Wisdom Keepers: Healing a Divided People

-I think political disagreement is downstream from our emotional lives.

We believe what we want to believe, and if our desires are for hostility, if our desires are driven by a sense of, "You're threatening me, you're disrespecting me," what we think is not consequential.

And so when people say, "We need to be more civil," well, if you were feeling existentially unsafe, civility isn't gonna cure that.

-We're all seekers searching for answers to life's biggest questions.

There are people who have made it their life's work to explore and uncover the wisdom we all seek.

In this episode, I speak with author and commentator David Brooks about shifts in American culture and social reconnection.

This is "Wisdom Keepers."

David Brooks, welcome to "Wisdom Keepers."

-Good to be with you, Ray.

-Now, we've known each other a long time, but not well, which actually gives me kind of a vantage point to look at you and think, this is a guy who's been through some stuff and come out the other end, but... shockingly, unlike the David Brooks I used to know, wants to talk about it.

What happened?

-[ Laughs ] I used to be way more emotionally reticent.

I always say, if you watch this movie "Fiddler on the Roof," you know how warm and huggy and emotional Jewish families can be, laughing and dancing and singing.

But I come from the other kind of Jewish family.

And so the slogan in our household was, "Think Yiddish, act British."

And so we were, like, stiff upper lip, show no emotion.

I radiated emotional avoidance.

But then life hits you and, you know, you have some public failures.

You have some humiliations.

And, you know, my marriage had ended -- was ending.

My kids were going away, so they were gone or about to go away to college.

And, um, I'm living alone on a little apartment, and I did what any male idiot would do, which was try to work my way through the emotional problem, basically avoid -- just workaholism.

And that was just a period in the valley.

And I think one of the things I read during that period was when life sends you into the valley, you can be broken or broken open.

And I had a lucky break a year or two after that, where I got invited over to a couple's house here in Washington, DC, and they had a kid named Santi, who was in the public schools.

And Santi and a friend who -- named James -- whose mom had some issues and drug and other health issues and couldn't always feed him.

And so they said, "Well, James can stay with us."

And then James had a friend and that kid had a friend.

And by the time I went over to their house, there were about 40 kids around the dinner table and 15 mattresses around the house.

And I walk in the door there, invited over for dinner with this -- about 40 kids.

We call them "kids."

They were 18, 19.

I reached out to shake a kid's hand, and he says, "We really don't shake hands here.

We just hug here."

And I'm not the huggiest guy on the face of the Earth.

But I hugged and I went back to that dinner table for every Thursday night from about five or six years.

And we did vacations together.

We did holidays together.

And it was a chosen family.

And what those kids offered was they demanded emotional availability, that they were gonna beam their love and appreciation onto you, and you had to beam it back.

And so one of the things I learned is when you're down in one of life's valleys, it's really hard to pull yourself out.

But sometimes there are people who will reach into the valley and pull you out.

-That also sounds like it requires a certain amount of radical honesty that you didn't have to express before.

-I guess so, but, uh, living a joyless life is just not a way to live.

There's a great novelist I admire named Frederick Buechner, And he says, "If you cut yourself off from the pains and vulnerability of life, you've cut yourself off from the holy sources of life itself."

And that was a phase where I think I got a lot more vulnerable in public, actually, and vulnerable in private.

It was a sign, well, if I could do that, I could pretty much do anything.

[ Chuckles ] -I want to talk about what's wrong, how we got here, and how we're gonna work our way out of it.

Can we do that?

-[ Chuckles ] Yeah.

I'm known as the unrealistic optimist in my workplace.

So, what's wrong?

I trace a lot of our problems to a weird spiritual and relational problem when we're having a crisis.

Everybody knows about the rise of mental-health problems.

30% rise in suicide.

And there's just something weird going on.

So the number of Americans who say they have no close friends is up by four-fold since 2000.

35% of high school students say they're persistently hopeless and despondent.

The number of people who rate themselves in the lowest happiness category has gone up by 50% since 2000.

So we're just a lot sadder as a country.

