Episode 7: How can we cure our social blindness?

Introduction [00:00]

How many people in our lives do we really know? How can we get to know the people around us? [01:48]

• Mónica: “we are digging to the foundation here, folks. Disagreeing well about politics doesn’t start with thinking through arguments. It starts with that magic that happens when you’re really hearing someone else and they are really hearing you.” 

Introducing our guest, David Brooks, author of “How to Know a Person” [03:27]

Mónica asks Brooks why he wrote his book [04:26]

• Brooks: “I just find an epidemic of blindness. That there’s black people who feel their daily circumstances are not understood by whites, Republicans and Democrats looking at each other in blind incomprehension, lonely teenagers that [feel] no one sees them and they’re despondent, husband and wives in broken marriages who realize that the other person who should know them best has no clue. And so I figured this basic social breakdown in our society is the cause of a lot of the dysfunction in our politics. And frankly, a lot of the cause of a lot of the dysfunction in our mental health.”


• Brooks: “Every human being is worth–deserves to be seen by a friend, a parent, by society, by the media and when they’re not seen…it’s so burningly humiliating to look at the national conversation and not see yourself.”

 
Mónica asks why knowing someone is a critical skill for addressing the political divide? [07:57]

• Brooks:  “I’m in conversations with people across the political divide…And when those people come to me with those conversations they often come to me with critique and blame that I’m part of systems of oppression that keep them down. And so my first instinct is to try to get all defensive and say, ‘Hey, I’m not the problem here, I’m one of the good guys here!’ or ‘You don’t understand what I’m dealing with’ and I’ve learned my first job is not to get defensive, and my second job is to stand in their standpoint. If they come at me with a critique, then I should ask them three or four or five times in different ways, ‘how do you see things? What do you mean? What am I missing here?’”

 
Brooks shares an example of a conversation where he felt he didn’t do enough to be heard or to hear the person he was speaking with on a panel, and how he would do it differently if he could do it again. [10:12]  

Mónica and Books discuss the importance of understanding each other’s “frames” in conversations [13:30]

• Brooks: “There are two different modes of thinking. There’s paradigmatic mode, which is argument, like a legal brief or a PowerPoint presentation, and then there’s narrative mode, which is storytelling. Politics would seem to be the realm of the paradigmatic, that you make an argument, then I make an argument. I write a newspaper column, you read a newspaper column. I write a think tank report, you read a think tank report. But to me that’s a great way to not see somebody, because paradigmatic thinking– this argument mode– is a non-vulnerable, non-revealing way of talking whereas narrative mode is a very vulnerable and very personal way of talking, and you get the whole person rather than just some put on set of talking points.”

 
Brooks shares about “constructionism” as a strategy for better understanding the person we are speaking with. [18:28]

• Brooks: “Each of us is constructing a world…so where do those models come from? They come from your whole life experience. Your whole life experience. If your life experience is as a security specialist, you’re going to see a different living room than somebody whose whole life experience is as an interior designer. And this goes down even to the most basic level…we should not assume that we each are going to see the same reality because we each have gone to the same room, have the same party or listen to the same speech or watch the same movie…we’re all experiencing it a little differently.”

 
Mónica pauses to dive into some data from A Braver Way sponsor USAFacts about the points Brooks made. [21:41]  

Brooks distinguishes between “illuminators” and “diminishers” [24:50]

• • Brooks (on “diminishers”): “That’s the first thing, they’re just not curious. The second thing about “Diminishers” is they stereotype and they do a thing called “stacking.” I’m “stacking” if I learn one fact about you and then I make a whole series of stereotypical assumptions about you.’

• “Illuminators make you feel lit up. They ask questions about you, they respect you, and they just somehow get you.”

 
Brooks shares about being a “loud listener” and illuminating and humanizing people you disagree with [27:50]

• Brooks: ‘We’re in a culture right now of a brutalizing culture, a culture of bitterness, of disagreement, of dehumanization. And to me dehumanization is anything that covers over another human’s face… And so to me, it’s the most aggressively practical thing we can do to heal the ruptures in our society.”

• Brooks: “I try to be a little more vulnerable than the situation allows.. and there’s some people who will react to your vulnerability with vulnerability. Or I lead with curiosity. I ask something about them and then I wanna see, will they lead, ask something about me, ’cause the relationship always has to be reciprocal, of course. In order to behold somebody, you have to be willing to be beheld.”

 
Mónica and Brooks explore the negative power of labels and the importance of both seeing an individual as well as the importance of seeing the groups they belong to. [37:10]

• Brooks: “We only accurately understand each other about 20% of the time. And so the only way to get around that is conversation, so you have to ask. And that’s why the key to being a decent human being in a democracy is to be phenomenal at conversation.”

 
Mónica asks if “The Braver Angels Way” of speaking “freely, fully and without fear” is a fantasy? [43:09]  

Mónica asks “is there anyone not worth seeing?” [44:51]

• • Brooks: “If you’re in a conversation with someone who’s just dismissive and not curious about you, I wish I knew a way to convert that person, but I don’t know a way to convert that person. And so I think there are some people who are, you have to, as they say, ‘let people voluntarily evolve.’ You can’t force it upon them. And so I found if they’re not willing to be vulnerable, they’re not willing to trust. There’s probably nothing you can do about that. You just have to understand we’re just not gonna have a relationship.”

• Brooks: “I found in journalism that there’s a silent majority in almost every situation, who are sometimes riled up by the ‘conflict entrepreneurs’ but who otherwise are amenable to…reasonableness.” 

 
Mónica asks what brings David Brooks hope? [46:56]

• Brooks: “You know, we evolved to live in bands of 150 people like ourselves, but now we live in big diverse societies…if we’re gonna survive we have no choice but to make our social skills adequate to the societies we happen to live in.”

• Brooks: “How many times have I seen people who profoundly disagree become friends? Quite a lot, actually. And how many times have I [had] somebody write me an email that’s viciously angry, and then I write them one back that’s semi-respectful, and then immediately they turn around and they’re respectful? And, you know, a lot of people are nasty ’cause they forget for a second there’s another human being on this other side.”

 
Mónica thanks David and concludes their interview [48:11]  

Introducing our supporting partner: StoryCorps and their powerful new program “One Small Step” [48:41]  

Mónica defines the concept of “sonder” and introduces her conservative counterpart, April Lawson for a talkback on the interview with David Brooks [49:57]  

April and Mónica share their favorite moments from the interview [51:42]  

Mónica and April discuss what their prospective “sides” are good and bad at around “how to know a person” [55:14]

• Mónica: “I think about this with the blue side…creating new rituals with the land acknowledgments, with the sharing of pronouns, it’s like it’s an attempt to build a big frame that’s better than the one before at allowing certain people to be seen. And how cool is that, right? The attempt to create something that supports the seeing of those who have not been seen. So I think that’s really beautiful. That’s what I think the blue side’s really good at. And I believe it can help reverse lots of injustices and change culture over time.”


• Mónica: “I do believe we’re all pretty bad at ‘constructionism,’ meaning understanding that people kind of construct their own reality in a way that my experiences…will determine how I see the world. And so a lot of times we forget that…When we see someone with a belief that we can’t understand, [that’s] so confounding, we’ll go to what I think of as the…‘three awful assumptions’ about other people– where we think they’re crazy, stupid or evil.”


• April: “I feel like red—tend to be really good at listening deeply to some people, and really bad at listening deeply to other people, and that there are some stories that Reds find comfortable and relatable and true…and some stories that they don’t and that they’re really good at tuning in to the stories that they like relate to and tuning out the ones that they don’t.”


• April: “on the red side, partly because of that attunement to the individual, there’s a deep humaneness, like there’s something on the red side where you are much less likely, to be lumped in with a group in a way that you don’t like, , there’s a lot more willingness to say like, well, but who are you?”

 
April and Mónica discuss where David’s insights show up in their lives [1:05:20]

• April: “Listening isn’t just about asking question after question, right?…sometimes when we’re speaking, we also have to show, ‘I heard you,’ right? The way that you say that shows. 

‘I heard you.’ ‘I care about,’ ‘I’m thinking about what you might believe here’…even just the words you choose, and what tones, the moderation, how much you say…all of that is actually all part of that listening activity in a strange way. And that was a real insight for me.”  

Mónica shares how she got to know April. [1:11:05]  

Introducing another one of our supporting partners, The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression or FIRE [1:12:58]  

Our community voice: Lance Walker runs a barbershop out of his home in rural Chambersburg, Pennsylvania [1:14:02]

• Walker: “Especially, more so in the black neighborhoods, the barbershops historically have been places of gathering, because people of color back in the day couldn’t congregate too much…especially with the heavy racism…the barbershop has always been a place of conversation and exchange of ideas.”


• Walker: “We just need to learn how to dialogue better. There’s almost a thing of, ‘no I’ve got to destroy you’ and I don’t think that. That’s not the space that I want to operate in.”


