Elizabeth Oldfield speaks to New York Times columnist David Brooks. 08/12/2021

David is an op ed columnist for the New York Times, a radio and television host, author of multiple bestselling books, and Chair of Weave the social fabric project at the Aspen Institute, among many other things.

He speaks about the distancing effects of fame, his midlife crisis and subsequent conversion to Christianity, and the challenges of talking about morality in public life at the immense difficulty of dying to ourselves.

Each episode in this series includes an additional reflection from Elizabeth at the end, so keep listening if you’d like to. We are also publishing full transcripts of each episode so scroll down on this page if you’re a reader rather than a listener.  

You can read a full transcript of the episode here:

Elizabeth
Hello, and welcome to The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield. This is a podcast about the deep values that drive us, the people behind the positions in our public conversations, and how we can build empathy across the very many, many things that we disagree on. Every episode, I speak to someone who has some kind of public voice or platform, from activists to artists, journalists, to philosophers, entrepreneurs, to academics, to comic book writers to Archbishops and many more. I’m trying to listen deeply to people from a wide range of positions, to understand how they got to where they are both in their professional life and in their thinking, and learn from their wisdom about how we can better cross our divides. If you listen long enough, you should hear someone that you wouldn’t naturally choose to listen to who you might even vehemently disagree with or dislike. And it’s helpful to notice that those two things often come together. But I hope you will, by listening, increase your understanding, and maybe even learn something interesting. I have done this long enough now to know that everyone is more complicated, usually more conflicted, and often more a person of goodwill than I perhaps perceived them to be before we met. It’s really helped complicate my narratives about the different tribes in public life. And I really hope that it does for you too.

In this new series, you may already have noticed that we are adding some reflections at the end so I can chew over and reflect on my thoughts after the interview. So do keep listening, if you would like to. And as usual, if you have a moment, wherever you are now – on the bus, walking down the street, on the toilet, maybe head over to iTunes, and leave us a little rating or review. I’d be really grateful for that. And remember, one of the most helpful things you can do is send an episode to a friend and start a conversation with them. We really really love encouraging new, interesting, deeper conversations.

And in this episode, you’ll hear a conversation I had with David Brooks. David is an op ed columnist for the New York Times a radio and television host, author of multiple bestselling books, and chair of Weave the social fabric project at the Aspen Institute, among many, many things, you can go and read his very impressive biography for yourselves. We spoke about the distancing effects of fame, his midlife crisis and subsequent conversion to Christianity, and the challenges of talking about morality in public life, at the immense difficulty of dying to ourselves, I really hope you enjoy listening.

Elizabeth
I’ve actually, I’ve been thinking this morning, David that I was going to kick off by flipping the order of what we usually do. Usually right at the end, I ask people about how we navigate across our differences, our tribes, how we build empathy in places where there is division, and I’m going to flip it and ask at the beginning, partly because I know you’re writing about how we learn to really see each other, to really encounter each other as human beings, partly because I am, after the Bible, Martin Buber’s I–thou is my kind of secondary, sacred text. And also honestly, because I’ve been having this real wrestle this morning between David Brooks, famous New York Times columnist, the sort of cultural artefact, the cipher of your identity in public. And then David Brooks, fragile, complex human being like everyone else who I want to be able to connect with in this conversation. And the – I find it often when I interview particularly famous people, or powerful people, or – there’s various ways we create distance, right? So I just wanted to name that right at the start to try and get out of the way. And ask are there ways, from what you’re reading, and also from your experiences, that would help this conversation be more I–thou, that I can honour you and treat you as a human being and not just someone who I’m trying to extract something from?

David
Yeah, I mean, the thing that comes to mind is – I don’t think this has to do with writing for the New York Times and being moderately well known. I think early in life, you put up walls and barriers in order to be efficient, and in order to achieve success, and so I would say I value, I came to value time over people. And that was sort of a natural defence for somebody who’s naturally aloof – my nursery school teacher told me I was an aloof personality. And Jerry Seinfeld, the comedian said, my friends say I have an intimacy problem, but they don’t really know me. And so that that’s, that’s something I share. And I would say, in midlife, I hopefully have gotten more emotionally open. And I’ve had a couple of occasions where somebody didn’t know me, or somebody knew me a little and saw me say, within a four year interval, and on a couple occasions, five years after they previously had a conversation with me, they said, I’ve never seen anybody change so much in midlife. You were so blocked before. And when I look at videos of my earlier self, I think, Wow, I’m really not that guy anymore. Which is a good thing. Though I suffer a lot more. I was much happier when I was super shallow. I didn’t have any bad emotions, I wasn’t sad in the mornings, so it’s kind of good. I’m so pleased to be shallow. Now I’m burdened with the world’s problems.

Elizabeth
Even Oprah said that to you, which I thought was hilarious. Just like, Oh David Brooks got interesting again.

David
If Oprah knows then that must be the truth because she’s Oprah.

