Solving our big national problems by doing the small things well.
1: David Brooks is a journalist. His job is to interview people.
What has he learned?
“I often find myself interviewing people who tell me they feel invisible and disrespected,” he writes in his book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.
This feeling of being invisible shows up across all parts of the political spectrum.
“Black people feeling that the systemic inequities that afflict their daily experiences are not understood by whites, rural people feeling they are not seen by coastal elites, people across political divides staring at each other with angry incomprehension.”
This sense of isolation also seeps into our personal relationships: “Husbands and wives in broken marriages who realize that the person who should know them best actually has no clue,” he observes.
What’s driving these feelings of alienation?
“Our social skills are currently inadequate to the pluralistic societies we are living in,” David writes.
“Human beings evolved to live in small bands with people more or less like themselves,” he observes.
“But today, many of us live in wonderfully pluralistic societies. In America, Europe, India, and many other places, we’re trying to build mass multicultural democracies, societies that contain people from diverse races and ethnicities, with different ideologies and backgrounds.”
What is needed, David believes, is the ability to understand what another person is experiencing.
This skill is “at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society. . . , the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen—to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood.”
2: Yet we don’t learn this in school. And social media certainly doesn’t teach us how to connect on a deep level. Here, “stimulation replaces intimacy,” David writes. “There is judgment everywhere and understanding nowhere. . .
“Some days it seems like we have intentionally built a society that gives people little guidance on how to perform the most important activities of life.”
The result?
“A lot of us are lonely and lack deep friendships,” he notes. “It’s not because we don’t want these things. Above almost any other need, human beings long to have another person look into their face with loving respect and acceptance.”
3: David believes solving our big national problems begins with learning to do the small things well.
“People need social skills,” he writes. “Over the past four years I’ve become determined to learn the skills that go into seeing others, understanding others, and making other people feel respected, valued, and safe.”
David shares what he has learned in his new book How to Know a Person.
“First, I’ve wanted to understand and learn these skills for pragmatic reasons,” he notes. We “can’t make the big decisions in life well unless we’re able to understand others. . .
“Life goes a lot better if we can see things from other people’s points of view, as well as our own.”
Next, he wanted to improve his social skills for spiritual reasons.
“If you beam the light of your attention on me, I blossom. If you see great potential in me, I will probably come to see great potential in myself. If you can understand my frailties and sympathize with me when life treats me harshly, then I am more likely to have the strength to weather the storms of life.”
Lastly, David wanted to learn and share these skills for “reasons of national survival. . . To survive, pluralistic societies require citizens who can look across differences and show the kind of understanding that is a prerequisite of trust—who can say, at the very least, ‘I’m beginning to see you.
“Certainly, I will never fully experience the world as you experience it, but I’m beginning, a bit, to see the world through your eyes.'”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: How intentional am I about seeking to understand other people’s perspectives?
Action: Experiment with this mindset today.
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