• Walker: “I still am registered as a Republican but I’m disassociated from any political party in as much as I feel like they’re all too small…I feel like they want to box you in and I think every last one of us are much larger than  one or two or three major topics that…each party kind of presents and comes with. So that’s where I stand right now.”

 
Mónica closes the show with an invitation to look beyond labels [1:19:42]  

Closing Song: “The Great Divide” by Jud Caswell [1:20:24]

Closing credits, call to action [1:21:15]

Monica:

Today we’re talking about something you’d think we’d intuitively know how to do. But do we?

David Brooks:

I just find an epidemic of blindness that there’s a black people who feel their daily circumstances are not understood by whites. Republicans and Democrats looking at each other in blind incomprehension, uh, lonely teenagers that no one sees them and they’re despondent…

Monica:

And then we’ll introduce you to someone who’s unlocked the secret to this superpower in his own little microcosm of America…

Lance Walker:

I’ve literally had customers stand up for me, like “hey man, don’t talk like that in this man’s shop.” so I was like, wow, okay. This is, It is kind of cool.

Monica:

All this and more is just ahead … on this week’s episode.

Monica:

Welcome to A Braver Way, a show about how you — yes YOU — can disagree about politics without losing heart.

I’m Monica Guzman, your guide across the divide, [and I’m here] to help you hear and be heard by people who confound you.

We don’t want to be at war in our country. We want to be at home.

So strap in.

‘Cause it’s time we learn how to turn up the heat, turn down the fear, and get real about things that matter with more of our fellow Americans than we thought possible.

Hey everyone. Welcome back.

Chances are, you’ve interacted with a bunch of people this week. At home, at work, on social media. Of all those people, how many do you feel like you truly know? And not just their name, or what their job is… but what makes them tick, how they look at the world, what experiences they’ve had that shaped them into the people they are today? And how many of the people you’ve interacted with know these things about you?

Getting to know the people we interact with, just as a basic human skill, for everyone, everywhere, is — GAH — so important! To everything! I mean, this is a complicated world we’ve all inherited. It’s got loads of different people, each with their own perspectives, their own lenses, their own motivations. And on top of all that, we’ve built our whole political system — this set of norms and processes for how we try to thrive together — around the idea that people need to be able to disagree with each other, while still coming together and functioning, somehow, as one big unit!

How do we hold something that messy together?

I’m really pumped about this episode for two reasons. One — because we are digging to the foundation here, folks. Disagreeing well about politics doesn’t start with thinking through arguments. It starts with that magic that happens when you’re really hearing someone else and they are really hearing you.

It starts with getting to know other people.

This is a skill — a mandate, even — that’s always been with us and somehow, these days, feels remote. Unobvious. Even a little endangered.

Which brings us to the second reason I’m excited about this episode, and that’s who we’re talking to about all this.

David Brooks has been an opinion columnist at The New York Times for 20 years. He’s a commentator on “PBS NewsHour,” NPR’s “All Things Considered” and NBC’s “Meet the Press” — so, the man has survived more than his fair share of political arguments — and he is the author of six books, including his latest, How To Know A Person.

In political disagreements and anywhere else, it is so frustrating to not be understood. What can you do to make it easier for someone else to really hear you? And how can you do someone else the honor of truly hearing them?

Here is my conversation with David Brooks…. and I start by asking one of my favorite questions for helping to get to know a person, which as it turns out, is one of David’s favorites too!

Monica:

Why did you end up being the person to write the book on how to know a person? Why you and not someone else?

David Brooks:

Well, as you know, I love that question so much. I cited you in the book, as the expert telling me to ask that question. And I guess in my case there, there are two reasons.The first is a personal reason that I’ve tried over the course of my life to become a little more socially adept. And so we think people often think journalists…you must be people people, ’cause you’re around interviewing people all the time. But it is not true. I remember the first couple days I walked around the New York Times newsroom and I thought, how much more social awkwardness can you put in one room? And

Monica:

I believe it.

David Brooks:

it. And so. I’ve spent the last 20 years of my life trying to become a more full human being.

Trying to graduate from somebody who was too much in his head into somebody who leads with the heart more, and someone who was just more socially skilled.

So that’s the selfish reason. The somewhat less selfish reason, is that I just find an epidemic of blindness that there’s a black people who feel their daily circumstance are not understood by whites. Republicans and Democrats looking at each other in blind incomprehension, Lonely teenagers that no one sees them and they’re despondent, husband and wives and broken marriages who realize the other person who should know them best has no clue. And so I figured this basic social breakdown in our society is the cause that a lot of the dysfunction in our politics. And frankly a lot of the cause of a lot of the dysfunction in our mental health. There’s nothing cruel than making somebody feel invisible, unseen, unimportant, that you don’t matter.

Monica:

And I love how you said in the book that it feels like an injustice because it is when someone feels unseen, unheard, neglected. Can you say more about that? I found that really profound

David Brooks:

Yeah. Well, every baby comes out of the womb looking for a face that will see them and that doesn’t change much as we age as adults. We still need somebody to look into our face and recognize our existence.The beautiful opening for Ralph Ellison’s book, “Invisible Man,” was an inspiration to me. And in that opening the unnamed narrator says, “people look at me, but they see everything else but me. They see their projections onto me. They see their stereotypes of me, they see my background. The thing they don’t see is me. And this is, feels so horrible. I wanna lash out with my fists.”

Monica:

mm-Hmm.

David Brooks:

And it seldom works out. And so every human being deserves to be seen; by a friend, a parent by society. By the media. And when they’re not seen, and it’s so burning, humiliating to look at the national conversation and not see yourself.

Monica:

Yeah,

David Brooks:

Of course you’re gonna be angry,and of course you’re gonna lash out. And that’s why a sad society turns into a mean society.

Monica:

Right, right. I’ve told people sometimes that in this funny way, if only we could be robots, because when robots don’t have data, they don’t have data. But what humans do is we fill in the blanks with guesses, right? So when you say often what we see when we look at another person is our projection of them, that’s really quite true.

You’re, you’re close to the political divide, I would say. You tackle some, some tough issues. You probably hear from people who disagree with you a time or two. How then, did you come to believe that this skill of knowing someone was critical, even to something like the political divide, this skill?

David Brooks:

Yeah. Well, you know, first of all, to know another person, you have to be open hearted, but you have to have skills. And they are skills that can be taught just like carpentry or motorcycle maintenance or tennis. And some of them are social skills, like how do you sit with someone who’s suffering, how do you listen really well? How do you ask for an offer for forgiveness? But some of them are more political, and so one’s soul will set a concert of skills as “how do you have hard conversations?” And so I’m a critic of Donald Trump, a pretty vociferous critic, but a lot of my friends and members of my family are big fans of Donald Trump. And so I’m in conversations with people across the political divide. And then I’m in conversations with people on the hard left that don’t like me either. And when those people come to me with those conversations, they often come to me with critique and blame that I’m part of systems of oppression that keep them down. And so my first instinct is to try to get all defensive and say, “Hey, I’m not the problem here. I’m one of the good guys here. Or, you don’t understand what I’m dealing with.” And I’ve learned my first job is not to get defensive, and my second job is, is to stand in their standpoint. If they come at me with a critique. Then I should ask them three or four or five times in different ways. How do you see things? What do you mean? What am I missing here?

Monica:

Right, and I’ll jump in there because in The book you told a story that was so powerful about a very hard conversation you had not that long ago, and you reached a conclusion at the end of it. And I bet a lot of our listeners have been there. So I’ll, I’ll read it. You said “it was a hard conversation and I did not navigate it well. I left it feeling like I should have done more to understand her point of view, but I also should have done more to assert my own, to clarify and explore any disagreements we might actually have.” So this is an example of a conversation where somehow there was a failure to hear and to be heard, even though there was a lot of effort. And you mentioned, as you talked about that conversation, the undercurrents of emotion. Can you, can you workshop this out for us, for those of us who really relate to that? Like, did I fail in hearing? Or did I fail in being heard? I failed at both!

David Brooks:

Both. It was a conversation between me in public on a panel with a prominent African American intellectual, who I would say is like, if you measured us on an ideological scale, she’s probably nine ticks to my left. And one of the things that was interesting about that conversation was first I, as a white male talking to a black woman, the first thing I have to understand, and this is my personal opinion, is that all of society conspires to make me visible. And so I walk in a room, I can be myself.

I don’t have to think what version of me am I gonna bring into this room? I can just be myself. And the way the world sees me is probably pretty similar to the way I see myself. And for a lot of people in more marginalized groups, that’s not true. The way they see themselves is very different than the way the world sees them. So I have to be aware, as I’m walking in that conversation, what’s the historical context for our conversation. The second thing, which I think I was aware of but didn’t have a solution for is what’s the power dynamic here? And so she’s a black academic and I’m, I’ve worked for the New York Times and elite media, and so by one logic of events, I’m the one with the power. I work for the establishment media. By another logic, and the one that was going through my head is I’m in public having a conversation on race with an illustrious black academic who has spent her career writing about race. So I did not feel at all I had any power. And so that sense of I could say something, well-meaning, but wrong that sense fogged up my brain. And so I didn’t quite do enough to get her point of view out. But then I also just didn’t wanna say anything wrong. And so all I said were utter banalities. And so afterwards, some of the audience and the organizers said “you guys didn’t disagree enough.” But I felt immobilized by fear, to be honest.