Elizabeth
She is. Okay. I am going to ask you about the word sacred. Tell me both how you feel about it as someone who cares about words, and if you have an intuition about what might be sacred to you.

David
Yeah, I mean, the first thing that leaps to mind is the word soul. And I happen to be a person of faith. But I don’t think you have to be a person of faith to believe in a soul. That you can believe that each person has some piece of themselves that has no size, weight, colour or shape, but has infinite value and dignity. And the reason slavery is wrong is it’s an attempt to insult the soul. Rape is an attempt to insult the soul. And we’re not equal in the realm of our ideas or our muscle power. But we’re equal on the level of our soul. And so my view is if you treat everybody who has a longing soul, a soul that longs to be good, you probably treat them the right way. And so that’s the first thing that leaps to mind with sacred. The second and maybe more peculiar thing is time, is transition over the centuries. So when I feel the sacred, I feel that in Cathedrals, I feel it on the streets of Ephesus. I feel it anytime there have been a progression of people over centuries, who have regarded a place as important. And even in the US, if you go to the Gettysburg Battlefield. Or if you go to Waterloo in Belgium, and you find places where people were violently alive. And you hear the ghosts, the ghosts of their dead and the beaches of Normandy. For some reason, that procession of human interaction over centuries in a sacred place is when I feel that kind of spiritual depth most acutely.

Elizabeth
Do you think what you hold sacred has changed? Or have those two things being fairly constant?

David
Yeah, I used to hold Arsenal sacred. And you know, I think – I definitely think it has changed. I would say what was sacred to me as a kid was probably not that much. I grew up in New York immigrant household. And like New York immigrants, there was a culture in those days of acute Anglophilia. And so the phrase was ‘think Yiddish, act British.’

Elizabeth
I’ve never heard that.

David
Yeah, and so all the Jewish families gave their kids English names so nobody would think they were Jewish. And they were names like Irving, Norman, Milton, Sydney, it didn’t work at all, because – in America, at least – those were considered Jewish names, not English names. But I was sent to an Episcopal School called Grace Church school on lower Manhattan. And I looked up at the ceiling of this beautiful, beautiful little school, it looks it’s a gothic chapel. And I certainly had a calling of the sacred. And I’m not sure it was the stained glass, the images of Jesus, the Stations of the cross, it was more the soaring arches that enlivened something in me even as a four year old, a fourth grade choir boy.

Elizabeth
So you had a sort of – syncretistic feels too strong, it’s usually used negatively. I don’t mean it like that, but certainly a kind of woven inheritance of Christianity and Judaism in your childhood. What, if anything, I’m going to use the G bomb, was God a presence to you, an absence, a theory at that stage in your life?

David
An absence. As a Jew I experienced Judaism as peoplehood, as the exodus story, as a procession of the centuries, as one’s responsibility to a people who just 16 years before I was born, were nearly exterminated from Europe. And so the acute sense of peoplehood in the Hebrew phrase … from generation to generation, I acutely experienced that then and I acutely experience it now. And Christianity was really polite, tall, good looking people. Now, I’m exaggerating, but it was like, as an immigrant, these Episcopalians were, were essentially Anglican, but they were the establishment. And they had, they came from different culture, they didn’t shout as much as we did. But they, but the story and the songs and the hymns were just woven into the fabric of my childhood. But I certainly did not experience any presence of God, I had no encounter with God, I had no sense of the transcendent. It was – these were just important moral systems built around a series of books that were useful to read for wisdom.

Elizabeth
We’ll come back to this later but you’ve written a lot about the transition from a kind of moral realism to moral romanticism and, and various other dualities. When you think about your childhood, is it a mix of those stories? Or would you pull out one or the other that you think was most dominant?

David
Yeah, I mean, frankly, when I think about my childhood, I think about my grandfather and the immigrant story that he raised me with that, you know, that which is an exodus story, it’s we came from oppression, we crossed the ocean and came to the promised land.

Elizabeth
Where did he come from?

David
Ukraine, Ukraine and Latvia, essentially. So we were all on the pail of settlements, the Jewish settlements in Central Europe. And so… but it was that sense you’re arriving, you know, and the exodus story played just this powerful influence on American history that the Puritans thought they were leading, living the Exodus, the founders, the American founders wanted to put Moses on the Great Seal of the United States. Because we had come to the Promised Land, Martin Luther King talked about Exodus more than the New Testament. And so that was just the story into which our lives were shaped. And the exodus is a story that happened in order to be told, God told Moses to lead people across the desert so we can have a story to tell about ourselves. And the community is a group of people organised around a common story. And so that was certainly the defining feature of how not only I saw the moral life of the centuries, but my own personal life as this journey toward the land of milk and honey.

Elizabeth
What were your teenage years like?
David
Schmucky, you know, I was a smug, self–satisfied, completely happy teenager. And so I did not go through an angsty period – I knew I wanted to write, but I was in a pretty nice group of friends, probably about 30 of us and we all dated each other in different order. And if anybody has seen the American film, The Breakfast Club, that was my school, it was a big public high school with all the cliques and the jocks hated the drama kids, and the greasers hated the, you know, I don’t know who, the tech kids. Everything I know about American society, I learned in the cafeteria in high school, which is that people will divide themselves off into social identity groups. And there will be natural rivalries between these groups.

