Chris Anderson: Hello, I’m Chris Anderson. Welcome to the TED Interview. This the podcast series where I get to sit down with a TED speaker, and we take a deep dive into their ideas.
Today on the show: David Brooks, and how to lead a life of meaning and move toward less polarized politics. For more than 15 years, David has been a political and cultural columnist for "The New York Times," and he’s the author of several blockbuster books that have really helped shape-shift a lot of people’s worldviews, books like "Bobos in Paradise," "The Social Animal," and "The Road to Character." Traditionally, David’s politics have been seen as a little right of center, but what’s most striking to me about him is how broad his thinking is. More than almost any other writer I know, he has a talent for synthesizing ideas from different fields -- sociology, history, psychology, politics and economics -- and then weaving them into clarifying insights highly relevant to where we are today.
David recently published "The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life." It’s a book anchored in his own search for meaning, following a divorce six years ago. And in his TED Talk In April, he made the case that the key to us finding a better way forward in our divided politics is to focus on deeper human values and the rich connections between us.
(Recorded talk) David Brooks: We no longer feel good about ourselves as a people. We've lost our defining faith in our future. We don't see each other deeply, we don't treat each other as well. And we need a lot of changes. We need economic change and environmental change. But we also need a cultural and relational revolution. And to me, the weavers have found that language.
CA: In this episode, David and I are going to explore how these new ideas connect, both the quest for personal meaning and the dream of political renewal anchored in a new focus on neighborhood. David will share why he’s inspired by a group of people he calls "weavers," for moral and political answers. David Brooks, welcome.
DB: Good to be with you.
CA: So, I'm really intrigued by this conversation, because I see you as one of the great synthesizers of different ideas. It's always amazed me how you can combine thinking from sociology and psychology and philosophy and politics and economics and somehow weave it into a coherent article, at least good enough for an op-ed for the day in "The New York Times." You're just coming out with this new book, "The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life." I'm intrigued to hear you connect the ideas in that book, in that thinking, through to some of what you've been writing recently about the malaise in our current politics and society and culture generally and what we might do about that. Methinks there's a connection. I think you think there's a connection.
DB: I think there's a connection, yeah. CA: Deep connection.
CA: So let's try and do that. I mean, David, start by just telling me the basic thesis of the book.
DB: Well, it occurred to me this morning, the book is about the central lie of our culture, and that lie is, "I can make myself happy," that if I earn some success, if I have more exciting experiences, that if I get a little thinner, I can be happy and fulfilled. And that's a useful lie to have. It's a lie we have on the first mountain of our lives, because it motivates us to start companies and take risks. But if you've achieved any success in life, you realize that is a lie, that success does not actually make you feel fulfilled, that the only way you feel fulfilled is by giving love and receiving love. And so, on the second mountain of life, you realize you're at a very different mode of living. It's not about earning and acquiring, it's about contributing and giving back.
CA: Is your belief that most people literally have these two mountains, where they spend the first decade or two of their adult life somehow climbing Mountain One, and then they have this midlife crisis or moment of realization, and they enter more a life of meaning or pursuit of meaning?
DB: I think most people live what the culture wants them to live for some time. It can happen at any age. Then they make this discovery. So they get out of college, say, and have a career they're going to build. "I'm going to be a doctor or lawyer." And then, they either achieve success and find it unsatisfying, or they fail, they're not on their mountain. Or something bad happens that's not part of the original plan: a cancer scare or they lose a child, and they're down in the valley. And in the valley, they realize they're much deeper than they thought they were. There's a great Paul Tillich line -- moments of suffering, when we have these valleys in life, they remind us we're not the person we thought we are. They carve through what we thought was the basement of our soul and reveal a cavity below that and carve below that and reveal a cavity below that. And we realize we're just much deeper, and only spiritual and emotional food is going to fill those cavities. And when you make that discovery about yourself, what you really desire, the desires to the heart and soul, then you're ready for the second mountain, because you realize only spiritual food is going to fill that: "I've got to live a very different life."
CA: I mean, one challenge I'm sure that you have faced or will face is that people find it hard to talk about this second mountain. The first mountain, the currency is stuff that's out there. It's literally the currency, what you're earning, what you're making, how much you're achieving as an employee or social entrepreneur or whatever, and it's the obvious things that you can see. Someone got a promotion. "What are you doing, now? What are you working on?" These are easy conversations -- easy-ish -- to have with people. The conversations around "Have you deepened your love for your neighbor or your partner?" are much more intimate and much harder to have. Do you see a risk that people will shy away a bit and say, "I'm not ready for that"?
DB: No, you know, sometimes I'm hired to give speeches at big convention halls to corporate types, And so I'll walk into a room with 4,000 people, and they look like the most boring 63-year-old white men you could ever imagine, in gray suits, and I'm about to talk to them about the love life of George Eliot or something really emotional and gooey and woo-woo. And I walk into that room and I look over these bored faces who've been talking about health benefits for the last three days, and I think to myself, "This is not going to go well." And then I start talking about it. And then I start talking about the hard moments in my own life, and there's a quality of silence that occurs none of the other times I go out and give speeches. And that's because people are really emotionally and morally starved for someone who's willing to be vulnerable and someone who's willing to tell about the real truths of life, which are not part of the common currency. We are overpoliticized in our culture and undermoralized. We are not used to talking about this stuff, especially guys.
CA: A lot of people have noticed the shift in you and your interests away from ... For many years, you were seen as the token right-of-center columnist for "The New York Times," who half the readership loved to hate, and others were dazzled by, for sure. But you were seen very much in that lens. People saw you as a Republican and were interested in these other pieces that you brought to the table. And then, there was this shift to more talk of moral issues and meaning. And people wondered whether this was more about you, that you yourself were going through some kind of transition. I mean, to what extent is that true?
DB: It's somewhat true. but I'm a very average person with above-average communication skills. In 2013, I went through a tough period in my life. But it turns out, I was going through a tough period at the exact moment a lot of people were going through a tough period, and it was the same kind of toughness. It was a loss of social connection and a sense of isolation. So in my case, I had gone through a divorce. My kids had left home. A lot of my friends were conservatives, but conservatism was changing, so I lost a lot of those friends. And so I'm living alone in an apartment with vast nothing-to-do over the weekends because I had no friends of that sort. But at the same time, America's gone through this crisis of isolation. So you've seen the number of people who say no one understands them has risen, the number of people who say they're chronically lonely has risen; 55% of Americans say no one knows them well. And so, in the last few years, you've seen this spike up in mental health issues, a spike up in depression, 30% rise in suicide, 70% rise of teenage suicide. And so the whole country is going through a crisis of disconnection and isolation, exactly as I was. And I just had maybe a little head start. So I spent six years thinking about, "How do you get out of this? What do you do with these moments and how do you recommit your life to some sort of connection?" And my process is very much the same process that millions of people are going through.
CA: So what do you see as the key causes of that growing isolation?