Monica:

Given the research you’ve done, when you go back to that, the fog in your brain, how does one, like if you put yourself in that situation again, how do you un-fog.

David Brooks:

Yeah. I think experience would’ve mattered. I mean, I wanted to Be a helpful supporter, but I didn’t want… but I was cast in the role of sort of the enemy of whatever…I’m allegedly now the opponent of whatever she’s saying. And I didn’t feel like I was an opponent, but I didn’t feel like I was totally in agreement. And so on your feet to try to tease out where I agree, where I don’t agree. In those circumstances, I found just tremendously hard and intimidating. ’cause I feel like I’m being judged.

Monica:

Right.

David Brooks:

As you know, I’ve been teaching college students for 20 years and one of the things I’ve noticed is my students used to love to debate each other. We would just have knockdown, drag out arguments in class. Now, 20 years later, they do not do that. They’re all, there’s so much fear in the classroom that the idea that you might say something wrong, really muzzles people and I couldn’t be muzzled ’cause I was on a panel, but I was walking on eggshells. I felt I should have been more assertive. I should have said, “no, here’s how I see it.” But, I had ‘second guessing’ voices in my head.

Monica:

Yeah. Fascinating. There’s so much to dig into there. One of the things that you said in the book that I thought was, was really, really fascinating was, you made the point that people have different frames for how they approach an issue. And she had her frame and you had yours and you said that you wish you had spent a little more time in her frame before yanking it back to yours.

And I wanna share a story. I called my mother the night of the 2016 presidential election, and that night I was in a lot of pain because I did not like the result at all. She was very happy, but I didn’t even know she was happy because she was just listening to me and I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but especially after reading the language you gave to that, I thought my mom stayed in my frame. And what happened was after some time of her listening to me, she was able to pivot to her own perspective. And I feel like I heard her better. From what she said, because she had spent so much time listening to me. So, say more about what are these frames? What is it that we can do with this?

David Brooks:

Well, so I’ll give you one example. So first, in the conversation we just referred to with me and the intellectual, the nominal subject of our conversation was the culture war. And so when I hear that phrase, culture war, I hear like all these complex series of arguments about abortion, about religion, about gender issues. And to me, that’s a culture war. And my instinct as a journalist, my whole training is to get 30,000 feet above it and look down upon it and see, well, this side, you know, most debates are a competition with partial truths.

So this side is right about this, this side is right about that. And so I’m, I’m a detached observer, but for her, the culture war is the assault on the teaching of black history. And she does not approach it from a 30,000 foot perspective because she perceives it as an attack on her personally. And so, her frame is both more engaged than mine, but also with a slightly [different] definition of what the word ‘culture war’ means. And so I should have stayed in her frame. Like, how do you feel attacked? Who’s attacking you? What’s the nature of the attack? And so that I would at least understand it from her point of view. And I think, I dunno what she thinks, ’cause I didn’t ask her directly about this, but I felt like by being a detached 30,000 word person, she’s like, “that guy has the luxury to be detached,” but I’m here in the middle of it. And I don’t have that luxury. So every person who speaks in public events, you either speak from a detached perspective or an engaged perspective. And these are two very different mindsets.

Monica:

Yeah. So what would’ve been different do you think, if you had spent more time in her frame?

David Brooks:

Yeah, I think I would’ve understood… I think one of the things I should have done in retrospect, and I don’t know where I learned this, but I may have learned it from you is never to ask people “what do you believe?” I ask them, How did you come to believe this?

Monica:

What you believe.

David Brooks:

And that way you, they’ll start telling you personal experiences. They start telling you about the people who shaped their point of view and you’re getting them in narrative mode. There are two different modes of thinking. There’s paradigmatic mode, which is argument; like a legal brief or a PowerPoint recitation. And then there’s narrative mode, which is storytelling. And politics would seem to be the realm of the paradigmatic, that you make an argument. Then I make an argument, I write a newspaper column. You write a newspaper column. I write a think tank report, you write a think tank report. But to me that’s a great way to not see somebody ’cause paradigmatic thinking, this argumentative mode is a non-vulnerable, non-revealing way of talking. Whereas narrative mode is a very vulnerable and very personal way of talking, and you get the whole person rather than just some put on set of talking points. And I say in the book, you know, we have these Sunday shows, “Face the Nation,” “Meet the Press,” and they’re in paradigmatic mode. The newsmaker comes on, the host asks a bunch of gotcha questions and then the politician gives back a bunch of, you know, dodgy answers. But if they asked your question for the hour, “Senator, so-and-So why you? Why are you here?”, that would be more interesting. It would be, make a better politics. So I wish I’d gotten us into storytelling mode and less of that paradigmatic “point, point, point, point.” Somewhere I read a bad argument is people making statements at each other. A good argument goes somewhere. It starts out with one little interesting thing that we then explore, and it’s that process of exploration that makes a really good argument.

Monica:

Something you said reminded me too of the tactic of accompaniment comes back to the narrative and the story, so we talked about the difference between the question, “why do you believe what you believe?”. It can sound accusatory. How do you believe what you believe is an exploration? It’s an invitation to a collective. You call it a community of truth. Maybe we can build a community of truth. The thing you gave me language on was constructionism. I hadn’t heard that before. You and I both talk about how we don’t see with our eyes, we see with our whole lives, with our whole biographies. And the truth is that we each kind of construct our reality in our own minds. So you have, I thought this is something I’m gonna take away immediately from your book and, and use a lot where you say, “don’t ask what happened. Ask. How did you see that?” So, so the question isn’t so much, is it out there that is true, that we could argue about, it’s more, “I wanna know your perspective.”

David Brooks:

I wanna know how you build your reality. That’s how I understand you. Yeah, so there was a football game in the fifties between Dartmouth and Princeton or something, and it was a pretty violent game. and both sides thought the other team committed twice as many penalties as their own team.

Monica:

Hmm.

David Brooks:

And weeks later, after they calmed down, they were shown a film of the game. And both sides looked at the film as objective proof that they were right, that the other team had looked, had committed twice as many penalties, and they were looking at the same film. And so the researcher’s point is, there’s no such thing as the game out there. There’s only our perspectives; the perspectives we each create of the game. And so we construct our own reality. And Aldus Huxley wrote that experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you; how did you interpret it, how do you make meaning. And so each of us is constructing a world there. And so where do those models come from? They come from your whole life experience. If your life experiences as a security specialist, you’re gonna see a different living room than somebody whose whole life experience is as an interior designer. And this goes down even to the most basic level. So for example, we in the West, see, I think it’s seven banded rainbows, and we see all these seven colors. But of course a rainbow has no bands. It’s a continuum, stream of light and it has no color. It’s just a bunch of vibrations and particles. Then Russians, they see eight banded rainbows, because they have two words for the word blue. They have a light blue and a dark blue, which we don’t distinguish between. And so they see a different rainbow than we see ’cause they have different models in their heads. And if that’s true, if something as basic as looking at rainbow, imagine how differently we construct concepts like justice or fair or virtue.

These are abstract concepts. And so my point is we construct our realities from the bottom up, from the colors we see. There are no colors in the universe. The way we hear sound, there are no sounds in the universe. All that stuff is happening up in our head. And when you get into the brain science of it, you’re amazed we see the same world ever. That’s kind of a miracle.

Monica: It’s, isn’t it?

David Brooks:

We can agree upon as much, but we should not assume that we each are gonna see the same reality. ’cause we each, we each have go into the same room, have the same party or listen to the same speech or watch the same movie, and we’re all experiencing it a little differently, and that’s one of the joys of life, but it makes communication hard.

Monica:

Ok folks, I’m going to jump in to zoom in on something David said earlier that got me pretty curious. The idea in the background of all of this, that every human being deserves to be seen… it instantly clicked for me. Insisting that this baseline link between people is right, and important.

And David said he thinks what we are seeing is a breakdown of these connections. I can assume a lot about that, given the trends I am also seeing out there. But instead of filling in the blanks with my own guesses, I wanted to follow my curiosity to see where it would lead. So I went to USAFacts and did some digging.

USAFacts is a nonpartisan nonprofit that’s out to guide people through the maze of public data from the nation’s more than 90,000 government entities by compiling it and organizing it so it’s accessible and understandable to everyone. Not just policy nerds. Not just journalists. Everyone.

They are also, now — I am very excited to tell you — the first official sponsor of A Braver Way.

A couple clicks on USAFacts led me to some data from the US Census Bureau on how often we chit-chat with our neighbors. In 2008, almost half of us said we talked with them at least a few times a week. But by 2021, less than 30 percent of us said we talked that often with the people living near us.

