Welcome to the 27th
annual writers' Symposium by the Sea at Point
Loma Nazarene University. I'm Dean Nelson under journalism faculty
at the university, and it is our pleasure
to have David Brooks, a New York Times columnist, a contributor to the
Atlantic, PBS News Hour, author of several books
including Bilbo's in paradise, unparadise Drive, social animal, Road to Character,
second mountain. He's known for his
observations on what makes society work or not work with piercing insight in humor and he's just
playing reasonableness, something we really
admire him for, and it's a tough combination. David Brooks, welcome to
the writers' Symposium. First of all, it's a pleasure to
be with you all. Super fantasy actually
human beings, after writing them around
or referred for two years. I got to spend a lot of time with students today
at Point Loma, which is always a thrill. I did five or six events, got to meet with a
bunch of students. I didn't have a story
running through my mind, as I was doing all these different
conversations which was, I made the mistake of recording my first book
for books on tape. When you do that, you
realize how boring your book is because you
have to read it aloud. But, I did get a
story out of it, which was the sound engineer told me about a novelist who had a 700-page novel that he
had to read all by himself. In the middle of the book, the sound engineer looks in the booth and the guy's weeping. The engineer set
pushes the button, says "Sir, is there anything
I can do to help you?" The novelist says,
"Don't I ever shut up?" I've hope I'm not strained
the communities' patience today, but I'm happy to be here. If you see me weeping, you'll know the answer.
Let's start this way. Professionally, you started out as a crime
reporter in Chicago, then you became more
nationally known. But your real roots as a writer, go back to Paddington
the bear in childhood. How did that awaken
something in you? Yeah, I was seven and I'm a big believer in this thing called
the Annunciation, one more thing there's
somethings that happen early in life that prefigure
everything that comes later. I'm in second grade
and I read this book, and I just think, "I want to write these things." I actually went back years later and re-read Paddington the bear. It's actually a very sad story, it's about a bear who's stuck in a train
station with no family. Like what happened to me? Why did that attract to you? I started writing. I had my first piece published in second-grade
literary magazine. It was a crime thriller. Then I just started writing it. It's been 50 years
since then and have probably not been 200 days that I have not
written 1,000 words, so I write seven days
a week, 1,000 words. It's been central to my
life and in high school, I wanted to date
this woman named Bernice. She didn't
want to date me. She dated another guy and I remember thinking,
"What is she thinking? I write way better
than that guy." That was my values and my wife, when we got married, though, we would have these nice
leisurely breakfasts. But, I really didn't talk to anybody until I've
written my 1,000 words. I come out of it at
9.30 or 10.30 or 11.30, however fast it goes. But, I just need to
do that every day, and if I don't do it for a
couple of days, I get rusty. Probably a little cranky. Yeah. Even on vacation, I really need to do. You wrote for your
college paper as well, this is one of my favorite
anecdotes about you. At the University of Chicago, when you heard that
William F. Buckley was coming to the University
of Chicago to speak, you wrote this satirical column. Didn't you actually say
something like, "How about it, Billy, how about giving me
a job?" Did you say that? Yeah, he had written this extremely pompous
book called Overdrive, which was like, I wake
up in the morning. I talk to Queen Elizabeth
and I talk to David Niven, and then I have extended
bouts of name dropping and making people feel inferior in the evenings. I was
like all this stuff. I wrote this parity about him, William F. Buckley was born on Christmas Day in Bethlehem. He wrote three volumes of his memoirs on the
day of his birth, about the age before Buckley, the Glorious Dawn, which
was about the conception of Buckley and then this coming into his fight in World War II, me against Germany and I was like ideal Buckley
Form 2 magazines there's one called
the National Buckley, one called the Buckley review, he merged to form
the Buckley Buckley. I wrote this and I ended
up with this joke. He came to campus, gave a speech to
the student body. At the end of the speech,
he said David Brooks, if you're in the audience, I'd like to give you a job. But where were you? That was the big
break of my life. But I was not in the audience. I had a good excuse
because I had been hired by PBS to go to Stanford to debate Milton
Friedman on a TV show. It was, Milton Friedman, talks to the young and I
was there as a socialist. Basically, you can
go on YouTube, and if you type in Milton
Friedman David Brooks, you'll see a guy with
a big heavy afro, these 1980s gigantic glasses, which are apparently
on loan from Mount Palomar lunar observatory. The show is me making an argument that
I read in some book, him destroying it
in six seconds, and the camera lingering
on my face for 20, 30 seconds, while I tried
to think of what to say. Can I just say I
watched that video? No. I did. I've never seen