DB: I think it's a cultural thing, a culture of hyperindividualism. In the 1950s, we had a culture that was very communal. We had to face big challenges like World War II and The Depression, and we had a culture that basically says, "We're all in this together." And there were very rich and tight communities. If you grew up in Chicago, you didn't say, "I'm from Chicago." You said, "I'm from 59th and Pulaski," because that was your neighborhood. And that was great, but it was also stifling. So in the 1960s, people said, "I'm being crushed by conformity, I'm being crushed by these social roles. I can't tolerate the racism and sexism that is in this culture." So they smashed it. In 1962, in the Port Huron Statement, say, a bunch of kids wrote, "I'm free to be myself. I want individual freedom. I want to be liberated from restraint." And that was important and necessary to do. We couldn't have had the Silicon Valley revolution unless we had an individual culture of rebellion and creativity. But we've had 60 years of it now, and we've sort of run out the string. And we've created a culture where we think of ourselves as buffered individuals who create our own sense of meaning, our own sense of purpose in life, and we've destroyed the connections between us. And that, to me, is the heart of the problem.
CA: Is it possible that the generation in the '60s, the hippies and fellow travelers, were successful? Because they had grown up in a different situation. They had grown up with certain kinds of values infused into them, which were kind of taken for granted. And it was actually -- you could throw off a lot of the rules, but still, they believed in love. They believed in connection with each other. They just didn't want to be told how to do it. Is it possible that that generation actually did OK, but that what went wrong was that the kids that they raised were all raised not to think about, really, communal responsibility but just about their own preciousness and specialness and the dream of finding that passion and, "Go and flourish," and that's part of what happened?
DB: Well, first, there was a sort of left-wing individualization, which was more social and lifestyle. There was also a right-wing version, which was about economic deregulation. And I do think the Baby Boomers, say, were living off some of the social capital they grew up with, the communities and institutions. But then, when we came time, frankly, for my generation to pass it down to our kids, we gave them nothing. I spent a lot of time looking at commencement addresses, because that's how our culture passes down moral lessons: we hire a bunch of very successful people to give speeches on why success is not important. And they always tell you you shouldn't be afraid to fail, from which you learn if you’re JK Rowling, failure is fine, but for the rest of us, failure sucks. But, the main thing you learn is that we have no moral advice to give to our kids. We have no moral shared norms. So, they're graduating from college. They wonder, "What do I do with my life?" And we say, "Be free! Enjoy your freedom!" And that doesn't help them define. So then we say, "The future is limitless, take risks." That doesn't help them choose. They ask, "So, where do I look for authority? Where is wisdom found?" And we say, "Look inside yourself. Find your passion. You do you." But the "you" is exactly the thing that hasn't formed. And so, basically, they're looking for a way to find out what to devote their lives to, and we have nothing to say except, "You do you." No wonder life in the 20s right now is a very hard life, because there's no shared sense of, "This is what is most worth wanting."
CA: I mean, it is quite hard to picture what the advice should be. I don't think we want to go back to "The Graduate" and, "One word: plastics."
DB: Right.
CA: Is there one word? What is the advice that we should be giving?
DB: If I had to choose one word, it would be "commitments." Now, we're not going to go back to the deference to authority. But we can organize our lives around commitments, the promises we make to each other and being faithful to those promises. And most people graduating from college or high school, in the 15 or 20 years after, they're going to make four big commitments in their lives: to a spouse and family, to a vocation, to a philosophy or faith and to a community. And the fulfillment in their lives will depend on how well they choose and execute on those commitments. Social freedom sucks. Political freedom is great, and economic freedom is great, but social freedom, not being committed to other people, is just useless. The free man is the unremembered man, because he's not committed to anything. So you want to be able to plant yourself down on the other side.
CA: So, help me understand that better, because I think at first pass, someone listening to that might say, "That's a little bit terrifying. I'm supposed to run my life through commitments, but how do I choose them?" A commitment is a scary thing. It's going to control my life for the next years, certainly at the level of to marry someone, commit to a career ... So how does someone get to the point of knowing what to commit to?
DB: Well, the choosing is the hard part, and then the executing is the second hard part. We have acquired human wisdom on these questions. And so, for example, say the marriage decision, which I think is the most important decision we make. Marriage is a 50-year conversation. Choose someone you can really talk to for the rest of your life. And you'd better have purity of communication. The second bit of wisdom that I pass along: choose agreeableness, avoid neuroticism. The agreeable, kind person may not seem to be the most exciting, but that's really what correlates to really good marriages. What kind of love do you have for the person? Is it philia, which is just friendship? Is it eros, just a sexual desire? Or is it agape, which is selfless love? You better have all three kinds of love. And so emotion is the second lens. And then, the third lens is the moral lens. Love is going to fade and rise and fall, but admiration is pretty stable. Do you basically admire this person? And so you can walk through these different lenses and make a good choice.
CA: Yeah, there's certainly plenty of wisdom there. You and I both have been divorced. So it's possible to think you know what you're doing and get it wrong and actually find love much later in life as well.
DB: Which is what's happened to us. And people always think, "When I think about a marriage decision, I should ask a lot of questions about the other person." But maybe ask some questions about yourself. Are you really ready to do this? Love and selfishness don't go together, so are you still too selfish to really be in a loving relationship? There's a great -- Tim Keller, who's a pastor here in town, describes what happens in a marriage, that about six months into the marriage or a year, a couple years, you realize that the person you married who seemed so perfect is actually selfish in all sorts of ways. And as you're making this decision about him or her, she's making this decision about you. So you have two choices. You can either have a truce marriage, in which you both sort of agree to ignore the selfishness, or you can say, "Actually, my selfishness is the key problem here." We all have a tendency to think it's the other person's selfishness, but it's only our selfishness that we can really control, and if both partners agree to declare war on their own selfishness, then you'll probably have a good marriage.
CA: I think Alain de Botton has said that one of the keys in making that decision is finding someone where you can figure out how to resolve the inevitable unhappiness with each other that you're going to walk into.
DB: Right; he has a good line that, before you're married or living with someone, you can live under the illusion that you're easy to live with. And once you're living with someone, you realize, "Oh, I'm actually not easy to live with. I never shut the drawers. I don't turn off the lights. I leave tissues everywhere ..." And you realize all the ways you are unpleasant to live with.
CA: So, let's talk about some other themes of this sort of quest for meaning, because I think a lot of it in the book is about reaching out into the community, building relationships and the sort of transition of trying to find something that's bigger than you are. What does that mean?
DB: Well, the one that's most engaged me, I think because of our social crisis, is the lack of community. So I've really come to admire people I call "weavers," who live for community. They live for relationship, not for themselves. And there are so many people like that. There are weavers all around the country. They're a movement that doesn't know it's a movement. I find them inspiring because social change happens when a small group of people find a better way to live, and the rest of us copy them. These weavers have found a better way to live. And sometimes they have very bad valleys. A woman I met in Ohio named Sarah, her husband murdered their kids and himself. She came home one Sunday evening and found the bodies. I can't imagine a worse thing. And she decided, "Whatever that guy tried to do to me, he's not going to do it. I'm going to lead a life of purpose and meaning." She operates, in part, out of anger, that "He's not going to ruin my life." So now she works at a free pharmacy giving away pharmaceuticals. She teaches kids. She has a foundation. She leads a life of selfless service.