But that’s neighbors. What about closer connections, like the people we live with? A collection of stats on relationships in America confirmed one thing I already knew. We’re marrying later and less. So are more of us living alone? Yes we are. In 1960, just 13 percent of the U.S. population had no one else at home. As of 2022, it was 29 percent.

But no matter what your living situation, there are many, many ways to stitch together this social fabric of ours, which leads me to some very cool stats about what the Census calls “informal helping.” It’s a measure of how many of us have lent a hand to people around us in a way that isn’t just formal volunteering. Half of all Americans over the age of 16 did that during the pandemic, and an interactive map on USAFacts lets me check the rate state by state.

So where are residents the most “informally helpful?” In Big Sky Country — otherwise known as Montana — where 69 percent of residents traded casual favors with their neighbors in 2021. Nebraska and Maine rank second and third on this — so, go Maine and Nebraska.

But if you happen to know anyone living in Nevada, maybe encourage them to check in on the folks next door? The Silver State ranks dead last in informal helping, with 37 percent of residents pitching in. The stakes are high, Nevadans. But I like your odds. He he he.

This data on informal helping came from AmeriCorps and the Census Bureau. They partner to release their findings every two years, then USAFacts pulls it all together and makes it accessible to the rest of us.

Thank you, USAFacts, for the quick data plunge. And now, back to David…

Monica:

I wanna take a step back to one of the first concepts that you introduce in the book, A distinction between being an illuminator and a diminisher. And I absolutely love this, so I wanna tell you a story of something that happened to me a decade ago. I was at a networking event at the University of Washington where they brought students together with professionals. I noticed that one, I think, student wasn’t saying a whole lot. So, so I remember I turned to her and I said, “so what’s, what’s your story?”

And she said, “Oh no, I’m not very interesting.” That stabbed me in the heart.

David Brooks:

Yeah.

Monica:

You know, that idea that, that someone could think that about themselves. And when I read your distinction between illuminator and diminisher, I thought that that woman was really in need of illumination. So can you tell us about that?

David Brooks:

She’s self diminishing, yeah. So diminishers are people who make you feel unseen and invisible. And so I find for example, that only about 30% of the people I meet are question askers. Like if you have a normal conversation, only about 30% are asking you questions about yourself consistently. The other 70%, they may be nice people, but they’re just not question askers. So that’s the first thing. They’re just not curious. The second thing about diminishers is they stereotype and they do a thing called stacking. Which is, I’m stacking if I learn one fact about you, and then I make a whole series of stereotypical assumptions about you. So you mentioned earlier, which I knew from your book that your mom was a little more friendly toward Donald Trump. So then I’m gonna make a, a bunch of stereotypical assumptions about your mom, which, your mom is a white male trucker from West Virginia.

Monica:

Mm-Hmm.

David Brooks:

I know, I’m probably gonna get that a lot wrong.

Monica:

Not true. Right.

David Brooks:

So you learn one thing about a person and you make a bunch of stereotypes. That is a classic form of diminisher. And so those are diminishers. Illuminators make you feel lit up. They ask questions about you, they respect you, and they just somehow get you. And so some of it is just the ability to listen. There’s a novelist named Ian Foster who wrote in 120 or 130 years ago and his biographer wrote of him that he had a kind of inverse charisma. He listened to you with such intensity. You had to be your smartest, best self. And that’s like somebody who just listens with intensity.

Monica:

Yeah. Oh, that’s just beautiful. How do you know when you’re deeply listening to someone else? What does it feel like? What’s the anatomy of that?

David Brooks:

Yeah, I would say first, I have a work phrase in there. Treat attention as an on-off switch, not a dimmer. It should be a hundred percent or 0%. It should not be 60%. And so that’s, I think there’s something called the slant method, which is basically sit, listen, lean in. I’m like gonna be totally for there for you. I have a buddy I mentioned in the book named Andy Crouch. And when you talk to him, it’s like talking to a Pentecostal church, like one of those charismatic churches. Like he’s going, yes, yes, I agree. Yes, yes. Amen. Amen. Preach. And I just love talking to that guy ’cause he’s a great listener.

Monica:

You call them a loud

David Brooks:

A loud, he’s

Monica:

I, have to tell you, I’m a loud listener

David Brooks:

Yes, I know that

Monica:

In my journalism when I do live interviews and it’s recorded for TV or whatnot, I get people going, “stop it! Stop saying yes. We’ve gotta get the audio clear.” I’m like, I know, but I can’t help myself. But it is your, your book. That, piece was the first time I felt good for being a loud listener.

David Brooks:

You are right.

Monica:

So thank you David.

David Brooks:

The hell with TV Although I will say somebody who’s on tv who’s also a lot of listeners, Oprah, I watch Oprah do interviews. Like she did that one with Megan and Harry, or whatever their names are, and I could tell when, when they’re saying something good, she’s like sighing along with them. But when they’re saying something sad, she goes dead quiet and you can see her just creating a silence for them to keep talking and, and she’s, she’s just, her facial expressions while doing an interview are very expressive and, and that she’s another example of a loud listener.

Monica:

Yeah, it’s pretty cool. So, there are ways to construct a question where you know what’s underneath it. And one of those ways is questions that begin with “how can you possibly…”, clearly have a lot of skepticism in them. So, I’m gonna throw one at you because this is out there. How can you possibly illuminate someone you hugely disagree with?

David Brooks:

Yeah. Because they’re human beings. Everybody is fascinating on some topic. Everybody is better than you at some thing. My basic source of most of my values is human dignity. And so I’ll tell a story. I tell in the book. I was having breakfast at a diner in Waco, Texas with a 93 year old lady named LaRue Dorsey. And she presented herself to me as a stern disciplinarian. And I was a little intimidated by her. She, had been a teacher and she said, “I love my students enough to discipline them.” And then into the diner walks, a mutual friend of ours named Jimmy Dorell, who’s a pastor. He goes up to her, shakes her and looks into her face and says, “Ms. Dorsey, Ms. Dorsey, you’re the best, you’re the best. I love you. I love you.” And that stern, intimidating lady I’ve been talking to turned into this nine year old eyes shining girl. She was utterly transformed by his approach. And I think what the core behind his approach, because he’s a pastor, is that he thinks everybody he meets is made in the image of God. That everybody meets when he is looking to a person, he’s looking to the face of God. He’s looking into somebody who’s a soul of infinite value and dignity.

Monica:

Mm-Hmm.

David Brooks:

And you can be religious or not religious, but that kind of respect and reverence has to be at the center of how we approach each other, how we approach every human being. And I’m not a Trump supporter, but I meet a Trump supporter. I know that deep down, that person has a soul of infinite value and dignity. And I know that deep down, that person has a story to tell that I will find fascinating. We only typically see 5% of each other. And if, even if you get to see 20% of another person, suddenly all this weird stuff comes out.

Monica:

And what does that lend? What does that do to a disagreement.? I mean, you were talking about being in that conversation with the woman where you were somewhat paralyzed by fear, fogged mind, right? I mean, being an illuminator suddenly would be really hard, right? People run into those barriers when there is a big disagreement or when they feel so unseen or that this other person is not treating them with dignity, so…

David Brooks:

Yeah.

Monica:

You know, what is the payoff to be worth so much work?

David Brooks:

It’s just very useful in life to understand other people.

Monica:

Yeah, so, say more about that. You, you called it very practical that this is the practical skill.

David Brooks:

Yeah. I think this is the most practical. So first I always tell college students, you know, if you want the most practical major, you should major in one of the humanities, because that’s where you’re gonna learn about people. And if you can’t learn about people, you’ll be miserable and you’ll constantly be surprised how people behave, and you’ll make other people miserable. And so it’s practical. So we’re in a culture right now, of a brutalizing culture, a culture of bitterness, of disagreement, of dehumanization. And to me, demonization is anything that covers over another human face. And so, to me, the most practical and aggressively effective thing you can do. To make our lives better, our politics better is acts of defiant humanism. Acts of standing there and say, “no. I will ask the other person that question, a question about their life. I will sit there and listen to their life story. And when I do that, even those little moments, and as we do that to each other, that’s the thing that builds trust. That’s the thing that builds respect for each other. People are not gonna change until they feel understood. And so to me, it’s the most aggressively practical thing we can do to heal the ruptures in our society.

Monica:

Yeah, so I’ll tell you this story. There’s a leader in Brave Angels named Jade, and in a prior episode, we had her kind of in her own voice talk about a really tough period where through an Instagram post, she ended up in this exchange with a friend that went south. And part of her telling back that story, she talks about how all of a sudden this person who knew her for a long time seemed to treat her like she was so evil because of something she believed. And so Jade says in the recording, “you know, I kept thinking, you know me, it’s Jade, you know me.” So it feels like. Political disagreement, other kinds of divides have a way of driving a wedge in the already knowing that we have for other people when what people unsee each other, it seems because of what they believe. So walk us through this. How do you encourage other people to see you when they don’t?