you just struck dumb, the way he struck you dumb. Yeah. I've been struck dumb
many times since then, but he was the greatest debater ever against other
Nobel Prize winners, let alone a 20-year-old kid, it was totally unfair,
I was bullied. But, I called Buckley literally three years later and said, "Is the offer still open?" He said, "Yeah," and so
I moved to New York. Would you advise
college students today to take that approach in their job search to insult the person they
want to work for? Yeah, yeah, it takes a
bigger person than me. If somebody insulted me, it would be like, get the
hell out of here kid. But, he had a great facility for not asking
you about your politics. If he sense writing
talent, he would hire you. People, Joan Didion,
Garry Wills, lots of people we don't
associate with conservatives, had my job because he
sensed writing talent. Then when he edited
me, he was brutal. My little paragraphs
I would write for the magazine would come
back covered in red inks, he would say, "Come
on, David, do better." But, he also semi-adopted
me as a son for 18 months, so I've never been on a yacht before. He
took me on a yacht. We used to go over to
his house for dinner, this fancy piano tear on Park Avenue and they'd
be Finger bowls. I didn't know what
a finger bowl was, so it's like your
soup is watery. But we became close and then he sent me
off into the world. He did this for dozens
and dozens of people. His great skill was friendship. Absolutely fantastic friend. Then you also wrote for
The Weekly Standard and for The Wall
Street Journal and The New York Times
where you said you were hated on a mass scale. Yeah. Well, I was given the
job at The Times in 2003. They told me I was
as conservative as they thought their
readers could stand. My joke about
working at The Times was being a conservative
columnist at The Times is like being
the chief rabbi at Mecca, not a lot of company there. So I got there, and turns out I
was a little more conservative in those days
than the readers could stand. In those days, they put our e-mails at the
bottom of the column. After about four months, I cleaned up my e-mail folder
and there were 290,000. The central message was Paul Krugman is great, you suck. That was the core message and
I had read them all I felt. I got so depressed because it
turns out people who write nasty things are emotionally
very intelligent. They're just intelligent at
learning how to wound you. I really got
depressed and then I finally told my
assistant he had to read them and he got depressed. It was a brutal period
of skin thickening. I guess I had to go through it, everybody has
to go through it. But it was the hardest professional
period of my life for sure. Well, it just seems like so much of your writing,
books, columns, articles, you're drawn to this topic of moral
and social decay. It strikes me. It's a laugh riot. The psychological
unraveling of America. That just seems like
where you've landed. But I just wonder is that
from A, if that's true. B, is that from those Chicago reporting days where you saw that
social programs that were high minded just didn't work and you've been doing
that writing ever since? Yeah, that's when I
became a conservative. I'm a certain Burkean
conservative, I belief that society
is really complicated. We should change it constantly, but gradually because we should be humble about
what we can now. I've always had this
suspicion of grand plans and people who think they can figure out using
rational reason. But I don't think I write
about decay that much like The Second Mountain
is about redemption. It's about a personal
redemption for me going through hard times and
then learning from others how to grow
from suffering. They wrote character
is about people I was saying earlier were
pathetic at age 20, amazing at age 70. Dorothy Day, Frances Perkins, Bayard Rustin, Samuel Johnson. These are stories of moral
and spiritual growth. I would see the core
theme in retrospect. I've written about
the same people but one layer down each time. A lot of us writers, we figure out our
stuff in public. We're just, what are
we going through? I don't really tell the
story everywhere else, but I'll tell it. I was raised significantly
by my grandfather. He was an immigrant kid. He raised me to think as an
immigrant kid and to write, he was a beautiful writer and to dream big and to try
to make it in America. There are two Jews in America. There's the kind that you
saw in Fiddler on the Roof, all huggy and emotional then
there's the kind I was from. The slogan for our people was, think Yiddish act British. We were buttoned up, we never expressed emotion, we lived our life from here up, and we were not emotional. My parents loved me, fine but we'd never talked about that and we'd never hug
or do anything, that thing. My grandfather raised me. When I was about 22, he got cancer and he was in
the hospital room. I went to visit him, and he says to me, I'm a dead duck,
I'm going to go. I sat there for a few hours, we talked and I'm walking out
the door and he says to me, I love you so very much. To my eternal regret
I did not say it back to him because nobody in my family had ever
said that to me. A lot of my career is trying to get to be the person who is
comfortable saying that back. When I write about emotion, The Social Animal is
a book about emotion. It's written by a guy trying
to figure out emotion. Emotion is very closely
