How to know a person: the Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

Book Review (David Brooks)

I picked this book up mostly because I saw Russell Moore recommend it a little while ago, and then I saw it turn up on a few other lists, and I thought, "yes, that sounds like something I'd like to read". And the opening dovetails so nicely, so serendipitously, with other things I've been reading and pondering. Here:

Human beings need recognition as much as they need food and water. No crueler punishment can be devised than to not see someone, to render them unimportant or invisible. “The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them,” George Bernard Shaw wrote, “but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.” To do that is to say: You don’t matter. You don’t exist. On the other hand, there are few things as fulfilling as that sense of being seen and understood. p.9

And so this book isn't about the inhumanity of indifference, it's about learning the skills to truly see others, to know other people as human beings. That is a thing that I am all about. And it's what David Brooks’s book is all about: what are the skills that allow us to do that and how do we learn them? The book falls into three parts.

He begins, in chapter two, with the idea that people are either illuminators (helping other people by shining a light on them and amplifying them), and diminishers (basically shutting down other people), and runs through an analysis of some of the things that cause us not to see people? Egotism, Anxiety, Naive Realism, The Lesser Minds Problem (i.e., assuming that other people have less going on upstairs, because we don't have access to that), objectivism, essentialism, static mindset (I knew person X 5 years ago, they haven't changed).

What, then, does the opposite look like? What helps us pay attention to others?

“Attention,” the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist writes, “is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being.” The quality of your life depends quite a bit on the quality of attention you project out onto the world. p.30

Tenderness, Receptivity, Active Curiosity, Affection, Generosity, Holistic Attitude, these are the attributes, or cultivatable skills, that lend to attending to others. Brooks then goes on to consider how, just how you do this on a practical level. For instance, chapter four explores ‘accompaniment’ - how to 'be' with people,

When you’re first getting to know someone, you don’t want to try to peer into their souls right away. It’s best to look at something together. p.45

Small talk and just casually being around someone is a vastly underappreciated stage in the process of getting to know someone. p.45

And then gives a four-step guide:

1. patience

2. playfulness

3. other-centredness

4. presence

Things get a little more meta- in chapter 5, “what is a person?” My goodness, the vignette that opens this chapter is powerful, painful, and revealing. I won't spoil it, and I better save it up in case I want it as a sermon illustration! But the chapter moves on to the idea that reality is always two-layered - the objective thing out there, and the subjective, experienced layer. All of us are subjects, and we see the world, in fact construct our own worlds out of our own perspective. To know a person, then, is to know a perspective. And when we realise that, we'll go about trying to get to understand other people's perspectives. We need to learn to ask the questions that help us see how the other person sees. And as we learn to do so, it widens our perspective, it grows us.

But to do this, we are going to have to become better conversationalists. I've never thought of myself as a good conversationalist, and that's no surprise. But the art of conversation - of steering one to bring out the best in all participants and take us on a journey of genuine dialogue - is indeed an art, and one that can be learned. And so much of it goes back to being an "illuminator" - seeking to help other people shine.

Part 2

You know, you're reading along in this book, thinking it's a lovely fine book about developing people skills, and then it takes an abrupt left turn. Brooks says as much. What you've just read is all fine and dandy for normal life and normal times, but we live in abnormal times. Greater loneliness, isolation, decline in friendships, but also increasing polarisation, politicisation. So how do you truly know a person in these trying times? Part two turns to that question, and after making a case for the disjointed and disconnected times we live in, Brooks begins with hard conversations - how do you talk to people across political divides, class, race, gender, culture wars, etc.. How do you simultaneously understand them as a unique individual, as well as the host of structural and category differences that mean that your frame of reference and their frame of reference have little in common?

But if part 2 was an abrupt left turn, chapter 10 was a truck blindsiding me as a reader. Brooks talks about how to be a friend to someone experiencing depression, and he does so through the story of a close friend of his, Brooks' own mistakes, and his friend's eventual suicide. I had to put the book down several times in this chapter, overcome with tears. It’s one thing to learn to see a person, another to see a person and know them deeply in the midst of their struggles.

Thankfully the book doesn’t keep going at quite that level of intensity, but the next chapter begin exploring empathy, in particular the various defense mechanisms we set up to keep others out, and how what most of us need isn’t introspection but communication. Talking to others is what helps us deal with our problems. Which means empathy, “a set of social and emotional skills”, primarily mirroring, mentalizing, and caring. To summarise: feeling what you feel, thinking through what it means for you to feel that why and why you do, and then working out what you need (not what I would need).

… to know someone who has grieved, you have to know how they have processed their loss—did they emerge wiser, kinder, and stronger, or broken, stuck, and scared? To be a good friend and a good person you have to know how to accompany someone through this process. pp. 162-163

Part 3

Whereas part 2 is seeing people in their struggles, part 3 is seeing them in their strengths. It’s a much more upbeat section! It starts off with one of my favourite things: dunking on Myers-Briggs. Instead, Brooks talks about actual research into personality, and the Big Five traits. Then follow chapters on Life Tasks (i.e. the big ‘things’ in life we’re trying to do at different stages (drawing on Erik Erikson); Life Stories (the way we narrate our own lives, and construct meaning over the course of it; the shaping power of culture and ancestry.

I want to end with the last chapter though, with a bit more reflection. It’s titled, “What is Wisdom?” And Brooks gives us an insight into how his own thinking on wisdom has shifted, from the all-knowing guru, to something else:

I’ve come to believe that wise people don’t tell us what to do; they start by witnessing our story. They take the anecdotes, rationalizations, and episodes we tell, and see us in a noble struggle. They see the way we’re navigating the dialectics of life—intimacy versus independence, control versus uncertainty—and understand that our current self is just where we are right now, part of a long continuum of growth. pp. 248-249

This kind of wisdom is the learned experience and skill of seeing others deeply, hearing them, knowing them truly. Brooks ends with four stories, four more examples.

The most cherished times of my life are the conversations I’ve had with people, where we’ve moved past the small talk and the trivialities. Not that those don’t have a place, indeed they are necessary. But those times and places where words share deeper truths, where we share who we are, our pasts with all their faults, failures, wins and wounds; our dreams and hopes for futures, collective and individual; our feelings, aches, longings; our stories, the who we are and the how we became. Those conversations, and the friends who’ve shared them, are some of the gold of life. And this book gives me a yearning to develop the kinds of skills that let other people shine.