The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with David Brooks: How to Know a Person

Episode Date: September 12, 2023

New York Times columnist and bestselling author David Brooks is a cultural commentator and astute observer of social trends and behaviour. He believes that our society is fractured, and the number of people who report feeling isolated, alone, and invisible is higher than at any time in recent memory. David joins us to talk about his new book coming out this fall, How to Talk to Strangers, which offers a practical guide to help people truly get to know each other  in order to foster deeper connections at home, at work, and in their communities.   The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events.This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Editor: Kieran LynchBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When you're a journalist and people don't trust you, it's always your fault. These people need to be represented. They are Canadian. They deserve to have a voice and a seat at the table. It is time to go back to the office, and the time is now. Russia had reasons to be concerned. They had reasons to be fearful. We're at an absolute turning point in reproduction. This is the problem with realism. They just treat all countries the same. They don't distinguish between dictatorships and democracy. Hello, among listeners, Roger Griffiths here. You're a whole. host and moderator, welcome to this, our continuing conversations called the Monk Dialogues. These are

in-depth questions and answers with some of the world's sharpest minds and brightest thinkers. We go deep into the big issues and ideas that are transforming our world and shaping the public conversation. This week, we're speaking to New York Times columnist, best-selling author and former monk debater, David Brooks. He's a cultural commentator and an astute observer of social trends and behaviors. He believes that our society is increasingly fractured. The number of people reporting, feeling isolated, alone, and invisible are higher than at any time in recent memory. David has a new book coming out this fall, which offers a practical guide to helping people truly get to know each other in order to foster deeper connections at home, at work, and throughout our lives. He joins us

from Washington. David, welcome to the Monk Dialogues. Great to be back with you. Likewise. I look back fondly on our debate with you. That was in downtown Toronto. The topic was capitalism. Let's see if that's a subject we revisit in this conversation. So much has happened on that front in the last four years.

But what I want to begin with, David, with you is the new book you have coming out. I'm excited, as always, to see a new David Brooks book. This book in particular, I think, resonates with us here at the Monk Debate. we're trying to do, in a sense, what a lot of the book is about, which is kind of modeling civil and substantive conversations. And what I've learned and what I want to hear from you, David, over the last number of years of trying to do this is, you know, that's not easy. It requires a certain kind of set of attitudes and behaviors and inclinations. You've done a beautiful job of putting this together in your new book, and I want to kind of dig into it with you in that spirit. So why don't we

begin there? What was the impetus for writing how to know a person? Where did this come from? What path set you on the road to write this book? You know, as I traveled around, my job is to interview people like yours, and people kept telling me, they felt invisible, unseen, and unheard. And so it occurred to me, there's, you know, there's all this depression across our societies. There's mental health problems. You know, there's been a rise in the number of people who say they have no close personal friends. And so it just seemed like there was this epidemic of blindness. You know, black people feeling in their daily experience was not understood by whites. Rural people not feeling seen by coastal

elites. You lonely young people not being seen by anybody. Husband and wives and broken marriages is feeling invisible to the person who should know them best. And so it seemed to me that this, what is this skill? How do we make people feel seen, heard, and understood? And it occurred to me that if you're going to run a successful family or company or organization, you have to be able to understand the people around you and make them feel felt, make them feel seen, heard, and understood. And so I really started writing the book just like, what is this skill?

And I figured, you know, therapists have it. I think biographers have it. I think teachers have it, nurses have it. Actors have it. And so I just wanted to interview a lot of people and figure out, how can I be better at making the people around me feel that I understand them and feel respected and valued by me? Okay, let's dig into this. When you talk about these skills, where should we look for them? Is it in our ability to communicate? Is this a kind of outbound skill? Or is it incoming? Is it our ability to listen? It certainly seems in our society we put a lot of emphasis on the former and not so much on the latter. Yeah, I found, you know, even the act of asking questions. So questioning is a moral act. And I go to parties and I sometimes I leave the party and I think, you know, that whole time nobody asked me a question. And so good questions are open-ended questions like tell me about. Like you don't want to dictate the answers. If you get to know somebody well, I find the great conversations to have after you've earned their trust are like big questions where you get them to stamp 30,000, feet above their lives and maybe see themselves anew. So I ask people, uh, what crossroads are you at? Most of us are in the middle of some crossroad, but we don't think about it until somebody asks.

