Coming Soon: Faith in Elections Podcast

Eboo Patel: This is the Interfaith America Podcast, and I’m Eboo Patel. 

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I am thrilled to have David Brooks here with us in studio, physically, in person, at Interfaith America. David, of course, is a longtime columnist at The New York Times. He’s the founder of the Weave Project at the Aspen Institute. He’s taught at Yale. He’s written six books, the latest of which is How to Know a Person. David’s work explores what it means to be human and the institutions that support our humanity. He pays particular attention, as we do here at Interfaith America, to the institution of the university. With universities in the news a lot lately, it’s a perfect time to discuss how these institutions can foster the qualities that David writes about in How to Know a Person, and also his books like The Second Mountain and The Social Animal. 

I have personally been following David’s work since his article, The Organization Kid in The Atlantic, which came out while I was in graduate school, 25 or so years ago, and which resonated with me deeply. David, thank you for joining. 

[00:01:15] David Brooks: Oh, it’s great to be with you. We’ve spoken many times. I’ve never been to Interfaith America, so I’m downtown Chicago in the beating heart of Midwest capitalism right here. 

[00:01:22] Eboo: That’s right. [laughs] The first thing that I want to ask is, as you watch what’s happening on college campuses right now, and, of course, there’s many things that are happening, but the reason the college campuses are in the news is because of the high-profile conflicts with encampments around divestment in either Israel totally or Israel’s weapons, et cetera. I’m curious, are you surprised by it? Do you think of it as predictable? 

[00:01:50] David: My mood now is I feel I’ve been part of a media that’s a bit overblown what’s happened on college campuses. I’ve been teaching at the University of Chicago, and we had an encampment, but I would say most of the students on campus were sympathetic to the idea of the suffering in Gaza, but not particularly supportive of the way that the protesters going about it. Even if you looked at the encampment, 50 yards away, kids were playing frisbee. 

I just did three commencements around the country, and in none of those cases did the issue even come up. When you looked at the polling of young people, of voters 18 to 29, and then a specific poll of college students, Israel-Gaza ranked very low on the list of what they were interested in, 15 out of 16. We shouldn’t overblow it. On the other hand, there is a fervor on campus. I’m like the nine millionth person to say this. I do think a campus that, in my view, is there to teach the diversity of viewpoints and the pluralism that is within each of us, and that we are all multiple selves with multiple perspectives. I think it has settled for simplistic stories. As everyone says, they’re oppressor-oppressed, colonizer-colonized. 

I think those simplistic Manichaean stories have had the tendency to pulverize how people view each other, and A, reduce them to one thing, which can either be blamed or praised, and also stifle debate. I taught at Yale for many years. I’ve reached the gamut of American education from Yale to Chicago. That’s from A to B. 

[laughter] 

I visit many schools. I would say students at almost every place I go feel less free to argue with each other than they did when I started teaching 20 years ago. There’s been a suppression of expression done by social norms. People are just afraid of being judged. I do think we have an oversimplified politics on campuses and then an overall culture of a norm of non-confrontation, non-argument, which is sad. 

[00:03:54] Eboo: Yes. I want to delve into the deeper story on a couple of tracks here. One is the idea of non-confrontation is being challenged because the encampments are meant to be confrontational. I’m curious about getting into that. Deeper story number one, one of the things you write about in the Organization Kid, again, 25 years ago, and there’s a good chance I remember this better than you do, again, because I felt like it described who I’d been all of my adolescence. You write about, you’ve got these young people who are hyperconformists around doing well on the resume virtues. Another thing that you’ve written and spoken a lot about. 

When a group of people become hyperconformist about something, it is a time that’s ripe for a shattering. You’re like, “Look, I would not be surprised if a Jerry Rubin or an Abbie Hoffman or a new beatnik movement emerges.” That’s like, this is just crazy. Sleeping four hours a night when you’re 15 years old in order to get a 1600 in your SAT in order to get into Yale. That is crazy, is part of what’s on display on campuses right now. 

I always want to take people at face value. There’s a deep despair and suffering in Gaza. That is very real. I want to take very seriously college students raising their voices around that. There’s probably other things going on also. Is one of the things that’s going on organization kids throwing off their shackles? 