And when you get sadder, you get meaner, because if you feel threatened, if you feel unseen and invisible, you regard it as a threat and an injustice, which it is.

And when you leave people naked and alone, surrounded by distrust, they do what their evolutionary roots tell them to do, which is they revert to tribe.

They look for protection.

And so we have -- I think out of a sense of existential anxiety, people resort to fanaticism, they resort to enmity, and in particular they resort to distrust.

And it used to be two generations ago if you asked people, "Do you trust your neighbors?

", two-thirds of Americans said, "Yeah, my neighbors are trustworthy."

Now it's 30%, and 19% of Millennial and Gen Z.

The younger you go, the more distrusting we are.

So that's the spiritual and relational crisis that I see around us.

Now, can we pull out of it?

Yes.

We've done it in the past.

And so I'll just point to one historical era.

In the 1870s, we were a period -- we were a country with lots of distrust.

We were a country with savage inequalities.

We were a country with vast sorts of change going on, intense political corruption.

But change happened in three ways.

The first way was a cultural shift.

In the 1870s, the prevailing culture was called "Social Darwinism," man against man, all against all.

Blood, bloody.

You gotta eat or be eaten.

That changed, and there was a new culture called the Social Gospel movement, which said, "We're communal.

We're in this together."

And so that culture shifted.

Then the second thing that shifted in the 1880s and 1890s was a civic renaissance.

All sorts of civic groups came into being.

The Settlement House Movement in Jane Addams, which was sort of social-welfare movement.

There was the temperance movement.

There was the union movement, the environmental movement, the NAACP.

And then finally, there was a political renaissance, which was the progressive movement, which happens in around 1900, and they clean up government.

They created the Food and Drug Administration, eventually the Federal Reserve System, all these institutions of government so we're better governed.

And so the change then happened, cultural and then civic and then political.

And that's, I think, where -- we're in the middle of a cultural change now, searching for community.

I think we're in the middle of civic renaissance.

I travel the country talking to civic groups and people who are working in their local communities.

They're everywhere.

The politics hasn't come yet, but I think that'll come eventually.

-You don't have to go back through the long sweep of history to find when things were different.

At the end of the '90s, a majority of Americans thought we were on the right track.

Today, a whopping 19% do.

An AP poll found that two thirds of Americans were pessimistic about the future.

-You look at -- we're most -- we were positive.

The public conversation was positive through the 1860s, through the Great Depression, through World War I and World War II.

And then around 2013, it just collapses.

And so we're in a much more depressed and negative and hate-filled conversation now than we were during the Great Depression.

And so some of that is just we've got this negative vibe going.

There was something weird.

If you look at a lot of the social statistics, something weird happened in 2013, around there.

They were pretty good.

America seems healthy, relational.

People are thinking the country's going in the right place.

And then suddenly it goes down sharply.

And it's not only in America.

This happens in Western countries all around the world.

And so I think what happened around the 2010s was, first, social media.

What -- the smartphone comes out about then, so that has an effect as we're all on Twitter and online.

But then there's a disgust with the leadership class.

And so one of the things that's happened in America is we've created this inherited meritocratic class, that if you are born into a family making $100,000 a year, your odds of getting through university, or a selective university, are like 77 times higher than somebody coming from a family making $30,000.

So a lot of people look around at this society and they say, "This game is rigged by the elites.

And my children do not have a chance."

There's a guy at Yale, a Yale law professor named Daniel Markovits, and he says the gap in educational attainment between the wealthy and the less wealthy is right now greater than the gap between whites and blacks in the era of Jim Crow.

So there's just a chasm.

And 80% of America takes a look at that, says, "Hey, if you're gonna rig the game so my family loses every time, I'm gonna flip over the table."

-David, if you look across the broad sweep of American history, one thing that made Americans different was their tendency to turn failure in on themselves.

It wasn't the system.

It was me, my moral failings, my shortcomings, that were causing my inability to move ahead.

Have we changed that model?

Are we now looking at the bigger system and saying, "Yeah, that's what's doing it to me"?

That's a pretty substantial change, isn't it?