Or what would you do if you weren't afraid? A lot of people, uh, no fear plays some role in our lives, but they don't know exactly how. And when we ask them, it gives them a chance to talk about that. How do your ancestors show up in your life? We're all been affected by our ethnic heritage, our culture. But how exactly? It's fun to talk about these things. And so in the book, I basically, I basically, walk people through the skills from the very first second you lay eyes on another, to hanging out casually, to having good conversations, asking questions, to disagreeing well. So it's really a set of very practical skills. And I think the shocking thing is these are some of the most important skills we can have. Think about it. Breaking up with someone without destroying their heart.

Asking forgiveness, getting to know somebody else's story. We just don't teach these skills. as a result, I think a lot of people are lonely. I think a lot of people are hurting, and a lot of people aren't treating each other well. Let's go bigger picture for a second. One of the things that seems to be happening in our society, David, is the intrusion of instrumental reason into everything. Everything is, in a sense, a means to an end. Increasingly, we often, in our conversations with each other, how we treat people in our day-to-day lives, these interactions are, as you say, so important to giving context and cadence and kind of humanizing ourselves in this digital existence we live, yet we often force or treat people as means to our ends as opposed to

ends in themselves. Do you agree with this thesis? Is that a problem? And then if we were trying to reverse engineer that, what are the early steps that it would take to, build a sense of compassion and empathy, a genuine concern for other people as ends in themselves. Yeah, well, let me just start with the very first moment. Let's say we're just meeting and we're just casting eyes upon each other. Let me tell you a story about how to do that. So I was in a diner at Waco, Texas one morning, having breakfast with a lady named LaRue Dorsey. And she's this 93-year-old black woman who presented herself to me as a stern disciplinarian. She had been a teacher. and she said, I love my children enough to discipline them.

And I'm so intimidated by her, to be honest. An income into the diner walks this mutual friend of ours named Jimmy Durrell, who's a pastor down there, a big roly-poly guy who really has a church for the homeless. And he comes up to our table of the diner, and he grabs Mrs. Dorsey by the shoulders and shakes her way harder than you should ever shake him, 93-year-old. And he says to her, Mrs. Dorsey, Mrs. Dorsey, you're the best. You're the best. I love you.

I love you. And she from this stern disciplinarian immediately turns into this bright, eye-shining, nine-year-old girl. She's just like radiant all of a sudden. And it showed me the power of attention. When we first meet somebody at any time, we are either casting a gaze upon them that says, I value you and respect you, or I'm cold and I'm treating you instrumentally. You're just an object to me. And the kind of attention we cast will determine what we see.

And Jimmy's case, he's a pastor, so he looks at everybody through a particular theological lens. When he's looking at anybody, he's looking at a person made in the image of God. He's looking into the face of God. He's looking somebody with an soul of infinite value. Now, you can be an atheist or a Jew or a Christian or whatever, but looking at each person you meet with that level of reverence and respect is an absolute precondition for knowing them well. when we're meeting someone, everyone is asking unconsciously a question, am I a priority to you? Am I a person to you?

And the answer to those questions will be delivered with your eyes before they're delivered with your mouth. And so when I think about the skill of treating somebody as a human being, not as an object, it starts at that very first moment when I lays eyes on you and I tell you, yes, you are a person to me. I will just take joy in you, whatever you have to offer. Those are great insights. Let's talk about disagreement because that's another part of what we do here at the monk debates. You've been part of them. Their purpose and no small part is to agree to disagree.

And I could say that some of our debates are obviously better than others. It's precisely often because not the actual content of the debate or the substance, but the style in which people engage in disagreement. So what do you see is the effective habits when it comes to disagreement? How can disagreement move us forward to understanding, maybe even raise the possibility, the prospects of conciliation? How, David, should we think about disagreement? Yeah, well, for the book, I talked to a bunch of conversation experts and to try to learn how do we do this well. One of them said to me a great conversation is two people who think the other is wrong.