connected to morality. We don't think a
way to be moral, we have moral
sentiments which we try to educate to love
the proper things. So it's about an emotional
and moral journey of opening. What had been repressed
is unrepressed. When I look back
now, years later, I think about that theme as
the thing I've been pushing. Wow. I actually really admire the humility of what you just said
about when you write, you're figuring out your
own stuff because I read other columnists
who are telling me, this is how you got to think. This is how the world is, and I never get a width
of that in your columns. You let ideas duke it
out in your columns. I just think that's a beautiful
thing you've given to us. It's hard. A column is 850
words, most of them. My goal is not to tell
people what to think, but provide a context in
which they can think. To give some information, to provoke and hope people
will think out of it. Mostly just to start with a question and see if you can come up with an answer. Some of the columns
I admire them more, I'm proud of stuff are ones that made no
political point at all. I wrote a column years ago
called The Art of Presence. I had a friend who was
a young singer in DC, he was a friend of mine
and I had a friend in her band and she had this
terrible bike accident, really puffed up her face. I went to visit her
and this woman, Catherine had an older
sister named Anna, who was killed in Afghanistan working for a non-profit
called Ashoka. Her mom was there taking
care of Catherine. So I spend an
afternoon talking to her mom about things
I didn't know about. How do you sit with
people who are in grief? Mary, her mom said, you know, people often wonder if
they should mention Anna to me because they might be bringing up an
unpleasant subject. They should know, they
should always mention Anna, because Anna is
always on my mind. If they mentioned it, then I can talk about it or if I
feel like if I don't, I don't have to. That was just useful
advice for me. Then while she's taking
care of Catherine, she says, you know what the
best thing that's happened to me during this period? Was that somebody came
over, brought food, went to the bathroom, noticed there was no shower
mat in the shower. They got on their bike,
they went to Target, they bought a shower mat, they put the shower mat on the floor, they didn't tell me,
but then they left. That practical advice, their thing, this
action, that was so fun. I'm so glad they did that. That meant so much to me. Just to know the
art of presence, just showing up for somebody. I'm writing a book
now on the art of seeing others deeply
and being deeply seen. I didn't make people feel
seen, heard, understood, and valued because there's so many people in society
who feel invisible. I always ask people what's
time you felt really seen? I'm amazed by how many times they don't mention somebody saying something
brilliant to them. They just mention an action. One woman who's probably now in her 40s tells
me when I was 13, I got really drunk,
my first party. They dropped me off at home, I was so drunk I
lay on the porch, I couldn't get inside. My father was a big strict
disciplinarian, comes out. I know he's going to scream
at me and he's going to say all the things
that I think are going on in my head already, which is I'm bad, I'm bad. Steady just scoops her up, carries her to the couch, puts her gently on the
couch and he says to her, there'll be no punishment here. The experience was enough. She felt he understood
what she was thinking. He saw her. He saw her and often those moments are not like
you say some wise words. It's not like that, it's
just knowing what to do. I aspire to read as
widely as you do. Every column of yours sites
a book that I want to read. You got me reading Belden Lane. I'd never heard of this guy. I start reading
and I'm thinking, Oh my gosh, this is awesome.
Thank you for that. But do you just have this huge staff of people
that when you say, I'm working on a book
about forgiveness. Ursula, give me everything you have about forgiveness and they just back the truck up and dump it out in your office.
How does this work? No. I share one assistant at the Times for my columns, but for books, I have
no assistance or staff. Really? Yeah. What kind of a filing
system do you have? Because I'm stunned by all of the
things you pull in, whether it's polls or statistics
or poetry or whatever. How do you do this? Normal people go to meetings. I don't go to meetings. I mentioned that
I write everyday. I write my 1,000 words, sometimes
it's 9:30 and I'm done. I'm calling my friends,
"Let's hang out, I'm done." But they're busy, and so I am looking around for what books I can
use so I can write tomorrow. I've got to reload.
I'll go online, read long articles,
but then I've always got six or seven books. I've got my backpack here. There are probably eight
physical books in there. I'm doing a piece on
moral change in America, so I've got Walter
Lippmann in there, and I've got a whole
bunch of books. I read two or three
this morning. The way I read is, not
necessarily like I'm in the book, I mark up what I need, and a good quote, a good point, a good argument,
and I mark it up. For a column, I'll have about 350
pages of notes. Hold on. Three hundred
and fifty pages of notes for an 850-word column? I've got an eating
disorder. What can I say? I'm not good at writing
newspaper columns. I'm a 5,000-word guy.
