It's Better Than It Looks: Election 2016

David Brooks Author

10/05/2016 Added

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New York Times Op-Ed columnist David Brooks has a unique gift for bringing audiences face to face with the spirit of our times, and he does so with humor and insight. A regular analyst on PBS NewsHour and NPR’s All Things Considered, he is a keen observer and commentator on politics and foreign affairs. His newest book, “The Road to Character,” tells the story of ten great lives that illustrate how character is developed and models how we can all strive to build rich inner lives.

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[00:00:02.902](bright music)
[00:00:09.776]FEMALE ANNOUNCER: Today you are part of an important
[00:00:11.811]conversation about our shared future.
[00:00:14.881]The E. N. Thompson Forum on World Issues explores
[00:00:17.450]a diversity of viewpoints on international
[00:00:20.286]and public policy issues to promote understanding
[00:00:23.590]and encourage debate across the University
[00:00:25.792]and the State of Nebraska.
[00:00:28.128]Since its inception in 1988,
[00:00:30.964]hundreds of distinguished speakers
[00:00:32.832]have challenged and inspired us,
[00:00:35.135]making this forum one of the preeminent speaker series
[00:00:39.539]in higher education.
[00:00:42.609]It all started when E. N. "Jack" Thompson imagined a forum
[00:00:46.846]on global issues that would increase Nebraskans'
[00:00:49.783]understanding of cultures and events from around the world.
[00:00:53.720]Jack's perspective was influenced by his travels,
[00:00:57.090]his role in helping to found the United Nations,
[00:00:59.859]and his work at the Carnegie Endowment
[00:01:02.429]for International Peace.
[00:01:04.931]As president of the Cooper Foundation in Lincoln,
[00:01:08.001]Jack pledged substantial funding to the forum,
[00:01:11.171]and the University of Nebraska
[00:01:13.006]and Lied Center for Performing Arts agreed to co-sponsor.
[00:01:17.477]Later, Jack and his wife Katie created
[00:01:20.246]the Thompson Family Fund
[00:01:22.282]to support the forum and other programs.
[00:01:25.485]Today, major support is provided by the Cooper Foundation,
[00:01:30.790]Lied Center for Performing Arts,
[00:01:32.859]and University of Nebraska Lincoln.
[00:01:35.762]We hope this talk sparks an exciting conversation among you.
[00:01:42.335]And now, on with the show.
[00:01:44.737](bright music)
[00:01:52.512](applauding)
[00:01:58.618]MIKE ZELENY: Good evening, I'm Mike Zeleny
[00:02:00.186]with the University of Nebraska.
[00:02:01.855]I'm honored to welcome you
[00:02:03.289]to tonight's E. N. Thompson Forum on World Issues.
[00:02:06.059]For more than a quarter century,
[00:02:07.594]the University and Cooper Foundation have partnered
[00:02:09.662]with the Lied Center for Performing Arts
[00:02:11.331]to make this forum possible.
[00:02:13.199]We would like to especially thank the generous sponsors
[00:02:15.635]of tonight's lecture, including NET,
[00:02:18.404]Nebraska's PBS and NPR stations,
[00:02:21.674]the UNL Chancellor's Office,
[00:02:23.276]which special thanks to Chancellor Ronnie Green
[00:02:25.578]and Former Chancellor Harvey Perlman,
[00:02:27.714]the College of Journalism and Mass Communications,
[00:02:30.316]and the Center for Civic Engagement.
[00:02:32.986]This year, E. N. Thompson forum speakers
[00:02:34.854]are addressing the theme Crossing Borders.
[00:02:37.457]The seemingly hard and fast lines
[00:02:39.659]that define American politics have blurred
[00:02:41.995]in the 2016 presidential election.
[00:02:45.031]Perhaps no journalist today is better
[00:02:47.200]at incisively analyzing culture and politics
[00:02:50.003]than our speaker tonight, and we're grateful he chose us
[00:02:53.206]over the Vice Presidential Debate.
[00:02:55.341](laughing)
[00:02:57.010](applauding)
[00:03:03.349]Although I understand it was a closer call
[00:03:04.851]between tonight's forum and Maroon 5.
[00:03:07.387](laughing)
[00:03:08.821]David Brooks is one of America's
[00:03:10.056]most prominent political commentators.
[00:03:12.158]He writes a biweekly op-ed column for The New York Times.
[00:03:15.094]He's also a regular analyst on PBS NewsHour
[00:03:17.630]and on NPR's All Things Considered.
[00:03:19.832]David has a gift for bringing audiences face-to-face
[00:03:22.769]with the spirit of our times,
[00:03:24.337]humor, insight, and quiet passion.
[00:03:27.006]His current book, The Road to Character,
[00:03:29.075]explores the road to a deeper inner life
[00:03:31.578]and explains why selflessness leads to greater success.
[00:03:35.348]His previous books include The Social Animal,
[00:03:37.817]On Paradise Drive, and Bobos in Paradise.
[00:03:41.187]David worked at The Wall Street Journal for nine years,
[00:03:43.489]and has written for The New Yorker, Forbes,
[00:03:45.592]and The Washington Post, along with other periodicals.
[00:03:48.728]This evening, after his remarks,
[00:03:50.430]you will have the opportunity to ask questions via Twitter,
[00:03:53.433]using the hashtag #ENThompsonForum.
[00:03:56.069]Ushers will also be available in the aisles
[00:03:57.937]to collect your other questions and bring them to the stage.
[00:04:01.107]The title of tonight's presentation is
[00:04:03.543]It's Better Than It Looks: Election 2016.
[00:04:06.846]Let's give a rousing Nebraska welcome to David Brooks.
[00:04:09.382](applauding)
[00:04:21.226]DAVID BROOKS: Thank you.
[00:04:22.228](applauding)
[00:04:25.365]Thank you.
[00:04:26.199](applauding)
[00:04:29.302]I will always be grateful to Nebraska
[00:04:31.137]for letting me miss that damn debate.
[00:04:33.573](laughing)
[00:04:35.541]And I thank you for the vote of confidence that I'm...
[00:04:38.711]The fact that you're here means you think
[00:04:40.179]I'm more interesting than Mike Pence and Tim Kaine, so...
[00:04:42.548](laughing) (applauding)
[00:04:44.717]We'll see.
[00:04:49.389]Now, I'm gonna talk about the nation and politics
[00:04:53.593]and especially the character of the nation.
[00:04:56.329]And you should know I just wrote a book on character.
[00:04:59.065]And when I talk about the character of the country
[00:05:00.833]and the character of the people in it,
[00:05:02.535]I don't wanna seem like I'm on a high horse.
[00:05:05.071]And you should know that writing a book on character
[00:05:07.674]doesn't actually give you good character.
[00:05:10.977]Reading a book on character
[00:05:12.211]doesn't actually give you good character.
[00:05:15.415]Buying a book on character, however,
[00:05:17.483](laughing)
[00:05:19.185]does give you...
[00:05:21.721]And no, I'm no paragon.
[00:05:23.089]I started out sort of emotionally and morally shallow.
[00:05:27.126]My parents were sort of lefties in New York City in the '60s
[00:05:30.930]and they took me to what the hippies would call a be-in,
[00:05:34.467]where hippies would go just to be.
[00:05:37.203]And one of the things they did was they set a garbage can
[00:05:39.439]on fire and threw their wallets into it
[00:05:40.973]to demonstrate their liberation
[00:05:42.308]from money and material things.
[00:05:44.277]And I was five years old
[00:05:45.678]and I saw a $5 bill on fire in the garbage can,
[00:05:49.282]and so I broke from the crowd, reached into the fire,
[00:05:51.017]grabbed the money, and ran away.
[00:05:52.752](laughing)
[00:05:54.220]And that was sort of my first step over to the right.
[00:05:56.489](laughing)
[00:06:02.161]And then when I was 18, the admissions officers
[00:06:04.163]at Columbia, Brown, and Wesleyan decided I should go
[00:06:06.599]to the University of Chicago,
[00:06:08.735](laughing)
[00:06:09.902]which others have called a Baptist school
[00:06:13.139]where atheist professors teach Jewish students
[00:06:15.074]St. Thomas Aquinas.
[00:06:16.509](laughing)
[00:06:19.479]At Chicago I had a joint major in philosophy and celibacy.
[00:06:24.317](laughing)
[00:06:27.353]I learned to do what all college students,
[00:06:28.788]I presume, here learn to do,
[00:06:29.989]which is how to dominate classroom discussion
[00:06:31.591]while doing none of the reading.
[00:06:34.794]But I still didn't, after graduation,
[00:06:36.929]didn't rise to a life of higher pleasures.
[00:06:39.732]I moved to New York, my hometown.
[00:06:41.701]I tried to hang out with those fancy,
[00:06:43.736]extremely slender Upper East Side ladies.
[00:06:47.306]If you see them, they're so slender
[00:06:48.374]they don't actually have thighs,
[00:06:49.575]they just have one calf on top of the other.