A terrible conversation is two people who think there's something wrong with them. And so we can argue without thinking the other person is some way diminished. And the way you do that, there are certain tricks. So one of my friends said, find the disagreement under the disagreement. If you and I are disagreeing about, say, gun policy or tax policy or abortion, what is the philosophical basis deep down which is causing us to disagree? We can have fun taking a joint expiration to find that out. Another is another rule is keep the gem statement in the center. So if you and I are disagreeing, say my brother and I are disagree about our dad's health care.

We may disagree about what kind of health care you get, but we both agree we want what's best for our dad. So if we can keep coming back to that, to that gem statement, we'll save our relationship in the course of having a disagreement. And just one more I'll mention. You know, sometimes people in politics, we talk across difference. That's our job, whether it's an ideological difference, sometimes it's a class difference. Sometimes it's ethnic difference. And so sometimes somebody's going to be attacking you, critiquing some system you're a part of or some way you've behaved. And your natural instinct, at least mine in those circumstances, is to get all defensive.

Like, no, it's not me. I'm not part of the problem. I'm actually part of the solution. But I think that's the wrong approach I've learned. The right approach is to stand in their standpoint. Instead of being defensive, ask them a whole series of other questions. What am I missing here? What's your position?

and how did you come to believe that? And then I stand in your stance point. I show respect for your point of view. And respect is crucial when we're having disagreements. There's a great book called Crucial Conversations, which I recommend. And in there, the authors say, in any conversation, respect is like air. When it's present, no one notices. When it's absent, it's all anybody can think about.

So with each thing I say to you, I may be disagreeing with you, But I want to say it expressed in a way that makes me show I respect you. That makes you feel more safe. And that the underlying flow of emotions, if that's healthy and respectful, then the intellectual disagreement can happen with wild and kind of fun abandoned. Sign up now for a complimentary monk membership. As a free monk member, you get all kinds of great perks and privileges, including streaming of select debates, dialogues and podcasts on our website. A 24-hour advanced ticketing window to access seats to our in-person debates before the general public, written transcripts of all of our content, and email updates on special offers and promotions. You can grab your complimentary monk membership right now at Triple W Monk Debates. That's MUNK, DebateswithanS.com.

Simply click on the membership tab in the top right of our navigation. grab your monk membership and open your mind to a world of great debate. David, let me try out on you one of the arguments that you're probably all too familiar with, but I think it's widespread in our society and maybe people aren't always as conscious of it to the extent to which how it informs, I think often are agreements and disagreements with each other. It's a view that there are certain things that are unknowable. In fact, many of us, according to this theory, are ultimately unknowable to each other. And in a sense, what you're presuming, what you're arguing about is really a fiction,

that this kind of intuitive awareness and empathy is a construct, a construct of liberalism, a construct of our modern world. And for these critics, they would say that the world we live, in as a world of power relations. It's a world of huge cleavages, race, gender, and identity that separate us off from each other in ways that are profound and suggests that any conversation we have across these gaps, these chasms will always be incomplete, messy, and maybe ultimately unsatisfying. Yeah, I just don't think that's true. I mean, I think it's harder across difference. There's no question. And I don't want to say that the matter of economic and racial and other injustices are unimportant.

This book is about how we can build relationships one another, not to solve all the world's problems. But I do think, and you know, I go around and I ask people, tell me about the last time you felt seen and heard. And with glowing eyes, they tell me stories sometimes radically across difference, sometimes across race. Sometimes they just read a book, say a white woman reading a book. book by Zadie Smith, a black novelist, and feeling herself wrapped up in that book. And so, you know, I had a guy tell me about his daughter recently who was struggling in second grade. And a teacher said to her, you know, you're really good at thinking before you speak. And that little comment made the whole year go well for the girl. Because before what she thought

was her weaknesses, she began to see as a strength. And she began to think that teacher, gets me and it really turned her around. If you have doubts that we can see each other across differences, I guess I would recommend a book by Tracy Kidder called The Strength of What Remains. And Tracy Kidder is a white guy in his 60s who went to Harvard. And he writes a book about a guy named Deo Gracius, who grew up in the hills of Burundi and survived the Barundi genocide. And the book is told from the perspective of Deo. In the first scene, Deo has, lived in rural Barundi all his life. He's never been an airplane before.