[00:05:20] David: I think so. Yes. I’m wondering, we go back, I was too young to really be part of the protests in the 60s, but from what I’ve read, it really was common, especially in Berkeley to say, we’re not a number. The idea was the universities are trying to reduce us to punch cards and just treat us all mass. Once again, students are reduced to a number. It happens to be their SAT score, their GPAs. The pressure to get into these places has become so onerous. 

I think one of the most malicious institutions in America right now is the meritocracy and the way it’s structured. We begin sorting people at a phenomenally young age based on two things, their ability to do well on standardized tests and their ability to please teachers between age 15 and 25. When I went to the University of Chicago, for example, 74% of the kids who admitted got in. We self-selected, but the pressure was not on. Now it’s, what is it, 4%? 

[00:06:10] Eboo: Yes, it’s crazy. 

[00:06:11] David: All these schools, my daughter took the SATs and she started getting mailings from Harvard to recruit her to apply there. There is nobody in my zip code who could get into Harvard who doesn’t know about Harvard. The reason they’re sending out those brochures is so kids like my daughter will apply and get rejected. These have become rejection academies. Their prestige is based on the fact they reject 96% of the students who apply. That creates an atmosphere along with parental pressure where childhood is, has been totally reformed, transformed. 

Annette Lareau wrote a book years ago now called Unequal Childhoods. It said college-educated parents and highschool-educated parents are not on a continuum of parenting styles. They have two radically different parenting styles. The one college-educated kids do is called concerted cultivation. Frankly, it’s what I did with my kids, driving them around, travel team sports, oboe practice, everything. 

The effect is that as Robert Putnam has found, the average college-educated family invests $5,000 per kid per year, just in extracurricular activities. Then the total amount spent, including travels to Europe and museum stops, Daniel Markovits at Yale calculates is 10 million invested in each kid. The system wants to turn them into little machines for achievement. It’s no idea that a full human being is like, “Screw this.” 

I think what I saw in my students was a tremendous sense over the last 20 years, a big word for them was agency. “I lack agency. The system has me in its grip. I don’t get to control what I do. I do whatever pleases the admissions officers.” Along with the political thing, which you described, the horror over what’s happening in Gaza, I do think there’s a spiritual and emotional thing. 

I forget where I read this. One of my big phrases that I’ve kept in mind the last year, especially, is that if you don’t understand how the spiritual and political are connected right now, you don’t understand either. I do think there’s a strong spiritual element and a rebellion against the system. Just finally, I have a friend of mine who teaches at Stanford. He said, the idea that I’m teaching here because I want the best for my students, that’s an idea that’s foreign to many of my students. They see me as part of a system that’s keeping them down. That’s a rupture in the relationship between the faculty and the system and the students. 

[00:08:40] Eboo: I just rewatched Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7. Have you seen it? 

[00:08:45] David: No, I haven’t seen it. 

[00:08:46] Eboo: It’s great. Aaron Sorkin did The West Wing, of course. Part of the reason I watched it is because I’m here in Chicago and this protest energy is coming to the DNC in August, no doubt. There’s a moment where the actor playing Bobby Seale says to the actor playing Tom Hayden, “You know part of what you’re doing is giving your daddy the middle finger, right?” That’s part of this whole SDS thing. The Tom Hayden character nods his head. Then the Bobby Seale character says, “There’s a difference between a noose on a tree,” which is what black people were facing in the middle of the century, “and being angry for a minute on a college campus.” 

Now, that is not being serious about what many young people were facing in the 1960s, which was a Vietnam draft and in a terrible, unjust war. At the same time, there’s always something else going on. 

[00:09:36] David: About five years ago, I reread the Port Huron statement, which was a bunch of kids at Michigan, I guess, or Wisconsin, one of those two schools. 

[00:09:43] Eboo: Michigan. 

[00:09:44] David: Michigan, led by Tom Hayden, to how to retreat. They constructed a document called the Port Huron statement, which was meant to be a statement of a generation. It’s eerily prescient. This happened in the early 60s. It’s eerily prescient of everything that happened later in the 60s. Then one of their key points is the personal and political are the same. That political transformation accompanies personal transformation. 

[00:10:04] Eboo: Yes. I really want to get directly into, David, the stuff that you care so deeply about and that I care about, which is what does it mean to be a whole person? In the most recent book, which I just think is beautiful, like all of the books you write, how to know a person and how institutions nurture the kind of qualities in people that we consider funeral qualities. Gravestone qualities, as you’ve written about before. 