And a lot of people I've met around the country in the last year of the travels are people who've had something bad happen to them, and they turn that into just a selflessness. And it's inspiring to be around those people. I was in Englewood in Chicago. I was with a woman -- and she lived in this neighborhood, which is a tough neighborhood. And she decided she had to move out because it was too dangerous. And the day she was moving out, she happened to see two girls playing with broken bottles in an empty lot across the street. And she turned to her husband and said, "We're not leaving. We're not going to be just another family who abandoned this." And so they unpacked all the boxes and she Googled, "Volunteer in Englewood." She had no idea what to do. She started volunteering, she got on some boards ... She created something where the neighborhood could watch documentaries together and have conversations. Now she runs something called RAGE, which is the community organization in Englewood.
CA: And that story is often told as "this is transformation for the individual." But with these weavers, it sounds like it's also transformational for the community that they are in. Fundamentally, what they're doing is building connections, creating possibilities for other people, listening to other people, helping other people find their own weaving capability.
DB: I've really come to the conclusion that the neighborhood is the unit of change, not the individual. A friend of mine from Shreveport, Louisiana says, "You can't only clean the part of the swimming pool you're swimming in. You've got to clean the whole pool."
CA: So, this really strikes me as an interesting idea, and perhaps is the key to the later connection to some of your political thinking. Make that case, that the neighborhood is the unit of change. That, at one level, fundamentally contradicts the anchoring idea of neoliberalism, which is that it's about the individual, that you build a society based on life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. That is really a statement, or it seems to be a statement about individuals, and you give people as much freedom as they can, so long as they don't bump into others -- that is how we should think about life. And to say, no, we've got something wrong here, that the unit of change is the neighborhood -- talk about that.
DB: I do think that's right. We've taken individualism too far. We imagine human creatures are these individual, utility-maximizing creatures motivated by money, status and power. And these weavers are not motivated by any of those things. They want to live by the real things that motivate us: to be in right relation with each other and to serve some ultimate good. And so, that's philosophically the case. In the social science term, just take, for example, the work of Raj Chetty, who is a great economist who is dominating the world these days. And what he shows is that the neighborhood you happen to be growing up in is a powerful predictor of how you do in life, the neighborhood. So, for example -- this is Eric Klinenberg's research -- there was a heatwave in Chicago. Two neighborhoods, one across the street from each other, completely identical. In one, lots of old people died in the heatwave. In the other, nobody died. What was the difference? One neighborhood had a library. In the library, people got to meet each other. And if they could make social contact with each other, when there was a heatwave, they checked on the old people and they saved their lives. In another neighborhood, there was no library. They didn't know each other. The old people died in the heatwave.
CA: I presume it wasn't just the library. It's not like you can fix this by putting in a library. It's that the library is a symptom of a broader sort of interest in --
DB: Social success and economic success flow from social trust, frankly. Us guys, we want to talk about the market and all that stuff, but there's no escaping the realm of the intimate because if you don't have those intimate connections, you don't have an economy.
CA: But the challenge with the view that the neighborhood is the unit of change, it's hard to know what to do with it. I mean, a neighborhood is a really complex thing. It depends on the local architecture. It depends on the local demographics. It depends on whether there are church services and others going on. It depends on education. It depends on so many different things. And so it's just very, very hard for someone to say, "This is the fix." From that viewpoint, what does it mean to try to make life better?
DB: Well, there's no silver bullet. We're recording this on 4th Street, I think. If you traveled half a mile west, you get to the neighborhood where Jane Jacobs lived in the 1950s and '60s, the West Village in New York City. She wrote this beautiful passage about the street as a ballet, that in the morning the garbage men come through, then the moms are coming out taking out the trash, then, the fruit man comes. And so, there's always eyes on the street, and it's this organic ballet. And that's the beauty of a community; it's like a ballet. It's very dynamic and it moves. Or, it's like a jungle. And what we do as members of that is thicken the jungle. And there are a million ways to do that. You can invite your neighbors over for dinner. You can mentor a kid. You can set up a place like a dog walking park, where you'll meet people. The number of organic connections are infinite.
I heard of a lady in Florida, a friend of mine met her, and he asked her, "Do you have any time to volunteer?" She said, "No, I have no time to volunteer." At the moment he asked her that question, she was helping kids get out of elementary school and walk across the street, sort of a crossing guard. He said, "Are you being paid?" "No, I'm not being paid." He said, "What are you doing after this?" "Taking food to the hospital for the sick people." He said, "Do you have any time to volunteer?" She said, "No, I don't have time to volunteer!" And she didn't regard that as volunteering. That's just what neighbors do.
And I think one of the problems we've had in our country is we've lost the art of neighboring, and there are a certain set of skills and norms that neighboring involves. Transitions: when somebody moves in, you welcome them in. If somebody comes out of prison, you have a ritual to welcome them back into the community. And we've sort of let that all strip away in our desire for, basically, accomplishment, because we're so busy, and our desire to put privacy over everything else.
CA: So, those are the drivers of that? That just we raised a generation to believe that they should be focused internally on their own needs, passions and potentials and just didn't encourage old-fashioned but beautiful ideas like, "Just show up. Be there for so-and-so. Stop talking about yourself so much."
DB: Right. No, I do think, I wouldn't say we raised, I think we're part of the generation that is part of this problem. We've just buffered ourselves from each other, partly over fear of intimacy. And so, the way you bring it back, sometimes it's through formal organizations. One of the great weaver organizations is called "Thread" in Baltimore. And there's a woman named Sarah Hemminger who saw lonely kids in Baltimore, underperforming kids, so she surrounded them with four sort of mentors who are volunteers, and then four more who are grandparents and then 12 more who are collaborators. She built this intimate web of connections around these kids, and in part, it was to create structure for the kids. Somebody could drive them to school, bring them a sandwich. But in part, it was to bond the adults with each other. And that's one of things I noticed about the weavers in particular. It's the radical mutuality. We're all broken, we're all walking through this together. As one of them from New Orleans told me, "We don't do things for people, we don't things to people, we do things with people." And it's that complete sense of social equality and moral equality that drives these people, and I think they're part of the repair of our country.
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CA: You've written about just how rabidly partisan we are and the magnetic ideas of right and left that have helped drive that, and that possibly, this idea of the neighborhood could become a magnetic idea that draws people to the center. Talk. Make that thesis.