David Brooks:

Well, the first thing I do is I try to be a little more vulnerable than the situation allows and so I live in Washington, DC and so this is the most emotionally avoidant spot on the face of the earth.

Monica:

It could be true.

David Brooks:

And so I try to just be a little more vulnerable, and there’s some people who will react to your vulnerability with vulnerability. and you gotta proceed slowly. You don’t want to spill your guts right away, but then suddenly you’re, you’re getting deeper into each other and more curious about each other and you’re really beginning to develop a relationship. Or I lead with curiosity. I ask something about them and then I wanna see, will they lead, ask something about me, ’cause the relationship always has to be reciprocal, of course. In order to behold somebody, you have to be willing to be beheld.

Monica:

Mm-Hmm.

David Brooks:

And so I try to lead with a a little more emotional openness than people expect,

Monica:

And it’s risky, right? Because if you, let’s say that you allow some of that vulnerability to come outta you, but it doesn’t have the effect of helping the other person be open to you or see you deeply, then it almost feels like you’ve given something away without getting anything back.

David Brooks:

And sometimes people betray you. They’ll take advantage of your vulnerability to attack you.And sometimes you feel like you’ve overshared, you feel a little creepy afterwards, but I’d rather be lead with trust and sometimes be betrayed than not. Lead with trust ’cause what’s at stake here is not only our relationship, but what’s at stake is my own heart. In brutalizing times, am I gonna be the kind of person who walls himself off, who gets calloused over, who is suspicious and hard and brutal. Or am I gonna be an open-hearted person who wants to see the world with generous eyes? And so to me what’s at stake is my own heart. Here I could… There’s a way to lock up your heart so it becomes impregnable and unreachable even to yourself. And I’m talking about spilling your guts. Let me give you one example. I taught on and off at Yale for 20 years. And one time about 10 years ago, I used to have office hours in a bar at night between nine and one in the morning.

Monica:

That’s great.

David Brooks:

Yeah. So it was fun. We would just sit around seven or eight of us and we’d shoot the breeze and it was super fun. And one night there’s a woman who I was courting to try to marry me, and she was coming to town to tell me whether she would marry me or not. And so I didn’t tell all that to the students. I just said to the students, I’m gonna have to cancel office hours. Somebody’s coming down to town, I’m dealing with something personal. And that’s all I said. And of the students in my class, the 24 25 students in the seminar, I’d say eight 18 of them emailed me that night. And said, professor Brooks, just want let you know I’m thinking about you. I’m praying for you. And that, that little encounter changed the tenor of that whole class, the whole term. Suddenly I was not austere Professor Brooks. I was just another schmo trying to get through life.

Monica:

Mm.

David Brooks:

And so we were all much closer just from that one little thing. I’m going through something personal and it was a lesson to me: to, to lead with trust.

Monica:

Let’s talk about labels and categories and groups you put it in the book really well. Slapping a label on someone renders them invisible. It reminded me of a, a story I heard. A friend’s brother who had a very contentious relationship with their father, and they would get into political disagreements. And he talked about one of those disagreements. He said, “You know, we were really getting somewhere, and he’s progressive and, and his father’s conservative. And, you know, we were finding all this common ground and things that he believed that I didn’t realize, right. And then I told him what was right in front of my face. I said, ‘dad, you know, when you say this and this and this, I mean, face it, you’re progressive. He said, and then suddenly my dad just stopped listening and didn’t want anything to do with the conversation.”

And so when, when I saw what you said about slapping a label on someone renders them invisible. Labels have that power. They come with all this. The bundle is all there. And then we just assume it all applies and we want to, don’t we? A label is almost like a way to have a hold on someone. We really want it.

David Brooks:

Right now, my life is really testimony to, to the negative power of labels. So I, I was hired in 2003 to be a columnist of the New York Times. At the time when I was pretty conservative, I was mainstream. George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, conservative. so over the years though, the Republican party drifted in a way that was very strange and not where I was. And so I haven’t really, um, to be honest, I haven’t voted for Republicans since 2004, so that’s 19 years ago. And so I’ve shifted, well, I think, I think I’ve stayed the same and the Republican party has gone so hard populist that it’s just not my, I don’t agree with it on much of anything, but if you look at how New York Times readers think of me, if you go to the comments section beneath my column, it’s always “that conservative” believes this, the conservative believes that. And I’m like, “where have you been the last 19 years?” Have you read my writing? Like I’m. I clearly was pretty pro Obama. I’m pretty pro Biden. I’m, I’m for reparations, and some of my heroes that I had back then, I still have like Edmund Burke, who is an old fashioned conservative philosopher. Alexander Hamilton. But I haven’t been a right winger for a long time now. And yet I would say to many of my/our readers, the idea that there’s a distinction between me and Anne Coulter is not evident in how they react to me. Because they, they see conservative and they think conservative. Like they think they know me and therefore, they don’t even read what I write. They read what they think a conservative would write and then they attack.

Monica:

There’s the projection, right? The label comes with projections. So you, you talk in the book of the importance of learning to see the individual But you also say that it’s really important to see groups they might be a member of, and that somehow you do those things at the same time. And so I wanna pry a little bit. How in the world do you do those things at the same time? I’m concerned that when we are on the group thing, our brains are just hijacked by it. Say, more about that because I can tell there’s something really important there, but how do you actually do it?

David Brooks:

Yeah. So my theory is that you have to see people on multiple levels at once. And that’s what makes so hard. You have to see them as the never to be [retrieved?] individual that they are with their own unique circumstance, their own unique point of view. But also, they’re part… we emerge in groups and we have heritages, and the heritages also shape who we are. And then on the third level, each of us has a social location that some of us are by the nature of our group identity or what we do in life, we’re in the center of the room. And some people are more marginalized enough to the side of the room and are not given as much recognition. And so just to take one example, my friend, I do a show on Friday’s called the PBS NewsHour with Jonathan Capehart. On one level, I want to see Jonathan as the unique human being he is, but I wouldn’t really be seeing the real Jonathan if I didn’t also see him as a black man. And I wouldn’t also be seeing the real Jonathan if I didn’t understand, see him as a gay man. And so if I want to have a good conversation with him, I have to be respectful about all those things.

Monica:

Yeah. Because then you have to be careful that when you say, “okay, he’s a gay man, he’s a black man,” that comes with a lot of assumptions that you have. So how do you do that without becoming too beholden to what you think it means to be a gay man? Or you decide that you know this black man’s experience because it must be the same as all the other black men’s

David Brooks:

Right. Exactly. And that’s where, um, that’s where a conversation fits in that, in my view. That if you think you’re smart enough to imagine how the other person sees a situation, how they’re subjectively making meaning out of it, I can tell you you’re probably wrong, and I quote research in the book that when we meet somebody, we only accurately understand each other about 20% of the time. And so the only way to get around that is conversation. So you have to ask, and that’s why the key to being a decent human being in a democracy is to be phenomenal at conversation.

Monica:

Yeah. Yeah. You said that everyone in a conversation is in a constant conflict between self-inhibition and self-expression.

David Brooks:

Mm-Hmm.

Monica:

It does seem like one of the ways to diagnose the funk we’re in now is that the, the scales are tipping toward self-inhibition and if they’re tipping towards self-expression, it’s happening in spaces and contexts that are very unproductive for that self-expression, right.

David Brooks:

Yeah. Right.

Monica:

How do we tip the scales toward, toward self-expression? Seems to be the, the deeper question that we’ve been asking all along. At Braver Angels, we have something called “The Braver Angels Way,” and one of the tenets of it is that people should speak fully, freely, and without fear. And that that can be a goal. So, alright, like, is this a fantasy David, fully, freely, and without fear tipping towards self-expression in many or most cases. Just give us the 30,000 foot view on this now that we’ve gotten into so much of the detail.

David Brooks:

So I think it is possible, but it only takes a few bad apples to poison the atmosphere. So, every time I’ve tried to tell a joke on Twitter, it’s been a disaster because, whether the jokes are good or not, people are waiting to pounce on anything you say and to humiliate you. On the other hand, in one of my classes, I had a group of guys who were military and they were mid-career.They were, roughly, in their thirties and forties. And because they had that shared military bond. they felt free to say absolutely anything to each other. And one of ’em would start out a phrase, “you know, this may sound racist, but…” and I was like, “No whatever you’re gonna say, don’t say it. Don’t say.” But they would all laugh with each other and they were a, a widely diverse group. And so that was a real, a trusting atmosphere and a concrete example of a trusting atmosphere.

Monica:

Yeah, I love that. It reminds me, in our second episode we talked to a couple of friends, one black, one white, who discovered that the family of the white man had owned the family of the black man, as slaves. It’s a fascinating story, and they didn’t discover it until they were really good friends for 10 years.

David Brooks:

Mm-Hmm

Monica:

And they talk about that as this principle of “the who before the what” and, and it feels connected to trust. It feels connected to knowing people. Let me ask a question that you might answer quickly or not, I’m not sure. Is there anyone not worth seeing?