He's never seen a room that nice before. He's never traveled while sitting down before. And Tracy Kidder takes us into his mind. So we see the plane from Deo's point of view. We see the trip escaping the genocide from Deo's point of view. We go back to Barundi and see the spot where the genocide happened from Deo's point of view. If anybody thinks it's impossible for one human being to gain, not to understand another

person the whole way, but to gain great insights, then that book is to me a refutation, and that book is not alone. I know people who feel deeply felt and seen by people across racial categories, through cross-gender categories, through class categories, even across political categories, I firmly believe it's possible to get. So I can say to you, no matter who you are, I'm beginning to get you. I'm not all the way there. I don't get you all the whole way, but I'm beginning to see the world as you see it. And there's no finer way to live in a diverse society. And this is another motivation for the book, frankly,

is, you know, human beings evolved to live with people kind of like ourselves. And now we live in North America, especially, in these wonderfully diverse countries. But our social skills are not adequate to the societies we live in. And we just have to be a lot better at seeing across difference. And I can provide you with case after case to show that it's possible. that as the Terrence, a Roman poet said it, I am human and nothing human is alien to me. So, David, how do we scale this? I mean, is this something that can be modeled beyond simply a hope, a desire to become better at acknowledging each other, really recognizing each other,

discoursing with each other, coming to understandings with each other on a case-by-case individual-by-individual basis? Are there some examples, some tactics, some approaches that we could use here to be more purposeful about each other when we interact in society as a whole? Yeah, I think there are, first of all, what I'm talking about is, you know, I was in a world where I spoke a lot, spent a lot of time talking about community and relationships and connections, and I believe in all that. But it was a little too abstract. I wanted to know what is the micro process by which a relationship is deepened? What is the process by which a friendship is deepened? David White, the poet said, you know, a friendship, we're not there to improve each other. We're there just to be a witness, just to share and have the privilege of being seen by somebody on a journey you can't complete on your own.

And so to some extent, it doesn't scale. To some extent, every relationship is built slowly and locally between young human being and another. And I'm simply trying to give people the tools to be better with their members of their families. with members of their company, with members of their community. So at some level it doesn't scale. But the systemic part of invisibility is that there are communities in both our countries where they look in the mirror of society's regard and they don't see themselves. They've been rendered invisible by the media.

They've been rendered invisible by the power structures. And I talk about a great book by Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man. And it begins with the guy who, because he's black, says no one sees me. When they look at me, they see versions of themselves. They see pieces of their imagination. They see everything around me. They see everything but me. And he's describing a world that's been structured to make black people invisible.

And so that part is not simply one-on-one, getting members of different groups visible, equally visible with all other groups. That's a matter of social justice. Do you think, David, from a pedagogical perspective, we do enough to teach this? I mean, listening to you, I think to myself, wow, wouldn't this have been fantastic in first year, university or community college, if I'd been sat down and led through these types of exercises and understandings that you're talking about? I mean, I don't feel like we really have many of these opportunities. If they come about, they come about through serendipity by being lucky, by the fact. that you have an association with a group of friends or a professor, a teacher, some mentor in your life

that instills these values in you. David, are we making a mistake here by leaving all of this in effect to chance? Yeah, I think so. It's what I'd say the greatest frustration in writing the book is that nobody teaches this skills. I mean, these are skills. It's like learning carpentry. It's like learning tennis. How do you listen well? If my friend is suffering from depression. I have a chapter in the book, a friend of mine was hit with just a savage depression. And I didn't know what to say to him. I'm reasonably well educated, but nobody had ever told me, what do I say to someone with depression? So early in his depression, I tried to think of ways to suggestions about how he could get out of depression. And I later learned that if,