[00:06:51.577](laughing)
[00:06:53.012]And they're usually married to these old guys
[00:06:55.681]who have decided they made a billion dollars,
[00:06:58.017]and so they've decided to just not die.
[00:07:00.553](laughing)
[00:07:02.054]And so they hire squads of personal trainers,
[00:07:04.524]and they're popping Cialis like breath mints,
[00:07:06.559]and they're running around Central Park.
[00:07:08.628]And you see them just zooming by you.
[00:07:10.229]They're like 94 years old,
[00:07:11.697]they've shrunk down to 80 pounds, 4'6".
[00:07:14.700]It's like being passed by a little iron Raisinet
[00:07:17.170]as they go by you.
[00:07:18.471](laughing)
[00:07:22.208]And then I became a conservative columnist
[00:07:25.044]at The New York Times,
[00:07:26.512]a job I liken to being the chief rabbi at Mecca.
[00:07:29.148](laughing)
[00:07:30.683]Then I moved out to the suburbs
[00:07:32.718]and tried to realize the American dream.
[00:07:34.554]Again, not super deep.
[00:07:35.655]I bought the big Viking stove
[00:07:37.790]that looks like a nickel-plated nuclear reactor,
[00:07:40.059]a subzero refrigerator,
[00:07:42.295]'cause zero just wouldn't be cold enough.
[00:07:45.665]I used to shop at these progressive grocery stores
[00:07:48.367]like Whole Foods and Trader Joe's
[00:07:50.002]where all the cashiers look like they're on loan
[00:07:52.104]from Amnesty International.
[00:07:53.806](laughing)
[00:07:55.041]My favorite section there is the pretzels
[00:07:56.909]and potato chips section.
[00:07:59.078]They actually can't serve those kind of vulgar snacks
[00:08:01.047]in the snack food section.
[00:08:02.481]They have instead all these seaweed-based snacks,
[00:08:05.051]which is for kids who come home and say, "Mom, Mom,
[00:08:07.753]"I want a snack that'll help prevent colorectal cancer."
[00:08:10.590]And they get that. (laughing)
[00:08:13.693]And so I was still not leading a deep life.
[00:08:20.666]I got a little older.
[00:08:22.101]I actually found I got a little more feminine.
[00:08:24.537]I'm the only male who's ever read that book Eat, Pray, Love.
[00:08:30.309]By page 123 I was lactating, actually.
[00:08:33.446](laughing)
[00:08:36.948]And then finally faith came in.
[00:08:39.452]But my first faith was more of a judgmental god.
[00:08:42.788]I thought I was gonna be damned
[00:08:44.023]to my own personal form of hell,
[00:08:45.892]which would be playing Twister in eternity with Ted Cruz.
[00:08:48.828](laughing)
[00:08:52.899]And so this was sort of the trajectory I was on.
[00:08:56.102]Not a good one.
[00:08:57.870]But occasionally we are handed events
[00:09:00.806]that sorta lift you up.
[00:09:04.477]And I had an event.
[00:09:05.511]I do a show called The NewsHour
[00:09:07.813]with a guy named Mark Shields.
[00:09:09.548]Our segments is called Shields and Brooks.
[00:09:11.651]We wanted to call it Brooke Shields,
[00:09:12.685]that would've been better.
[00:09:14.387](laughing)
[00:09:17.290]But I was driving home, this was about 10 years ago,
[00:09:19.792]to my home which was then in Maryland.
[00:09:22.361]And I drove, it was a summer afternoon,
[00:09:25.131]and I drove home and I pulled into the driveway.
[00:09:28.167]The driveway wrapped around the house
[00:09:29.402]and looked into the backyard.
[00:09:31.304]And my kids, who were then 12, nine, and four,
[00:09:34.307]had one of those supermarket plastic balls,
[00:09:37.176]and they were kicking it up in the air
[00:09:39.178]and they were racing across the yard
[00:09:41.447]to try to be the first one to get to it.
[00:09:43.816]And they were laughing and they were tumbling
[00:09:45.551]over each other and they were giggling.
[00:09:48.888]And so I just came home and unexpectedly was confronted
[00:09:52.825]with this tableau of perfect family happiness.
[00:09:56.529]And it was like one of those perfect summer evenings.
[00:09:58.264]The sun was coming through the trees
[00:09:59.498]and the grass somehow looked perfect.
[00:10:02.301]And it was one of those moments.
[00:10:04.337]I just sat there staring at it through the windshield.
[00:10:07.640]It was one of those moments when life and time are suspended
[00:10:11.444]and reality sorta spills outside its boundaries
[00:10:14.180]and you get confronted with the happiness and joy
[00:10:17.483]that you don't really deserve.
[00:10:20.519]And those moments, which are moments of grace,
[00:10:24.323]they sorta crack open a shell and you feel a higher pleasure
[00:10:26.892]than you ever get from anything at work,
[00:10:29.161]and you wanna be worthy of those moments.
[00:10:32.832]At that moment, something about the spirit sorta swells.
[00:10:37.770]And so that's the kinda moment that sorta lifts you up.
[00:10:40.940]Another moment happens to me on Thursday nights in D.C.
[00:10:43.709]or about twice a week, in fact, last night in D.C.
[00:10:46.312]I have some friends named Kathy and David who are married,
[00:10:49.382]and they have a kid who has a son in a public school in D.C.
[00:10:54.220]And he had a friend who came
[00:10:55.421]from sort of a nonfunctioning home.
[00:10:56.689]Dad had split, Mom had health and drug issues.
[00:10:59.625]And so there was no place to sleep at home,
[00:11:01.293]there was no food at home.
[00:11:02.862]And they said to this kid,
[00:11:05.131]"You can come stay with us when you need to.
[00:11:07.233]"You can have food at our house."
[00:11:09.335]And then that kid had a friend
[00:11:10.803]who was in the same situation and that kid had a friend.
[00:11:13.239]And now when you go to Kathy and David's house,
[00:11:15.875]in the basement there are a bunch of mattresses,
[00:11:18.344]and there are kids staying there,
[00:11:21.414]and there are kids eating them out of house and home.
[00:11:24.617]And when you go over to dinner as I did last night,
[00:11:27.386]they're serving Spike's chicken,
[00:11:29.488]and there are just 15 or 20 poor teenagers.
[00:11:34.527]And it is the warmest possible place you could possibly be.
[00:11:38.297]And the thing they give to us,
[00:11:40.166]the thing we give to them is that people are going around,
[00:11:43.269]they're sharing their hopes, their dreams,
[00:11:46.138]they're affirming each other
[00:11:47.440]in what they're trying to do in life.
[00:11:49.942]And the thing we give to them is we give them the gift
[00:11:52.311]of receiving their gifts.
[00:11:55.381]So there's always music around.
[00:11:57.516]There's a kid named Ed.
[00:11:58.784]He reads poetry off his little phone.
[00:12:01.520]There's a woman named Casari who just has a voice
[00:12:03.489]that sounds like New Orleans jazz in the '20s.
[00:12:05.758]She's about 18.
[00:12:08.394]There's a woman named Samara who shows her photographs.
[00:12:13.499]And you just receive them, serve as their audience.
[00:12:17.002]And the thing they give to us is that
[00:12:19.839]in the adult world there's normally some emotional distance
[00:12:22.308]as we greet each other.
[00:12:24.176]But they just say, "No, we hug here."
[00:12:27.813]And they hug and they embrace and they hang all over you,
[00:12:30.716]and they turn to you like flowers turning toward the sun.
[00:12:34.653]They turn for love.
[00:12:37.823]And it's just emotional unveiling
[00:12:40.493]every time I go to that house.
[00:12:42.695]I have an acquaintance named Bill Millican
[00:12:44.263]who's worked with young people for 50 years.
[00:12:48.367]He's often asked, "Well, what programs work
[00:12:50.870]"to turn around young lives?"
[00:12:53.072]And he says, "In 50 years I still haven't seen one program
[00:12:56.342]"change one kid's life.
[00:12:58.677]"What changes people is relationships and love.
[00:13:02.047]"It's someone willing to walk through the shadow
[00:13:03.782]"of the valley of adolescence with a kid,
[00:13:06.519]"who loves them week after week, month after month."
[00:13:09.788]Emerson said, "Souls are not saved in bundles,
[00:13:11.757]"they're saved one at a time."
[00:13:14.193]And at these meals, again, there's these moments
[00:13:16.328]of touching something soul-swelling.
[00:13:19.498]For underprivileged African American kids
[00:13:21.634]and overprivileged white pundits,
[00:13:24.937]there's just something lifting.
[00:13:28.140]And then the final experience I'll mention happens
[00:13:32.111]to me sometimes when I'm working.
[00:13:35.314]I read a book when I was seven called Paddington the Bear
[00:13:38.083]and decided I wanted to become a writer.
[00:13:40.786]I remember in high school I wanted
[00:13:41.921]to date this girl named Bernice.
[00:13:43.422]She dated some other guy.
[00:13:44.757]And I remember thinking, "What is she thinking?
