By: Jack Brittle, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Burlington Local-News.ca
On January 13, the Burlington Public Library hosted a virtual author talk with political and cultural commentator David Brooks to discuss his latest book, How to Know a Person.
The event was facilitated by the Library Speakers Consortium (LSC) and was hosted by Brandon Adler. Adler described the LSC as “ a partnership of more than 500 library systems across the U.S., Canada, and New Zealand, with the goal of making author talks more accessible to communities of all sizes.”
Brooks said that his inspiration for the book started when he decided that “there’s one skill at the centre of every healthy family, organization, and society. And that’s the ability to make others feel seen, heard, respected, and understood.”
In How to Know a Person, Brooks identifies two types of people who react differently when meeting strangers.
“A diminisher is someone who doesn’t see you,” Brooks said. “And you can tell because they’re not curious about you. They also do something called ‘stacking,’ where they learn one fact about you, and then they make a whole series of assumptions about who you must be [based on that].”
“Illuminators, on the other hand, are curious about you,” he continued. “They listen to you with so much intensity, it’s like they’re burning calories. They want to get inside your head and see your frame of mind.”
He said that the book walks readers through how to make others “feel at home” by being good listeners and conversationalists.
Brooks said that the book attempts to do this even when circumstances make it challenging, such as dealing with someone with depression or with whom you politically disagree.
In the book, Brooks discusses a close friend of his who died by suicide after years of battling depression. Brooks said that through this experience, he learned a lot about how to properly empathize with someone battling poor mental health.
“I tried to give him ideas on how to make the depression lift,” Brooks said. “And I learned that when you do that, you’re just reminding him you don’t get it. Because it’s not ideas that a depressed person is lacking. He may have a desire for a lot of things, but not ideas.”
He said that instead of reminding his friend of good things he had in his life, which he said made him feel like he just wasn’t appreciating them, Brooks tried a different approach.
“I finally came to learn that your first job is to say, ‘This sucks, tell me how it sucks,’” Brooks said. “Because people are going through hard times. They feel isolated in their pain, and they feel nobody can understand. They can’t quite communicate what it feels like, but if you can ask them, ‘Tell me exactly how it sucks,’ then they can feel less isolated.”
Brooks spoke about how he has learned to empathize with those with whom he fundamentally disagrees.
“One of the things I’ve taken to understand opposing points of view is I never ask, ‘What do you believe,’” Brooks said. “I ask, ‘How did you come to believe that?’”
“Say I’m in rural North Dakota, and I run into a guy who’s a big Trump supporter, and I said, ‘How did you come to believe that?’” Brooks continued. “And he said, ‘Listen, for the last 30 years of my life, my jobs have gotten worse and worse. The salaries get lower and lower, and the hours are more unreliable. My stature’s gone down. I’ve watched my community eviscerated. We’ve had an opioid addiction crisis for 20 years.’ And he says, ‘That guy may be a jackass, but I need a change. He’s my change.’ And…you see somebody just narrating their life. I think, ‘Well, I don’t agree with you, but I can definitely see where you’re coming from.’”
He said that another pivotal moment in the development of the book was when he attended a Major League Baseball game and caught a foul bat.
“I’ve never caught a foul ball, but one day, about 10 or 15 years ago, I’m with my youngest son in Baltimore at the Camden Yards, where the Orioles play,” Brooks said. “The batter loses control of the bat, and it flies in the air, and it lands in my lap. And for anybody who knows baseball, you know, getting a bat is a thousand times better than getting a ball.”
“So any normal human being would be standing up, high-fiving everybody and getting on the jumbotron, dancing in victory,” Brooks continued. “And I just took the bat, put it on the ground and sat there like a little turtle. And I look back on that guy and think, show a little joy.”
He said that this event made him become aware of his emotional “shortcomings.”
Brooks said that in his experience as a newspaper columnist, writing about society, he learned some troubling statistics.
“America’s just gotten a lot sadder,” Brooks said. “Depression and suicide rates are up. The number of Americans who say they have no close friends is up fourfold, and since 2000, the number of Americans who rate themselves in the lowest happiness category is up by 50%.”
He said that when you get sadder, you also “get meaner.”
“If society doesn’t see you or recognize your voice, you feel it as an injustice, which it is, and you want to lash out,” Brooks said. “And so the sadness and meanness of America, I think, comes elementally from people feeling not only isolated and disconnected, but deeply wounded by the sense that ‘nobody sees me.’”
Brooks said that although he invokes the idea of a soul often throughout the book, he doesn’t view this through a purely religious lens.
“Each one of us has within us something that has no size, colour, or weight, but gives us infinite value and dignity,” Brooks said. “The reason murder is wrong, the reason slavery is wrong is because it violates the dignity of a human soul. And so I don’t think you need to believe in God to believe there’s something called a soul.”
“We’re all equal in the relevance of our souls,” he continued.
To watch the full author talk, click here.
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