if you say, you should do this, you should do this, you're just showing you just don't get it. Sometimes early in his depression, I said, you know, you shouldn't be depressed. You have so much to live for you of a wonderful family, you have a great job, your kids are amazing. And I later learned that saying that to a person is depressed only makes it worse because you're telling them to enjoy the things they palpably can of joy. And so I went into that hard circumstance, really completely uneducated. And I look at some of my students and frankly, some of my fellow adults, they don't know the basic social skills. And so the book is really meant to fill that in. I interviewed a guy in the middle of writing of this book, a guy named Dan McAdams. He studies how people tell their

life stories at Northwestern University. And what he does is he brings people in. He gives them a research fee. And for four hours, he asks them about their lives. He says, about half of them cry while talking about their lives. And then at the end of the four hours, he says, okay, we're done. Thank you very much. Here's your research fee. And they say, I don't want to take your money. This has been one of the best afternoons I've had in my life. No one has. ever asked to tell me to tell me about my story. And so somehow we've wound in a culture where nobody ever asks, what's your story? And then go into detail. And I can tell you, now I do it, you know, now that I've written this book, I'm the most socially inept person on the face of the

earth. But even I, I sit on trains or planes and just to ask people their life story. I can tell you it's fun. It's way more fun than putting on my headphones and reading a book. And so it's just encouraged me to really change the way I live. Yes, that is a great insight. If we all think about the number of just fascinating kind of off-the-wall conversations we have, it does delight. I remember once being on an airplane flight and striking up a conversation with the person beside me who turned out to be a trained locomotive engineer for his entire life. I learned everything about the intricacies of union politics in the railway industry, freight derailments, how the industry had changed.

You know, I couldn't have spent a better two hours with this person. And to share, to have that story, none of that would have come about if we hadn't been curious in each other and in each other's lives. Yeah, I met a woman at a Trump rally, actually, and turned out she was. was a lesbian biker who converted to Sufi Islam after surviving a plane crash. I was like, what, what stereotype are you fitting into? People are always more amazing. One thing I've learned, people are not a problem to be a solved. They're a mystery that you'll never get to the bottom of. And so it's just fun. And we deny ourselves a lot of that kind of just interpersonal fun.

David, let's segue a bit because it's related to this conversation of how we impart dignity to people. written a lot over the years and recently I think in powerful ways that remind us that those of us who belong to what you've characterized as the boho class, the bourgeoisie bohemians of which I would include myself, at least in part based on my education, you've talked accurately at times about the need to kind of puncture the self-satisfaction, the self-regard of, of the self-regard of the knowledge worker slash laptop class. How do we talk to that group, David, about these issues? And you get at this, there's a certain conceit amongst this group, again, to which I belong,

which is that we think we know it all. You're not telling us anything new. We're sophisticated. We're educated. Of course we listen to people. Of course we try to reach across the divides in our society. our lives to give other people a voice and respect. In effect, David, thanks for the insights, but we've got this. We're handling it. How do you puncture that self-certainty? Because

it is a reality, as you say, it's very subtle, but it's still nonetheless alienating us from each other. It's othering a lot of people from different walks of life, most notably people that are often perceived as belonging to a different socioeconomic class. And arguably, it's pretty bad for our politics right now, too. Yeah, well, I would go to the data. So, you know, I don't know, our listeners, I don't know most of them personally, but I can say something with high degree of tolerance. When it comes to knowing other human beings, you're not as good as you think you are.

And so there's this guy named Willis Ikees at down University of Texas. He studies how people know the thorn. of what's going on the other person's head as they're talking to them. And the average person is right only 22% of the time. The average person is right about friends and family only about 35% of the time. Some people are really good. They're right 55% of the time. Some people are really terrible. They're right 0% of the time. But they think they're right 100% of the time. So the evidence is that we're just not that good. Naturally, without training, you and I, we walk around in social ignorance, not completely unaware of what other people are thinking of us.

And that matters in all sorts of realms of life where highly educated people congregate, there was a McKinsey study done where they asked people in firms, why did you quit? And the CEOs of the firms think, people quit my firm because they want to get more pay elsewhere. But when they ask the people who actually quit a company, why did they quit? It was because my manager doesn't recognize me. They didn't feel seen. And if you went to those managers, I'm sure they think they see and recognize their employees, but they don't. They're overly confident about themselves.