That's my best length. I write every column as if it's 5,000 words and the
columns that are really bad are the ones
where I try to take a 5,000 word idea and
scrunch it to 850. I take, say, these 350 pages, and I lay them out on
my floor in piles. Each pile is a
paragraph in my column, so the process of writing is
not typing into a keyboard. It's crawling around the floor, putting each paper on each pile, and organizing the
structure of the piles. Then I pick up a pile, bring it to the desk, layout each page in order, type up the paragraph
throughout the papers, pick up the next
pile, type it out, throw out, and so you
go down the piles. I somehow need to see it geographically laid out in front of me to know
the coherence of it. It has to be geographic. I tell my students, writing is about traffic management
and structure. By the time you type
on the keyboard, your paper should
be 80 percent done. I was at the Hemingway
House or you have a Faulkner House in Ole Miss, he's got the whole outlines of his novels written
on the walls. A lot of people have this
system on one form or another, just how do you organize all
this stuff in your head? For me, it's piles. You just have to figure out
a system that works for you? Yeah. For some people, it's writing on the walls. I think it's something for
everybody, but it's something. The first three books, Bobos in Paradise,
Social Animal, On Paradise Drive, they're so funny and
they're so poignant. But I come away with
those books that you just have a disdain
for shallow people. Is that accurate? I often say I've made an entire career out of self-loathing. Well, it wouldn't
be self-loathing because you're not
a shallow guy. But do you have disdain
for shallow people? I don't think so. In
our job in journalism, you interview
hundreds of people. I rarely meet somebody I think, I really don't like that person. I interviewed a guy, I can't remember which country
he was from, maybe Yemen, this was years ago, a dictator who I was aware had killed hundreds of
thousands of people. You're interviewing about
some political situation in Yemen and he is not dressed
in his native costume. He's in a Western suit
with his foreign minister. They've never seen
each other in ties, so they're rubbing each other's
ties the whole interview. I feel like I was
saying, I should be hating this guy, he's a monster. But he's rubbing
his buddy's tie. Generally, I find
people fascinated. This is what you've written
in your book of that. I am pretty academicy, but I so believe in the centrality of the
journalistic interview that interviewing is
the gold standard of our profession because it
defies every stereotype. I was at a Trump rally years
ago in South Carolina. If I remember this correctly, I interviewed a woman who
was a lesbian biker who'd converted to Sufi Islam after surviving a plane crash and was now supporting
Donald Trump. Seems obvious. I was like, what stereotype
is she walking out of? People are always
more complicated and the interview reveals that. I would say I've never had an interview I didn't
enjoy, I'm almost never. Most people are infinitely
unique and fascinating. With Bobos in Paradise and
with On Paradise Drive, you do these really, really deep analysis
and coming up with data and just talking
about these observations. Here is my favorite out
of Bobos in Paradise, and this is out of the chapter
on consumption. If T.S. Eliot were alive
today and of a mind, he'd open a chain of
home furnishing stores called Objective Correlatives, and each object in them would be the physical expression of
some metaphysical sentiment. I read that in an airport in Salt Lake City, I circled it. I just thought
that's just one of the most awesome sentences ever, or wheat germ toothpaste doesn't kill the
bacteria in your mouth, it just asks it to leave. You've got this way of boiling it all down
into these awful, awesome, sarcastic comments. Are you always judging people? I call that comic sociology. If you remember,
it was the '90s. It was the time of Whole Foods and Anthropology because if you're
going to buy clothing, you're going to buy it
from a clothing store named after an
academic discipline. Those days just show how much you rejected material things. You had to buy Nabi fabrics from Peru and this
thick organic bread. Everything was textured in those days, late shower stalls. There was a code of
consumption to show how little you
cared about money. It was like you could spend
any amount of money on any room formerly
used by the servants. People were buying these
$10,000 AGA stoves, which looked like nickel-plated
nuclear reactors. I would just go to
an Anthropologie or to Restoration Hardware, I just stand there taking notes. It writes itself. I was in Restoration
Hardware in Palo Alto and a leftist came
in and got arrested on the renaissance couch,
this leather couch. She was ahead of her time, actually.
She was right. Then on Paradise Drive
is more about suburbia. so I went to a Home Depot and I watched American men
buy a barbecue grill, which is when they're
most emotionally exposed. You just watch it and you hopefully tell
a joke that people said, "We really do a manly waddle that we do in the presence
of large amounts of lumber." Those were what
those folks were. But with Social Animal, you take a different approach. You create these
composite characters and you tell their story, but you underpin their actions
with data and studies. Here is the pattern
for Social Animal. It was narrative, then
you'd make a pronouncement, then there would be
research that supported it, and then we went back
to the narrative. Why that approach? It was a risk, but A, non-fiction is boring
unless they're a story. So I wanted to create narrative. Two, the research
only gets you so far. You do a bit of
psychological research which could be interesting. I think one of the
studies I have in there was done in Germany. They take research subjects, tape gauze pads
under their arms, have some of the
research subjects watch a horror movie and
some watch a comedy. They take other
research subjects who were presumably
highly paid to sniff the gauze pads and to guess whether that person watched
a comedy or a horror movie. With good objectivity, they can tell just by smelling. Women are way better at
this than men, by the way. That's a bit of
research about how much as mammals we rely
on the sense of smell. People who lose the
sense of smell suffer greater emotional
deterioration than people who lose
sight or hearing. We're constantly
sniffing each other, we're not aware of it. But when you kiss somebody on the first day
or the first time you kiss, you're somehow swapping saliva and becoming aware of the
other person's immune system, so this is all going on. That's interesting. But if
I'm not going to have A, I'm going to have 300 pages,
it can get a little dry. But B, it's important to take social science research which tells us something
about ourselves. But to put it into a story
of a quasi human being, an actual character, because we're all much more than the product of our
social science findings. I want to capture the
pain of a person, the hurt of a person. The book is really about unconscious processes
and emotion. To capture emotion, I wanted
two people to fall in love. I wanted them to
have long periods when their marriage
is completely dry. There is a young woman who
is the heroine of the story, who is this immigrant kid
ferociously ambitious, wants to get into a
local charter school. They won't let her in so she burst into the meeting and says let me in your school. I need to be in your school. There's a hedge fund guy
who funds the school, and he says you can't barge
in here, get out of here kid. We have a system.