Elizabeth
You went to University of Chicago and you’ve talked really movingly about the kind of intellectual legacy there. And you were studying Western civilizations, or that was your kind of summary of what was being taught there, is that right?

David
We were all studying Western civilization. So the – Chicago had a great books programme, a core. So for the first two years, I read, I think I calculated I wrote 17 papers on two… I probably took three or four classes on Thomas Hobbes, we were thrown into the great books, and it changed my life, once you’ve tasted the fine wine of those books, it’s hard to go back to Kool Aid. And so I think it left an imprint, first, intense love of learning. And our professors… You know, there’s a saying that if you catch fire with enthusiasm, people will come from miles to watch you burn. And our professors thought that if we read these books carefully, we would learn how to live, learn how to live a good life. And so there was the moral improvement of oneself was on the agenda. And the tool was not the Bible. It was not charity, was not Doctors Without Borders. The tool was Nietzsche, Hobbes, Kant, Augustine, George Eliot. And so this was the path to the good life. And once you raise that sort of moral aspiration, that life is about what the Germans called moral formation, then you’ve planted a seed of disquiet in your students that they will spend the rest of their life trying to trying to fulfil.

Elizabeth
My impression is that’s maybe ebbed a bit from educational institutions, certainly in the UK, and the US as what’s seen as the purpose of education. Do you feel that?

David
Very much so. There was a sense that education was about what they call the humanistic idea of the formation of humans. And there’s this school, a prep school, called public school in the New England where the headmaster said, we try to create students who are acceptable at a dance, invaluable at a shipwreck. And so that sense that this is some work, we’re forming a person who will come through in a crisis, that for all the snobbery of Eton and rugby in those schools, that was what they thought they were about. And that was certainly what the University of Chicago thought it was about in a different way. The universities have shifted. And I have a friend and cousin, the very famous linguist, Steven Pinker, who says, you know, I’ve been involved in a zillion faculty hiring decisions, and I went to grad school, and I never got a class in moral formation or character building, and forming characters has never been part of our hiring decisions when we hire for our department. And so we know nothing about this. So we should not really be in that business. And I understand his point, but I would say, especially when you’re dealing with young people, and maybe with all people, you’re in the business regardless, and the students are hungering for – not people to tell them how to be good, they they’re not going to listen that way. But they want to have a moral vocabulary so they can figure it out. And so whenever you offer a course that tries to deal with moral formation, they flock to it. Even if it’s a shallow course on positive psychology or something like that, the hunger is out there.

Elizabeth
I will ignore the wince so I can hear from all the positive psychology listeners. So you left the University of Chicago with this – sounds incredibly precious sense of the power of literature and words and civilization for the good life. And then were writing opinion pieces and editing and working your way up in journalism and writing books that were more kind of social analysis, Bobos in Paradise, The Social Animal, which is where I first came across you. What were the kind of threads you were pulling on during that season of your life, I guess, personally and professionally?

David
I think it was really more about status. I was more in the Tom Wolfe world, the world of pure bourgeois would be the highbrow version of this. And the world of Paul Fussell, the guy who wrote Class. So I was writing sociological analysis, and it started because I was a humour columnist. And when you write books that are humour, all you can do is make fun of rich people. And I was perfectly happy to do that. So I made fun of rich people for a living, and so these are the sort of people who live in upscale suburbs of America. And so my first book Bobos In Paradise was really gentle mockery of people who had made a tonne of money and then had invented a code of consumption in order to prove how spiritual they were. So they wouldn’t spend money on the fancy chandelier and lobster, but they would spend $20,000 on an Aga stove to prove that you were sort of a peasant involved in good cooking or shower stalls – the rule was you can spend any amount of money on a room formerly used by the servants. So it was this code of sumptuary consumption that was spiritually enlightened. So I – Bobos In Paradise was really making fun of them. And little did I know that this class of bourgeois Bohemians would become the dominant elite class in society against which every other class would rebel. And little did I appreciate that the people used to be, what do you call them – Sloane park rangers or people like that, they would grow up to be slightly more cultured. And then the whole Tory party would swing against them. And nominate, you know, Boris Johnson to stick a thumb in the eye of the Hampstead Elite or something like that.

Elizabeth
Whilst looking suspiciously similar himself in many ways. And it’s a – How were you, conceiving of yourself during that time? There’s sort of ridiculous internecine conversations about elites, but did you have a – Did you have a human status anxiety yourself? Did you wonder how you’re positioning yourself? How was your sense of identity during that period?