-Yeah.

I mean, it used to be, if you looked at Americans, if you said, "Is your own personal destiny shaped by your individual level of effort, or is it shaped by the wider system?

", we were the -- we were outliers in America and we said, "No, it's up to us.

Like, if I work hard, I'm gonna make it in this country."

And now many people don't believe that anymore.

And one of the things that's been interesting to me about the shift in American culture is the loss of American exceptionalism.

Now, that's a phrase that has a lot of meanings.

The meaning I like is that we're not better than anybody else.

We're not worse.

We've been different.

And we used to be much more individualistic, much more religious.

And so we had a different sense of ourselves.

Now if you look at world opinion surveys, we're completely typical.

If you ask people all around the world, "Is the system broken?

", 69% of people all around the world says the system is broken.

And in America, 69% say the system is broken.

We have settled into the norm, the average.

And so we've become a much less exceptional country, for good and bad, and become part of swept up of a global culture of loss of faith.

The most important statistic in public life is do you trust your government to do the right thing most of the time?

And through the 20th century, 70% of Americans said, "Yeah, I trust government to do the right thing."

Now it's 15%, 12%.

It jiggles around at an incredibly low level.

And so that loss of faith in institutions shapes our politics.

-You have been trying to be part of the solution.

But if we go back to the early days of your career, do you have to be a shareholder in being part of the problem?

You were an elbows-out partisan, a guy definitely pulling on one end of the rope in the great societal tug-of-war.

Were you part of the edifice that got us here?

-Well, I mean, I'm an opinion journalist, and I used to be way more conservative than I am now.

I think I was responding correctly to the times.

Like, I believed that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were energizing societies in good ways.

But like any political movement, there were certain ugly downsides to that.

I was wrong about the Iraq War.

And so I'm culpable for that.

And so I think I was part of a system.

And if you look back at when Mark Shields retired, our friend from the "NewsHour," they showed some clips of Mark and I over the 20 years we worked together.

And there were some of those clips I was really embarrassed by because I was too sharply partisan.

I have come to see that most of politics is a competition between partial truths, that you're not gonna agree with everybody.

But if you sit with them and say, "Tell me your life story," it's really hard to hate people up close.

There's always something in there, an experience in their past, something in the story, where they really needed a change.

And so I hope that's a little wisdom that's come with age.

-When I covered politics earlier in my career, people might have argued not whether a blue wall was blue or not.

They agreed it was a wall.

They agreed it was blue.

They might disagree over whether you call it robin's egg or navy, but they did both have to concede at the beginning that there was a wall there.

It feels like now we can't even start the conversation with the basic agreement that there is a wall there.

-Yeah, I think what's broken down is not only what we believe, but to use a fancy word, the epistemological regime.

Epistemology is a study of what we can know.

And there was -- there are a group of people in society who try to lead the way, how do we know what we know?

And these are people like academic experts or people who do the peer-review process.

You think of the scientific method -- somebody writes a paper, somebody peer reviews it.

And we try to figure out what seems to be true.

But as society has gotten more distrustful, and as a lot of people feel left out of the media, left out of the academy, left out of the cultural institutions, a lot of people have said, "Not only screw you, but screw you and the epistemological regime you came in on.

I don't believe in your fact-checking.

I don't believe in your objective journalism.

All those things you call neutral, those are just things you use to preserve your power."

And so one of the things that's broken down is going to the same sort of method to figure out what's true.

And once you give away that commitment to the method over anything else, then you've given away a lot.

One of the things I admire about scientists is they have -- they fight over the origins of the universe or the human genome, but they all have the same method, and of the best of them.

If the weight of evidence says, "No, your theory's wrong," the best of them say, "You're right.

My theory is wrong."

When's the last time you saw somebody in public life do that?

-Yeah, really.

Do we have to find a better way of disagreeing?

-I think just relating.

I think political disagreement is downstream from our emotional lives.

We believe what we want to believe.

And if our desires are for hostility, if our desires are driven by a sense of, "You're threatening me, you're disrespecting me," what we think is not consequential.