We have a lottery. She says, I don't care,
lead me on the school. The hedge fund manager
writes something on a piece of paper and slips it to the principal
and he writes, rig the fricking robbery. He wants to get her in. You want to have an episode to anchor social science and
something that feels real. I'm not a novelist
and I certainly learned that writing that book. I felt it was a wonderful
approach to talk about basically, sociology. It was just a really
creative approach to it and I admired it. But then you do
something else by the time you wrote the
Road to Character, there's this evolution
that is taking place and now you're not just
talking about data, and sociology, and moral, and social decay, you're talking about how individuals developed
their character. By virtue of our reading that, we see how we can
develop it in ourselves. That's a bit of a
departure for you. Then by the time you get
to The Second Mountain, Road to Character
is about how people live out their contradictions. You get to Second
Mountain and it's how you live out
your contradictions. It's much more personal. How risky was that? I didn't put myself at
all in the first draft. You didn't? No. It was about how people expand morally with me hiding conveniently
behind the curtain. But I had been through super hard time and I realized
this is so dishonest. The way my hard time took it
as a burgeoning workaholic, and I wrote about this
in The Second Mountain, I had suffered divorce and my kids had gone to
college or going to go. I was living in this crappy little
apartment and I did what any idiot American male does in the presence of
an emotional crisis. You try to work your
way through it. I'll just work. Not a
metaphor, the real thing, but it was a metaphor
for a larger truth, was if you went to my kitchen, I didn't have anybody over. If you go to the drawers
where there should have been silverware for when I
was entertaining guests, they were just posted notes. In the place where there
should have been plates, there was envelopes
and stationery. That's an objective reality of somebody whose
values are screwed up, and you go through that. I went through a religious
awakening at that time. I never wanted to write
about my faith in public because it's so
green and it's so fragile. It's not like I'm a
lifelong believer, I'm middle age believer. It's hard to hang language and experience like you've had. How do you articulate that? I really struggled because
I was searching around. I'd always had faith. I was raised Jewish, but I was in a Christian choir. I went to Christian school.
I went to a Christian camp. I remember the choir was
called Grace Church School in New York and about 30 percent of us in the choir were Jewish, so to square with our religion, we just wouldn't
sing the word Jesus. The volume would drop down and
then would come up. That was your
experience with civil disobedience at that time. But you get seeds
planted in your head. I was around especially
at this camp, and I have a camp friend named Stephen Morseau who
is here with us tonight. We are around goodness. There was a certain
sort beautiful behavior that was goodness. There's a certain
Jewish goodness, which is like homey affection. You're around this, but
it doesn't seem real, it just seem like stories. Then it begins to become alive. The world begins to seem enchanted and you're
just reading. It turns out if you're
searching religiously, especially around Christians,
they give you books. I was given in the course of three months about 500 books, only 300 of which were Mere
Christianity by CS Lewis. Slowly, it's just a
whole series of books. But I never had a moment like, I should tell that today
the Christian students, "When I was searching
around and then Jesus walked through the
walls and he said follow me." I was like, nope,
that didn't happen. The metaphor which I think I read somewhere but
I can't find the sources, was you're sitting on a train and all the people around
you are just normal, they're drinking coffee,
reading the paper. You look out the window and you realize there's
a lot of distance behind you and suddenly you're
not an atheist anymore. You realize you've crossed
over to some border, you're a believer in something. Everybody is still sitting here. It's not like there was some
radical transformation. It was very gradual step by step the most boring religious
awakening in the world. But suddenly I was in
a different country. That doesn't mean
doubt went away. We were talking about
somebody I admire, I guess someone you knew,
Frederick Buechner. He wrote somewhere, and
this was comfort to me, we wake up every morning, and he actually wrote this, and after you read
the New York Times, you ask yourself, "Can I really believe this all over again?" He says if you say yes
10 days out of 10, I really don't believe
you know what faith is. But if you say yes
two days out of 10, then on those two
days you should say it with great gladness. That like I said, "Oh, it's okay to be left the way I am." It was that gradual
settling into a process. At what point did
you say I need to actually insert myself
into Second Mountain if you wrote this whole
thing or at least started to without that dimension? How did you come to actually, I need to get there? I talked to my friends. I have a rule and I have
violated this sometimes. My rule is not only in stage
but in normal conversation, you should be so vulnerable, not 100 percent, but so vulnerable you should
feel slightly bad about it afterwards. I learned this the other
month, a Danish friend. The Danes have an
expression for this. They have an emotion for, "I feel so bad for you, you just express too
much emotion in public." I get that. You don't want to
spill your guts, but you want to be honest and you want to
be a little vulnerable. I will say most of my books, like every book, is 60 percent women
reader, 40 percent men. That's the bookmarking.