One of the interesting things, of course, is that this is why universities were built. Universities are built to nurture gravestone qualities. You just wrote about Howard Thurman in a recent column. He was a great black Christian spiritual figure in the latter half of the 20th century. He was the dean of the chapel at Boston University. He was a huge inspiration to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and probably his best-known book is Jesus and the Disinherited. You quote him as saying that, “The most important thing about somebody’s soul is what is sacred in them.” 

What nurtures that in Howard Thurman? Morehouse, the college he goes to. He has a line about Morehouse where he says, Morehouse placed a crown above my head and challenged me to rise up and achieve it. He doesn’t mean that about its biology exams. He meant that about the character that it nurtured something. Can you imagine a time when a university stands up and says, we nurture character, and actually we really mean it. 

[00:11:29] David: They know how to do it. 

[00:11:30] Eboo: They know how to do it. 

[00:11:31] David: I think Morehouse still, when you meet a Morehouse man, you’ve met a Morehouse man, you know right away. There are some schools that I think are like that. I think Mount Holyoke still, one of my heroines is Frances Perkins, who was in the class of Mount Holyoke in 1905. It was a long time ago, but the ethos of the place was go where no one wants to go, do what no one wants to do. Mount Holyoke sent hundreds and hundreds of women all around the world, either on mission trips or in poverty alleviation trips. Frances Perkins devoted her life to worker rights and worker safety. She was a fire at Mount Holyoke. 

I do think for most, and my secret text here is a book called The End of Education by a guy named Anthony Kronman, who used to be Dean of the Yale Law School. He says, the ideal for much of American history was the humanistic ideal, that our job as educators from K through higher ed is to turn out people of fine character. Then there was a guy who ran the Stowe School, who said, our job is to turn out graduates who are acceptable at a dance, invaluable at a shipwreck. 

[00:12:32] Eboo: Yes, I love that line. 

[00:12:33] David: Even the National Education Association as late as the 1950s said, “The primary purpose of schools is moral formation.” Then Kronman writes, that went away in the 60s, and it was replaced by what he calls the research ideal. “The purpose of the university is to advance knowledge,” which is a pretty good purpose, it’s good. It also leads to incredibly narrow specialization for all the scholars. 

Kronman says, “When everyone’s narrowly specialized into some minute sub-discipline, then they’re asking the big questions, like what is life for? What does a good life look like? Are not only unasked, but they begin to seem unprofessional to ask.” I would say that’s what’s happened on American campuses. They’ve just shoved all that aside, or did for a period. It became, how do we get our kids into Goldman or into McKinsey? That was the obsession for the students, and that was the default pattern for the whole administration. You began to see, and I think 20 years ago was the peak of this, just the de-spiritualization of the American campus, the demoralization. It became a training academy, and then financial pressures kick in. 

Just once I want one of my students to come up to me and say, I really want to major in accounting, but my parents are forcing me to major in French poetry. The parents are forcing students to do what they don’t want to do. I’m beginning to think that’s changing now. I think on almost every campus I go to, there’s one or two professors teaching a course on the good life. Even if it’s only on positive psychology, which I regard as thin, but at least students are looking, what does a good life look like? I think that demand is beginning to be met and supplied. 

[00:14:19] Eboo: You taught at Yale for a long time, and you’ve shared stories with me about some frustrations. When you asked the question, “What’s your favorite book?” Students were like, ‘Well, we don’t actually read that way.” Tell me when it went well. Give me a story or two of when you thought to yourself, I asked a couple of questions, or I signed something, or somebody made a comment, and actually I think that we created a space where some character was built, where some reflection happened. Tell me when it went well. 

[00:14:46] David: I had a wonderful kid named Vinay who I was teaching a class. I taught various courses at Yale. The students just called them all therapy with Brooks because we just unloaded on each other. This was a class in commitment making. The idea of the class was for most college students, over the next 15 years of their lives, they’re going to make four big commitments. To a philosophy or faith, to a community, to a vocation, and probably to a spouse and family. How do you make the big commitments in life? It really was going into the inner spiritual life of people. 

I taught Dorothy Day’s great book, The Long Loneliness. I taught Victor Frankl’s book. I think we read the book of Exodus together. A series of books on this sort of thing. Last day of class, this wonderful student, very bright, a Rhodes Scholar, said to me, “Professor Brooks, now that I’ve taken this class, I’m a little sadder.” I took that as a total win. Because this kid had mastered the meritocracy. 

[00:15:42] Eboo: Yes, right. 

