How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

by David Brooks

But over the years I came to realize that living in a detached way is, in fact, a withdrawal from life, an estrangement not just from other people but from yourself.

When I was young, I wanted to be knowledgeable, but as I got older, I wanted to be wise. Wise people don’t just possess information; they possess a compassionate understanding of other people. They know about life.

The real act of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete social actions well: disagreeing without poisoning the relationship; revealing vulnerability at the appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to end a conversation gracefully; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; knowing how to let someone down without breaking their heart; knowing how to sit with someone who is suffering; knowing how to host a gathering where everyone feels embraced; knowing how to see things from another’s point of view. These are some of the most important skills a human being can possess, and yet we don’t teach them in school. Some

Our problem, I believe, is fundamentally moral. As a society, we have failed to teach the skills and cultivate the inclination to treat each other with kindness, generosity, and respect.

Moral Education in America, B. Edward McClellan argues that most elementary schools began to abandon moral formation in the 1940s and 1950s and “by the 1960s deliberate moral education was in full-scale retreat.” He continues: “Educators who had once prided themselves on their ability to reshape character now paid more attention to the SAT scores of their students, and middle-class parents scrambled to find schools that would give their children the best chances to qualify for elite colleges and universities.”

several generations, including my own, were not taught the skills they would need in order to see, understand, and respect other people in all their depth and dignity. The breakdown in basic moral skills produced disconnection, alienation, and a culture in which cruelty was permitted. Our failure to treat each other well in the small encounters of everyday life metastasized and, I believe, led to the horrific social breakdown we see all around us.

So when I see you, I want to see back into the deep sources of your self. That means asking certain key questions: Where’s home? What’s the place you spiritually never leave? How do the dead show up in your life? How do I see you embracing or rejecting your culture? How do I see you creating and contributing to your culture? How do I see you transmitting your culture? How do I see you rebelling against your culture? How do I see you caught between cultures?

“You live through time, that little piece of time that is yours,” the novelist Robert Penn Warren wrote, “but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that are simultaneous with yours….What you are is an expression of History.”

Wise people don’t tell you what to do; they help you process your own thoughts and emotions.

Wise people help you come up with a different way of looking at yourself, your past, and the world around you.