Second Mountain, I would look at the autograph
lines, 80 percent men. You tapped into something. I learned there a lot
of middle age guys who are going through something. Especially if I go to
business conference, a set of CEOs come up
to me and say, "Hey, can we have a private
relationships, I've got nobody to talk to." I realized that could
be a CEO whisperer. I think for guys in
particular of a certain age, there's not a lot of talk about this stuff and so I felt if I can be a little vulnerable,
others could relate. It is a great example of
Dorothy Day quote you have about writing in The Road to Character
book where she says, writing is an act of community, an expression of love and
concern for each other. That is what you just got
at, wouldn't you say? Dorothy Day wrote
a beautiful book called The Long Loneliness. I've never met Dorothy
Day in my life, but she's one of my life
friends and heroes. She was the woman who like
all the people in the book, her life was a
complete mess at 25. She was one of these people
when she read novels, she couldn't only read the
novel, she lived it out. Unfortunately, she read
a lot of Dostoevsky, she was like drinking,
carousing suicide attempts. Then I can't remember her exact age but I
guess it was around 30, maybe you get a little younger. She has a daughter, not married, but
she has a daughter. I'm going to butcher the quote, but it's a beautiful quote. She realized during pregnancy
that all the accounts with childbirth she'd ever read
were written by guys. She said I'm going to
write one, and she wrote one 40 minutes after
her daughter was born. Mostly it's about the
pain, the process. But at the end she says, "If I had composed the
greatest symphony, written the greatest poem, painted the greatest painting, I could not have felt
the more exalted creator than I did when they placed
my child in my arms." With that came a flood
of exaltation and joy and with that came a
need to thank somebody. "Who do I thank for this joy?" She realized there
must be a God because that's the only one I
can think of to thank, so she then became a Catholic. In the road to character work, you also quote John
Ruskin saying, the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what
it saw in a plain way. You could be
describing yourself. Well, that's one of
my favorite quotes. It's a goal. I live in the world of politics. People see what
they want to see. That's true in life.
There's a famous experiment done in the 1950s. There was an extremely
vicious football game between Princeton and Dartmouth, and each fan base thought the other side had committed twice as
many penalties. They were viciously sorted, they showed the film to each fan base and
each side said, see the film objectively
proves the other side did it. The researcher says, "What
we've learned from this, there's no game out there. There's just each person's
experience in the game. Life is not what happens to you. It's what you do with
what happens to you." There's a great
Aeneas Nin quote. "We don't see the
world as it is. We see the world as we are." There's just a lot of
subjectivity in the world, and what Ruskin is pointing to, is the ability that
some people have. I would put Tolstoy
in this camp, I would put George
Orwell in this camp, I would put George
jelly in this camp, just to get themselves
out of the way and see reality plainly, and be honest about it. For all of us to do this work, Orwell is a hero. Because it doesn't matter if it's his side or the other side, he's going to just
be brutally honest. He said he had the power of
facing unpleasant truths. That's a very good quality
to have in anybody. You are so much more comfortable
using language like sin, holiness, wisdom,
loving your enemies, the word soul,
forgiveness, suffering. You talk about those a lot more than our
religious leaders do. I'm just wondering, how come you're so
comfortable with that? I don't know. It's
not my living. Especially coming from the
world of politics I think we're over politicized
and under moralized, that we talked about
politics too much, we fight about it too much. The real difficult and
important things are, how do I be a good husband? How to be a good father? How do I build a relationship
with somebody at work? How do I remain faithful
under temptation. I think we don't
have enough public voices using the language. I told you earlier,
when I was on TV talking about road to
character before I came out, I used the word sin because
the people I wrote about, knew they were sinners. They struggle with that,
and they figured out how can I be redeemed for my sin. I use that word and an
editor in another house, publishing house wrote to
me and said, "You know, I love the way you
talked about your book, but don't use the word sin, it's too much of a downer." I use the word insensitive. I was like, "Yeah, the Nazis
were really insensitive." But I wanted to learn how to use it so
people would not reject it. Because a lot of people
have used the word sin in regards to sex is a sin, or having fun as a sin. Puritans are not
really Puritans. Puritans get a bad rap. They were wonderful people, but the people we call Puritans, they used it as a
mask for hypocrisy. How do you talk about
sin in a secular world? I borrowed, as I mentioned
today at St. Augustine. St. Augustine has this
concept of disordered loves. We all love a lot of things, but we all know somethings
are higher than others. If I cheat to make money, I put my love of money over my level of honesty.