DB: Well, we're engulfed in tribalism right now, and so where does that come from? And it's all over the world, by the way. In my view, if you leave human beings naked and alone, which we've done in a culture of hyperindividualism, they do what their evolutionary roots tell them to do: they revert to tribe. And tribe seems like community -- it's bonding. But it's really the dark twin of community, because community is based on mutual affection. Tribalism is based on mutual hatred of some other. And so the tribal mentality is always making us-them distinctions, friend-enemy distinctions. It's a scarcity mentality. "They're out to take what we've got." It's always: erect walls, perceive threat, distrust, repel others. And to me, it comes from this loss of any animating idea to bond us together. We started out as a country, in the US, believing that God was the real magnetic idea, that America was where God's plan for creation would be realized. And then, in the 19th century, nation, American exceptionalism and all that, Manifest Destiny -- this was the holy mission. Recently, it's been self, the liberation of the self. And, as I say, we've sort of run out the string, and now we've got a bunch of paradigms that are competing with each other. I would say on the left, it's social justice, the idea that we can defeat systems of oppression, and that's a real magnetic idea. On the right, it's the tribe, ethnic nationalism. I'm a moderate, so I believe the magnetic idea that really should motivate our lives is "love your neighbor," building these communities at the local level and at the national level, having a national story we can all believe in. And that process of "love your neighbor" is really something you can devote your life to.
CA: I mean, a lot of people in both those other tribes, on right and left, would say that they also believe in "love your neighbor," and that's actually what drives part of what they do. A social justice warrior -- what are they doing other than to look out for the interests of invisible communities and voices and people who, for years, have not been properly acknowledged? You know, there is power to be readdressed. You described that battle as a zero-sum, sort of ... just a power shift between two different tribes. Why is it different from what you're talking about?
DB: Well, first of all, I'm a moderate, so I think politics is a competition between partial truths. I think all real political movements have an essential truth that they're grasping, and we're trying to find a balance. My problem is, today, with the social justice warriors, is the assumption that life is primarily about conflict, that there's a class conflict, there's a racial conflict, and that there tends to be hard differences. If you listen to Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, they tend to describe in conflict terms. There's the system of bankers, the us-versus-them, the rich-versus-the-people.
CA: Oppression. DB. Oppression. And I fundamentally think there's a lot more stupidity than oppression in the world, and a lot of our problems are just caused by stupidity. There's a lot of greed, too, I don't want to minimize that, but I do think that we do not live in a zero-sum world. I don't think we live in a world where conflict is the necessity. I'm an American Whig (Laughs), a party that died, but I believe there's a fundamental unity to America.
CA: Some people listening will say, "Yeah, but come on. Here we are, two white guys talking about this. You know, you haven't seen what others have seen for their whole lives." Is there an argument that there is a lot of truth in some of the anchoring ideas that motivate that drive for social justice? Would you argue that part of the problem is that the very language and the animation behind that effort doesn't give any choice to either side other than to engage in the push? There is no talk about possibility, about how to sort of build something outside that would create more possibility? It does become, essentially, a battle for power between different tribes.
DB: Sometimes. But what kind of power? The civil rights movement and Martin Luther King and Bayard Rustin and Philip Randolph, they believed in the power of love, and they believed in the power of organizing, and they believed in the power of redemptive love. King has a famous passage where he says, you aggressively throw love to the people and you love your enemies. And at first, they'll hate you and they'll fight back, but eventually, they'll crack under the power of your love, because your power of love has the power to illuminate what's good and what's evil." So they believed in that redemptive power and saw it as a tough-minded virtue. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was fighting the Nazis in World War II. He had the exact same philosophy. Gandhi -- a lot of the people who actually believe in social change and were, in some ways, the toughest. The idea of the beloved community is a King idea.
CA: What's the fundamental difference between his approach, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s approach, and social justice warriors of today, in your view?
DB: He always extended the circle of care. I would say that would be the thing he did. He extended the circle of care and he believed we're all God's children. And he had a radical hopefulness. There was a, frankly, religious foundation. At the same time, he had a deep awareness of sin. There's a good book called "A Stone of Hope," which compares the Northern white civil rights movement to the Southern black prophetic tradition, and the Northern white was like, "Oh, if we just educate people, they'll see the segregation was wrong." And the Southern prophetic tradition was like, "Sin is real in the world, and we really have to force them to confront their own sinfulness. We really have to take the battle right to them." So it was aggressive, it was completely aggressive, but it was aggressive in a loving manner, in a way that you don't corrupt yourself and turn yourself into the mirror image of hate and prejudice.
CA: The sin wasn't perceived to be only in the enemy, as it were -- outsiders. It was also believed to be within?
DB: Right. And if you take sin seriously, you see it as a common thing that radiates. I'll go back to an idea we earlier discussed: the neighborhood is the unit of change. So the sin of slavery, the sin of discrimination, is not just an individual sin, it's a national sin. It's a sin that radiates outwards and affects all sorts of things across our society. And tough measures have to be taken against that sin. I've recently been convinced that reparations is the right policy as a way to really dive into and acknowledge that sinfulness, really, as a sign of respect to those who have suffered under that.
CA: Wow, well, coming from you, that will surprise some people.
DB: Well, believe me, I never thought I would get there.
CA: This is really interesting to me, David. Tell me more about the evolution of your thinking on this.
DB: Well, a few years ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a famous piece for "The Atlantic," called "The Case For Reparations." And I read it learning a lot about the redlining and some of the discriminatory housing policies, but ultimately saying the idea of reparations seems completely unworkable. Like, how do we find out who was a descendant of an African slave, who was not? Are we supposed to give money to Oprah Winfrey and LeBron James? Is it a matter of writing checks? And so, the whole thing seemed wrong because so many Americans have no history in their family of perpetrating slavery. Maybe they're immigrants who came. It seemed like a completely impractical idea.
But over time, as I've seen the crisis grow, I've seen society divide. I've seen our politics overline with our racial divisions, which seems, to me, poisonously dangerous. And we've seen the rise of white ethnic nationalism. It's sort of radicalized my view. And I don't think reparations should be a guilt payment from white people to black people. I think it should be a sign of respect for all of the pain and suffering that has been inflicted through discrimination, through slavery, and it should be a process of coming together to figure this out. And as Coates writes in that essay, the very process of having this conversation is a way to show the respect, a way to acknowledge wounds, and a way to acknowledge that, collectively, this has been our great sin. And it's the great radiating sin that has polluted a lot of our society. And it's the sort of gesture that could at least get us over to the other side, where we can have a different conversation.
Being around the country talking to weavers, I've seen: A, this is a make-or-break moment on race. I really have come to think that with the election of Trump and all the rest. B, there's just so much anger in so many conversations I've had. Of course, we're all aware of it intellectually, but when you spend your days having dinner with folks in South Carolina or wherever, Chicago, New Orleans, and you see the level of not just indignation but pessimism ... I was with a woman in South Carolina -- she was an older woman -- she said, "I grew up in 1953. It's worse for young African American kids in my neighborhood than it was when I grew up." And when you see that level of pessimism, that level of disenchantment, at the same time you have the Trump election and you have, really, our political divides overlapping with our racial divides, you come to the conclusion something unusual needs to be done. And that was my conclusion.