[00:13:47.059]"I write way better than that guy."
[00:13:48.994](laughing)
[00:13:50.563]And so those were my values.
[00:13:54.433]And now I have a column in The Times.
[00:13:55.968]I tell college students,
[00:13:57.236]"Imagine having a paper due in three days,
[00:13:59.572]"and then imagine that's the rest of your life."
[00:14:01.574]That's what I do. (laughing)
[00:14:04.510]But what I tell my students, and they don't listen to me,
[00:14:08.147]is that by the time you sit down at the keyboard,
[00:14:09.848]your column, or your essay, should be 80% done.
[00:14:14.653]Writing is not about typing on the keyboard.
[00:14:16.388]It's about structure and organization.
[00:14:19.291]And I have a really bad memory, so I write everything down.
[00:14:23.529]And for my columns, I'll 200 or 300 pages
[00:14:25.531]of research material which I've marked up.
[00:14:28.033]And for me the process of writing is not typing.
[00:14:30.669]What I do is I organize all these papers
[00:14:32.271]into piles on the floor of my living room,
[00:14:34.540]and each pile is a paragraph in my column.
[00:14:38.077]And so the process of writing is crawling around
[00:14:40.412]on the floor of my living room, arranging my piles.
[00:14:44.283]And there are some moments when the ideas are coming to me,
[00:14:49.221]and things are happening, I'm moving the piles,
[00:14:54.326]that are like the best part of my job
[00:14:56.595]and that feel almost like a kind of prayer.
[00:15:00.899]And I'm a believer, with others, that there are four levels
[00:15:04.670]of happiness that we can experience.
[00:15:07.306]The first is material pleasure, good food, nice clothing.
[00:15:11.543]The second is ego and comparative pleasure,
[00:15:13.512]having some success, winning some status.
[00:15:16.282]The third is generativity,
[00:15:18.684]the pleasure we get from giving back to our community.
[00:15:21.720]And the fourth is transcendence,
[00:15:24.089]having intimate I-thou relationships,
[00:15:26.759]those moments in life when the self falls away
[00:15:29.295]and you feel a deep, unconditional oneness
[00:15:32.464]with a cause, a truth, a person, a home, a god,
[00:15:35.734]or the cosmic order.
[00:15:38.570]And I've talked about these three moments,
[00:15:41.340]and what they all are is they're moments of intimacy.
[00:15:45.344]First, intimacy with family,
[00:15:48.447]intimacy with a community,
[00:15:50.749]and intimacy at work, with a vocation.
[00:15:54.520]And I've talked about these moments
[00:15:56.021]because I think they are big, important, swelling moments,
[00:15:58.891]but mostly because it's a lead-in
[00:16:00.959]to talking about this election,
[00:16:03.462]'cause I think we have a problem of intimacy.
[00:16:07.499]Or to put it in a more social sphere,
[00:16:09.435]we have a crisis of solidarity, a crisis of community
[00:16:13.372]that undergirds a lot of our other problems,
[00:16:16.709]problems like polarization, poverty, widening inequality,
[00:16:21.313]our inability to compromise and govern ourselves.
[00:16:25.284]In the social sphere there's a lack of connection.
[00:16:28.987]There's first a lack of social trust.
[00:16:31.757]A generation ago, most Americans said they could trust
[00:16:33.759]the people around them.
[00:16:35.394]Now only 1/3 do, and only 19% of Millennials.
[00:16:39.298]People are living much more lonely lives.
[00:16:41.700]A generation ago only 8% of Americans lives alone.
[00:16:44.403]Now 28% live alone.
[00:16:46.205]There are more American households with dogs
[00:16:48.507]than with children now.
[00:16:51.710]Decline in marriage.
[00:16:53.912]The majority of American children born to women
[00:16:55.581]under 30 are born to single moms.
[00:16:58.417]Decline in friendship.
[00:17:00.419]A generation ago, most people could list five or six
[00:17:02.888]close friends with whom they shared everything.
[00:17:05.523]Now the average poll respondent says,
[00:17:07.326]"I have two or three close friends."
[00:17:09.261]And the number of people who say they have no close friends
[00:17:11.964]has risen from 10 to 25% of the population.
[00:17:16.468]Among Americans over 45, 35% suffer from chronic loneliness.
[00:17:22.074]The fastest growing religious group is non-affiliated.
[00:17:25.210]The fastest growing political party is non-affiliated.
[00:17:28.714]There's an epic rise in suicide,
[00:17:31.150]which is a mark of loneliness.
[00:17:33.118]Since 1999, suicide rates have been spiking.
[00:17:36.889]And right now 25% more Americans die from suicide
[00:17:39.691]than from auto accidents.
[00:17:42.928]And so that intimacy that we experience
[00:17:45.230]at our best moments is increasingly missing
[00:17:48.167]in our social sphere.
[00:17:51.336]Now, I wrote in the first half of 2016, last half of 2015
[00:17:55.240]about eight million columns
[00:17:56.742]about why Donald Trump would not be the Republican nominee.
[00:17:59.511](laughing)
[00:18:00.946]I'm remember thinking, "The guy's gonna be driving
[00:18:02.481]"down Pennsylvania Avenue having taken the oath of office,
[00:18:04.483]"I'll still be writing 'Don't worry, this will not happen.'"
[00:18:06.885](laughing)
[00:18:11.857]So I've spent the last seven months trying to figure out
[00:18:14.259]why I got that wrong, traveling all around America,
[00:18:17.729]especially to Trump or red parts of the country,
[00:18:20.532]trying to figure out what's going on.
[00:18:23.602]And I have to tell you,
[00:18:24.837]it has not been a depressing journey.
[00:18:27.606]Wherever you go, there are healers.
[00:18:29.374]There are people healing society.
[00:18:31.176]I was in a little neighborhood Houston,
[00:18:32.878]a little triangle between three freeways,
[00:18:35.380]in a little Latino neighborhood there
[00:18:36.682]with no after-school program,
[00:18:38.383]so this young woman comes down from New England,
[00:18:40.419]creates an after-school program with 1,400 kids.
[00:18:44.223]I was on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico.
[00:18:46.825]A couple comes down from Minnesota,
[00:18:48.560]they create a drug treatment program
[00:18:50.229]for 60 year old ex-cons.
[00:18:53.899]Not glamorous work.
[00:18:55.767]And the day I visited them,
[00:18:56.969]they have $17 in their bank account.
[00:19:00.472]And so you see these healers,
[00:19:02.875]but you also see gaps in society opening wide.
[00:19:08.113]Struck everywhere I went by the levels of opiate addiction,
[00:19:11.483]which is just a slow-motion form of suicide.
[00:19:15.287]Struck by how many people would talk about feeling betrayed,
[00:19:19.224]betrayed by their jobs, betrayed by their government,
[00:19:21.627]betrayed by their dads who split,
[00:19:23.595]betrayed by husbands and wives.
[00:19:25.898]It's as if people once felt that they lived
[00:19:28.400]in a web of giving and getting.
[00:19:30.903]I give to you, you give to me.
[00:19:32.137]I give to my job, my job gives to me.
[00:19:33.906]I give to my government, my government gives to me.
[00:19:36.441]And they feel that the basic web
[00:19:37.943]of getting and giving has been betrayed
[00:19:40.178]and the basic systems of life have been betrayed.
[00:19:44.316]I was struck by how much loss of dignity you find
[00:19:46.618]in those conversations, a sort of moral injury,
[00:19:51.189]that a lot of people could say,
[00:19:52.891]"Hey, I'm not the richest person on earth.
[00:19:55.360]"I'm not the most famous person on earth.
[00:19:57.629]"But I can be counted on.
[00:19:59.798]"I'm responsible to people around me.
[00:20:01.500]"I show up, I do what I'm supposed to do,"
[00:20:03.735]and there's a respectability in that.
[00:20:06.471]And so many of those, that respectability,
[00:20:08.574]that code has been undermined, frankly,
[00:20:11.710]by the code of reality TV,
[00:20:13.412]the code of Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo,
[00:20:15.380]which says if you're not famous,
[00:20:17.015]if you haven't become a celebrity,
[00:20:18.483]if you haven't made it rich fast, somehow you're invisible.
[00:20:22.588]And I found a lot of people feeling invisible.
[00:20:26.258]And all of these problems are exacerbated along class lines.
[00:20:31.797]It's used to be that college educated families
[00:20:33.131]and non-college education families
[00:20:34.633]looked basically the same.
[00:20:37.502]Little differences in income, but not big.
[00:20:40.205]Now they live in different universes.
[00:20:42.874]10% of kids with college educated moms grow up
[00:20:45.644]outside of marriage.
[00:20:47.279]70% of kids with non-college moms grow up
[00:20:50.382]outside of marriage.
[00:20:51.950]College educated people marry more, they vote more,
[00:20:55.120]they donate blood more, they're 1/3 less likely to be obese,
[00:20:59.024]1/3 less likely to smoke.
[00:21:01.526]College educated parents spend an hour more a day
[00:21:03.962]actively raising their kids.