And so when people say, "We need to be more civil," well, if you were feeling existentially unsafe, civility isn't gonna cure that.

When you're confronted by somebody who really opposes you, I've come to appreciate the only thing you can do is stand in their standpoint, is to ask them three or four or five times, "Tell me about your point of view.

What am I missing here?"

And there's a great book called "Crucial Conversations" by a guy named Joseph Grenny and a bunch of other authors, and they have a line in there that has stuck with me, which is that every conversation takes place on two levels.

It's what we're nominally talking about.

But then there's the flow of emotions, the undercurrent of emotions flowing between us as we talk.

And everything I say or you say, you're making me feel more respected or less respected, more safe or less safe.

And they write that in any conversation, respect is like air.

When it's present, nobody notices.

When it's absent, it's all anybody can think about.

And when people are coming after you, often they're feeling disrespect from you.

And so you have to show them the respect of curiosity.

Just say, "Tell me -- Where'd this come from?

What are you thinking?

What am I missing?"

-Our inability to just be with each other, to inhale the same air, to inhabit the same space, seems to be making all of this much harder, isn't it?

What's the solution?

-For sure.

And what's the solution?

So, in 2017 or so, I started a little organization called Weave: the Social Fabric Project.

And the idea behind it was that if people are distrustful, are nasty, are uncivil to each other... ...how do you fix that?

And we decided it's being fixed at the local level by people we call weavers, who are community builders.

And I find those people everywhere.

Often they had something bad happen to them, and they want to save others from having.

They lost a child to suicide and they now run suicide hotlines.

Some of them are more formal.

I have a friend in Baltimore named Sarah Hemminger, who runs an organization called Thread.

And Thread surrounds underperforming kids from the Baltimore schools with sort of an extended family, people who drive them to school, bring them lunch, and then another 12 who are supportive, and then a wider network.

So suddenly they're woven into this fabric.

And these young people, they've been betrayed often in their life.

And when people come up to them, they slam the door in their face because they think, "There's just gonna be another person that's gonna betray me."

And Sarah says, "When somebody keeps showing up for you after you've rejected them, it's life-changing, and it's life changing to be the person rejected who then keeps showing up."

And so that's how trust is built.

It has to be very visceral.

I trust you.

I'm safe with you.

Once the trust is there and the respect is there, then you can have conversations about anything.

-I take it as gospel truth what you say about people working together in communities, accomplishing things that we didn't even know were possible as a thing.

But how do you communicate that spirit up?

-Trust is built by -- at the "speed of relationship," as they say.

And relationships don't scale.

They take time to build, and they don't scale.

But norms scale.

If you can shift how people think about neighboring, then you can have a big effect.

Think of how anti-littering -- the norm, we don't litter, that's scaled.

Every social movement succeeds because we declare something formerly acceptable as disgraceful.

Racism -- that's disgraceful.

Sexual abuse -- that's disgraceful.

Polluting -- that's disgraceful.

We say, "We're gonna have a norm.

We're not gonna do that anymore."

And then you get these big societal shifts all at once.

Culture changes when a small group of people find a better way to live and the rest of us copy it.

And so people who are active in their local community, who are living for community, who are really sitting with the poor, they're living a very fulfilled lives.

And if the rest of us -- we don't have to be heroic, but if we're a little more like that, it would make society a little healthier.

-Do you worry that the slain dragons of the past don't stay slain?

You talked about norms.

I'm seeing public people, identifiable people, purposely violating norms, kind of in an in-your-face way, saying things that really are just breathtaking.

You think, "Oh, my God.

I thought we were all past that."

-Yeah.

-But we're not in 2025.

-Yeah.

No, norms can be -- Healthy norms can be constructed and they can be destroyed.

And it's a lot easier to destroy them.

When you violate the norms, you say, "I'm against polite society."

And I kind of like polite society.

It's how we handle diversity.

And I just think the idea if you're gonna protest against it, you can protest against the policies, but you can't -- you can't destroy basic decency because democracy is not just voting.

Democracy is the act of disagreeing well.