CA: On the right, they might also say, "Don't talk to me about this community being the sort of solution, the center. Our whole point is about community. We are a community that has not been listened to properly. We believe passionately in, you know, the America that we remember and love and miss and whatever, and it's all about community." So what are they missing?
DB: Yeah, well, I would say -- say, evangelical Christians on the right. They have community, but they also have a siege mentality, a mentality that they're completely under assault, which I think is exaggerated. Once you have a siege mentality, once it's us-them, once it's tribal, you're willing to tolerate a leader who violates all your principles, which is what they've done in signing up to Donald Trump. You also, on the right, had an orthodoxy which was economically free market, which actually undermined community. I was William F. Buckley's -- he was my mentor. And at "National Review" in the old days, we had a sort of a tension between the real Milton Friedman free-market conservatives and the social conservatives. But by the time Reagan came along and let alone Paul Ryan, the individualists had won. And so it became all-corporate free market. And the idea that there was any social cohesion that was being ripped apart by the free market, that all was given lip service but no real message. And conservatism drifted off into this hyperindividualism, which has left us, in part, where we were. Free-market economics doesn't give you a way to moralize the market. We're moral creatures. And if you put us in an amoral system, we will rebel. That's sort of what's happening now. And I think what young conservatives are doing is trying to find that thing, that moral market, that sense that, "Capitalism is great, but we've got to put it within social constraints."
CA: But when you think about community, is it -- what would you say to someone who said, "I believe in community, but I also believe this, that community depends on, to some extent, deep roots of tradition. You cannot bring in, in a very short period of time, huge numbers of outsiders with different cultural and other assumptions and jam them in the same space and expect things to go well"? Is that a reasonable point of view?
DB: No. We're in Lower Manhattan. If you walk a half mile southeast of where we're sitting, you'll pass where my great-grandfather had a kosher butcher shop. You will pass where my grandfather had a law firm. You will pass where my mother and father both grew up, where I grew up and, right now, where my son is in college. So that's five generations. And when you go back and look through this neighborhood ... When my grandfather, once, he wrote me a map of the neighborhood, Lower Manhattan. And there were Finnish buildings, there were German buildings, there were Bohemian buildings, there were Russian buildings. This all seemed incredibly polyglot and multicultural at the time. And it had tensions -- I mean, if you walked by a wrong building the wrong day, kids would throw rocks at you. But it was a creative tension, ultimately, and it was something we could handle. And the vision of America as the universal nation was realized in some large measure. I think that's still happening today.
I was in Nebraska yesterday, and I had dinner with about 15 folks in Nebraska. They were all white except one Latina woman, who was a small-business owner in their small town. And she said, "I never had a home, I had to leave home when I was 14. But you people have given me a home, and I love you for the way you've made me feel. And in the last few years, I've just had to turn off Twitter, because I don't want to see what you like on social media." She does not want to know their opinions on immigration policy. She just wants to know them as human beings. And as human beings, they get along. When they start talking about Donald Trump, they get into trouble. So they try not to talk about it.
CA: But it still seems to me that there's an art to how communities can embrace and bring in outsiders, and that there's a huge difference between that feeling of, "People are coming in on our terms and welcomed by us," as opposed to suddenly huge numbers of people who don't look like you and don't talk like you arrive and create that, sort of, feeling of angst. Isn't it possible that the global capitalists who just believe, "Open up everything, make everything free," whatever, that they've been naïve about humans' ability to adapt to change that rapid and that dramatic?
DB: Well, there's clearly tensions, but, every once in a while -- this has happened to me probably six times in the last four or five years -- I say to myself, "You know, I'm going to write a column where I admit that immigration is really complex, and that it's economically a very mixed bag. It hurts people from low-wage jobs." And then I look at the data, and I just don't find it there. I find that immigration boosts growth. It doesn't actually that much cut into the wages of low-wage jobs, because it pushes other people, the earlier inhabitants up the wage scale, up the job scale. So I just don't find evidence to argue that it's this thing that is really sucking down the lower middle class.
CA: Put these together a bit more, because there's quite a wide feeling right now that politics is broken. To some extent, capitalism seems broken. Lots of jobs get lost, lots of inequality. There's just a lot of unease with the comfortable sense of 20, 30 years ago of, "Oh, end of history. We figured out how to run societies." How much are we in need for a radically different political story, perhaps one based around ... you know, with community at the center of it? Or is it better to think -- I mean, you're a conservative. In general, you don't believe in radical change. It's like, "Tinker gently and carefully," right?
DB: I'm a Burkean, yes. CA: (Laughs) Yes. But you're sitting there with what actually is, in some ways, quite a radical idea of there's this magnetic idea at the center. So how should we think about politics right now? Even something as basic as the left-right spectrum seems to be shifting before our eyes. I thought I knew what that was, and I don't think I know what it is now so much. How do you see things now, and where do you hope they go?
DB: Yeah. Somewhere in the book, I mention a theory of change, which is "ratchet, hatchet, pivot, ratchet." So, we face a common set of problems: World War II, The Depression, whatever. We create a culture to fix it and we do that collectively, and we ratchet upward, we move upward, and that culture works for a while. And then it stops working. And then you have to hatchet it up, you have to chop it up. And those are moments of paradigm shift, when everything is in uproar. And 1968 was such a moment, 1848 was such a moment, probably 1905, and now is such a moment. We're chopping it all up. And in those moments when you're chopping up the old paradigm, it can seem really messy. But I have faith in human ingenuity that we'll figure it out, and we'll pivot over, and then we'll ratchet up again. So I do think that our core problem right now is social isolation and social fragmentation, loss of trust, loss of social capital. And if we built a society based on our affections -- and I always get woo-woo and gooey, because that is the real stuff. What are our affections that bind us? There are sort of four things.
There's our kids. We rally around our kids. So if we had a set of policies to help kids have early childhood education and nurse-family partnerships and better schooling and better training, that's something we can all agree on.
Second, we rally around our work, our ability to give to each other through work. And if we had a set of policies that were about training, about community colleges, about wage subsidies, that would lend dignity to work. That's something else we could rally around.
Third, we rally around a story. A community is a group of people who share a single story, and we as Americans have lost our story. We had a story, but it was sort of the white male story of American exceptionalism. We need a new story that includes all the voices who are here. So telling that common story is the third thing.
And then, I think just our love for each other is the final thing, just creating those neighborhood bonds that lead to national bonds.
CA: Have you seen any leaders adopting some of this thinking? Is this just going to be subjects for columns for years to come, or might the country, and not just this country, other countries change in response to some of this thinking?