[00:21:05.664]College educated parents invest, on average,
[00:21:08.200]$5,300 per kid in extracurricular activities every year.
[00:21:13.739]Non-college educated parents can't afford that.
[00:21:16.642]So the kids of college educated people are now more
[00:21:19.478]than twice as likely to play high school sports,
[00:21:22.147]twice as likely to be captain of their sports teams.
[00:21:25.250]And so you see this chasm opening up.
[00:21:30.322]And what's happened is that our politics has caught up
[00:21:33.325]with our society.
[00:21:35.093]The chasm in society, the fragmentation of society
[00:21:38.730]is now reflected in our politics.
[00:21:41.566]What we began to see in the Republican primaries,
[00:21:44.503]is that some Republican candidates would do well
[00:21:47.039]in areas with more education and rich in social capital
[00:21:49.941]where there were these connections,
[00:21:51.543]John Kasich, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio.
[00:21:54.713]Donald Trump always did well in places
[00:21:56.848]with low social capital and less education.
[00:22:00.552]In the general election,
[00:22:01.787]college educated people are voting for Clinton
[00:22:04.556]Less college educated people are voting for Trump.
[00:22:07.826]As he screamed at one rally, "I love the poorly educated."
[00:22:11.697](laughing)
[00:22:13.098]And with that has become a fundamental shift
[00:22:15.667]in what we talk about.
[00:22:17.369]Campaigns is not only left and right.
[00:22:19.237]It's about what is the subject of this debate.
[00:22:22.140]And we used to have a debate about the size of government.
[00:22:26.111]Progressives wanted big government,
[00:22:28.013]conservatives wanted smaller government,
[00:22:29.548]and that was our core debate in the '90s and in the '80s.
[00:22:33.485]But now it's between open and closed,
[00:22:35.854]or open and controlled.
[00:22:38.123]On the one side are those who feel the tailwinds
[00:22:40.392]of globalization and the meritocracy pushing them up,
[00:22:45.664]who favor open trade, open borders,
[00:22:47.299]open multiculturalism, open social mores.
[00:22:50.902]And on the other side are those who feel the headwinds
[00:22:52.637]of globalization and the meritocracy
[00:22:54.606]blasting in their faces,
[00:22:56.875]who favor controlled trade, controlled borders,
[00:22:58.877]controlled American culture, and traditional social mores.
[00:23:03.381]And so the most important political divide
[00:23:06.551]is between the well-educated America marked
[00:23:08.787]by economic openness, traditional family structures,
[00:23:11.089]high social capital, high trust in institutions,
[00:23:14.526]and the less-educated American marked
[00:23:16.027]by economic insecurity, anarchic family structures,
[00:23:19.898]fraying social fabric, and a pervasive sense
[00:23:22.534]of betrayal and distrust.
[00:23:27.439]And that's propelled the two candidates,
[00:23:31.309]who are both phenomenally unpopular.
[00:23:34.780]They're both about 57% unpopularity rates.
[00:23:38.049]Both are waging a campaign in a context
[00:23:40.418]of negative polarization.
[00:23:42.554]Negative polarization means you don't try
[00:23:44.122]to persuade people to vote for you,
[00:23:46.091]you just try to persuade people to hate the other guy,
[00:23:49.561]and that's sort of what the campaign has been.
[00:23:52.364]And also, since I'm emphasizing this solitude in society,
[00:23:56.468]both of them seem to me unusually solitary for politicians.
[00:24:01.773]Politicians are actually extremely
[00:24:02.941]socially gregarious creatures.
[00:24:05.110]When you walk up to them, they touch your face,
[00:24:09.047]they invade your personal space,
[00:24:10.782]they rub their hands around you.
[00:24:12.617](laughing)
[00:24:13.618]I remember I was once...
[00:24:16.354]I was in Aspen, Colorado.
[00:24:18.390]This was not part of my getting in touch with America tour.
[00:24:21.193](laughing)
[00:24:24.563]And I see Bill Clinton on the sidewalk
[00:24:26.264]watching a high school jazz band.
[00:24:28.834]And I go up to him and I,
[00:24:30.268]he's telling me about the saxophonist.
[00:24:32.771]But because he's a normal politician and Clinton,
[00:24:35.040]he can't just talk to me.
[00:24:36.608]He has to knead it into me by touching me a lot.
[00:24:39.744]And because I'm me, I cower away.
[00:24:41.847](laughing)
[00:24:43.348]And so we moved like 30 yards in the course of two songs.
[00:24:45.650](laughing)
[00:24:50.789]But these two candidates are not actually like that.
[00:24:54.226]Trump and...
[00:24:58.029]It's gonna become clear I basically agree with Ben Sasse.
[00:25:02.434]And actually... (applauding)
[00:25:07.639]And while I'm in Nebraska, I should say I think he's,
[00:25:10.442]A, the most promising Senator in the U.S. Senate,
[00:25:12.878]just in terms of intellect, but also a brave one.
[00:25:18.750](applauding)
[00:25:22.821]And so Trump has the solitude, to me, of the narcissist.
[00:25:27.525]He has no aides, no strategy, no advisors.
[00:25:30.328]His vocal patterns, he has a flight of ideas
[00:25:32.397]that zoom off in all directions,
[00:25:34.132]but every eight words return to self.
[00:25:37.002](laughing)
[00:25:38.536]And narcissists suffer from what they call alexithymia,
[00:25:41.840]the inability to understand the emotions of the self.
[00:25:44.242]And here I'm not diagnosing Trump,
[00:25:45.510]just their general pattern.
[00:25:47.846]They are unable to know themselves or love themselves,
[00:25:51.283]and so they hunger for a never ending supply
[00:25:52.951]of attention and admiration from outside.
[00:25:56.221]They lack an inner criteria
[00:25:57.522]to create what's right and wrong,
[00:25:59.457]so they demand the external criteria for their own worth
[00:26:03.528]based on luxury and appearance and beauty.
[00:26:06.731]They divide the world between winners and losers.
[00:26:09.401]They can't rest unless they're in the spotlight.
[00:26:12.671]And, again, this is the general description of narcissists.
[00:26:15.573]I think it happens to apply.
[00:26:17.509]But there's a solitariness to somebody caught in that,
[00:26:20.812]and sometimes I feel very sorry for Trump,
[00:26:23.848]up at three in the morning tweeting some hostility.
[00:26:26.751](laughing)
[00:26:28.320]And there's an aloneness.
[00:26:30.422]Clinton has the solitude of suspicion.
[00:26:34.759]Clinton, her husband is out there touching
[00:26:36.928]and being vulnerable and trying to make connection,
[00:26:42.600]but she seems to sometimes have interpreted life
[00:26:45.503]as a battlefield
[00:26:47.238]and is gonna put up a preemptive defensive wall.
[00:26:50.375]And maybe that's borne out of the reality
[00:26:52.010]of what her life is like,
[00:26:53.511]but it does mean there's no media contact.
[00:26:57.115]It does mean there's very little contact
[00:26:58.583]with a lot of Democratic politicians
[00:27:00.018]who would naturally be her friends.
[00:27:02.354]It does mean there's often a brittleness when challenged
[00:27:06.291]and just a closedness
[00:27:08.393]so we don't often know what she's thinking.
[00:27:11.363]I don't know what she does for fun.
[00:27:13.131]There's certain parts of normal life
[00:27:14.632]that she has closed behind the walls of protection,
[00:27:17.769]and it has often come back to hurt her.
[00:27:19.904]In Bill Clinton's administration,
[00:27:21.373]the Whitewater scandal was just brewing,
[00:27:24.075]and a lot of the people in the administration,
[00:27:26.378]including the president, said, "Let's not do Watergate.
[00:27:28.813]"Let's just get all the details out,
[00:27:30.749]"and we'll just have a bad week,
[00:27:31.983]"but let's be open about this."
[00:27:34.886]And she decided, no, we're not gonna do that.
[00:27:37.188]We're gonna build a wall, we'll release nothing.
[00:27:40.525]And as a result, there was an investigator,
[00:27:43.395]and as a result of that investigator
[00:27:45.630]there was a prosecutor named Ken Starr,
[00:27:48.400]and as a result of that prosecutor
[00:27:49.734]you have the whole Lewinsky scandal.
[00:27:52.137]And it was a case where being closed came back to bite them.
[00:27:57.742]And so it seems to me we have a country
[00:28:00.178]with a crisis of solidarity,
[00:28:01.413]with segmentation and solitude and isolation,
[00:28:04.182]and two candidates who arise out of the country
[00:28:06.651]who are a little isolated themselves
[00:28:08.920]but mostly living in a political context
[00:28:10.822]where they magnify the isolation.
[00:28:14.993]And so when I think about what we do as citizens,
[00:28:18.963]the first thing I think we do is we wage a campaign
[00:28:23.134]for intimacy, for connection,
[00:28:24.836]for community, and for solidarity.
[00:28:27.539]Now, some of those things you can do through organizations.