David
Yeah, especially in that kind of time in my life, I made a living off of self–hatred. So I proudly said I’m a member of this. I do this like, I went to an elite school. I live in New York City or Washington DC. I ride the SLO, which is our train line from New York to New Haven to Boston to Washington. And so that, that I confess to being a member of the class and I guess I still am. But I wrote a piece called Status Income Disequilibrium, which is about people who have high status and low income.

Elizabeth
That is familiar, every journalist I talk!

David
And so like, we talked to rich people, interviewing them for our jobs, and then they go home to these really nice apartments, we go to these crappy little places where we have to clean our own toilets. And I talked about the moral trauma of this life

Elizabeth
Which is a helpful pivot to 2013. I don’t mean to laugh, because I know it was actually a very dark time. So forgive the crunch of gears. You have written really vulnerably and openly about that crisis. Can you tell us a bit about what happened?

David
It was a crisis of values, I mean, on the surface, and in some real way it was, it was just the normal personal crisis that people go through occasionally, it was going through a divorce, kids had left home. And so I was stuck in this crappy little apartment. And I did what any American Idiot would do, when overcome with a moral and emotional problem, I tried to work my way through it. And so I became a complete workaholic. In the, in my book, The Second Mountain, I describe the metaphor for that phase of life, which was, I was never entertaining anybody, because I didn’t have that kind of friends. And so I, if you went to the drawer in my kitchen, where there should have been silverware, there were post–it notes. And where there should have been plates there was stationary. And that’s the metaphor for a kind of workaholic life. The larger problem was a sense of leading a life according to values that I knew were wrong, and coming to not recognise oneself. And that’s leading a life of emotional numbness, lack of vulnerability, lack of spiritual hunger. And so, you know, I had written this book, The Social Animal about emotion, it was classic me, I wanted to find out what emotions were. So I wrote a book about it. Rather than maybe I should feel some. And, and so that was, that began the process of hopefully, some sort of personal change. And what I said earlier about that Oprah thing, it’s a lesson which I firmly believe that people it’s never too late to pretty radically change your life.

Elizabeth
And what’s really telling, and it’s beginning in The Road to Character, where it’s clear that your kind of hunger for these stories of people who have depth and moral courage. And there’s beginning to be bits of you in there. But it’s only really in The Second Mountain where you write really vulnerably and openly about – you use the phrase, the howling loneliness of, your howling emptiness of the weekend or the loneliness, and I had this real sensation of, Oh, thank goodness, because in all our conversations about vulnerability in public, and the importance of not just kind of staying distant and analytical about these deep things, it’s usually women who do that, it feels like there’s a harder set of hurdles for a male, you know, slightly older, conservative leaning generation that doesn’t come at all easily. How hard was the temptation to resist of just going ‘I’m gonna keep writing about this analytically at a distance, and not put myself in it’?

David
Yeah, it was, it was hard at times, partly because I have a political profile. And so all your political opponents take your vulnerability as an opportunity to pounce on you, which they indeed did. And so I knew that was going to happen. But I figured I couldn’t really write about this stuff from a position of distance. And I had to take some chances on myself and I think the rule of vulnerability is you should be slightly more vulnerable, you should regret it slightly afterwards, you should be more real, and then say I was probably a little too open there. And if you’re not doing that, you’re probably not going far enough. And I would say that though, that in most books, most nonfiction books in the US probably in the UK, are read by 60/40 women to men, there are more female readers than male readers. But this book when I toured The Second Mountain a couple years ago, you know, you signed books, and there’s this line of people to stop, and I would look down the line, and there would be 8 guys, and then a woman, nine guys, and then a woman. And so there, my line was basically like, a bunch of 50 year old white guys. And I realised I could have a second career as a CEO whisperer, because there were so many successful business executives who said, Hey, can you have a fun relationship? I’ve got nobody to talk to. And so it was a lesson in private male misery. Which I think is not being processed the way when, if you look around the restaurant, when you – two women get together, they’re staring into each other’s eyes, and they’re talking about real stuff. Men, it’s, it’s much more, let’s look at the opposite sides of the wall, and talk about football.

Elizabeth
Yeah, and you know, you see that cashing out in suicide rates and all kinds of other things. I do want to ask you about Christianity, I want to ask you about what – the sort of shorthand for seems to be a conversion. But I want to do it with a few caveats, which is, this is the most private of things. I’m also aware of the way that when people move tribes in public, there is an unlovely instinct for the receiving tribe to kind of want to stick a flag in them, you know, as fast as possible to like, bag their scalp and say, one of us… in a way that totally flattens the complexity and the fact that we might shift around in all kinds of things, and that finding faith at any point in life is a delicate, easily squashed process. What were the beats in the song that led you to go okay – Am I right in thinking you’re probably just about ready to call yourself a Christian now?