David Brooks:

There’s some people, some, let’s put it this way, we talked about this illuminator, diminisher thing, and if you’re in a conversation with someone who’s just dismissive and not curious about you, I wish I knew a way to convert that person, but I don’t know a way to convert that person. And so I think there are some people who are, who you can’t, you have to, as they say, let people voluntarily evolve. You can’t force it upon them. And so I found if they’re not willing to be vulnerable, they’re not willing to trust. There’s probably nothing you can do about that. And you just have to understand, we are just not gonna have a relationship. And so it’s like, you cover any big dispute.You cover, say, the Middle East, which I used to cover. And you meet Israelis, Palestinians. Most people you meet, frankly, I think are the sort of people out of whom a police agreement could be made. That they want peace. They have normal desires to live in a secure, safe neighborhood, and they want the best for their people, and they’re willing to make some compromises. But there are some people who are so extreme that will never sign on to a peace deal. And Hamas is the most obvious example of that. They want genocide and they want it all. And so you have to, in any situation I’ve found, you have to say, well, some people, it is just simply not possible to talk with those people. And you’re not gonna get anywhere, and that’s just the way life is. But let’s build a decent society out of the silent majority who you can talk with. And I have found in journalism that there’s a silent majority in almost every situation who are sometimes riled up by the conflict entrepreneurs, but who otherwise are amenable to, reasonableness.

Monica:

Yeah. So, take us home on that. I mean, my big dream might be a little bit like a vision that you might have is a world that sees itself that’s curious enough to be able to do that. you know, a world that knows itself, a world full of people who know themselves might be something that you look forward to. What gives you hope that that’s possible?

David Brooks:

Yeah. Well, you guys. And what Braver Angels does, but also just the millions of encounters I’ve had even in these rough political times with people who you think you’re gonna have nothing in common with them. You’re at a bar somewhere and suddenly wow, you, you’ve learned 8 million…some very surprising things about that other person and just how fun it is. And plus, we have no choice. You know, we evolved to live in bands of 150 people like ourselves, but now we live in big diverse societies and we just have, if we’re gonna survive, we have no choice but to make our social skills adequate to the societies we happen to live in. And so, and how many times have I seen people who profoundly disagreed become friends? Quite a lot actually. And how many times have somebody written me an email that’s viciously angry and then I write them one back that’s semi respectful and then immediately they’re turn around and they’re respectful. And you know, a lot of people are nasty ’cause they forget for a second there’s another human being on this other side. And once you remind them of that, it doesn’t take much for them to suddenly become good again.

Monica:

Yeah, it’s so true. Well, David, thank you so much for joining us for this. and good luck building a world that might know itself.

David Brooks:

Well thank you and thank you for teaching me the stuff you did that I shoved into the book. I really appreciate it,

Monica:

Awesome. Well, thank you David. Have a great time.

David Brooks:

You too Monica. See ya.

Monica:

Before we move on I want to tell you about one of our Supporting Partners, StoryCorps, and specifically their powerful new program called One Small Step.

One Small Step pairs people with opposing views not to debate politics, but to have a conversation about their lives. Because they believe it’s our patriotic duty to try to see the humanity in everyone – even people whose views feel really hard, if not impossible, to accept. StoryCorps designed this program with the goal of making conversations across difference feel not just more productive but also just more, well, normal. Each 50-minute conversation is recorded and archived in the Library of Congress.

More than 4,500 people across the US have participated so far. Want to join them? Apply to be paired with your own conversation partner at TakeOneSmallStep-dot-org.

Thank you to StoryCorps for being a supporting partner of A Braver Way and a member of Braver Network.

To learn more about Braver Network and how your organization can join the movement for civic renewal, go to braverangels.org/abraverway.

Not long ago, I learned a new English word coined by the author of a fascinating book called the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

The word is “sonder,” and it’s defined oh so poetically like this: “Sonder, noun, the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own — populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness — an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

[Deep sigh.]

So how do liberals and conservatives and centrists and moderates – and everyone else – tend to do when it comes to helping people feel known and seen and heard across the political divide? Here’s my conversation with my good friend and Red to my Blue, April Lawson…

Monica:

Hello, April, my friend. How are you?

April:

Hello. Good. How are you doing?

Monica:

I’m great. I’m, I’m thinking more about how I can illuminate you.

April:

U-huh!

Monica:

I don’t want to diminish.

April:

Yes.

Monica:

Well, we’ve just heard from David Brooks talk about that driving question. How can you know if someone is really hearing you? And how can you do someone else the honor of really hearing them?

And because this is the Braver Way podcast, we’re always thinking about the political divide as our context. So, let’s start with favorite moment.

April:

Yeah, well, this is sort of a fun and special episode for me because, as you know, but probably not everybody knows, I worked for David Brooks for five years before I came over to work at Braver Angels. And so I worked with him at the New York Times, helped him with his columns.

And then co-founded his program at the Aspen Institute with him, which is called Weave. And so I have a ton of like affection and adoration for David. So I just love that he and I are both in this episode, and so just sharing that as sort of context. So my favorite moment was actually his story about Yale, and, when I worked for, for David Brooks, I, would sort of TA his classes up there, so I did that for a while, and I remember when he had to tell everybody, look, I have to cancel, someone’s coming to town. And, the thing that I remember is that he was right that it just changed everything really quickly, and, and it struck me that as soon as you use the word personal, people change.They change their reaction to you. It says, wait, we’re going to step out of whatever our frame is and interact like people, like we’re both people who have challenges and joys and that’s just real.

Monica:

It’s kind of funny when you think about it that everything is not personal. We’re all human all the time. We’re being people, all the time, and yet we exist in contexts where that’s not actually out front. So, that’s fascinating.

April:

How about you? What did you like?

Monica:

I really liked, it was a, a small moment because David has a lot of gold coin ideas and insights, and they just kind of come at you, and you can’t possibly dig into them all. But, one of, one of those that he said very quickly was acts of defiant humanism. He said that what we need are acts of defiant humanism. And I loved that, especially stemming from something that he has in his book that he also mentioned in the podcast with me was that not being seen and not being understood feels like an injustice.

So you, you start at that place of it’s an injustice to not be seen. And, so then you go into this, he calls it the brutalized time that we’re in. The brutalizing culture. And so, acts of defiant humanism. I’m going to ask that question that the climate right now tells me it’s safer for me not to ask.

I’m going to go talk to that person and learn more about them, even though others might see me as betraying my own views or what have you. So, that is awesome, and it reminds me of a phrase that I thought a lot about when I was writing my book and as I do my work, which is that being curious in this way is exercising a kind of resistance, political resistance, social resistance, but to me it’s righteous.

April:

You bet.

Monica:

So I love that he spun it in that way of like, it’s defiant, it’s defiant humanism. I will stand for humanity, no matter what. And that it’s a choice that we make. He mentioned that too. Do I want to be really negative and diminishing others? Do I want to harden my heart, or do I want to, always try to open it? And easier said than done. It’s a choice every day, and I really like that.

So let’s move to our second question about what our respective sides tend to be good at and bad at with these strategies, and there are so many that he mentioned, so feel free to go where you will, around hearing and being heard

April:

I’m actually wondering for this one if you would go first. I have some thoughts, but I think that what you say may spark some thoughts for me.

Monica:

Yes, okay, I love that. Let’s do it. Okay, so what is the blue side good at and bad at with this? Oh boy. David talked about Oprah. He’s been interviewed by Oprah twice, and the second time that Oprah interviewed him, she apparently told him, Wow, you, you are so much more, like, bright and out there as a person. And he sort of took that as a real compliment. But he mentions here that he has noticed that when Oprah is listening to somebody, she’s a very active listener

April:

Loud.

Monica:

A loud listener, right. But that when she listens to somebody say something sad, you know, he said, she goes dead quiet. And it’s like she’s creating a space for them to keep talking. So, in the blue side, I see a like, really, really good ability to, make space for those who, you know, appear to be quite unseen by our society, for groups of people. I think in particular about, the newer norm, especially in bluer places, around, asking for pronouns, or name tags at events where everyone has their pronouns, right? And that comes from a, a place of, we want those who use nontraditional pronouns, or pronouns that don’t conform to the way, you know, we thought about gender, or many people did, at least for a long time, by all of us saying our pronouns. Even if, you know, I conform to she/her, but somebody is they/them in this room, and we want to make them seen, and so we create this space for them to step in. I also think of land acknowledgements. With indigenous cultures. So again, you know, mostly prevalent, I believe still in blue spaces,

And so, yeah, there’s this really lovely effort, to work on that, to make space for groups. And, David also talked about frames. And in a way I think about this with the blue side creating new rituals with the land acknowledgements, with the sharing of pronouns. It’s like it’s an attempt to build a big frame that’s better than the one before at allowing certain people to be seen.

April:

Mm-Hmm.