[00:28:32.811]I happen to think there should be a period
[00:28:35.480]of at least three months after high school
[00:28:37.415]where students are expected to do
[00:28:38.917]at least three months of national service
[00:28:41.686]so a kid from Lincoln could meet a kid from Long Island.
[00:28:44.389](applauding)
[00:28:49.294]I think all of us have a responsibility
[00:28:50.829]to put ourselves in cross-class contexts.
[00:28:54.332]So if you're a college educated person from around here,
[00:28:57.235]you could go find a high school educated person
[00:28:59.037]who's a member of the NRA, and vice versa.
[00:29:03.041]I think we all have to be in one organization that puts
[00:29:05.710]into contact with people completely unlike our own.
[00:29:09.814]I think government can support these platforms
[00:29:11.850]for relationships, nurse-family partnerships,
[00:29:14.886]wraparound services, mentoring programs.
[00:29:18.389]But more than that, I think we need a change in culture.
[00:29:21.659]And so I've been thinking we need a new anthropology.
[00:29:24.462]We need to shift the culture.
[00:29:26.464]We can't have political repair
[00:29:27.832]until we have social, spiritual, and some moral repair
[00:29:31.236]of how we talk to one another.
[00:29:34.472]We have to be more communal
[00:29:35.673]in an age that's too individualistic.
[00:29:38.143]We have to use a moral lens
[00:29:39.344]in a culture that's too utilitarian.
[00:29:41.846]We have to be more emotional
[00:29:43.081]in a culture that's too cognitive.
[00:29:46.284]Public discussion has become overpoliticizied
[00:29:48.620]and undermoralized.
[00:29:51.589]I'm an emotionally avoidant middle-aged white guy
[00:29:53.124]who lives in the most emotionally avoidant city
[00:29:54.826]on the face of the earth, Washington D.C.
[00:29:57.128](laughing)
[00:29:58.363]But we have to learn to talk in a mushy way,
[00:30:01.266]because it's the soft and squishy things
[00:30:02.901]that are actually hard and practical.
[00:30:06.704]And so as I cover this election,
[00:30:09.307]I've been thinking a lot about intimacy and how it happens
[00:30:12.377]and how commitment to each other happens.
[00:30:15.280]And if I learned anything about intimacy,
[00:30:17.882]believe me, it's not because I'm good at it.
[00:30:21.052]My friends would tell you that me talking
[00:30:22.487]about intimacy is like Gandhi writing about gluttony.
[00:30:25.089](laughing) It's not my normal thing.
[00:30:29.994]But I hope I've learned a few things
[00:30:31.362]from failure and observation, if not success.
[00:30:35.300]The first is that we're formed by intimacy.
[00:30:39.204]There were these orphanages in Nevada
[00:30:41.606]where they decided, this was back in the '40s,
[00:30:45.376]they wouldn't touch the kids
[00:30:46.678]'cause they wanted to keep them antiseptic,
[00:30:48.179]so they gave them health care and food but no handling.
[00:30:51.249]1/3 of the kids died by age three.
[00:30:53.885]It's literally the touch of intimacy
[00:30:55.653]that wires the fibers of the brain together.
[00:30:58.723]And hopefully we die in intimacy.
[00:31:00.258]I heard the story the other day of a woman,
[00:31:01.926]an Ivy League grad who worked at Google,
[00:31:03.861]who married a man who was looking after his elderly father,
[00:31:07.298]and he had a stroke.
[00:31:08.533]He was supposed to last two days.
[00:31:10.535]But this woman would bathe and care
[00:31:12.470]for this old, elderly man.
[00:31:16.107]And he slipped into a coma,
[00:31:18.042]and she would just hold him and stroke him
[00:31:19.978]and say to his forehead, "I love you, I love you,"
[00:31:22.981]and his eyes would open, and that would be the only time.
[00:31:27.085]And if any of us have been around someone
[00:31:28.653]who's died in a bath of family love,
[00:31:31.422]you do feel something lift spiritually upward.
[00:31:35.994]And so we're born in intimacy, hopefully we die in intimacy,
[00:31:38.529]and we certainly prosper in intimacy.
[00:31:42.033]There's a great study called The Grant Study
[00:31:43.568]that tracked these guys from 1940
[00:31:45.370]up until the present moment.
[00:31:47.605]Men who had no deep loves in their lives
[00:31:50.575]were three times more likely to suffer mental illness,
[00:31:53.378]2.5 times more likely to suffer from dementia,
[00:31:56.381]made 50% money over the course of their careers.
[00:32:00.652]Those who have a strong attachment with their mother
[00:32:03.221]at age 18 months, that's more predictive than IQ
[00:32:06.190]in how you're gonna do in life.
[00:32:08.226]The author of the study said it simply,
[00:32:11.029]"Happiness is love, full stop."
[00:32:14.399]And so I've come to think, thinking about intimacy
[00:32:16.200]amidst an era of isolation,
[00:32:18.870]that there are five key kinds of intimacies,
[00:32:20.905]five key commitments we make in the course of our life,
[00:32:24.876]to a spouse and a family, to a vocation,
[00:32:28.980]to friends, to a philosophy or faith,
[00:32:32.750]and to a community and nation.
[00:32:35.820]And the fulfillment of our lives depends
[00:32:37.422]on how intimately we bond with these five things,
[00:32:40.958]how well we choose our commitments,
[00:32:42.393]and how well we execute them.
[00:32:45.396]And we think of these five spheres as kinda different,
[00:32:48.232]but the act of becoming close to something,
[00:32:50.301]whether it's a god, whether it's a person,
[00:32:52.470]whether it's a vocation, whether it's a community,
[00:32:55.340]has some similarities.
[00:32:58.876]First it starts with a glance.
[00:33:01.346]We've all had these moments in life
[00:33:03.715]where you glance at something,
[00:33:05.717]and suddenly your life is changed
[00:33:07.952]'cause it seems really interesting.
[00:33:10.021]I had that moment at seven
[00:33:11.222]when I read that Paddington the Bear.
[00:33:13.958]I suddenly wanted to become a writer.
[00:33:16.427]My hero Bruce Springsteen saw Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show
[00:33:21.299]and said, "Hey, that looks interesting, that life."
[00:33:24.335]There's a scientist named E. O. Wilson,
[00:33:25.703]a great, great scientist who grew up in Florida,
[00:33:28.306]saw some ants walking across the forest floor,
[00:33:31.576]got riveted by it,
[00:33:34.746]and he studied ants for the next 70 years.
[00:33:38.349]Sometimes the first glance of interest takes fantastic form.
[00:33:42.320]I just heard a story about a woman.
[00:33:43.921]She was getting her hair done.
[00:33:45.590]She was about to move to L.A.
[00:33:47.625]And she walked into the hair salon,
[00:33:49.293]she saw the stylist, this guy,
[00:33:51.496]and she went to the changing room, called her mom,
[00:33:53.231]and said, "I just saw the guy I'm gonna marry."
[00:33:55.967]She sits in the chair, he's talking to her,
[00:33:58.536]and he says, "What are you doing?"
[00:34:00.138]And she says, "Well, I'm gonna move to L.A.,
[00:34:02.473]"but I won't move, I'll marry you."
[00:34:04.809](laughing)
[00:34:06.411]And she said, "Will you marry me?" (laughs)
[00:34:09.213]And he says, "Excuse me?"
[00:34:10.348]And she repeats the question.
[00:34:12.750]And he says, "Yeah," and they've been married for 25 years.
[00:34:15.420](laughing)
[00:34:17.588]But that underlines a core point,
[00:34:19.424]that love is fundamentally a process of attention.
[00:34:23.494]The opposite of love is not hate.
[00:34:25.563]The opposite of love is boring.
[00:34:28.433]You may get tired of chocolate cake,
[00:34:29.967]you may get tired of hearing
[00:34:31.168]that damn Adele song over and over,
[00:34:33.170](laughing)
[00:34:34.472]but the thing you really love never gets old.
[00:34:38.042]So that's the first stage.
[00:34:39.976]Then there's the phase of learning about the thing,
[00:34:43.414]about learning about your craft,
[00:34:44.882]discovering the enjoyment you experience doing your job,
[00:34:47.952]learning about a person, those magical moments
[00:34:49.853]when you're amazed that neither of you like foie gras.
[00:34:53.891]Oh, that's amazing, we must be fated for each other.
[00:34:57.094]We don't like to spend $9 for a cupcake.
[00:34:58.996]Oh, that's amazing.
[00:35:00.398](laughing)
[00:35:01.699]We must be soul mates.
[00:35:04.869]And that's the second phase.
[00:35:07.839]Then there's the process of losing control
[00:35:09.574]when you fall in love with a subject,
[00:35:12.143]you fall in love with a job,
[00:35:14.045]and it just gets that headlong rush.
[00:35:18.149]There's a great Indian poem,
[00:35:19.617]"Fire runs through my body, the pain of loving you.
[00:35:22.353]"Pain runs through my body with the fires of loving you.
[00:35:25.456]"I remember what you said to me.
[00:35:26.657]"I'm thinking of your love.