David
Yeah, I I used to say I’m religiously bisexual, because when I found faith, I felt more Jewish than ever. And – but also more Christian than ever. And my Jewish friends said, yeah, that’s not really allowed. If you accept Jesus, then you’re not on the team anymore. Yeah, and so that’s fair point. I think what happened was, I found – it all happened in the wrong order. It happened in an order that didn’t make sense, I experienced grace before I experienced God. And so I experienced some sort of love, unconditional love before I figured there was a guy up in the sky, or, and then what, then I experienced a sense of being observed. And then gradually, I experienced a sense that there is a moral order to the universe. And so there’s a theologian Paul Tillich, who has a phrase ‘the ground of being’, that the ground of being is a loving order, a moral order, an eternal order. And so I was up, you know, occasionally in nature, I just had this sense of things clicking into place, and I didn’t have words for it. And it wasn’t like Jesus walked through the wall and said, Hey, come follow me. It’s like, that never happened. It was the most boring process imaginable of gradually, life seemed to become more enchanted and more alive. The spiritual realm seemed to be alive with a transcendent and divine presence. And I liken it to, I think, in The Second Mountain, to you’re riding in a train, you’re sitting around all the familiar people, you’re drinking a cup of coffee, and you look out the window, and you realise you’ve covered, there’s a lot of ground behind you. And at some point, you’ve crossed over a border. And you’re no longer a non–believer. You’re a believer in something. And then when you do, at least in my case, you read and you try to read people who are articulating what you’re going through, and I found that as you’re searching, people send you books. And so I was sent about 600 books in the course of three months. And my joke is only 350 of which were Mere Christianity by CS Lewis. And but it was in that process of reading I came to refine what is this that I’m feeling. What is this enchanted sensation? What is this sense of, of divine love and really more sense of a moral order? And because I had grown up with the Christian story, and because I’ve grown up the Jewish story, they both came alive to me. And I read the Bible, Old and New Testament. But I found myself in in the States, when, in my community, sort of highly educated coastal, when you come to faith, you come to faith through Oxford. And so it’s CS Lewis, it’s JR Tolkien, it’s Sheldon Vanauke who wrote A Severe Mercy. And so you have a very classy kind of God, and sort of appropriately Britishly restrained kind of Jesus. And I think I sometimes wrestle against that, like, Jesus was a Jewish guy from the Middle East. And when you actually see him through the Jewish lens, living in Jerusalem in a land of vicious conflict, a series of highly organised power structures, which he upsets all at once, you realise, Jesus is a total badass, he’s not like, a guy in a tweed jacket. And so I came to defend the much more aggressive Jesus that shocks. And I came to believe in that. I will say that the one thing you said about when people want to put you on their team, that was certainly true for me. And I would come to – when I was exploring, going to churches, I get there early, like normal. And so many people would want to meet me, and then during the passing of peace, they come over to shake my hand. So I began to go to church late after the service and started to leave early before it ended, in order to not go through the social rigmarole. And that made me lonely, that made me really lonely. And so that was destructive.

Elizabeth
Yeah, yeah, it’s that thing about the way fame distances us from seeing people as a real person, right, they become a symbol or cypher of something else that we can use for our ends. I know a few friends who also find it difficult to go to church because of that. I have been reading your book this week, and also Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton, who is a philosopher, very good writer. And you both quote The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy, which was obviously written at a quite similar turning point in Tolstoy’s life, where the sense of the moral universe that I’ve been living in, that if I have enough status, and money and progress and success, that kind of First Mountain life, then I will find satisfaction. And both Ilyich and Tolstoy have a crisis of realising the hollowness and the lie that that is where satisfaction is found. And you and Tolstoy somehow managed to cross the precipice into an alternative moral universe where there is grace and connection and relationship. For whatever reason – my husband jokes I have this weird, like spiritual gift of being a friend to overeducated, middle aged men, and some of them have been on the podcast. I have lots of dear, dear friends who have moved a long way from a very materialist atheism to a conviction that religious faith and spirituality is good for societies, to a conviction that it’s good for individuals and have got stuck. Because… there’s a couple of conversations on the podcast, you can listen to people going, why can’t I accept this for myself? I don’t know. I just can’t, there’s something about the leap. What is your…Do you see that in people around you and what is your analysis of what holds back that particular tribe, because I see such a lot of it.

David
I’d like to rewind the tape to the sentence that included the phrase you and Tolstoy, I like that sentence, that’s good to hear. Nice comparisons. I would say it’s apt to say Tolstoy because one of the things that Tolstoy had was, he was one of the greatest writers of all time and knew it. And so he was renouncing something that he was, was at the top of the game. And I would say, for me, when I get stuck, as maybe I am stuck, it’s because I still haven’t disabused myself of the Tolstoy myth that if only I can write a really good book, then the spiritual fulfilment is there. So it’s the, it’s really hard to renounce all the values you had as you were climbing up the meritocracy. And it’s not only selfish, you think if I wrote a good book, it would be a contribution to our all our conversation, so you think you’re doing good. And but it’s about the self–perfection, the self–improvement, the mastery of a craft, and the mastery of a communication skill, and the ability to renounce that and die to self? Well, that’s a really hard thing to do in our culture, or in any culture. And I certainly have not succeeded. I wrote this book The Second Mountain about renouncing some of the worldly definitions of success, then I’m freakin checking my Amazon rating every hour. So like, I wouldn’t say I cured myself of this. And but I think Tolstoy does part the way. And when you meet somebody, some of the characters in Dostoevsky in particular, who have renounced self, you see a beauty there that is, that is beyond what what you can achieve when you stay in our frame.