That's a sin. If you tell me a secret and
I blow it at a dinner party, I put my love of popularity
over my love of friendship. That's a sin. It's
not about depravity. It's, we're all screwed
up in some way and we put our lower loves above our higher loves
some of the time. We need to educate our emotions, so we loved the highest things. Refining your love. That's something we
can all relate to, that we react shallowly
when we could act nobly. We do that, that's
a daily occurrence. But if you don't
have the word sin, you don't have redemption. If you don't know what grace is. I tell my students, you got sick, maybe
you lost a loved one. I bet that some people you thought would show up
for you, didn't show up. But I bet there were
other people you never expected to show, who totally showed
up. That's grace. If you don't have those words, it's hard to understand
your moral growth. Forgiveness. Martin Luther King was a master of forgiveness. He said, "Forgiveness
is not denying the sin, it's just saying
the sin will not be a break in our relationship." Once you have a concept
of forgiveness, then you have a structure
for how to do it. You confess the sin. You try to repair the sin, you ask forgiveness for the sin. You try to make
accounting for the sin. It's a whole set of stages. Forgiveness is not cheap, but it's part of a process
of a relationship repair. King had this concept of
the sinfulness and others, which meant that
when he was fighting the Civil Rights Act movement, he couldn't just expect people to read an enlightening
book and then think, oh, yes, segregation is wrong. He had to shove their
sin in their face. He was aggressive. But then he knew that
in the course of this, he himself was likely to be
seduced by power, by fame, by the violence of any conflict, and so there had to be a
process of self-discipline, of redemption, of
forgiveness of sin, of self-doubt, and
reliance and grace. The Civil Rights Movement was this incredibly
complicated set of moral actions which were
completely aware of the brokenness of people
in all sides and that's a level of moral sophistication
you are unable to have if you don't have
these concepts. Sure. What advice
would you give us, as citizens to live more
peacefully with one another, to talk with each other
more civilly than we do. I know you don't think these are the most divisive times that we've ever had
in this country. Some people have said they are. I know you don't think they are. But what can bind us together? You'd think a pandemic
would have done it? I thought that for three weeks. But on the other hand pandemics
really historically drive people apart because we're
suspicious of each other. The book I'm working on, is about making other people feel seen, heard,
and understood. There's just an epidemic of
blindness in the country. It's like rural
people aren't feeling seen by urban people, blacks feeling whites don't understand their
daily experience. Republicans and
Democrats looking at each other in blind
incomprehension. I've come to think that
the most important skill for any successful family, organization or school or country is people
feel dignified, they feel seen, they
feel understood. This is a skill, and it's a set of skills that start with empathy,
certainly accompaniment. Most of life we're not going to have deep conversations
all the time. We're just going to be
together and being together, talking about sports, our bodies begin to
feel safe together. The mind can't enter if the
body doesn't feel safe. Then empathy, but
the one thing I've learned is that we all think we understand the people around us. I don't know everybody
in this room, but I would ask you
how good are you at knowing what's going on in the mind of the
people around you? I can say with
absolute confidence, you're not as good as
you think you are.. There are people who study this, if we're talking and I think I know what's going
on in your head, on average, I'm going to be
right 22 percent of the time. Some people are right
zero percent of the time. Yeah. They think they're
right, a 100 percent of the time. They're the most vocal ones Yeah. What's the skill that correlates with knowing
somebody well? Is it empathy? No. Empathy, being
able to waive, not very far, it's
verbal intelligence. It's the ability to ask you the right questions and listen
carefully to your answers. There's this thing called
perspective-taking, where I'm going to
get your perspective. That doesn't work, it's got
to be prospective asking. You wrote about the questions, I now collect very
good questions. Start off with the
normal questions like, where's your name come from?
