurd observation from you in this book, quote, the person practicing the politics of recognition is not trying to formulate domestic politics or to address this or that social ill. He is trying to affirm his identity, to gain status and visibility to find a way to admire himself. Again, very astute observation there. I’m wondering, David address Christians here who want to engage in politics to love their neighbors. How can they get involved without falling into that identity trap that you just identified there? Yeah, I

David Brooks
think first understand, as our friend Andy Crouch says, a recognition is the first human quest that a baby comes out of the womb, looking for a face that will see it. And if you’ve ever seen if you online and Google still face experiments, you’ll see what happens when. When a bit of mothers are told to not respond to their children’s bids for attention. They just sit there still face within 30 seconds that the babies are hysterically upset. They we need that recognize Should. And so to offer each other the recognition of an on a human level. And one things to remember is we can’t imagine our way into somebody else’s mind. We can’t say, oh, I’m gonna put myself in your shoes because people are too different from one another. And so the core of any kind of relationship, and especially a political relationship, is conversation is being really good at conversation. And so in the book, I have a whole list of tips on how to be a better conversationalist. And some of them are things like speaking of Andy Crouch, be allowed listener. So when you talk to Andy, it’s like talking about charismatic church. He’s like going, Uh huh. Yeah. Amen. Yes, I love talking to that guy. That’s true. That was, don’t be a topper. And so if you tell me, Oh, I had this bad flight, we sat on the tarmac for two hours. My instinct is say, I know exactly what you’re going through. I had a bad flight. And we sat on the tarmac for six hours. I’m trying to relate. But really, what I’m saying is, let’s not pay attention to your inferior experiences, let’s talk about my more important experiences. And so don’t be a topper. And so these are just skills like learning to play tennis, learning, carpentry, being a great conversationalist is a skill. And when we’re getting involved in politics, there’s often people who are going to disagree with us profoundly. And I’ve found that persuasion is about is not 80% talking and 20% listening, persuasion is 80%, listening, 20% talking. And so when somebody comes at me from a different political point of view, my first job is to stand in their standpoint. It’s to say, tell me what I’m missing about your point of view. Tell me again, tell me again. And they may not. They may not persuade me, but at least I’ll have shown them the respect that I’m curious about their point of view. And then the other final tip I have I’ve learned as a journalist is I never asked people, what do you believe? I asked people, How did you come to believe that? And that way, they’re not giving me an argument. They’re telling me a story story about an experience, or somebody shaped their values and caused them to believe that way. And so suddenly, it’s a much more human encounter when you’re telling stories.

Collin Hansen
Wasn’t our our late friend Tim Keller, a good example of the listener listening to persuade? Yeah,

David Brooks
I mean, it’s, I think it’s now public and that I think, become public because of your book that I was in a book club with Tim. And Tim had the knowledge and the ability, every meeting of our book club, could have been a press conference with Tim Keller, we get to just sat there and peppered him with questions. And said, he let us talk and I’m sure he knew this stuff material way better than way better than any of us did. But he led us we haven’t we had even conversation. And Tim was a just a beautiful example of someone who had certainly had the knowledge and the brainpower just to dominate every room we walked into. But he didn’t, because he had that basic humility.

Collin Hansen
Yeah, it was one of the things that I learned in the process of working on that book. I thought, What did this guy do to strategize coming to New York City? What were the books he read, and I did a lot I was kind of doing my imitation David Brooks, I was looking all this stuff, you know, Wolf of Wall Street, things that originated mid 1980s, things like that. And some of that he really, they were significant factors. But the biggest significant, the biggest factor was just sitting down in a diner and listening to people. Listen to them about their questions, listening, going back study, and coming back, you know, listening some more. And I think that’s a good example, the way that evangelism, which is obviously a form of persuasion works today. We listen. And as people listen, we learn and as we learn, then we get an opportunity to share our own perspective and to continue that dialogue and discussion. Another example of this from from your book, just in terms of how we relate to one another. Again, the whole point of the book, is the relationship between empathy and suffering. i This is a inexperience I think we a pattern we see over and over in Scripture. And we just have known it from our own lives as well. But it’s not that everybody who suffers is empathetic, you point out but the empathetic have seemingly always suffered. So help us understand that how do we turn our pain into a means to understand and connect with others? So