Elizabeth
Yeah. I want to talk about the challenge and the difficulty of talking about these biggest, most important things in public. I was reading a review of The Second Mountain. And it made me laugh out loud, but it was a, he was commenting on a particular passage that you were talking about these transcendent moments of connection with other people and the world. And he wrote in the margin, ‘is this book about bonking Brooks?’, and really seemed unable to deal with the lack of concreteness of talking about virtue and ecstatic encounter and intimacy and relationship and was clearly trying, bless him, but just, it was like bouncing off. He was, he was – he thought it was a good book. He was, he wasn’t sure what it was saying. It just – is it about sex like that’s, that’s the only category I have for intimacy and relationship. As your writing has moved from this more kind of very good but distant social analysis to this more urgent, personal, ‘Who do we want to be? How do we want to live?’ What have you learned about how you help that stuff land well?

David
Yeah, I was struck by that. And that has happened several times. When you talked about Martin Buber and I–thou, and I was trying various points in the book, without Uber’s eloquence or mysticism, to get into that sense of the interpenetration of souls of what deep communication is really about. And more than one person just said that’s sex. And I think that’s because I guess for a lot of people, they were not raised with the category of intimacy. And so that’s the best they can do. And it’s kind of smartass to say, Oh, he’s just talking about bonking. I’m a secular writer, I write for secular – The New York Times, secular publications. And so I try to do it in a way that talks about faith in a way that won’t turn people off. And you know, one thing to do is I’ve raved on CS Lewis, who I don’t mean to because I admire him greatly, but he, you know, he would never use a big word when a small word would do. And he wrote for radio often. And so that’s just very useful as a communications tool. Everything was low key, it’s not, he was not operatic. “The Good Lord came down to me and when a burst of sunshine and rain.” He was “Yeah, this is just what happened.” But I would say there are certain categories that one has to be careful about explaining, some even bother me. And so for example, I was talking about before The Second Mountain came out, I was talking about it on a TV show, and I mentioned the word sin. And an editor wrote to me on email, I love the way you talked about your book, but I wouldn’t use the word sin, I would use the word insensitive. It’s like, Well, I’m not sure insensitive is really sin. But I asked a friend of mine, how do you talk about sin in public, a pastor. And he said, I talk about disordered loves, that we all have certain loves. And we all know some loves are higher than others. This is an Augustinian concept. And if I, you tell me a secret, and I blab at a dinner party, I’m putting my love of popularity above my love of friendship. And that’s disordered love. That’s a sin. And if you talk about it as disordered love, you don’t have to talk about it as depravity in the human soul, which really does repel a lot of people. And you don’t have to talk about sin as masturbation, which is what a lot of Christians talk about it as. And so it’s something people can relate to. But translating the categories into acceptable forms, is, I think, part of just communications.

Elizabeth
Have you come across the Francis Spufford phrase for sin? He has a book called Unapologetic, which I think you’d really like, he was one of our earliest interviews actually. And he rebranded sin and I’m going to swear here, so apologies for listeners, but it loses its power without it, as the human propensity to fuck things up. And then he contracts that into THPTFTU or however you would spell it and uses that all the way through his very, very good book about the emotional power of Christianity. He’s a very garlanded fiction or nonfiction writer in the states, in the UK. But he says very early on, I need to talk about sin, but when I say the word sin, you think of lingerie, and ice cream. And I want you to think of the ways that we hurt each other, and the ways that we break things, and it is such a powerful usage that you might enjoy.

David
Yeah, the more highbrow usage is an ultimate allegiance to a finite end. That are you usurping something. You know, I’m writing a column today about there was a case in Philadelphia commuter train line, where a woman gets on at 914, a guy starts molesting her. He molests her for about 40 minutes, then 40 minutes later starts raping her. And there are other people on the train on the car. And no one intervenes, No one calls the police. They just whip out their cameras to get a video of it. And so it’s a case of somehow sin is there, the sin of the rapist, but the sin of the bystanders. And so the, you know, Chesterton said that concept of original sin is the one empirically verifiable aspect of this. And so that case is such a morally horrific case that you wonder what was going on in their minds? But then you wonder what kind of society is it in which people are enculturated in such a way that that happens?

Elizabeth
I was really struck actually reading your last two books, how often you, you’re very comfortable with the word morality. And my backstory with this is that I worked for a while on a BBC programme called the Moral Maze, which is an ethical discussion programme. And the M word was, it was always tripping us up because we’d ring people and say, We want you to come on and make this moral argument, which is a position that we know you hold, because you’ve said it somewhere. And they say, Well, I wouldn’t call it a moral argument. And we’d say, why not? It’s an evidence based argument, or it’s a philosophical argument. And I’d say what, why don’t why don’t you like the word moral and morality? They say, Well, it sounds it sounds judgmental. It sounds like we are judging people. Talk to me about that. How do you avoid sounding preachy? And why do you think we are so sensitised to the possibility that someone talking about their vision of the good is inherently a judgement on us?