DB: Yeah, Robert Putnam has a theory which I agree with, or at least I learned from him, which is, he looked at moments of social change, big change; and 1890 to 1910 was such a moment. It was a period when we had a big wave of immigration, a big economic transition, a lot of political corruption ... And he said, "How did change happen?" He said, "First, it happened culturally. The social gospel movement replaced social Darwinism, so a very individualistic ethos was replaced by a communitarian ethos. Second, you had a civic renaissance. You saw the creation of the Boys and Girls Clubs, the Boy and Girl Scouts, the temperance movement, the settlement house movement, NAACP, unions, environmental movement. And then, later, you had the progressive movement, a political movement. So, it went: cultural change, civic change, political change. And to me, that's probably the right sequence. I think we're in a cultural change moment. We're certainly in a civic renaissance. So many people are starting new organizations to weave people together. The political change ... I live near Capitol Hill, and that I don't see yet. But that'll come last, after we fix the society and the ideas.
CA: Give us a sense of what it feels like on the inside of being a Republican who is not in love with the current president.
DB: It wasn't that bumpy. I really didn't lose a lot of my friends. If you look at my résumé, I worked at the "Wall Street Journal" editorial page. I worked at "National Review, '" the "Weekly Standard," the "Washington Times." I've sort of done the whole thing. I worked at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. But I would say most of my friends are all Never Trumpers. And I think we shared a certain ethos of what conservatism meant. One of them, by the way, was that politics is a limited activity, that what really matters is character and relationships and things like that. And so it was beyond the pale for us to get involved with a guy like Trump who violates every moral norm you can think of. And second, frankly -- and I'm not sure those on the left will want to hear this, but -- I spend a lot of time in conservative circles, but I live in New York and DC, and so I spend a lot of time in liberal circles. I would say I've heard more condescending racial language in my progressive circles than my conservative circles.
CA: Like what? People talk about white supremacist casually without --
DB: No, not even that, but just sort of patronizing attitudes towards African Americans and other minorities and sort of "the bigotry of low expectations," as George W. Bush called it. And I think, for a lot of us, at least on my kind of conservatism, Trump's appeals to race were unsupportable. That was just -- no matter what else he said, that was beyond the pale and could be someplace we could never go. So it's been awkward. And for a lot of people whose policy ideas find a natural home in the Republican Party, it's not clear what's going to happen, because the Republican Party, I don't think, is not going back to the way it was, and it may be caught up in Trumpianism for a good while to come. And -- I'll just speak for myself -- I just feel homeless, politically homeless. I actually like Elizabeth Warren personally, but I never agree with her ideas. I can never support the current Republican Party. So what do I do? I don't know. There's that Starbucks guy, but I'm not sure he has an idea, either.
(Laughs)
CA: But that must be profoundly depressing, though. Right? That doesn't sound like you see a particular way forward for someone, let alone a party, who can actually execute and do something. Unless it's a centrist Democrat? Then you're feeling happier?
DB: Yeah, but because I'm conservative, I believe "... of all the things human hearts endure, how few are those that kings can cause and cure?" So, most of life is not political. Most of life is moral, social, relational. So that's why I wrote a book on how to improve relationships, because I think that's where the real action is, and that's how we can make big improvements in our lives and the lives around us.
CA: Let's actually explore that for a bit, because it's an easy thing to say, and I actually happen to agree. The pieces I would tack onto that is that a lot of what shapes history is scientific and technological; it's people who engage in the art of changing what is possible. It's changing, if you like, the shape of the adjacent possible. But, that is in flat contradiction to every media agenda. Like, the entire front page of every newspaper and the first hour of every cable show is all in the politics of the moment. It's the incremental "Who did what that was outrageous this time? Just how angry are they? How scandalous is it?" There's no exploration of this other stuff. So the implication of your view is that most of media is missing the most interesting conversations out there.
DB: For sure. That's a zillion times true. Like I say, we're over-politicized and under-moralized and under-culturalized, under-technologized. You know, I go to TED periodically and you get to see Sergey Brin. You get to see people who literally will be known in 300 years. When we look back on certain decades -- 1890s, 1880s -- how many decades do we think the political leaders were the most important thing in that decade? In the 1920s? No, it was the culture, the Flappers. In the 1930s, it was the Depression, but it was also the rise of Hollywood. And in the 1950s, it was, like, James Dean. And these figure in today. In the 1990s, clearly, it will be Silicon Valley, maybe even today. I often tell young people, if I were starting my career, I'd look into genetics, I'd look at biogenetics. I mean, that's clearly where the action is going to be. But we like to cover things that have press conferences. (Laughs) It's easier. And then, at the moment, we're all caught up in the national soap opera of Donald Trump's brain. And if you want to write a column that'll get a lot of views, you write about how bad Donald Trump is, and readers and viewers seem to have a limitless appetite for that. But I do think it's just a gigantic distraction to what's actually shaping and what's actually happening in America.
CA: I mean, that's a riddle that plays out in quite a painful way across all social media online, that there appears to be a frustrating gap between humans' natural attention magnets and what might be healthy for the culture. We've discovered what Rupert Murdoch has known for a long time, that the way to harvest lots and lots of attention, lots of eyeballs, is to showcase strong opinion, anger, outrage, drama. Reason does not play, is not a winner.
DB: Yeah, and I've found I can't Twitter about sacrificial love.
(Laughter)
DB: It doesn't get a lot of retweets.
CA: There's an extent to which people are embarrassed to have the conversation in public, I think. It's, in a sense, mockable. People will be there right now, sort of finding that tweet about which part of this they want to mock. It's just, the more, high-minded is the word, but the more sincere, the more earnest any conservation gets, the more people want to take the piss. Like, is there any scenario or future where it actually becomes cool to talk about uplifting material?
DB: I think it is for 90% of the people, but there are 10% of the mockers out there. And I've found that when my columns have generated the most vicious response, it's because I admitted some vulnerability, something I did wrong. And there's something about vulnerability that once, gets a lot of people to say, "OK, you're a real human being, you're not just some pundit blowhard," but there's another group that vulnerability enrages them, and they see it as a chance to pounce. And so, the courage to be vulnerable is one of the key courages of our time.
I mentioned this group Thread. There's a woman who sits on the board. Her dad beat her when she was a kid. And until she was in Thread, she didn't tell that story to anybody, because it would be vulnerable and make people uncomfortable. But she got in this group where they have an ethos of, as they say, "You will show all the way up. You will call a thing a thing. You will be brutally honest and vulnerable. So she told the story to Thread and then told it to her family, and then she allowed me to put her writing in my book. That's an act of great courage. And with that act of courage, you create combustion, you create emotional combustion. And that's how communities are formed. I think most of us know that, but there's a group of people who are not weavers of society, who are rippers of society, and when they see vulnerability, they see a chance to pounce and destroy. And I don't know what they're acting out of, but it is a fact. But that doesn't mean vulnerability should be stopped. Brené Brown, a woman I don't know, but I admire her, she's written a lot about vulnerability, and I think she's correctly identified the key trait of our age.