[00:35:27.625]"I am torn by your love for me."
[00:35:30.361]There's a poet, David White, who said,
[00:35:32.029]"There's a lovely disarray that comes with attraction.
[00:35:35.500]"When you find yourself deeply attracted to someone,
[00:35:38.169]"you gradually begin to lose your grip
[00:35:39.937]"on the frames that order your life.
[00:35:42.773]"A relentless magnet draws all your thoughts toward it.
[00:35:46.744]"Wherever you are, you find yourself thinking
[00:35:48.579]"about the one who has become the horizon
[00:35:50.348]"of all your longing.
[00:35:52.817]"When you are together, time becomes unmercifully swift.
[00:35:56.354]"No sooner have you parted
[00:35:57.755]"than you're already imagining your next meeting,
[00:35:59.323]"counting the hours.
[00:36:01.592]"This magnetic draw of your presence
[00:36:03.561]"renders you delightfully helpless.
[00:36:06.364]"A stranger you never knew until recently
[00:36:08.466]"has invaded your mind.
[00:36:10.201]"Every fiber of your being longs to be closer."
[00:36:14.005]And so there's that process of getting closer
[00:36:16.908]and more intimate with the thing.
[00:36:20.111]And then just at the moment of that headlong rush,
[00:36:23.814]there's the moment of stepping back,
[00:36:26.150]when you think, "What the heck is going here?"
[00:36:27.885]And that's the fourth stage of intimacy.
[00:36:30.187]Am I really ready to marry this person?
[00:36:32.456]Am I really ready to go to law school?
[00:36:34.659]Am I really ready to join the Marine Corps?
[00:36:36.294]Am I really ready to allow my life to be transformed
[00:36:39.697]by God when I don't know what he's gonna ask of me?
[00:36:42.767]And that's the moment of pause.
[00:36:45.436]And then's when the flow-o-matic comes out,
[00:36:47.438]when you start imagining all the sins
[00:36:48.940]of the person you're about to become committed to.
[00:36:51.008](laughing)
[00:36:52.510]She seems nice, she doesn't know how to pronounce Goethe.
[00:36:53.978]That's a problem for me.
[00:36:55.413](laughing)
[00:36:57.181]You start doing all the narratives
[00:36:58.482]of what other lives you could possibly have.
[00:37:01.385]We have a column at The New York Times, a love column,
[00:37:03.821]where we notice that men and women imagine their lives
[00:37:06.490]or imagine their mates differently.
[00:37:08.726]The men all write about the past,
[00:37:10.261]about women that got away.
[00:37:12.663]The women write about potential mates in the future,
[00:37:15.967]and they imagine extremely specific details
[00:37:18.436]about what those imagined guys are gonna be like.
[00:37:21.505]Sandy brown hair, wire glasses, khakis,
[00:37:24.575]drives a Jeep, comes from Iowa.
[00:37:27.044]They've got all these details.
[00:37:31.015]And when you're in that moment of pause,
[00:37:32.483]you adopt all these decision making frameworks.
[00:37:35.987]There's that one, the 10-10-10 rule.
[00:37:38.522]How will I feel about the decision in 10 hours,
[00:37:40.524]10 months, and 10 years?
[00:37:43.160]In marriage there's the communications rule.
[00:37:45.930]Marriage is a 50 year conversation,
[00:37:47.498]can I talk to this person for that long?
[00:37:50.601]There's the psychological traits rule.
[00:37:54.005]Is this person agreeable or are they neurotic?
[00:37:57.608]Marry agreeable, avoid neurotic.
[00:37:59.810](laughing)
[00:38:01.445]And so that's the fourth stage of intimacy,
[00:38:03.280]when you're just thinking about it.
[00:38:05.683]But then eventually intimacy and commitment
[00:38:08.586]and connection requires a leap of faith.
[00:38:13.090]Because when you join a community group,
[00:38:16.560]when you get married, when you have kids,
[00:38:18.162]when you go to law school, you go to med school,
[00:38:20.431]it changes you into a different person.
[00:38:23.401]You as your present self have no idea
[00:38:25.436]what that person is gonna be like,
[00:38:27.371]and so you have no data to make that decision.
[00:38:30.775]You just have to take a leap of faith.
[00:38:33.010]And the connections that bind us together require
[00:38:34.979]that leap of faith.
[00:38:36.714]My favorite poet, W. H. Auden, put it best.
[00:38:40.685]"The sense of danger must not disappear.
[00:38:43.354]"The way is certain, both short and steep,
[00:38:46.023]"however gradual it looks from here.
[00:38:48.359]"Look if you like, but you will have to leap."
[00:38:51.662]And he makes the case you have to get over the fantasy
[00:38:54.031]of thinking that staying put is safe,
[00:38:56.734]and you have to get over the fantasy
[00:38:58.803]that you can preserve your freedom
[00:39:01.939]if you have no connections,
[00:39:03.374]and this is the fantasy young people are raised with.
[00:39:05.376]If they limit their connections,
[00:39:07.111]then they'll be free and happy.
[00:39:09.780]But I think those of us who are older know
[00:39:11.248]that if you keep your options open,
[00:39:14.418]you'll render your life impotent and fragmented.
[00:39:18.622]You'll wander about in the indeterminacy
[00:39:20.458]of your own passing feelings, your changeable heart.
[00:39:23.728]Your life will be a series of temporary moments,
[00:39:26.464]not a flow of accomplishments.
[00:39:28.933]You'll never be all in for anything.
[00:39:30.968]You'll lay waste to their power,
[00:39:32.536]scattering them in all directions.
[00:39:35.272]And so eventually the sixth stage of intimacy is
[00:39:38.042]that moment when you finally commit.
[00:39:40.678]And this is the crucial moment in any social connection
[00:39:44.115]and really in our lives.
[00:39:46.183]Everything before is sort of ephemeral.
[00:39:49.620]You can have love and passions,
[00:39:51.689]but until you make those commitments to a vocation,
[00:39:54.859]to being a teacher, to a faith,
[00:39:57.461]to a person, to a friend or a community,
[00:40:00.431]it's all make-believe, it's sorta amateur.
[00:40:04.902]What is commitment?
[00:40:06.871]Commitment is falling in love with something
[00:40:09.740]and then building a structure of behavior around it
[00:40:11.976]for those moments to carry you through when love falters.
[00:40:15.713]It's making the kind of extreme promise
[00:40:18.349]that in the Bible Ruth made to Naomi.
[00:40:22.286]"Where you will go, I will go.
[00:40:24.321]"Where you lodge, I will lodge.
[00:40:26.524]"Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God.
[00:40:29.860]"Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried."
[00:40:33.697]That's a strong promise.
[00:40:37.001]Now, it's our commitments, our promises
[00:40:38.969]that define who we are.
[00:40:42.139]Hannah Arendt said, "Without being bound
[00:40:44.275]"to the fulfillment of our promises,
[00:40:45.709]"we would never be able to keep our identities.
[00:40:48.145]"We would be condemned to wander helplessly
[00:40:50.381]"and without direction
[00:40:51.916]"in the darkness of each person's lonely heart."
[00:40:55.486]It's our commitments that determine our character.
[00:40:59.757]Character is sorta like a wagon wheel with all these spokes.
[00:41:03.327]Every time you keep a promise you make the spoke stronger.
[00:41:06.297]Every time you break a promise you remove a spoke
[00:41:09.700]and the whole thing is likely to collapse.
[00:41:12.403]And intimacy is built by commitments.
[00:41:15.372]It's being reliable, time and time again,
[00:41:18.809]and becoming close to someone
[00:41:20.077]so you can be counted upon and trusted upon,
[00:41:22.146]and merging into that person.
[00:41:25.449]Tim Keller, this pastor, said,
[00:41:26.884]"Freedom is not the absence of restraints,
[00:41:29.053]"but finding the right ones."
[00:41:31.255]We move in life from open options to sweet compulsions.
[00:41:36.160]The things you chain yourself to set you free.
[00:41:39.730]And so we only have a ceremony for one of the commitments,
[00:41:42.099]to marriage, we have a wedding ceremony.
[00:41:45.202]But every single commitment we make in life has a moment
[00:41:48.272]when you've totally committed.
[00:41:51.542]And when you've done that, you've changed it.
[00:41:55.512]And you've turned it into what I think is the seventh stage,
[00:41:59.116]which is righteousness,
[00:42:00.351]the moments when you become morally involved.
[00:42:04.388]We all, I think, have a yearning for righteousness.
[00:42:06.624]We all wanna lead important, moral lives.
[00:42:08.692]We wanna be good.
[00:42:10.594]We don't really have a word for this yearning.
[00:42:13.197]The Greeks called it Eros.
[00:42:14.698]Now when we use the word Eros we just mean sex,
[00:42:17.601]but they meant an attraction
[00:42:20.037]to something greater and more excellent than themselves.
[00:42:24.041]Dorothy Day, one of my heroes,
[00:42:25.409]called this yearning loneliness, loneliness to be good.