[00:15:44] David: Suddenly he had saw things that, “I think are there stuff I really need to work on.” I think he meant it as a compliment. I certainly took it as a total win. 

[00:15:53] Eboo: Your metaphor for the meritocracy in the previous book is the first mountain. You ascend the first mountain. Can a college be arranged to teach the 18-to 22-year-olds who excel at the meritocracy about the second mountain? Is it possible? Do you just have to like climb the first mountain first? 

[00:16:12] David: No, I went to a college that did. They were Chicago when I went there, and to some extent still. Really, it did not prepare us particularly well for careers. I sometimes go to, “Have killed you to give us a little career advice?” [laughter] Because a lot of us wandered for years after. 

It did a few things. First, it welcomed us into the great conversation that goes back centuries. Whether it’s Confucian thought or whatever, we’re part of a long conversations. We as students were little peons. There was this great procession we got to join. I really felt, “Oh, I’m part of this long discovery of human truth.” Second, it introduced us to the moral ecologies, the moral traditions that have been passed down by the ages. We give terrible advice to kids, which is like, “find your own worldview. Figure out what you want to think.” If your name was Nietzsche, maybe you can do that. Most of us, we need somebody else’s. 

They didn’t say what we should think, but they said, “Well, here’s the Greek tradition of honor and glory. Here’s the Christian tradition of grace and selfless love. Here’s the Jewish tradition of Exodus. Here’s the rationalist tradition of science. Here’s the Buddhist tradition. Here’s the Stoic tradition.” They just introduced us to these traditions and said, “See which one fits you.” That really was useful, beautiful knowledge to have, because you could see these great moral traditions. Third, they just gave us new things to love. I think this is one of the purposes of a university is to, when you heard Ode to Joy, when you’ve seen a Rembrandt’s painting of the prodigal son, you haven’t had a new knowledge, but you’ve had a new emotional experience. 

For example, that Rembrandt’s prodigal son painting, he painted it when he was at the end of his life, and he was nearly broke and most of his kids were dead and his wife was dead. He was in a sad, very old stage of life. As I hope everybody knows, the parable is about a kid who takes his inheritance early, goes off and squanders and then comes back in disgrace and shame. The kid comes back, the father rushes out to greet him and the older brother’s played by the rules. He’s like, “What the heck? I’ve been playing by the rules and you’re going out to greet him?” That’s the parable. 

In Rembrandt’s rendering, the prodigal son is broken, hairless, shoeless and tatters. He’s a broken human being. The father’s paternal love is infinitely patient. If you look closely at the painting, one of his hands is a masculine hand and the other hand is a feminine hand. It gets all the kinds of parental love there. You feel this old guy really longing for his dead children. That’s how I interpret the painting. 

When you have that emotional experience, you’ve educated your emotions. You have a wider repertoire of emotions. You’re better able to feel compassion for suffering. You’re better able to feel rage at injustice. To me, a university can do that, can widen our emotional repertoire. Then the final thing a university can do, and this is the simplest and the most easiest, is just basic social skills. This is what my last book’s really about. Treating people well, it’s just like, you got to go know what to do. How do you sit with a kid who’s got depression? How do you sit with a friend who’s suffered some grief? How do you ask for an offer of forgiveness? How do you end a conversation? These are like basic social skills. 

[00:19:34] Eboo: One of my favorite stories in the new book is a story you tell about, you say a friend of yours has a daughter in first or second grade, who’s very shy, and is very self-conscious about being shy, and very self-conscious about not participating in first and second grade, singing the songs, whatever else. One day, her teacher says to her, I love the way you think before you talk. 

This is a story towards the end of the book. I’m reading it in bed at night and I like to sit up straight. It’s one of those, I think of it as a quintessential David Brooks story because it’s like, you chose the story that told the larger story. Our teachers are educated in schools of education. Can a school of education nurture that quality in a teacher? 

[00:20:18] David: I think so. I will say, for researching that book, I would go around the country and ask people, tell me about a time you felt seen. The number one category of people would refer to were teachers. Often, they had a story of some teacher who told them, who saw some potential in them they didn’t even see in themselves. I think it’s one of the reasons people go into teaching. 

I can’t remember if I put this story in the book when my friend told me that story about his daughter. I remembered a story of my 11th grade English teacher, Mrs. Dusnap. I was being a smart ass in class. She said, in front of the whole class, she said, “David, you’re trying to get by on glibness, stop it.” On the one hand, I was humiliated because she called me out in front of the whole class. I remember I thought, “Wow, she really knows me well.” 