David
Well, I don’t totally walk away from judgment, like the rapist on the train – I’m judging him. The passengers, I’m judging them. Am I confident that I would do otherwise if I were a passenger? Can’t be totally confident on that, we all think we would be the one to leap in. But in real life circumstances, people who say they will leap in do not leap in. And so I you know, that – people are asked, What’s the essential virtue, Augustine was asked this. And he said, Well, the essential virtue is humility, humility, humility. And I think if you try to aspire to a sense of humility, you can talk about judgement in a way that’s not preachy and insufferable. And you will often go over the line. But the alternative to talking about morality, is to have no one talking about morality. And we are moral creatures, and we all want to be better people. And you raise successive generations who don’t have a moral vocabulary, who don’t talk about grace and sin and redemption. And who don’t have a formula or even a theory of moral formation. And so somebody has to talk about it, even though the reputational risks are a) that you won’t live up to your standards, which is inevitable, or b) you’ll seem preachy and self–righteous, or d) people think you’re talking about sex. And, and so I talk about it freely, running the risk of being insufferable to some people.

Elizabeth
Yeah. I was trying to explain to someone the other day why I like the concept of sin in public. And the way I summed up why I’d love us to be able to talk about sin again, is that in excising it from our culture, we’ve let – ended up with this bizarre, seemingly contradictory mishmash of no one is responsible for anything, because we’re just stimulus and response mechanisms, determined by our genes, or our background, or whatever it is, but then everyone is responsible for everything, because there is no such thing as forgiveness and redemption, or change. And so I can’t even describe it. But it’s the two things at the same time, hugely judgmental, and hugely permissive seems to me to be psychologically much worse than, yes, I am sinful. And I have somewhere to go with that, I have the possibility of change. I have help. You know, there’s that there is forgiveness is on the table, rather than a total thing. Do you recognise that? And what might help us move beyond it?

David
Yeah, I would say if people are raised as we all were, at least I was, with the social science mentality, that schools in the phrases of social psychology of, of sociology, of economics, in which as you say, the human person, the agent is not there. Because it’s all correlation. And what correlates to what and what determines what, and it’s – And these fields are great at generalising about populations, they’re not particularly great at looking at the individual human person. And so you school people in this and then suddenly people have to make judgments about the individual moral person. They swing radically over and suddenly it’s the Spanish Inquisition. And so there’s no like a middle ground where you see people as mottled selves. And, and frankly, religions have spent, and many other moral systems, have spent a lot of time thinking about forgiveness, like how do you do it, you don’t just say, Oh, I’m sorry, oh, I forgive you. That’s just too simple and too easy. So there are rituals of confessing the sin, correcting the sins, reparation for the sin, acknowledging the sin, acknowledging the sin exists, but it will not be a barrier in our relationship to one another. And so these formulas are not only, I think, baked into the fabric of the universe, they’re just super useful. And so as Americans, we try to think about racism. There’s a formula here that has been established over centuries and maybe in all time, and if we ignore the formula then we’re just casting them out in darkness. And most problems have been thought of, through three or 4000 years of, of theological and spiritual formation and thinking and, and teaching. And to leave that all behind, which frankly, a lot of American Protestants do like – it’s like Jesus came, yada, yada, yada, I had a personal relationship with Jesus, all that social teaching nah I don’t really care. That’s one advantage the Catholics have. And the Jews have that steeped in tradition, really good at transmitting the inherited knowledge of the ages, which when you have a populace religion, especially American evangelism, with a direct encounter with God, you’re not going to have the depth of knowledge that comes with centuries of refinement, and the American church is suffering that crisis right now. And their attachment in my view to Donald Trump, and their unwillingness, large parts of evangelism, evangelical community to face up to racial injustice, the siege mentality that justifies a means justifies the ends mentality. I mean, I entered this faith, like, it was like investing in the stock market in 1929. Like I came in at the worst time, like just when the American church was going through a crisis, and young people for understandable reasons were leaving in droves. Thankfully, I didn’t know what I was getting into.

Elizabeth
I’m going to finish with a final question, which circles back really to the beginning about how, how do we get better at crossing these tribes, at connecting on a human level? You’ve been a liberal, and then a conservative. You’ve crossed tribes of faith and politics, and written deeply about how we encounter each other. And at the end of The Second Mountain, there’s just kind of relation list Manifesto. I know there’s a lot more coming in what feels like part three of a trilogy, I’m hoping is what your next book will be. But if there’s one thing that listeners could do, actively change their behaviour, not just think about, that might help them be part of the solution, not the problem to these deep divisions and differences. What would it be?