David Brooks
there’s a saying I forget who came up with this phrasing but so suffering can either break you or break you open. And it breaks you by thinking, Oh, I’m, I’m in pain. I’m going to cover I’m going to protect I’m going to callus myself over so I don’t want to feel anything. And breaking open is becoming more vulnerable, more feeling. And of course Jesus is the ultimate example of someone who has confront is confront suffering, and then his broken open and becomes more. Well, I don’t know if it gets more loving, but he refuses to harden himself. He refuses to put up his emotional guard, but just has those soft eyes of loving attention. Paul Tillich as a 1950s theologian, and he once wrote that stuff, moments of suffering, interrupt your life, and remind you, you’re not the person you thought you were. He says, They carved through what you thought was the floor of the basement of your soul, and reveal a cavity below. And then they carve through that and reveal another cavity below. So in those moments of suffering, you see depths of yourself you didn’t even might not have even been aware of. And I think when you see those depths, you realize that only spiritual and relational food will fill those depths. And so I think the hard part about suffering is you, you just want to protect, and you want to go through the world, with eyes sensitive to threat. But saying, No, I’m not going to react that way. I’m not going to cover myself over is an act of raw courage. And I’m a big fan of Fred bignor, the novelist and, and pastor, and his dad when he was nine, took his own life. And the mom took Baker and his brother, I think, to the Bahamas, or Bermuda, one of those two, and Nevermore never went to the funeral. And so we never really saw into the depths of himself till middle age. And so we didn’t cry for like 30 years after his dead deaths. By the end of his life, he could he was crying every day. And he learned you have to you have to operate from the depths and not from your shallows. And I think his story is a great example of someone who, who didn’t face suffering, but then finally had the courage to confront it head on.

Collin Hansen
Along with suffering, leadership will expose those depths that you’re not the person who thought, in part because leadership brings suffering, in part because of the difficulties you face, but also what you’re exposed to, in others. Just what you encounter there. I’d love for you to talk us through a little bit more this point, you say, a generative leader serves the people under him lifts other people’s vision to higher sights, and helps other people become better versions of themselves. A lot of folks listening watching this podcast are their leaders in a variety of different capacities in the marketplace to church. How can a leader grow and mature into that vision? Yeah,

David Brooks
I mean, I, I will say to an even higher authority, Ted lasso. And so in the first season of the his show to lasso, he’s asked by a journalist, what are your goals for FC Richmond, the soccer team, and he says, I’m just trying to help the fellows on this team become better versions of themselves on and off the field. And to me, that’s the ultimate definition of moral formation. I’m just trying to help the people around me become better versions of themselves, in work and at work. And so it’s that attention to moral growth. And this phrase, moral formation can sound fancy. But really, it’s three things. It’s one, trying to find ways to restrain our natural selfishness to it’s the ability to have an ideal and to worship something that’s worth worshiping. And third, it’s the skill of being considerate to people in the concrete circumstances of life. And so how do you sit with someone who’s depressed? How do you break up with someone without destroying their hearts? How do you host a dinner so everybody feels included? And so some of these are just basic skills. And for leaders, I think having a meeting where every voice is heard, and maybe where you speak last, instead of first. These are just basic leadership skills. And mostly, I think, you know, that my definition of wisdom has turned around writing this book, I used to think the wise person was like, Yoda, you know, or somebody uttering profound, Maxim’s now I think the wise person is the one able to receive somebody else’s story, and put themselves in the journey that person is going through, and to see a world a little from their point of view. And the ability to see the world from another person’s point of view is the ultimate and very difficult thing. And we’re never going to do it all the way. But if we can do it a little, then we will make people feel really known and Will you light up their life? researching the book, I would ask people tell me about a time you felt seen. And often it was when some authority figure, often a teacher or a boss just understood what they were going through. And so just a quick example, one woman, and there’s a trivial example in her she was in her 40s. And she said, when I was 13, I had my first taste of alcohol, and I got so drunk, I couldn’t move my friends dumped me on the front porch. I just lay there. And my dad who was the strict guy came out. And I thought he was screaming at me all the things I was thinking about myself, I’m bad, I’m bad. Instead, he just picked her up, scooped her in his arms rotor inside, put lay on the sofa, and said, there’ll be no punishment here, you’ve had an experience. And she remains not a big event. But she remembered that three or four decades later, because her dad understood, I don’t need to scream at her right now. She understands. And it just leaves a huge mark on people when when you you show some appreciation of how they’re seeing the world.

Collin Hansen
Got a couple more questions here with David Brooks on how to know a person. I was just preaching last week, David in Atlanta, one of the was on the parables of Jesus in Matthew 13. And I made a comment that you can either have friends or you can be free. But can I both? I think that was probably inspired by reading your book. How do we reconcile these opposites? Friendship? Freedom?