[00:42:28.145]C. S. Lewis called it joy.
[00:42:30.281]Joy wasn't satisfying your desires.
[00:42:32.116]It was having the highest possible desires.
[00:42:36.120]The way I think of it is metaphorically,
[00:42:39.456]that there's a part in each of our souls
[00:42:42.159]that is like a reclusive leopard,
[00:42:45.362]and this is the part of us that doesn't care about money
[00:42:47.498]or status or Facebook or any of the everyday things.
[00:42:51.969]The leopard is the part of us that feeds off transcendence,
[00:42:55.339]that seeks an awareness of one's place in the cosmic order,
[00:42:58.742]a feeling of connection to unconditional love,
[00:43:00.778]to truth, justice, beauty, and home.
[00:43:03.580]And for long periods of our lives,
[00:43:05.516]this leopard, this deepest part of ourselves,
[00:43:07.952]is high up in the forest, in the mountains,
[00:43:10.754]and you can forget about him,
[00:43:11.989]especially in your 20s when you're busy working
[00:43:13.624]on your career and getting married and having kids.
[00:43:16.927]And occasionally you see this part of yourself
[00:43:18.762]out of the corner of your eye through the trees,
[00:43:21.632]but maybe you forget.
[00:43:24.635]Then there are spare moments
[00:43:26.070]when you vaguely feel the soul's, this leopard's presence.
[00:43:31.542]When we make up in the middle of the night,
[00:43:32.910]you have those bad thoughts that run into you.
[00:43:34.578]A friend of mine, a poet, says in the middle of the night
[00:43:36.814]his thoughts come to him like a drawer full of knives.
[00:43:41.618]And then suddenly the leopard is there.
[00:43:44.221]Sometimes the leopard can visit
[00:43:46.090]and you become spiritually awake in great moments,
[00:43:47.992]like I had with my kids in the backyard,
[00:43:49.626]when you're at a bar,
[00:43:51.095]or when you're with your friends over a dinner table,
[00:43:53.130]and you just feel spiritually swelling.
[00:43:56.066]Sometimes in moments of suffering,
[00:43:58.836]when you've lost a loved one
[00:44:00.070]or something terrible has happened
[00:44:01.605]and life has carved into the deepest cavities of yourself
[00:44:04.708]and carved beneath them,
[00:44:06.210]revealing new cavities you didn't even know exist.
[00:44:08.946]But I think there are moments inevitable in every life,
[00:44:12.850]maybe more toward middle or older age
[00:44:15.486]when the leopard comes out of the hills
[00:44:17.287]and he just sits in the door frame in front of you,
[00:44:21.058]eye-to-eye and face-to-face,
[00:44:23.160]and he sorta demands your justification.
[00:44:26.330]What's your purpose of living here?
[00:44:28.465]What's your mission?
[00:44:29.800]What did you come for?
[00:44:30.734]Who did you connect with?
[00:44:32.169]Whose life are you really changing?
[00:44:35.339]And everybody has to throw off the mask at this moment.
[00:44:38.242]There's no hiding points.
[00:44:40.210]And the people who have given those questions know answers
[00:44:44.782]live and die with that suppressing that awful knowledge.
[00:44:50.354]And the people who are deeply committed to things
[00:44:52.289]and who have deep intimacies,
[00:44:54.992]they commit themselves not only emotionally
[00:44:56.994]but morally to that thing and a connection to that thing.
[00:45:01.665]And they think through a moral lens.
[00:45:05.436]They don't say, "Is this working for me?"
[00:45:08.172]They think, "Is it working for them?"
[00:45:11.075]They forget themselves, surrender themselves,
[00:45:13.210]throw themselves into something without counting the cost.
[00:45:16.914]They understand, if only by instinct,
[00:45:18.315]that their true joy is found
[00:45:19.650]on the other side of unselfishness, not on this side.
[00:45:24.388]They ask, if they're in a relationship,
[00:45:26.156]"How can I love this person in a way
[00:45:27.624]"that brings out their loveliness?"
[00:45:30.527]If we have a problem in this relationship,
[00:45:32.563]they say, "My selfishness is probably the key problem here."
[00:45:37.968]And these are the people who are so committed
[00:45:40.270]to their relationships.
[00:45:41.705]They're in it when things are good
[00:45:43.140]and when things are not good.
[00:45:46.743]And it's the seal, the final seal of intimacy,
[00:45:49.379]I think, is vulnerability.
[00:45:53.217]It's exposing yourself, being so close to other people
[00:45:56.553]that they see how weak and how broken you can be.
[00:46:00.491]A friend of mine named Leon Wieseltier expressed this
[00:46:03.160]in a wedding toast about marriage.
[00:46:06.697]He said, "This kind of love is private and it is particular.
[00:46:10.868]"Its object is the specificity of this man and that woman,
[00:46:14.771]"the distinctiveness of this spirit and that flesh.
[00:46:18.342]"This love prefers deep to wide and here to there,
[00:46:20.878]"the grasp to the reach.
[00:46:23.313]"When the day is done and the lights are out,
[00:46:25.916]"there is only this other heart, this other mind,
[00:46:29.386]"this other face to assist in repelling one's demons
[00:46:33.123]"or in greeting one's angels.
[00:46:35.425]"It does not matter who the president is.
[00:46:38.328]"When one consents to marry, one consents to be truly known,
[00:46:42.466]"which is an ominous prospect.
[00:46:45.068]"And so one bets on love to correct for their ordinariness
[00:46:47.905]"of the impression and to call forth the forgiveness
[00:46:51.141]"that is invariably required.
[00:46:54.111]"Marriages are exposures.
[00:46:56.380]"We may be heroes to our spouses, but we not be idols."
[00:47:01.919]And the weird thing about that kind of deep vulnerability
[00:47:04.655]is it strengthens the relationship
[00:47:06.356]and it strengthens and finally caps the intimacy with joy.
[00:47:11.195]Joy happens when the boundaries
[00:47:14.464]of self sorta begin to fade away.
[00:47:16.934]There's this great passage in a book
[00:47:18.769]called Captain Corelli's Mandolin
[00:47:20.637]by a guy named Louis de Bernieres,
[00:47:22.573]and there's an old guy talking to his daughter
[00:47:26.877]about his love for his late wife, and he says,
[00:47:31.882]"Love itself is what is left over
[00:47:34.084]"when being in love has burned away,
[00:47:37.287]"and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.
[00:47:41.191]"Your mother and I had it.
[00:47:43.493]"We had roots that grew toward each other underground,
[00:47:46.830]"and when all the pretty blossoms
[00:47:48.098]"had fallen from our branches,
[00:47:50.033]"we found that we were one tree and not two."
[00:47:54.037]And so that's perfect intimacy.
[00:47:59.509]And that leads to a kind of joyfulness,
[00:48:02.079]a joyfulness that can make some people have an inner glow
[00:48:05.249]when they're deeply connected to their community,
[00:48:07.451]they're intensely connected to their craft,
[00:48:11.388]they're intensely connected to their spouse and their kids,
[00:48:15.158]and so that's the sorta normal happiness we know.
[00:48:18.295]But there's another joy
[00:48:19.529]that actually comes even in bad times,
[00:48:21.765]but which is still a form of intimate connection.
[00:48:25.736]I'm a big fan of a book by a guy named Viktor Frankl
[00:48:28.572]which came out in the '50s called Man's Search for Meaning.
[00:48:31.408]And Frankl was a psychologist who was working in Austria,
[00:48:37.080]and he got captured by the Nazis
[00:48:38.348]and sent to a concentration camp.
[00:48:41.118]And he said to himself, "You know, I've always asked,
[00:48:42.819]"'What do I want from life?'
[00:48:44.655]"And this was not it."
[00:48:46.256](laughing)
[00:48:47.624]And so he said, "You know,
[00:48:48.859]"I realized that's the wrong question.
[00:48:50.894]"It's stupid to ask, 'What do I want from life?'
[00:48:53.397]"The right question to ask is, 'What is life asking of me?
[00:48:57.167]"'What are my circumstances asking of me?'"
[00:49:00.203]And he said, "Well, I'm a psychiatrist
[00:49:01.605]"in a concentration camp.
[00:49:03.340]"I should study suffering."
[00:49:07.010]And so he decided to study why some people in the camp,
[00:49:11.281]amid all this suffering,
[00:49:12.783]lived for a long time and others died.
[00:49:16.219]And he discovered that the people who lived longer
[00:49:20.657]had a relationship, a deep, emotional, intimate relationship
[00:49:24.594]with somebody outside the camp,
[00:49:26.563]even if they didn't know if that person was alive or dead.
[00:49:29.599]They spent their times talking to their spouses,
[00:49:32.502]mentally, who were outside.
[00:49:34.638]One of Frankl's friends turned to him one day and said,
[00:49:36.707]"Listen, if I don't get back to my wife
[00:49:41.378]"and you should see her again,
[00:49:43.647]"tell her that I talked of her daily and hourly.
[00:49:46.717]"Please remember.