One of the things I worry about the way we’re educating our teachers is, A, there’s so much technology in the classroom. My son is now a fourth-grade teacher. The technology can be interspersed between the student and the teacher. It can be like a mutual, just staring at screens together. I worry a bit about that. I worry about a school system, and this is in general, that really tries to chop kids into slices, that tries to slice away intelligence from spirituality, from social ability, and really focuses mostly on intelligence and drops all the rest. To me, to see a person, you have to see the whole person. 

Then finally, to see a person, you have to see how they see the world. The only way you can do that is by asking them. I worry sometimes in some classes, the teachers are so busy trying to drill information into students, there’s simply less time for the student to say, here’s how I see things. Here’s how the world looks to me. 

One of my classes at Yale, I asked the students a basic question, “What is a person?” You think, we don’t have a theory, what’s a person? Because all of our worldviews are based on a certain anthropology. “What is a person?” In my view, a person is a point of view. We take the experiences of our lives and the history and the ancestry and our environments. We use it to build a set of models through which we see the world. You have to see each person as a creator of their own worldview. 

I worry that a school that’s meant to sort of download information into students doesn’t appreciate how the many different ways they’re receiving that experience and how they’re manufacturing their own distinct, never to be repeated worldview. That can get crushed over if everything’s about tests. 

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[00:22:51] Eboo: After this short break, more with David Brooks. One of the things you highlight in that Thurman piece is to be a good citizen, it is necessary to be warm hearted, but it is also necessary to master the disciplines, methods and techniques required to live well together. How to listen well, how to ask for and offer forgiveness, how not to misunderstand one another, how to converse in a way that reduces inequalities of respect. I’m struck by the words that you highlight here. Discipline, method, technique. What’s the institution that talks the most about discipline, method, technique? It’s universities. 

Again, I still want to try to focus on the constructive and the positive and the possible. All of these things exist at universities. I started rereading the book probably for the third time last night. Half of the book is quotes from researchers at universities- 

[00:23:50] David: Absolutely. 

[00:23:51] Eboo: -right? Basically, the people who have done the exploration into what it means to be human, and you’re quoting theologians and scientists. You’re as interested in the insights from both. They’re at universities, the ingredients are there at a university for the buffet of what it means to be human, for what it means to develop character. What assignment would you give, or maybe let’s put it this way, what would you have students do during first-year orientation that would allow them to put those ingredients together, discipline, method, technique, insights and research from the people that are right there on the campus, and to say, here’s what we’re about at this university, bringing these together in a way that you can be a better person and you can come to know other people. 

[00:24:41] David: We’re in Downtown Chicago, but I’m going to put bookends from either end of Chicago. The first is a guy in Northwestern named Dan McAdams. He studies how people tell their life story. He calls people into his lab, and over four hours he asks them about their life stories, their high points, their low points, their turning points. At the end, he says half the people cry at some point. Then at the end, he gives them a little check to compensate them for their time. A lot of the people push back the check and say, “I don’t want to take money for this. This has been the best afternoon of my life.” 

Studs Terkel, another Chicago nearby, he said, if you ask them, people will talk. They will always talk because no one has ever asked them before. I would think a good way to start out the university life is to make people feel really seen, heard and respected and giving them the chance to tell their life story. Second, to go to the South side, my colleague Nick Epley at the University of Chicago, he studies how people interact on public transportation or just a normal life. He concludes that we underestimate how much we’re going to like talking to each other. We underestimate how deep people want to go in conversation. We underestimate how much people want to reveal their intimacies and tell their secrets, assuming there’s a zone of trust that’s been built. Yet I think that’s not happening. 

I was at another university last week, and they said, our problem is the students arrive and they’ve suddenly got a roommate, and one roommate is messing the other’s need. They have to figure out how to negotiate that. They just, they’ve never had a roommate before because most of them are affluent at these places and they don’t have that conversation. To focus on moral and social skills right up front in the first year, I think it would just be a tremendously valuable thing. 

One of my students at Yale, she’d had four boyfriends and all of them ghosted her at the end. They did not know how to do the breakup conversation. Maybe they were callous jerks, but maybe they’d just never been taught. I think these basic concrete social skills are just the key. In the book, as you know, I quote Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch a lot. Iris Murdoch said, “We tend to look at the world through self-regarding eyes, but we can grow by looking if we can cast a just and loving attention on others.” 