And that's why, you know, to me, the essence of seeing another, no matter what your education level is, it's not imagining what they're thinking. It's asking. It's asking them a question. And you have to do this skill, you have to just to get really good a conversation. You have to be exceptional at just knowing how to listen really. well and respond really well. So, for example, one of the things I tell people is be a loud listener. I have a buddy who when I'm talking to him, he's like grunting and saying amen and cheering me along. Just love talking to that guy. He like brings out the everything in me. And so, you know, I do think

these are skills that you may have a PhD in English literature, but these are skills that you're probably not as good at as you think you are. David, so much of what you're just describing here is about the benefits of living in a kind of offline world. Yet so many of us are spending most of our time in a very different world, an online world. What's your sense of the trade-offs here, the respective opportunity costs of not spending as much time, maybe as we should, offline? Yeah, my view is in the online world, there's judgment everywhere and understanding nowhere, that it's just very hard to present yourself because time and it's week. or an Instagram or TikTok post, you know, time to present the full you.

You have the only time to present the performance you. It's also not one-on-one. Real conversation, real getting to know another person, has to be reciprocal. If I'm going to get to know you, I have to let you get to know me. And we have to walk through these intimacy gradients where, you know, we slowly begin to trust each other. We're sharing things that are sometimes hard to trust. And in my experience, that just doesn't happen online.

And maybe it does for some people. And I can think maybe of some grief communities where it really does happen. But I'm a little skeptical that we can make the deepest friendships of our life be solely online friendships. I think online is great to meet people. But you want to meet them face to face at some point. And as I say, when I look at the bestsellers, there's a book called Girl Wash Your Face. It's a bunch of books like trying to help people overcome the fact they've just been harshly judged online. And the books say, don't worry, don't worry about it.

It's just somebody else's opinion. And I think that's because so many are bruised and traumatized by how they've been treated in the online world. So I guess I'm a little skeptical that you can really have the deepest possible friendships strictly over the internet. At the beginning of this conversation, you talked about depression, just how it's so prevalent in our society today, the kind of silent suffering that's going on. Talk to us a little bit more about the origins of this, why you think it has. has its roots in part in these attitudes that we bring to our public interactions with each other, how we engage or not with each other, and how the processes of meaningful, substantive conversation and understanding can actually have a healthy healing effect on people in their lives.

Yeah, well, let's go to an extreme case. The people who turn into these awful mass shooters, usually young men, they're invisible. They feel invisible and unseen. I read a manuscript or a Magicazine article by a guy named Tom Juneau who interviewed one of these guys who was caught before he could kill anybody. And he said, you know, even at that moment when I was had my guns and I was leaving the car, I thought, if somebody would just pull me aside and say, you don't have to do this, we'd just pay attention to you. He said, I would have given up. I would have stopped. And so that's the extreme cases of people who feel radically unseen. And therefore, they want to take it out on the world because, you know, if the world doesn't recognize you, you feel it as an injustice,

which it is. And then of the extreme cases, they get, you know, they basically get suicidal and want to, they want to get what they crave most, which is recognition. And so those are the extreme cases. And the more moderate cases, it's just loneliness. You know, the number of people who say they're persistently lonely and depressed has risen over the past 20 years from about, this is teenagers from about the, 20% to 45%.

It's just shocking. It's just a shocking degree of social isolation. And so I'm hoping that what I've learned, you know, as I said, I'm like, if you had known me in high school and college, you would have seen a guy who was really good at like, when you reveal something to me, I'm good at staring at my shoes and running away. I'm like fear of intimacy, kind of socially awkward, you know, journalism rewards people who are kind of aloof.