Monica:

And how cool is that, right? The attempt to create something that supports the seeing of those who have not been seen. So, I think that’s really beautiful. That’s what I think the blue side’s really good at and it, I believe it can help reverse lots of injustices and change culture over time.

Now, the bad side. I do believe that, and I don’t think this is exclusive to the blue side, but I’ll speak to it in those terms. I do believe we’re all pretty bad at constructionism, meaning understanding that people kind of construct their own reality in a way, that my experiences will determine how I see the world.

And so a lot of times we forget that, and so when we see someone with a belief that we can’t understand so confounding we’ll go to what I think of as these sort of three awful assumptions about other people, where we think they’re crazy, stupid, or evil. You know, they must be crazy, stupid, or evil for believing that, because I have forgotten that their experience in life and the way they construct reality might be really different from mine. There might be variables I’m not considering, I should ask what I’m missing, etc. So I find that to be diminishing. So that framework of illuminating and diminishing, I think the blue side illuminates in the ways that I was just talking about, but can really diminish in this. My concern, is that I’m kind of worried sometimes that the well meaning focus on groups and identities on the blue side to try to illuminate those who are not seen can erase the individual and the individual’s diversity and dignity and can end up diminishing the individual.

So I loved when, when David said, about people who read his columns at the New York times, many of them, they don’t read what I write. They read what they think a conservative would write and attack that. So the labeling rendering us invisible, you know, I think we fall victim to that on the blue side pretty often, by the way, super confession, April, and because you worked with him, you’re going to laugh, but. When he said in the interview, I’m not a conservative columnist, I was like, oh, you’re not? I thought it too! And I have read all his columns. I have read all his columns and I’ve been like, oh, yeah, you know. Doesn’t conform to what I think of as a conservative, but that label was in my head, too. I could never correct it. I never did.

April:

That’s okay.

Monica:

Isn’t that wild? Anyway, that, I almost told him, but I was like, nope, nope, nope. He can hear this later and, and figure that out. So, you know, so I think that there’s a culture of fear, you know, on the blue side of it being hard for people to speak up. And that’s another way that people aren’t seen and heard.

April:

Mm hmm. I love that. Love it. Also, I just have to put in my two cents about whether David is a conservative columnist. I think what he’s not is a Republican columnist, but he is a conservative, and he, I think, I’m pretty sure would agree with this, but like, he loves Edmund Burke. Burke, in some ways, is the founder of the modern conservative movement. Like, he’s, anyway, so I don’t think it’s, I don’t think you’re that far off.

Monica:

Fair.

April:

Although I will say he’s totally correct having moderated some of the comments that like, people read what they think somebody like him would say. That’s like what they think is in there, even if you can’t find it anywhere in the words.

So, thank you for going first. That makes a lot of sense to me and I really appreciate it.

I particularly liked what you said about lifting up groups and whether that erases individuals in some cases, because they’re, that’s an unexpected tension, but I think it’s real. I guess I basically still think that it depends a lot on the issue. Like, I feel like reds and blues, I would guess, but I’ll speak for reds, tend to be really good at listening deeply to some people and really bad at listening deeply to other people.

Monica:

Hmm.

April:

and that there are some stories that reds find comfortable and relatable and true and all of this stuff and some stories that they don’t, and that they’re really good at tuning in to the stories that they relate to and tuning out the ones that they don’t. And so, it’s sort of like, they’re good and bad at the same thing, but like with different groups, I will say that I think that reds place less inherent value on listening. I think that that’s like a blue, inherent, like definitely that is a really, at least that’s my sense, is that blues are like, listening is very important.

Monica:

Interesting.

April:

but I do think that there’s on the red side, partly because of that attunement to the individual, there’s a deep humaneness, like there’s something on the red side where you are much less likely, to be lumped in with a group in a way that you don’t like, there’s a lot more willingness to say like, well, but who are you? So…

Monica:

Ah. Interesting

April:

And, not that that’s always there, not that that’s there in all the moments it should be, anything like that, but I do think that there is some difference. But yeah, I’m interested in how this stuff interacts with power, because, so like, I think that when you take groups that are in the majority and then put them in minorities, they change their view sometimes. They’re less about listening, more about wanting to be heard. Like…

Monica:

Wait, wait, give me an example. What do you mean by taking someone from the majority and putting them in minorities?

April:

I mean, for people for whom they are used to being heard. I could use race or gender or actually here’s one, I adore conservatives on campuses. I was a conservative on a campus. Like I, all about it. My debate work tends to be very popular in that crowd. And I think that one of the reasons that conservatives on campus are so inclined towards sort of provocative behavior right now is that they feel more silenced than they used to. They previously sort of could say like, yeah, you get to be heard. I get to be heard. We both get to hear whatever. And now it’s much more, ‘listen to me, listen to me’ because they are no longer safe in that context, in their experience often. And so I just think that that justice thing kicks into play when people feel silenced.

Monica:

Huh, yeah, and as I’m listening to you I’m thinking about how many of the disagreements right now feel like, the substance of the agreement, the actual political issue being discussed, is certainly important, but that there’s an undercurrent disagreement that is something like, ‘I matter, no, I matter more, no, I matter more, no, I matter more!’ ‘No, we matter more. No, you don’t matter as much as we matter.’

April:

Black lives matter. Blue lives matter. All lives matter. Like, it just, and that gets into another interesting conversation you and I have been having offline about, like, when is it appropriate to, like, lift up a particular group and a particular story versus everyone and the context? And anyway, I agree with you strongly that there’s a, I mean, I just think that our whole culture has gotten more, has moved towards speech policing. And you can see this on the right, also, although I think it’s much worse on the left, my opinion. So all of a sudden everybody’s like no ‘don’t silence me, don’t silence me.’

Monica:

Totally! And I just thought of, like, some of the absurdity in it, to me, boils down to this. It’s sort of the belief that because you are being seen right now, I am not being seen. And so, where did that seesaw start, right? So anyway, we could talk all day about that, but let’s move to “Where does the driving question show up in our lives?” So I can go first on this one as well

April:

Yes, go first, please.

Monica:

just to change things up? Great. So, I read David’s book and in the interview really noticed myself every time he talked about what it is to be an illuminator of other people, that I really, something in my heart really, really jumped at that, like, yes, tell me. I want to illuminate.

April:

Oh!

Monica:

That sounds awesome, I want to do that, I want to be good at it.

April:

You are.

Monica:

Thanks. I try, but I know that I’m, can be quite bad at it too, and so I got to reflecting on that. so, you know, the illuminator diminisher thing in my own life. I was having a conversation with a friend, and we were actually in person, which I find to be the context that’s easiest to have your attention be all the way up, right? It’s, it’s a lot easier than on a computer, on social media, you know, ugh. And so we were walking, and we were talking about all kinds of things, and the What was it? The Pledge of Allegiance came up. And so she mentioned, the phrase, “One Nation Under God” came up and she said, “I had a hard time with that phrase, being Jewish as a kid.” And so my response immediately was like, “But don’t Jews believe in God?”

April:

That’s what just went through my head.

Monica:

Yeah, I went like, oh, but don’t Jews, don’t Jews believe in God? And, you know, the, the comment, like, we talked about the comment a little bit more and then moved on. Well, later, she called and told me how unseen she felt in that moment, and that it had really bothered her. Because where she came from was that that line represented the Christian God of America. Not the Jewish God at all. But, me thinking, I’m being curious. Let me ask a question. Let me ask a quick as soon as pops into my head. I did not actually pause to consider where she might be coming from. I just said, well, here’s where I would be coming from seeing that. So let me ask a clarifying question and then move on. And it really, it really bothered her. And, and I wish that I had been a little more attentive because there was an emotion to what she was saying that I wish I had listened to better.

April:

It makes me think, too, about when there are times when asking questions can actually be, I don’t know, can like, ’cause part of me is like, well, but you didn’t know . But then another part is like, well, maybe the deal is like attune better, like notice better or something, which is hard to do, and like, we all need grace for that.

Well, so, I also, with the illuminating thing, was like, I want to be an illuminator! Oh!

Monica:

Mm-hmm

April:

And, the first thing I would say is, how does this driving question show up in my life? I love listening to people. It’s like my favorite thing in the world ‘cause they’re so interesting.

I used to make a game. I moved to DC when, right after college. And like, DC is notorious, and appropriately so, for being a place where everybody comes and you go to cocktail parties to find out who that person works for so that you can social climb, basically. And it’s obnoxious and everyone knows it. But I made a game out of, like, how much can I get this person to tell me about who they are and it’s really interesting, because people have different levels of comfort with that, and you often have to, in my experience, like, move around a little bit, until you can figure out where are you comfortable showing me a little more of you, and so I think there’s a real art to that, like, listening isn’t just about asking question after question, right, it’s also about… Somebody said to me, we need to learn to debate as though we’re listening throughout the entire activity. And what that means is that sometimes when we’re speaking, we also have to show, I heard you. Right? The way that you say that shows, I heard you, I care about, I’m thinking about what you might believe here, like, and that even just the words you choose, and what tones, the moderation, how much you say… all of that is actually also part of that listening activity in a strange way, and that was a real insight for me.