Learning those basic skills, which you would think they’d be learned in the home or some time earlier in life, but they’re not. They’re just not. I think that’s a concrete thing any university could do. The researchers are right there. I quoted and therapists are right there. Therapists are really good at seeing other people, but somehow, it’s not been institutionalized as we define the university and we conceive of the university as a place to prepare people for career. 

[00:27:35] Eboo: I want to double back on something. If you think about elite education in the United States, it emerges from a world in which two magisteriums are intact. One is the magisterium of religion and Harvard. Seven of the eight Ivies are built as religious finishing schools for the aristocracy. That’s the second magisterium. The aristocracy is intact. In other words, part of the definition of the meritocracy is where you wind up in life socioeconomically, at least in terms of prestige is based on what you earn, which means there is this constant tumble of trying to get to the top. 

Part of the definition of aristocracy is you’re born at the top and therefore you don’t have to worry about where you wind up in the aristocracy. You have the time to nurture your character. It’s a social Maslow’s hierarchy. There’s a million things wrong with the aristocracy. I’m curious, can we have universities that seek to nurture character in the manner that you and I mean it, without an intact magisterium of aristocracy and an intact ecosystem of religion? 

[00:28:51] David: One of the great puzzles of life for me is that, 75 years ago, the definition of merit and getting into Harvard was did your dad go to Harvard? You really had to have the right bloodlines. Now we’ve made life so much more fair and open and we’ve included a much wider diversity of people and we’ve taken in more talent yet, but are our institutions working vastly better than they were when the old rich kids from Princeton and Harvard were running things? Not necessarily. Is social trust better? Is our financial world running better? Is our law world running better? Is the media running better? 

It should be a lot better because we’re just built a fairer society and somehow we have our own sins those of us who’ve grown up in the meritocracy. One of them, frankly, is, I think a sense of moral obligation, a sense of the moral lens in every profession. I do think those systems were horrible. I was a Jew, I would never have gotten into any of these places, and neither would you have, but they did spread this gospel of obligation. A sense that you’re blessed, you need to lead a life of selfless service. That really did happen. George Marshall and the military guy, John Foster Dulles, these were the exceptions. They were the exceptional people, but they really did exist. They got us through World War II. As a result, I feel like they were more in touch with working-class America than a lot of us in the current meritocracy are in touch with working-class America, maybe because they serve in the army or something. 

[00:30:20] Eboo: This is a major theme in The Organization Kid. Princeton is the subject of that. You were like, “Look, if you look at the people who went to Princeton in the early 20th century, it is not a world we would want to return to. Yet, because they were the aristocracy, this sense of what are you giving back was nurtured in them. All these guys went to World War I. 

[00:30:42] David: Our system of sorting was really created in the 1940s and 50s at Harvard. It was at a time when people thought social science was really a science and that human beings could be quantified. They had tremendous faith in quantification. They thought, “Well, we can quantify intelligence,” and they worshiped intelligence. Intelligence is important. It’s one of the more important qualities that predicts how you’re going to do in life, but it’s not most of what predicts. It’s not even close. 

To me, what we need to do to help address some of these anomalies and inequities is just a broader definition of what intelligence is or what ability is. The thing I care about most is drive. Do you have the willingness to be curious in life and learn for the rest of your life? Sociability, are you a good person? Are you going to be a teammate? In school, you don’t really have to be a great teammate, you can just get good grades. Most workplaces, you got to go be a good teammate. 

Those sorts of character skills and then just creativity, imagination, the whole human panoply of abilities, we have amputated to a very small degree, intelligence, ability to take tests. That’s just not the whole full human being. I’m hopeful that if we can somehow persuade universities to adopt a broader approach to what a human ability is, then the rich parents won’t have gained the system quite so much and will spread opportunity around a little and make for a healthier society. 

[00:32:06] Eboo: I got two more questions for you. One is based on the brief, wonderful talk you did at the Council on Foundations, which we were both at a week or two ago, and you quoted Isaiah Berlin, and you quoted him on values pluralism. If there’s an archetypal academic or philosopher of the latter half of the 20th century, it’s probably Isaiah Berlin in so many ways. Values pluralism is simple. We all understand what it is in our gut. He makes an academic framework of it. “Look, you can’t have all the freedom you want and all the equality you want, because if you want equality, you’re going to have to tax people and that’s going to limit the freedom of rich people to be rich,” whatever. 