CA: Yeah, she had a memorable TED Talk that is actually one of the most viewed of all time. And that idea, actually, really resonated with people. There are a lot people, I think, who are holding tension, and by being given permission to be vulnerable, it actually is a big deal for them.
DB: Yeah, and that is how a relationship is built. It's when one person's vulnerable, and the other matches their vulnerability and then offers. And then it's a series of gradual deepening and trusting gestures.
CA: I mean, the question for me is -- you know, these stories are inspiring. How scalable is this? Is there a world where enough people look around and they see, "Life isn't very good. I could do something. Let's do this," and it actually moves the dial in a way that, for example, reverses the current suicide rates and all the other miserable things that are happening? Do you think it's scalable?
DB: Yes, so, here's the theory of change for my project, called Weave: The Social Fabric Project. It is that relationships are the key to restoring society but relationships don't scale, because they're built one-on-one and they take time. But norms scale. If you can shift the norms of a culture, how we should behave in the world, then you can really have a bigger change. These weavers are a movement that doesn't know it's a movement. They're all out there. They don't know their common values. They don't know they're all part of one big thing. And we just try to lift them up and say, "You actually are one thing," And if we can unify and create some hubs, then we can have a big effect.
CA: I mean, is there any political policy that could further empower and inspire more people to join that movement?
DB: You know, the politics, as I say, comes last. There are things I would do. One thing I would do is I would take the charitable tax credit and I would make it possible as a refundable credit for people who are not making enough to really itemize their deductions, to really encourage charitable giving up and down the income stream, or at least reward it. The giving is already happening. Poor people give a higher percentage of their income than rich people.
CA: You get a deduction even if you're not paying taxes?
DB: Right. You get it, basically, an EITC-type credit. You get some refund. And so there are things I would do. I do think it's also important to devolve power. I think devolving power out of Washington and giving people actual local control is a way to really get them active in their community. I was in, as I say, Nebraska yesterday. Nebraska's weird because it's a state without too many people, but it's got 93 counties. Some of the counties only have 700 or 800 people in them, but they've still got to have a school board, got to have a water council. So everybody, basically, has to get involved in government, because there just are so many jobs that need to get done. And I think it's very good for Nebraska that people are really involved.
CA: One of the things that I think every community in the world today, every physical, real community anchored in place, is probably facing is that there's these new massive competitors for people's attention and time, aka technology in its different forms. I mean, Netflix is kind of awesome. The internet in general: full of unbelievably powerful addictions, attractions and ways to spend time, and including the offer, apparently, of community. And so, so many people are actually shifting their sort of potential to form communities to online efforts, their Facebook friends, etc., etc. Is that part of what's happened?
DB: Yeah, I would -- when you talk about the desire to find apparent community, I would emphasize the word "apparent." The 70% rise in teenage suicide rate correlates pretty well with the rise of the smartphone. And so it's an apparent community, but it's also a community that can be comparative and doesn't really satisfy people. So -- this is something you appreciate probably more than any other human being on earth -- we have, now, all these screens, we can sit at home and watch YouTube. So what's taken off in the last 10 years? The conference business. People want to be together. They want to be in a room together and experience something face-to-face, body-to-body and emotion-to-emotion. A surprisingly underappreciated sense is our sense of smell. When we're around each other, we're constantly taking in each other's pheromones and other things, and we're communicating in a way we're not conscious of. And so, I would say people in every neighborhood I go to, brunch has become the new church. People really need to be in direct contact with each other, and they need to have local contacts. So, Netflix and all that stuff is great, but I don't think there's anybody who really thinks that a fulfilling life is spent watching "Game of Thrones."
CA: But part of the problem is, people don't have to think that people's reflective minds can know that that's not the best thing, but in the moment, the power of a lot of these magnets is pretty intense. People may not say, "This is what I want to do," but people are addicted, and whether it's to technology or to opioids or to whatever it is, these addictions have a pretty toxic effect.
DB: Yeah, the ancient word is "idolatry." So, we idolize certain things that we think will give us ultimate satisfaction, and sometimes it's alcohol, sometimes it's opioids, sometimes it's Twitter. And the thing about idolatry, at the beginning, it feels great. It asks for nothing and gives you everything. The first drink of the martini tastes great. At the end of idolatry, it gives you nothing and asks for everything. Alcoholism totally takes over your life. And I think that's true of the smartphone. And we've got this new technology that, at the beginning, we thought, "Oh, it's going to make everything great. We'll all communicate and the world will be peaceful." Now we've realized that's the opposite of the truth, because we had an unrealistic view of human nature. We've also learned that these are tools. And if you look for a tool like a bus to get you from one place to another, that's fine. If you look to give yourself meaning, that's a mistake. We've learned that smartphones and the rest of the technology has to be controlled, we've got to create rules around it. So now what you're watching is, all across America, parents figuring out, "I've got to limit screen time. I've got to limit screen time. What rules do I place?" And we're figuring out how to use that technology. I have basic faith in, again, our ability to figure stuff out. We'll figure out how to use technology so it doesn't destroy us.
CA: So, pull the camera back and look out at the country and the world. Where are you, David, on the pessimism-optimism spectrum, and why?
DB: I'm a long-term optimist. In the 1990s, I covered Europe and that part of the world, and I covered a bunch of great events. I covered the fall of the Berlin Wall, German reunification, the end of the Soviet Union, Mandela coming out of prison in South Africa, the Oslo Peace Process in the Middle East. And it seemed like barriers were coming down, and liberal democracy was going to triumph. The past 25 years had been seeing the rise of ethnic nationalism, the rise of authoritarianism, the rise of tribalism. And so, that has been the great negative trend of the last few decades. But, as I say, I do think human beings figure stuff out, and I do think cultures shift. Culture is a collective response to the problems of the moment, and most of the people I visit with on the left and right don't want to live in an era of tribal warfare. They just don't like it. Even in Washington, that's true. And so, I have to feel that we have the ability to create an alternative future not based on tribe but based on our commitments to one another.
CA: I actually love that, those four words: "People figure stuff out." But people, actually -- that is outside most of the discussion. Most of the discussion we have is this sort of dawning realization of how awful some new trend or whatever is, and it feels overwhelming to most people. And our normal response is just to either change the subject or to carry it, feel sick about it. And we actually get annoyed with people who say, "You know, I think we might be able to solve that." It's like, "Don't be so silly." And yet, if there is to be any hope, that's kind of the only thing we can believe -- like, it won't sort itself out. And so, I kind of love that mindset of, yeah, live with the problem for a bit and then just say, "Well, what would it look like if people were to figure it out? Does that have to be done in a giant leap? Can it be done piecemeal? Who are the people who might do that?" Maybe those people should be on the front page of the newspaper from time to time. They often are not. They're just ignored or laughed at.