That's a good question. Then at some point in a
relationship when there's trust, you ask elevated
questions to get people thinking about
their life and new ways. Good question to me is, what would you do if
you weren't afraid? Fear governs all our
lives in some way, but we don't always
think about it. What crossroads are you at? What commitment have you made that you no longer believe in? Most of us don't know ourselves, the only way we
can know ourselves is in conversation with another. So as we talk, we engage in joint
exploration of each other. That's just a beautiful way
to deepen a relationship, and if we can't have those
kinds of conversations, it's not about being
civil to each other, it's about mutual exploration to find that who we are
and how we're different. Tell me if this is related, I'd love to hear
your explanation of your fond of this
phrase from Hegel, "the owl of Minerva
flies at dusk." Why is that meaningful to you? Well, now I'm getting older, so the phrase means that we
become wise as we're ending, and we live our life forward, but understand it backwards. I do generally think people get better living
as they go along. They get out of their own way, especially for guys at 50, they become really interested in legacy and how can I
serve the community? I think women do this
throughout their lives. But I tell guys, remember when you were 14
and sex came into your life, and suddenly you
discovered horniness? When you get to be 50,
there's going to be a generative horniness
that enters your life, and you're just going to do something good for society. You're going to be driven by a different moral motivation. There's a phrase at
the end of life, this is a psychologist,
Erik Erikson. He's got these
different phases in life, little schematic, but the N phase is
integrity versus despair. That either you can look back and understand
the meaning of your life and find satisfaction and how you've lived your life, or you feel despair. At earlier in my career, I asked the readers at
the time those over 70, to send me life reports, and grade themselves on
their personal life, their professional life,
the romantic life. They give themselves
an average grade of A minus on their
professional life, and B minus on their personal
and relational life. The people who were happiest, are those who divided
their lives into chunks every 3-5 years, they said, "what's
this chapter about?" If they didn't like their
life, they could readjust. The people who were unhappy
never did that exercise, and they just drifted along. There was one guy
who wrote to me, actually one of the
guys is remarkable. He wrote about his workholism, and then his love for
his wife that had developed after he got sick. We featured him a lot of
quotes from his report. I opened the front page
of The New York Times like six months later.
He killed his wife. People, they are complicated, but the one case I recall
was a guy who gave himself an F. He said, "I was an ior, I was gloomy, I never took a risk,"
and it's a cliche, but of the 5,000
people who wrote, every single one loved the risks I took even
when they went South. It's just a take
risks, but he said, "I really didn't seize life, and I give myself an F." I said, "Well, I want to take your
name off but can I run it?" He said you only
take my name off. It was one of the most
poignant letters. Just have somebody with regret, and those who live
with regret are those who didn't
take the time to really be intentional about what am I going to do
with the next five years? I told students that they don't ask, what are you going
to do with your life? That's too big a question. Just what's the chapter?
What's the next chapter? What advice do you
have for writers? Well, the obvious one
is write every day. Use the muscle, but the other one is know
something about something. Which is like if I were 20, I developed this interest
in neuroscience, so I'd know something
about neuroscience now. If I was 20, I'd probably know
something about genetics. Whatever I'm going to do
for the rest of my life, genetics will be interesting. There are a million
writers out there, but if somebody's going to
ask them for their review, you've got to bring
something to the table. Some field of expertise that you can really
be a teacher in. There's a phrase,
we both love it, I consider myself not
a writer or a teacher, I share other people's wisdom, I don't necessarily
come up with it. The phrase I think we
came upon separately, but both like is writers are beggars who tell other beggars where
they found bread. If I find a quote from
Frederick Buechner or Christian Wiman or Cornel West, I'm
going to use that quote. It's going to mean
something to me. Yeah. It'll enrich my life and I'd want to share
that with everybody. I'm wondering if
we could end this, I didn't ask you
this ahead of time, so you can say no. You want me to moon walk? There's an interpretive dance, no, there's a section out of
the road to character, I'm wondering if you
would be open to reading it as a conclusion. I will tell you that
I call it reporting, but you will call
it name dropping. I was interviewed by Oprah
for the last two weeks. Why do you keep bringing her up? What? I'm so sick of hearing
about Oprah all day. It's Oprah all day. Well, it was Barbra Streisand, and I and Oprah were
sitting around. She asked me to read something for her Super Soul Sunday Show. I think this is Oprah,
I'm going to do it at my most emotional, and I'm really
emoting like crazy. She pulls the book
out of my hand, says, "Let's not do this." Then she reads it and
its like supernovae. It's like I'll do my best. Do want me to do it? I want you to do it. It's this last
line on that page, and then to the left, two pages. I hope you pick the good
one. This is on our theme. People do get better at living, at least if they are willing to humble themselves and learn. Over time, they stumble less and eventually
they achieve moments of catharsis when outer ambition comes into balance
within our aspiration. When there is a unity of effort between Atom 1 and Atom 2, when there is that
ultimate tranquility, and that feeling of flow. When moral nature
and external skills are united in one
defining effort. Joy is not produced by, because others praise you. Joy emanates unbidden
and unforced, joy comes as a gift when
you least expect it. At those fleeting moments, you know why you were put here
and what truth you serve. You may not feel giddy
at those moments, you may not hear the
orchestra's delirious swell, or see flashes of
crimson and gold. You will feel the
satisfaction of silence, a peace, a hush. Those moments are the blessings and the signs of
a beautiful life. David Brooks, thank
you for being here.