One of the things that strikes me is that is all about the gray areas of life. That’s all about balance and compromise. So much of what we see right now, at least the loud voices on campuses, it’s all black and white, it’s all Manichaean. How do you think universities nurture in people the values pluralism approach, which is the good things in life, you balance. Their intention, how do you think about that? 

[00:33:11] David: There’s a whole train of philosophy that thinks this way. We can start by just teaching them. You go back to Vico, a medieval thinker that Berlin writes a lot about. He said there were different ages and different cultures. He goes back to the Roman age or the Greek age or different ages. He said, all of them had virtues. If you read the Iliad, you see the energy and the courage of Greek life, the spiritedness, but they had no concept of humility. It just was a foreign concept to them. Then you go to Christianity, they have a deep concept of humility. 

Vico says, “When you have a cultural transition from one culture to another, you gain some things, but you also lose things.” Berlin takes this to the tragic point that not all goods go together. One truth sometimes contradicts the other truth. Everything depends on context. 

There’s a guy who I think follows from Berlin, a British philosopher named Michael Oakeshott, who says life is about balance. Imagine you’re on a boat, sometimes the wind is blowing from the port, sometimes the starboard, you’re moving or shifting around depending on where the wind’s blowing from. Life is just trying to keep on an even keel in the complex and difficult circumstances and storms of life. If people got in touch with this tradition of what I guess you would call moderation, they would see that moderation is not like a tepid bland, I’m doing nothing. Moderation is trying to have a sense of reality, a sense of forward movement among the complex circumstances of life. 

If anybody saw that movie, Lincoln, I think the movie adds something that never actually happened to Lincoln. It’s a little parable he tells, and it’s the parable of the compass and the swamp. He says, “If I’m trying to end slavery, say, and slavery is my due north, I will walk straight ahead in where the compass point tells me to go. If there’s a swamp in front of me, then I’m just going to walk into the swamp. I’ve got to go around the swamp.” He says, you got to go have a true north, but you also got to go know where the swamps in life are and you move a little. That’s a good reminder of both having principles and having the ability to know what’s going to be effective. 

One of the things that I really admired about that Howard Thurman book was, and his emphasis on technique and method, was that we all want to live in a world of equal dignity, but how exactly do you get there? He thought very carefully about what’s really the problem is the status rankings. If you and I have different groups, have frozen status rankings, we’ll see each other as enemies. We don’t want to attack each other. We want to attack the status rankings and make them fluid. That was just a very subtle way of thinking about how to reduce social inequity. 

Then he influences Martin Luther King’s principles of nonviolence. Which in many ways, I put them in the column. They’re totally, I hope everybody knows them, but they’re totally counterintuitive. Don’t hate the person doing you evil. Hate the evil. When we go after our opponents, we’re trying to turn them into our friends. I would not say I see a lot of that in the protest movements today, that we are trying to create a beloved community in which these people become our friends. It’s not only more humane, it just strikes me as a more effective way to do social change. The civil rights leaders really thought about how do we do this effectively quite a lot? I think they’ve rarely been matched in American protest movements. 

[00:36:37] Eboo: When SNCC was first created, Diane Nash, John Lewis, that crew, their symbol was not only two hands clasped together, it was not a fist in the air. I always thought like Carmichael five, six, seven years later. It was two hands clasped together. It was a black hand and a white hand. In other words, it was the hand that was literally keeping people down in very tangible, legal ways. It was clasped together. 

If you grew up in a society where you are able to only be with the people you agree with, and you’re all two inches left of center, well, the way things will work is you will wind up three inches left of center or four inches left of center instead of if you are forced to encounter ways of thinking or people that you disagree with, you are required to balance. You’re just required to do it. 

[00:37:23] David: I find when you get into insular groups, your language changes, so you don’t even think about the words you’re using. In the Trump world, people talk about the lamestream media, what does that mean, who’s in there? I read academics a lot, so I’m mostly reading left-wing people. They’ll throw around phrases like late capitalism. I’m like, what does that mean? It’s just a phrase we use in our circle. It doesn’t quite mean anything, but it’s how we demonstrate our membership. 