DB: Right, and one of the good moments for me was, I looked back through the social science and the big public intellectual literature of the past hundred years, and in every decade, people were too pessimistic. There was always "the decline of this" and "the decline of that," and "the end of this" and "the end of that." And you look back, they were complaining in the 1950s. Well ... things were okay. (Laughs) And in retrospect, most of the cataclysms never come to pass. We in the public intellectual business are cataclysmic because it wins us attention, and because we genuinely want to draw attention to problems. But, if you look at the balance of our history, it's the story of people suffering through things and then figuring it out. And that was true of the Civil War, which was a more tumultuous period than our own. It was true of World War II, the Great Depression. These were all worse periods than our own. What decade, exactly, do people want to go back to? I wouldn't want to go back to any of them. I think our problems are severe, and global warming and things are really severe, but I'd rather have our problems than almost any other decade's problems.
One of the things I think about a lot -- and I haven't really taken this thought very far -- is that we've spent a lot of time, all of us in our business, thinking about decision-making and cognitive biases and heuristics and the work of Danny Kahneman. And over the last 30 years, we've learned so much about that and just how we do decisions. The next big frontier, it seems to me, is desire. What are our motivations? Where do our desires come from? How come I can't force myself to love clams? Where does that desire come from? So, to me, knowledge is now plentiful, but motivation is scarce. And so, figuring out what motivates people is really the next frontier in understanding ourselves. What are our desires?
CA: What will motivate people to make change? Is it that the assumption of a lot of activists is that you have to really turn up the level of concern? You have to scare the frog to leap out of their nearly boiling pot, otherwise, it will just fester there? But, others believe it can't just be that, that if that's pushed too far, you have no reason to do anything. It's some mixture of a belief that a solution can be found coupled with that. Has anyone researched that? It seems to me that's such an important topic, because, I mean, the future of our species kind of hangs on us collectively generating the conditions whereby enough people get off their asses and start to tinker around and fix things.
DB: Right. And I'm not sure I've seen data on that. I've read philosophy about it. And so, if I wanted to motivate people to do a cause, I would say, "If you join this, you can get really close to people." Most of our thinking is not for truth-finding. Most of our thinking is for social bonding. We think the things will get us liked. And so, if -- I mean, global warming, you know, one of the opportunities and one of burdens is, it's a collective problem that we have to solve together. And so, to me, it is the specter and the hope that this is the problem around which we can build a global community. And I'll go back to the Bible. This is a Rabbi Jonathan Sacks point. The Book of Exodus has hundreds and hundreds of verses on the building of the Tabernacle. Why do they have hundreds of verses around building this little structure? It's because a community is a group of people who build something together. Sacks's book is called "The Home We Build Together." So, dealing with global warming is the project that can unify us. That seems, to me, the hope, and that's really what motivates people, is to want to be with each other.
CA: On your own journey, do you feel you're halfway up your second mountain? Do you feel like you are finding meaning, and has it brought you happiness?
DB: I feel I've been through the valley and I at least know what to look for. I know what desires are the best desires, and I try to live -- even though I'm a newspaper columnist -- at the level the heart and the soul. And I've been taught a distinction between happiness and joy. And I shoot for joy. Happiness is when you win a victory. It's about the expansion of self: you get a promotion; your team wins the Super Bowl. Joy is about the transcendence of self, when you forget about yourself. It's when you're dancing with others and you lose yourself. It's a mother and daughter in communion with each other. It's when you're with your crowd and you forget all about yourself. And to me, the highest thing to shoot for in life is moral joy. When you're serving a cause and you care about it so much, you're not thinking about yourself at all.
So letting the self slip away is what I'm shooting for in life, and I don't always get there. In fact, I never get there. I never spend a whole day. But it's what I'm shooting for. When my column comes out, I always check to see, "How did it do? Was it popular, was it not popular?" That's something I should never do, but I'm stuck with myself. But the moments when you can forget yourself and lose yourself in a cause ... And the people I see who radiate moral joy -- they're not at stake. They're not thinking about themselves. They're living a life that genuinely is for others. And I used to think that was impossible, that everybody's sort of selfish, which is sort of true. But I've seen it so many times -- these weavers, they literally live for others, and they radiate joy.
CA: Speaking of evolutionary quirks, it is weird that people who live for others seem to get joy from it. It's not clear to me why evolution would allow that.
DB: Yeah, the theory would be, we didn't survive because we were really strong or fast. We survived because we're really good at cooperation. And the first time the tigers came to get us, they ate us, but the second time, we figured out ways to fight them off.
CA: But, if that was so, you would think that people would know that being generous to others would give them joy. Most people don't know that. They don't even think about it. It's not on their menu of possibility to really focus a huge effort.
DB: Well, first, we're supremely broken, but we're also splendidly endowed. We have both things. But I would say our culture has messed us up. The word "altruism" was only invented a few centuries ago. Once we invented the concept that human beings are basically selfish, then we had to invent a word for when they behave nicely. But before that, being altruistic wasn't odd. It was just what you did. It was part of your community. We in America are the most individualistic, so we're off on the extreme. And we have a social science model that says we're all basically self-interested, which I think is partially or largely untrue.
CA: So, David, I like to ask everyone who comes on this podcast, if they could implant one idea in everyone out there, what would that idea be?
DB: What I notice between first-mountain people and second-mountain people is those who have fallen into themselves, that we all sort of grow life leading in the ego level, like, "I am what the world thinks about me. I want people to like me. I want to be well thought of, I want to be admired, I want to win victories." But in the crucial moment of life, you realize those are not the important things. You fall into yourself, and you really live at the level of your heart, which yearns for the fusion with others, and the level of your soul, which years for fusion with some ultimate good. And people who have taken the bigger journey of life have fallen into themselves, and they've discovered the substrate, the lowest level of themselves, where they find an illimitable ability to care. I have a friend who I quote in the book. She said, "When my daughter was born, I realized I loved her more than evolution required."
CA: Huh.
DB: There's a level of love and care that is just completely human, and in that level of love and care, that's where our dignity is found.
CA: That's a beautiful line. Well, David Brooks, this has been an amazing conversation. We have charted individual dreams and the fate of the country, the planet, etc. I've loved every minute.
DB: Thank you. It's been a great honor to be here. Thank you, Chris.
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CA: David Brooks is a "New York Times" columnist and the author of four books, including "The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life." To listen to David’s Ted Talks, visit TED.com
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This week’s show was produced by Megan Tan. Our production manager is Roxanne Hai Lash. Our mix engineer, David Herman. Our theme music is by Allison Leyton-Brown. Special thanks to my colleague Michelle Quint.
If you like this show, please share it with someone else who is curious and consider rating and reviewing us on iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
I’m Chris Anderson. Thanks so much for listening.
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On the next episode: leading AI researcher, investor, author, Kai-Fu Lee. We talk about some of the amazing developments happening in China and the possible implications for the future of work for all of us.
(Recording) Kai-Fu Lee: AI will be able to do most of the jobs of 40 percent of the people. So I worry: Are we going to be able to shift fast enough and prepare for this future world in which the routine jobs are displaced?
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