David Brooks, 64, is known to many as a regular buttoned-up contributor to PBS NewsHour on Friday nights and as a conservative op-ed columnist for The New York Times.
He is also a nonfiction writer who came to the Estes Valley via Zoom this week to talk about his latest book, “How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.”
He was also a juvenile delinquent, breaking into his local public library with a group of his friends when he was a kid. They caused no damage.
“We ran around, and then we left,” Brooks told members of the Library Speakers Consortium. “I was the kind of kid that breaks into a library.”
The people nationwide watching the Zoom interview likely would have forgiven Brooks anything. They came to hear him talk about his book, which is really a guide to nurturing a skill, mainly, “the ability to make others feel seen, heard, and understood.”
“And it’s fun to get to know another human being,” added Brooks.
“How to Know a Person” is a New York Times best-seller and is now available in paperback. In it, Brooks identifies two kinds of people. There are “illuminators” and “diminishers.”
The illuminators are people who are intensely curious about you, who pay attention to you. Think of a dinner party where someone takes a sincere interest in you and asks a lot of questions. At the same dinner party, however, there may be a diminisher or someone who is not curious about you at all and couldn’t care less.
“When we look at another person, 90% of our thinking is unconscious…but our interaction with them makes them feel safe or unsafe.” Brooks argues that we should see each human being as a “soul of infinite dignity” worthy of respect.
Brooks said his job as a journalist is to ask people questions.
“No one has ever said ‘None of your damn business.’”
That’s because people yearn to be seen. They yearn, he suggests, to tell the story of their lives. But no one ever asks.
Brooks said there has been a serious loss of social skills in recent years, and the nation’s divisive political climate has done nothing to help.
But look at it this way.
“Most confrontations are competitions between partial truths,” he said. The trick is to get the balance right.
Brooks is a conservative, yes, but no fan of President Donald Trump.
“He is the wrong answer to the right question.”
Still, Brooks said he hasn’t lost a single friend over Trump.
Instead of shutting the door on another’s belief, Brooks asks the question that seeks an answer.
To a Trump supporter, he asks, “How did you come to believe that?” and gets an answer he can live with.
Perhaps more difficult than dealing with a Trump supporter is dealing with a friend who suffers from depression.
He says it may not be helpful to try to jolly them out of sadness.
Instead, he suggests trying to communicate to help them feel less isolated.
“Tell me how life sucks,” he says. “I’m not going away.”
These communication skills can be learned, and in fact, they have impacted him greatly, particularly through what he learned while researching the book.
“I am a work in progress,” he said. “I hope I am more than I was.”
Brooks was asked about how he works.
“I write from 7 a.m. or 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. every day,” he said. “It’s solitary. I had the solitary temperament before the career.”
Brooks has an unusual manner of organizing his notes. He piles pages of notes on the floor.
“I need to see it laid out before me.”
His 1,000-word column requires 14 separate piles of notes.
“Everyone has their own way of organizing,” he said. “I need room. I can’t write on a plane.”
Finally, this erudite man who quoted philosophers and scholars throughout his talk was asked what he was reading now.
“‘Secrets of Secrets’ by Dan Brown,” he said. “Lose the idea that I’m a high-brow. I’m loving it.”
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