Democracy is the act of negotiating difference among diversity, and that involves human contact, it involves emotional contact, it involves ability to listen, it involves a zillion other activities, and we just stink at a lot of those activities these days.

-I can't tell you the number of times in the last six months I've read or heard, "We as a country have never been so divided."

And I think, have you heard about the Civil War?

-Yeah, or the revolutionary period.

I mean, the colo-- the patriots and the Tories were viciously fighting each other.

One of my heroes is Alexander Hamilton.

He was killed by the sitting vice president.

[ Chuckles ] Like, that's pretty bad.

And so, you know, we've always had pretty vicious politics.

Not always, but -- and you look at the age of Andrew Jackson, which is the age that most closely parallels our own.

Andrew Jackson comes in, he's against the establishment, and a lot of rabble rousers, a lot of norms change.

And yet we were still a dynamic country.

And I would say if I surveyed America right now, I think economically, we're a very dynamic country.

We're still entrepreneurial.

We move a lot.

In my view, we have the strongest economy maybe in the world, or one of the strongest, but we're socially weaker.

The social distrust -- I think that's new.

And then, say, if I compared us to the 1970s and when Richard Nixon committed the Watergate crimes, there were a bunch of Republican senators who would go to the White House and say, "You need to resign."

That would never happen today, obviously.

-A lot of the people who've been coming on "Wisdom Keepers" are involved in religious work, and I've been asking them all whether in a country that is moving away from religious observance, moving away from congregational affiliation, they still have something to say to the society at large, to a culture that is now majority disaffiliated.

Have you been watching this with interest?

And what does it say about us now?

-Yeah, I watch it intensely, and there are some weak moments where I think most of our problems can be explained by the de-churchification of America, and that's partly a loss of faith.

But, you know, I'm a person of faith, but I look around and I see people of faith are not that much better than anybody else.

Like, people of faith, we talk a good game about virtue and sin and stuff like that, but we're not that much better.

But being a part of a church or a synagogue or a mosque, being a part of an organization, that has a massive effect on how people behave.

It makes them more likely to give to charity.

It makes them happier.

It means they have more sex.

Like, the churched really, like, live different lives because they're in community.

And it's also because there are rituals about how to show up for people.

So, for example, in the Jewish tradition, um, if you lose a spouse, it's not obvious that for the next week you should go to a party.

And yet, the Jewish Shiva tradition, when somebody loses a spouse, you gather around them for a week, and there are rules, like where you can sit and should you mention the ber-- the dead or not?

Like, and it's -- you bring a casserole.

And so when you are surrounded -- when you're "spiritual but not religious," your friends may show up and may not.

But when you're religious, the benefit is they know what to do.

And so the loss of that, I think, has just been pretty devastating.

And I should say, it's not a lost cause necessarily for the people who are unchurched.

It sometimes seems like the churches are trying to actively drive people away.

And a lot of the church scandals, a lot of that stuff has been so disillusioning.

But again, I look at American history.

We go through cycles of religiosity and non-religiosity.

The Revolutionary War period was very low.

The period in the early 20th century was very low.

The 1950s were very high.

And so we go through these cycles.

I don't think human nature has basically changed.

I think people -- and if you ask them, "Do you believe in a spiritual force?

Do you believe -- have you had transcendent experience, spiritual experiences?

Do you believe there's some force of love in the universe?"

You still get large numbers of people say, "Yeah, I do think that."

They're looking for a credible outlet for that.

I see it in a lot of the Christian colleges.

I visit a lot of Christian colleges, and what I see there are people who are not, like, megachurch prosperity-gospel people.

They are people for whom the faith is service to the poor, everybody's made in the image of God, taking care of the outcast.

But I just have this inkling that we're gonna see a revival of progressive Christianity, just because what I see is the real stuff there, what they call the real disease.

And so both on the right and on the left, I see parts of Christianity -- I'm focusing on that -- that seem incredibly compelling to me, and maybe those parts of our religious life will grow.

-David, I'm gonna need a couple of more elevator pitches on why be optimistic now?

