The Amazing Power of Truly Seeing Others — David Brooks

Collin Hansen, in the May 7, 2024 episode of Gospelbound, interviews David Brooks, regarding his new book (released October 2023), How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen (Random House).

View the video (39 minutes):  https://youtu.be/f7r7abh8-RY?si=A3Rc06IMqKUJTMN0

Collin writes:

[David Brooks] 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.

Other quotes from the book by David Brooks:

“As a society, we have failed to teach the skills and cultivate the inclination to treat each other with kindness, generosity, and respect.”

“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.”

Excerpts from the interview transcript (note:  very minimally edited it from the supplied machine-generated source):

Early in the interview, David Brooks is speaking:

Parker Palmer, once wrote [he] had a great speech. It’s available online if anybody wants to google it [It’s] called The Violence of Our Knowledge. And he said, We … 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  [eye]  we want to try to know the world personally. We want to try to know [it] 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 excess. Why [does] 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 [he does] 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.

A bit later Brooks says…

Yeah, I’ve always been sort of a cultural determinist. Some people like our technological [determinism], I think whatever technology [was], 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 [contributes to] 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.

Lots of unique insights here, from the perspective of a well-read and well-informed journalist who claims to have come to faith ten years ago.

 

This page by: Ron Richmond
First published:  2024/05/08