[00:37:53] Eboo: My metaphor for this, and I spend a lot of time on campuses also, and it’s moving word magnets around the refrigerator. There’s 12 words. Imperialism, colonialism, late capitalism, white supremacy, decolonialism. Now you know the term scholasticide, right? 

[00:38:08] David: Right. 

[00:38:08] Eboo: You’re just moving around the refrigerator. They could be useful concepts if deployed positively, but it is, as you’re saying, it’s a badge of tribal membership. Not conceptual tools. 

[00:38:21] David: I just had a meeting with a bunch of students at Chicago, and we were talking about some of my heroes and moral formation, spiritual formation. It was a great conversation. The students all had different thoughts, and it was going great. Then the faculty sponsor says, “Well, what about the systems of oppression?” To be able to think about your spiritual life, that’s already a mark of privilege because you’re not starving, whatever. She asked the standard political question. 

Then I say, “I’ve been to a lot of poor parts of the world. Those people are not spiritually naked. Those people are spiritually hungry, and the mosques and churches and synagogues of poor places around the world are filled with people who don’t have much, but they have elevated spiritual lives. In some ways, I’d say, as Christ would say, they’re closer to God than the rest of us are. This cliched class structure, class oppression view is just a substitute for thinking.” 

[00:39:13] Eboo: A substitute for thinking, yes. All right, last question. We do a lot of work at universities. I had a chance to spend time more and more with chancellors, because the question of how do you cooperate well is a central question. One of the things I suggest they think about is, what’s the promise you make to your students? What’s the promise you make to the public? 

[00:39:34] David: Yes, I guess the promise to the students would be to, we’ll treat you as whole human beings, and that we will not treat you as a brain on a stick. We’ll be carefully thinking about how communal life works, how your mental health works, how your spiritual life develops, and that this will be a place where we’ll try to teach you how to learn. We’ll try to teach you about spiritual growth. All the things you would want in a full human being will be on the agenda here. I would not let the academic disciplines shoehorn the education the students would receive. 

Then to the wider community, I guess I would say we’ll teach students to think and to decide. Our goal here is wisdom. I find I don’t remember much of the substance of what I learned in college, but I remember how my professors are, and I remember how tremendously admirable. That line you had from Thurman, which I love him, they put a crown above me, which I tried to live up to. I had never encountered that quote. It resonates so much. It’s such a goal for a university to give us something to live up to. 

I noticed some universities still have it. Morehouse in particular. I go to a lot of schools and so sometimes I think this place is fine, but they don’t really leave a mark on students. Students pass through. Sometimes you go to a school, you feel like they’re going to change these kids forever and they’ll forever walk away being a Kenyan, a little school in Ohio. I think that really affects people. 

My wife went to a Christian college outside of Chicago called Wheaton. I know a Wheatie when I met a Wheatie. The school affects them. The schools are not afraid to be themselves. They can be very distinct institutions. They give, as I said, students people to love and subjects to love. They often tell a sacred origin story. They have a clear sense of purpose. Some universities, they don’t have a clear sense of purpose, but they have a distinct sense of purpose. When people leave Morehouse or Wheaton or Kenyan or other schools like that, they want to bring the experience they had, they want to bring it to the next place. They want to replicate the culture. These are formative institutions as opposed to just something you pass through in order to get a degree. 

[music] 

[00:41:53] Eboo: Yes. I love it. This institution will treat you as a whole person and we will nurture you so that we deliver you to the public as somebody who can think and who can decide. David Brooks, let’s leave it there. Thank you for your friendship. Thank you for being who you are in the world. 

[00:42:06] David: Oh, same to you. Always a pleasure to be with you, friend. 

[music] 

[00:42:15] Eboo: How do you come to know a person? How do you see a person? How do you get to know their worldview? How are we nurturing qualities in educators that ask them to see the whole student to, as David spoke about in this podcast, come to know a person? How are we illustrating a variety of traditions that help the next generation shape their minds and their lives? 

As always, we’d love to hear from you. Message us in the comments or wherever you live on social media. You can find us on Twitter at InterfaithUSA and Instagram at InterfaithAmerica. If you enjoyed this episode with David, be sure to listen to our thought-provoking dialogue in Season 1, Does a Religiously Diverse Nation Need a Common Story? To read more about these conversations and find resources about bridge building in our religiously diverse nation, visit our website, interfaithamerica.org. I’m Eboo Patel. 

Intro/outro music provided by Mysterylab Music and composed by Mott Jordan.

Credit music provided by Die Hard Productions.