Monica:

That’s pretty revelatory, that, that even when you’re speaking, you can be listening.

April:

Exactly. And you can communicate. I heard you. I saw you. And so I think that the thing that we’re talking about this week is one of the most fundamental human capacities in some ways.

Monica:

Absolutely

April:

And I want to get better at listening through communicating how much I’ve heard and seen through the way that I talk, not just through silence.

Monica:

Yeah, I really like that. It reminds me, David says in his book, how, if I’m talking with you and I’m gauging how well you are listening to me, a lot of that comes across in the eyes and the gaze.

April:

Mmmm

Monica:

There’s, there’s ways we can communicate to other people. I’m here with you. Yeah. You matter to me in this moment, I’m interested in you. So, yeah, I really enjoyed this conversation with you because this particular question goes so far beyond politics.

April:

Oh, yes.

Monica:

It’s so much deeper. And more important, it’s what our political disagreements and any disagreement is built on top of

April:

Yes, 100%. Also, you’ve got to go first sometimes,

Monica:

Yeah, we will continue to mix it up here and make sure you are seen. Alright, well, thank you, April. This was fabulous as always.

April:

Thank you.

April:

Yeah. Thank you.

Monica:

As we’ve released these episodes, one thing I keep hearing from a lot of you is how much you appreciate what April brings to these conversations. So given that this is an episode about getting to know people, I wanted to tell you how she and I got connected in the first place.

We first met in 2019 as we were working on bringing disparate people together for different organizations. I was doing more and more on political depolarization and found myself totally captivated by her work. I watched her chair, so effectively, the national Braver Angels debates she designed to bring wildly different political perspectives together on everything from the COVID lockdowns to whether America is a racist nation. I saw her lead a giant national forum with Democrats and Republicans the day after the 2020 election. I interviewed her for my book, and remember how fast my fingers ran over the keyboard as I tried to capture every word she was saying on the phone.

She has a warmth to her that’s reliable and consistent whatever the stakes, whatever the urgency. Now I have a fire sometimes, that comes out and burns, but it settles with her.

And we don’t agree on much politically, people! Despite how in-sync we can sound in these conversations, I promise you our ballots can look very different. But we do see eye to eye on people. How mysterious we all are, how profound, how worthy of understanding. And as I hope you’re hearing, when you can connect on those things, at least a little, the politics take on a different tone. And that’s, kind of the point of this whole podcast.

Now, let me take a moment to tell you about another one of our Supporting Partners…

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, is a nonpartisan organization that promotes the value of free speech for all Americans in our courtrooms, on our campuses, and in our culture.

Regardless of politics or ideology, if the speech is protected, FIRE defends it.

Through legal support, advocacy, and policy reform, FIRE promotes and protects the individual rights to free speech and free thought.

By signing up with FIRE, you’ll be the first to know how you can make a difference when our right to speak and to listen are threatened.

To learn more and get involved, visit: thefire.org/braverangels

Thank you to FIRE for being a supporting partner of A Braver Way and a member of Braver Network.

To learn more about Braver Network and how your organization can join the movement for civic renewal, go to braverangels.org/abraverway.

So to close out today’s episode, I want to introduce you to Lance Walker.

Lance runs a barbershop out of his home in rural Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. But Lance’s customers get more than a haircut. At Lance’s barbershop, very different people come in with very different political beliefs, and they know, because it’s Lance, that they can say what they’re thinking and spark productive conversations with people who don’t see eye to eye with them pretty much on the regular.

Hearing and being heard is such an expectation at Lance’s, that some of the people you’ll see sitting along the wall don’t have any hair left to cut. They’re just there to talk.

Here’s Lance, in his own words…

Lance Walker:

My name is Lance Walker. I’m 56 years old. I live here in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. It’s right outside of Gettysburg. I own a barbershop here. I was, born and raised in on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. I was born into a single parent home. And so my mother was there trying to raise three kids in the projects by herself, but she was, a very principled, Godly woman. She, she really leaned on, biblical principles to raise us.

I’ve been cutting hair since ‘84 I believe. I started in high school whenever Carl Lewis was in the Olympics. Carl Lewis had the box haircut. tall. It was kinda like the eraser flat top, so, you know, that was the hairstyle that, that everybody was wearing. And I went to one of my local barbers and it didn’t, I mean, it, they cut it, but it was, a, it was a pretty rough cut because he didn’t use the electric clippers. He used the old fashioned squeeze clippers and felt like he was pulling more hair than what he was cutting. So I thought, you know what? I can do this myself. So I saved up my little bit of money, and I bought a home cut kit from Kmart, and me and my best friend Ivan started cutting each other’s hair, experimenting.

I believe that especially more so in the Black neighborhoods that the barbershops historically have been places of gathering because people of color back in the day couldn’t congregate too much without, you know, especially, with the heavy racism and everything else. But at the barbershop… the barbershop has always been a, a place of conversation and exchange of ideas.

I never owned a shop until I moved here to Chambersburg 17 years ago. My clientele base is probably 40% white, 40% black, and 20% other. And at any given moment, you’ll have a great mixture of different walks of life, different age groups, coming together. And I’ve personally made it a point to not shy away from any conversations. If anything, I’ll roll the grenade, I’ll roll the conversation grenade in the room and get it started. And everybody, matter of fact, everybody who comes now, they, they basically know we’re gonna engage in deep, meaningful conversation when you come to the shop.

The space that I feel like I’ve fostered there are all kind of political, differences, which I don’t normally see. ’cause it seems like to me that if somebody, no, I have had some people leave my barbershop because they thought I was… somebody came back and told me, it was like, they, they so-and-so heard that you were, a registered Republican, and they said, they’re not coming back to your barbershop. I was like, oh, hey, that’s, you know, that’s on them. I , you know, but, I find that’s being done more and more we disassociate with people who we disagree with.

And so now you have this thing where it, it seems like people, if you’re not of the same political affiliation, people seem to want to demonize, point the finger or not even want to be around, you know, someone else. But for some reason, my shop is, is it has got a diverse opinions. We were just talking about the the issue in in Israel in Palestine, this, this morning. And there was a couple different opinions on that, but it didn’t get to the point where it was finger pointing or people getting angry. And, you know, there are people who have strong opinions, don’t get me wrong. But, I’ve not had a problem. I think too, what has happened is, my customers have bought in and they’ve taken ownership to it, also, that I’ve literally had customers stick up for me like, Hey man, you know, “don’t talk like that in this man’s shop.” so I was like, wow, okay. This is, this is kind of cool. I mean, where I don’t even have to say anything that I got my, you know, people catching my back and saying, Hey, you know, that’s not the way it works here.

We just need to learn how to dialogue better. There’s almost a thing of, no, I’ve gotta destroy you. No, I don’t think that that’s, that’s not the space that I wanna operate in. I would hope that we would all lean into the introspective work, because if we don’t do the introspective work, I’m gonna continue down a pathway of…we’re creatures of habit, you know, and so, oh, this is right. Well, no, not necessarily. ’cause sometimes two things can be right, and if two things are right and true, then let me not hold so tightly to this one that I feel like is so right or so true.

I used to be a registered Republican. I still am registered as a Republican, but I’m disassociated from any political party in as much as I feel like they’re all too small in as much as I feel like they want to box, box you in. And I think every last one of us are much larger than a one or two or three major topics that each party kind of presents and comes with, so that’s where I stand right now. Yeah.

Monica:

We’re each so much bigger than an opinion. Bigger than a label. Bigger than one political agenda, one experience, one pattern, or any one definition.

Which makes even the idea of getting to know someone else kind of overwhelming. It’s like David said. The fact that we find so much in common at all, similar enough ways to look at the world that we’ve built everything we’ve built together is kind of a miracle.

Sometimes all we really get of each other is glimmers. But even just one good glimmer, in one conversation, can mean the world.

…

With that, I’m ready to send you brave souls back to your worlds with a song. It’s called “The Great Divide” by Jud Caswell, and it was one of the honorees in the 2020 Braver Angels Songwriting Contest. Take a listen…

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Thank you so very much for joining us on this seventh episode of A Braver Way!

A Braver Way is a production of Braver Angels.

We get financial support from the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust and Reclaim Curiosity, and count USAFacts as a proud sponsor.

Our Senior Producer and Editor is David Albright.

Our Producer is Jessica Jones.

Our theme music is by the fantastic #1 Billboard bluegrass-charting hip-hop band Gangstagrass.

A special thanks to Ben Caron, Mike Casentini, and April Lawson.

I’m your host and guide across the divide, Monica Guzman.

If this episode sparked questions or stories you want to share with us, trust me when I say, we can’t wait to hear them.

You can always reach us at abraverway@braverangels.org.

Take heart, everyone. ‘Til next time.

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