We don't, we don't really do anything, but we try to observe people. doing things. But over the course of middle age, I suppose, I've tried to get a little better. I've tried to be a little more emotionally open. I've tried to be vulnerable with strangers. I've tried to be vulnerable in public. And I have to say, it's changed me. You know, I can prove it. I've had the honor to be interviewed by Oprah twice in my life four years apart. And after the last interview, after we've done taping, she said to me, you, I've never seen anybody change before. You were so blocked before. And it was weirdly a proud moment for me because it shows that I may not be naturally the most intimate and socially adept person on the face of the earth, but we can get better

and you can get better at the skill of making people feel felt. And I've had in hard times and really bitter political times, can't tell you how many conversations I've had where I just felt so honored by what somebody shared. And I would mark them as among the emotional and highlights of the last few years. Some of those just really precious conversations. Final question, David. How important has your faith been to your thinking here in this book and the messages that you're trying to communicate to your readers in the broader public?

To what extent has faith, to some extent, provided you with a set of circumstances? I mean to broaden out your understanding. of the dignity and respect of other people, people from completely different walks of life and realities than your own. I mean, you mentioned earlier in this conversation in the example of the pastor, and I just wonder if you think there's something special that faith imparts to those who want to model

the kind of attitudes and inclinations and behaviors that you think are so long. important to giving real meaning to our day-to-day lives. Yeah, I would say faith helps, but is really not required. But what faith does, and I would say what the Judeo-Christian tradition, which I know best does, is it gives us an image. God knows us. He knows us not with rational eyes of a scientist, not with a cold, observing lens of a market

researchers. He loves us and sees us and knows us with the eyes of perfect. love. And so for him to know is not like some academic thing. To know is an intellectual thing, an emotional thing, a social thing. In the Bible, the verb to know has all sorts of meanings to have sex with, to enter into covenant with. The biblical people understood that reason and emotion are not separate. And so in the Bible, for example, there's the parable of the Good Samaritan. and there's an injured guy on the side of the road, and all these people walk by him, and they don't really see him.

Only the Samaritan, a person from a hated and reviled tribe, he sees him. Only the Samaritan goes to help him. And the other people not seeing him, it wasn't an intellectual failure. It was a failure of the heart. And so I think what the Bible does is it communicates a way of seeing we can admire and try to copy. And I would say that's not, you don't have to have biblical relationship. faith to see that way of seeing, that way of regarding another. And just to think, you know,

I may believe in God or not believe in God, but I ask you to believe that that each human being you meet has a soul, has some piece of them that has no size, weight, color, or shape, but gives them infinite value and dignity. And you're going to treat them not as an object, but as a bearer of an immortal soul. And if you keep that concept in your mind, you'll probably end up treating them well. And so I wouldn't say religion is necessary for seeing well. We all know blind religious people. But I think it holds up an ideal, an ideal that's a warm, embracing gaze and a sense that this person in front of me is of infinite value and dignity. This person in front of me is better than me at some things. This person in front of me is fascinating on some subject.

And so what's central, whether it's Christian humanism or secular humanism, the idea that you're going to see the complete value and complexity of the human being in front of you. That's the key. David, thank you so much for sharing this book with us. I think we all have to add it to our reading list when it's out this October. And I just want to thank you. You know, this is something, you know, that didn't just come out of the blue. You have to spend a lot of time and effort writing this book. I know these are issues and ideas that you've been working on for a while now.

Like you, those of us associated with the Monk Debate are kind of fellow travelers. We're trying to model this society that's less tribalized, less riven by polarization and divisions. And that's why, David, I just urge the Monk Debate community to support you. Get this book. Let's see what wisdom we can learn and what we can impart to each other. So, David, thank you so much for your time today. and for coming on the program and talking to the Monk Debates community. Oh, thank you. It's been a total pleasure.

Well, that wraps up today's dialogue. I want to thank our guest, David Brooks. He certainly gives us a lot to think about it. If you have feedback or reflections on what you've just heard on this or any of our podcast, please send us an email to podcast at monkdebates.com. That's MUNK DebateswithanS.com. Thank you for lending your time and attention to our efforts to bring back the art of civil and substantive conversation, one dialogue at a time. I'm your host and moderator,

Rudyard Griffiths. The Monk debates are a project of the Aure and Peter and Melanie Monk charitable foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thank you again for listening.