You haven't totally sold me yet.

Um, we are a snarly people right now, and it looks like we're gonna be that way for at least a while to come.

-Yeah, it's funny.

I think there are wells of patriotism alongside the wells of distrust.

I still think people love their country.

I find in Houston, for example, people don't really care where you came from.

They want to know what's next.

And I find it's a very open city.

Even, like, some of the rich towns I go to, if they have fires, towns are permanently altered by that.

But I met a guy in Santa Barbara, California, which is a pretty rich place.

He had been to like 20 funerals after their mudslides and fires a few years ago.

And I watched that community change.

And I think there are things -- Palestine, Ohio -- like, there are things that do -- that remind us who we are.

We need to find a way to practice our love of country in public.

We've sort of gotten sick of, like, chest beating.

We've gotten disillusioned with a certain form of patriotism.

But we've got to find another -- a way to -- we've got to find a way to tell our story.

To me, America is an Exodus story that most of us -- those who were not brought here in chains -- we escaped oppression.

We crossed an ocean.

We came to the Promised Land.

And the founders thought of themselves as an Exodus story.

Some of the founders wanted to put Moses on the Great Seal of the United States, because Exodus.

Every immigrant group, or most of them, had the same story.

Martin Luther King talked about Exodus more than he talked about the New Testament.

And I tell young people this story, and they say, "I don't buy it.

We're not a Promised Land.

We're not a land of milk and honey."

Um, I try to tell them, though, "Go abroad."

[ Chuckles ] Like, we're pretty special country.

But community is a group of people with a common story.

And if we're not gonna accept that, I guess we could have a redemption story.

That's Lincoln's second inaugural.

We're a beautiful experiment.

We have screwed it up in a million ways.

But the experiment is still going on, and we can still fix it.

And maybe that's a story that can unite us.

A people as diverse as us need some sort of common story and some sort of common project.

The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once pointed out to me that in the Book of Genesis, the creation of the universe is described in like nine verses.

In the Book of Exodus, the building of the Tabernacle, the structure the Israelites carried as they moved across Sinai -- that's like 300 verses, all of them -- -Measurements, materials, the whole deal.

-Yeah.

Incredibly boring.

[ Laughs ] And so Sacks said, "Why did it take hundreds of verses?"

It's because Moses had these 12 fractious tribes.

He was trying to unify them into one people.

So he gave them a building project.

And so, a common story and a common project.

And so the formula for -- for unifying a better diversity is there.

But it used to be if you were a carpenter or plumber, HVAC guy, there was a dignity in that, or even a miner you could see -- or an autoworker, you could see a car down the street and say, "I built that."

And somehow we've sort of withdrawn status from a lot of people, uh, in our own educated-class self-involvement, frankly.

And so, has to be -- that's part of a cultural shift that has to happen.

I read a book by a great political scientist named Samuel Huntington, and he wrote this book in 1981, and it was called "The Politics of Disharmony."

And he says, "I notice every couple generations in American history," we go through what he calls "a moral convulsion."

And he says a moral convulsion is when people get disgusted with established power.

Outsiders demand inclusion.

Morally passionate generation comes on the scene.

There's a new form of social technology, and there's all this chopping up.

And he says it happened in the 1770s with the American Revolutionary generation.

Happened in the 1830s with Andrew Jackson.

It happened in the 1890s with industrialization.

It happened in the 1960s with all the turmoil.

And so, writing in 1981, Samuel Huntington writes, "I don't know if I believe in these 60-year cycles, but if it comes true, then sometime around 2020, America will go through another moral convulsion."

And I'm reading that in 2020.

I'm thinking, good call, Samuel Huntington, because we're in the middle of it.

But the good news is that we come out of it.

We have a culture.

It stops working.

We have to chop it up.

And those periods of chopping up are brutal.

But then you create something new.

And so I think we're in the middle, or maybe the tail end, of a period of brutal cultural change.

But I'm hopeful we'll come out of it as we have so many times in American history.

-David Brooks, thanks for joining us on "Wisdom Keepers."

-It's good to see you again.