David
Well, to be practical, the next book I’m writing about, it’s in the skill of seeing others and being deeply seen. And so it’s how do you really get to know another person, and you think you can be empathetic and emotionally place yourself in another person, you probably can’t, you know, empathy is useful, but not just that powerful. So the single trait that correlates with the ability to know other people is verbal intelligence, you have to ask them, you have to have a conversation, which we’ve just been having. And so getting really good at conversation is, is part of the skill of getting to know other people. And there are things you can do that will make you better at conversation. Be a loud listener like ‘Uh huh, okay’, I have a friend who’s a loud listener – feels great to talk to that guy, because he’s always affirming. Restate what the person just said. So you’re sure you understand it. Don’t fear the pause, that when we speak, we – like a match in my arm is an answer. I start talking to the shoulder and I talk to the end of my fingertips, but somewhere around the elbow, we probably stopped listening. So we can think of, well, here’s what I’m going to say next. But if you’re having an important conversation, and you’re saying, Okay, I’m gonna listen to your whole statement, I’m going to pause for six seconds, then I will respond, that can be very powerful. Keep the gem statement in the centre. If you are… If you’re disagreeing about something, there’s something that you agree on underneath. So if me and my brother are disagreeing about the health care our father should get, we may violently disagree about that, but we both care about the health of our father. And so if you keep that gem statement at the centre, you’ll have something and then finally, the quality of conversation is determined by the quality of the questions. And so my favourite questions, and you’ve asked me deep and penetrating questions, you know, my favourite questions are questions that elevate you so you look at your life from a higher altitude. So there are questions like – what crossroads are you at? Not everyone is aware of a crossroads we’re at. Or what would you do if you weren’t afraid? We are not always aware of how fear plays a role in our lives. I read one from a guy named Peter Block. What forgiveness are you withholding? What commitment have you made that you no longer really believe in? And so these questions are really – open up excavations. They don’t yield easy answers, but they begin explorations. And so I think that’s the practical skill of overcoming a lot of our social and moral woes of actually taking the time to get to know each other through podcasts. Everybody should be on podcasts all the time.

Elizabeth
And on that very helpful infomercial, David Brooks, thank you so much for talking to me on The Sacred.

David
Oh, total pleasure. Thank you.

Elizabeth
Well, honestly, I was more nervous about this episode than most. And partly, that’s just because David has been writing for a long time. So he’s just written, absolutely loads and feeling properly prepped for it was quite a significant task. Actually, I think it’s partly because I’m formed into finding older impressive men with opinions intimidating, frankly. But it’s also because it feels like there was such a lot to talk about. But I was very quickly put at my ease. And it was so lovely to hear about David’s journey and his reflections on the wrestle of the personal and the private and the public. And this kind of thing he’s worrying away about how can we become more like the people that we want to be and the challenges of that.

I really loved his description of himself as a kind of schmucky, self–confident teenager. I was really moved actually, by the description he had of his sacred value about time, and continuity. And I think he used the phrase, these places where we know that people have been violently alive for a really long time. And I think we all kind of recognise that sense of being part of the continuity of human life. And it’s quite inspiring, so many millions of people who have felt as deeply as us and lived as fully as us over the centuries. It’s a sort of chronological equivalent of expanding our consciousness, away from just us as our individual selves to a sense of those around us – that staple of kind of all ethical and wisdom traditions is deeper consideration of the other. And I was reminded that that can work kind of backwards in time and perhaps forward in time to future generations as well.

It was funny hearing him talk about you know, when you when you come to Christianity, from his particular background, you come to kind of Jesus of Oxford colleges, through often a very bookish intellectual route, and then the tension with the Jesus of that world with Jesus, the Middle Eastern revolutionary, and the many, many worlds actually, that this figure can hold. 

I find it really refreshing when particularly men model vulnerability in public, it feels like something that is both more acceptable and, and also more or required of women in public. So I really, I really value it, people who let their guard down a bit and say, Look, we’re all just trying our best. 

I loved him talking about morality, and the difficulties of talking about morality and encounter and the ecstatic. And these moments of intimacy and connection with other people. And it reminded me again, of something I reference, quite a lot, which is Iain McGilchrist’s work on the different brain hemispheres. And the way we’ve kind of created a society where left brain thinking, that more linear and concrete and measurable, predominates over and – this is a massive simplification of his work, so apologies – but the kind of right brain, which orientates to intuition and faith and creativity and these less measurable, less concrete things. No trace of society just haven’t had any training or formation in those things haven’t developed. What would it mean for a society where these intangibles that are so deep and so important, and yet so hard to measure or talk about, where we can increase our levels of comfort with them? Or maybe patience for them? 

Those are some of my thoughts. I would love to hear your reflections. Send me a tweet @ESOldfield @sacred_podcast, send us an email and just be in touch. I really love having conversations with listeners about what they’re thinking about.

Interested in this? Share it on social media. Join our monthly e–newsletter to keep up to date with our latest research and events. And check out our Supporter Programme to find out how you can help our work.