David Brooks
Yeah, well, I think there are two kinds of freedom. There’s the one which is absence of restraint. And then the second kind of freedom is to have the ability to do something. So if I want to have the freedom to pay to play the piano, I have to chain myself down and practice the piano every day. And so in those circumstances, it’s our chains that set us free. It’s the commitments we make, and most of us make for the commitments to in a life, we make a commitment to our Creator, to a faith commitment. We make a family commitment, most of us, we make a commitment to a vocation, and to a community. And making the outcome of one’s life depends on how well ones choose and then execute those Commission’s commitments. And so I like to say that a commandment is falling in love with something, and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters. So Jews love God, but they keep kosher just in case, like they need that structure of behavior. I love my wife, but we were in a marriage because it builds a structure of behavior around our love. Going to church every Sunday, it’s a structure of behavior around love of God. So it’s not just like freeform. And so I think our friendships we would not say our friends inhibit our freedom. They might if they you know, we, we don’t want to do something in there. It’s their ailing and we have to go deal with them. And in some sense, I guess our kids restrain our freedom because you got to take care of them all the time and when they’re young. And yet, I think very few people with friends or with children would say I’m I’m in prison here. You’re in the tunnel, if your kids a little you like you’re in a tunnel, but you chose the tunnel. And there’s a greater freedom that comes out of that, which is the the ability to just love more deeply than you ever knew.

Collin Hansen
Amen. How do you see your writing, having developed in the last few years, especially with some of the changes and and maturing in your own personal faith?

David Brooks
I hope I’ve become more spiritually open. I hope I become more emotionally open. And so I think, you know, I, as a journalist, I was rewarded for being aloof. What we do, as journalists, we observe. And we don’t often get intimate and people think peep go people go into journalism, because they love talking about people, because what we do is we interview. But in fact, a lot of people go into journalism, because they’re socially awkward. They need the structure their interview, to have a human encounter. And so a lot of people by profession are socially quite awkward, even though our job is to interview people. And so I certainly fit into that pattern. I was aloof and and I decided, I think maybe 20 years ago that this was not an adequate way to live. As beginner says, if you shut yourself off from human vulnerability, you’ve shut yourself off from the holy sources of life itself. And then about 10 years ago, I came to faith. And I think that was another opening. And now I think I’m not all the way there, Lord knows, but I’m more I think I’m more spiritually and emotionally available for other people. And I can do things I never could have done. So I was at a conference about a year or two ago and tuck it and we’re meeting in a building and the speaker hands out these pieces of paper to everybody in the crowd, and they’re on the paper lyrics to a love song. And the speaker directs us to find some stranger in the room, gaze lovingly into their eyes, and sing the love song into the stranger. And if you had asked me to do this, like, many years ago, I would have spontaneously combust if I sang a love song in his eyes and I was is emotionally open to some stranger.

Collin Hansen
Oh, the strange places the Lord Lord leads us speaking of which last question, David, where do you want to go next, in your writing? Well,

David Brooks
there’s always the world to discover. So you know, I have a newspaper column. So I’m probably reading about the Middle East. I think what interests me most, which may be my next book, we’ll see is our definition of human ability. And so we have a meritocracy, people get into graduate from high school, go to college, or go to competitive colleges, based on a certain definition of merit, which is very cognitive, it’s getting good grades and scoring high on your standardized tests. And to me, this definition of, of merit is, needs to be replaced, in part, because it’s unfair, rich people have a huge advantage in every measure. So if you go to the elite schools, it’s mostly rich kids, because only rich kids can have been invested in enough to get into Princeton, Yale, Harvard. Second, AI is going to make our definition of intelligence obsolete. Because everything that we do in school AI can already do. It’s great writing papers, great to taking tests. So we have to have a more humane definition of intelligence. And finally, it’s not that effective. doing well in school isn’t predicts nothing about how you’re gonna do when life. And so it’s not a good way to sort people. And so I’d like to, you know, my main cause in the last 20 or 30 years, is to try to fight back against the forces of dehumanization, on behalf of the forces of humanization. And if we can have a definition that takes all our abilities, our courage, or spirituality or character, hunger, all the things that really matter in a person faithfulness, the ability to be a kind kindness, if we can measure people by that and sort people by that we’d have a more human Humane Society, and we wouldn’t be so divided along educational grounds as we are now.

Collin Hansen
Turning to anthropology, I keep hearing that that is one of the most important areas to be looking at culturally, theologically. sounds appropriate. I want to end with this quote. It’s kind of it’s almost a benediction of sorts. I think what we talked about, you say an illuminator is a blessing to those around him. When he meets others, he has a compassionate awareness of human frailty, because he knows that the way we are all frail, He is gracious toward human folly, because he’s aware of all the ways we are foolish. He accepts the unavailability of conflict and greets disagreement with curiosity and respect. David, thank you for helping us become illuminators in this book, How to know a person the art of seeing others deeply and being deeply seen. Thanks.

David Brooks
It’s a pleasure. I’m grateful for you having me on the show.