[00:49:48.652]"Secondly, tell her I've loved her more than anyone.
[00:49:52.055]"Thirdly, tell her the short time I've been married
[00:49:54.224]"to her outweighs everything,
[00:49:56.993]"even all we have gone through here."
[00:50:00.330]Another of the people he ran into was this young woman
[00:50:02.466]who was up in a sick bed in the infirmary,
[00:50:05.202]and she was dying of illness,
[00:50:07.571]just in this little bed all alone in a room.
[00:50:10.407]And she said to Frankl,
[00:50:13.043]"I'm grateful fate has hit me so hard.
[00:50:16.847]"In my former life I was spoiled
[00:50:19.282]"and I did not take spiritual accomplishment seriously."
[00:50:23.320]But in the camp she'd developed a relationship,
[00:50:26.823]and it turned out this relationship, oddly, was a tree.
[00:50:30.460]From her bed the only thing she could see
[00:50:32.195]out the window was this little chestnut tree.
[00:50:35.399]And she told Frankl,
[00:50:38.468]"This tree is the only friend I have in my loneliness.
[00:50:41.571]"I often talk to this tree."
[00:50:44.307]And Frankl asked her if the tree replied to her,
[00:50:47.611]and she said it did.
[00:50:49.112]And Frankl asked her, "Well, what does it say?"
[00:50:51.281]And she said, "The tree says to me,
[00:50:53.984]"'I am here, I am here, I am life, I'm eternal life.'"
[00:51:01.425]That's the fourth level of happiness.
[00:51:04.094]Even in that concentration camp
[00:51:05.796]to have that connection with the whole universe.
[00:51:09.499]And so I'm a political pundit,
[00:51:10.967]and this has nominally been a speech about politics,
[00:51:14.938]and it's veered off in this weird direction.
[00:51:18.041]But I did it because I happen to think the problems
[00:51:21.478]afflicting this country and shaping this election
[00:51:25.916]are deeper than the inflation rate
[00:51:28.084]or the unemployment rate or the threat of ISIS.
[00:51:31.521]They have to do with the quality
[00:51:32.856]of our connections to one another.
[00:51:35.725]And the central challenge of our time
[00:51:38.128]is a crisis of solidarity and connection.
[00:51:43.266]And as I said, sometimes you can repair that
[00:51:47.704]through programs that'll bring people together,
[00:51:52.242]but if we're really gonna understand and repair it,
[00:51:54.744]it's gonna be necessary to dive in to what exactly it means
[00:51:57.581]to be intimately connected to each other,
[00:51:59.816]to remind ourselves what we admire, how it comes about,
[00:52:02.652]how we get there, and to change our very vocabulary,
[00:52:07.491]and in that way change our thinking,
[00:52:09.759]and in that way hopefully inspire a change in behavior,
[00:52:13.797]a change in connection, a change in nation,
[00:52:16.399]and a change in politics.
[00:52:18.168]Thank you.
[00:52:19.202](applauding)
[00:52:47.297]MIKE ZELENY: We'll take questions from the audience.
[00:52:48.999]Again, you may tweet questions
[00:52:50.300]using the hashtag #ENThompsonForum
[00:52:52.502]or write your questions on notecards provided by the ushers.
[00:52:55.438]David, thank you for a thought-provoking talk,
[00:52:58.275]a little about the election and a lot about life.
[00:53:00.477]We're grateful.
[00:53:01.411]Our first question tonight comes
[00:53:02.612]from the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs
[00:53:04.080]Character Council of Students.
[00:53:06.149]"One of the core building blocks of integrity advanced
[00:53:08.451]"on the University of Nebraska campus
[00:53:09.986]"here in Lincoln is citizenship.
[00:53:12.088]"How does voting and participating
[00:53:13.523]"in the U.S. election process relate
[00:53:15.191]"to building character and citizenship?"
[00:53:18.895]DAVID BROOKS: So our founders had a theory about this,
[00:53:22.299]which was that there are many ways,
[00:53:25.235]there are many character testing things we do,
[00:53:28.271]but there are some things that only get tested in politics.
[00:53:32.509]If you get active in public affairs,
[00:53:36.947]first of all, you have to pay attention
[00:53:38.214]to people you don't like and who are unlike you.
[00:53:41.251]And so you have to develop some empathy.
[00:53:43.353]Second, you have to deal
[00:53:44.554]with extremely complicated problems,
[00:53:47.157]so you have to develop prudence.
[00:53:50.060]Sometimes you have to sacrifice yourself
[00:53:52.095]and your sacred honor for a political cause.
[00:53:58.435]And so you have to develop the sense
[00:54:00.236]that you're just a piece of a long chain
[00:54:02.806]in creating a country and serving problems
[00:54:07.143]that can't be solved in a single lifetime.
[00:54:10.046]And so I spend a lot of time on college campuses,
[00:54:13.083]and all my students wanna be Bono.
[00:54:17.020](laughing)
[00:54:18.221]They wanna work in an NGO, go to Africa,
[00:54:20.056]bring bed nets, bring Bikram Yoga to Syrian refugees,
[00:54:24.527]I don't know.
[00:54:26.096]My joke is I ask my college students,
[00:54:27.764]"What are you doing on spring break?"
[00:54:29.132]It's, "Well, I'm unicycling across Thailand
[00:54:31.301]"while reading to lepers, that sort of thing."
[00:54:33.603](laughing)
[00:54:35.805]But I'm a big defender in the craft of politics,
[00:54:41.211]in part because you can just get more accomplished.
[00:54:46.650]Not caring about politics is the luxury of those
[00:54:49.019]who live in a healthy society.
[00:54:51.221]If you live in a society
[00:54:52.455]where you don't know who's gonna shoot you
[00:54:53.890]or you have to pay bribes every five minutes,
[00:54:55.358]you do not have the luxury of not caring about politics.
[00:54:59.195]And so I just find the people I know who are in government
[00:55:02.465]are living life at full and are completely committed.
[00:55:07.237]I have a close friend, she's in government right now.
[00:55:10.774]She's thrilled.
[00:55:12.142]"Best job I'll ever have.
[00:55:13.843]"Every single day sucks.
[00:55:15.478]"The whole experience is amazingly rewarding."
[00:55:18.481](laughing) And that's often true.
[00:55:20.550]MIKE: Thank you.
[00:55:21.951]One of our Twitter followers would like to know,
[00:55:24.454]"What is life asking from you?"
[00:55:27.457]DAVID: Well, you just heard a bit of it. (laughs)
[00:55:29.793]You know, I do think...
[00:55:33.329]I think I have a few,
[00:55:34.964]hopefully God is calling me in a few ways.
[00:55:36.700]One is, as I say, is we live in an overpoliticized culture
[00:55:41.104]and undermoralized.
[00:55:42.572]I just don't think we have enough programs or discussions
[00:55:46.009]of what is grace, what is sin, how does inner life develop?
[00:55:49.846]And I'm hoping in the rest of my life to sorta shift
[00:55:52.015]the needle a little back over in that direction.
[00:55:55.018]And then we all have personal callings.
[00:55:57.454]And I say, like where I go to the dinners
[00:55:59.322]on Thursday nights, I hope to just connect with people,
[00:56:02.692]these kids who are completely unlike me.
[00:56:06.029]And then the final thing I'm hoping to do
[00:56:08.031]for the next 20 years is I teach college,
[00:56:11.067]and we're on a college campus,
[00:56:13.403]the years after college are just phenomenally hard.
[00:56:17.774]People are in a very highly structured atmosphere
[00:56:20.810]when they go through college and high school.
[00:56:23.146]There are highly educated people paid to read their essays
[00:56:27.083]and pretend they're interested in their ideas.
[00:56:29.686](laughing)
[00:56:31.087]But then they get out of college and there's heartbreak,
[00:56:33.757]there's a period of unemployment, there's bad bosses,
[00:56:36.159]every future employer is thinking, along with Kanye West,
[00:56:39.062]"There's a billion of you, there's only one of me."
[00:56:41.498](laughing)
[00:56:43.099]And so I'd like to somehow counsel people in the 23, 24 age,
[00:56:47.937]because I see that group really struggling.
[00:56:51.875]And so we all have certain callings.
[00:56:55.345]That would be mine.
[00:56:56.379]MIKE: Thank you, keeping in mind
[00:56:57.747]that this is the E. N. Thompson Forum on World Issues,
[00:56:59.649]"How does the Brexit vote illustrate
[00:57:01.084]"your key point about isolation?"
[00:57:03.119]DAVID: I think Brexit is of a piece with Trump,
[00:57:05.922]where I said the key debate
[00:57:07.791]is not big government-small government,
[00:57:09.325]but open versus closed.
[00:57:11.227]And the people who voted for Brexit,
[00:57:15.298]they think the pressures of globalization
[00:57:17.467]are slapping them in the face and hurting them,
[00:57:20.136]and so they're gonna take action.
[00:57:22.739]And the one thing I would say,
[00:57:24.073]which I would find fault with the reasoning
[00:57:27.177]that supports Trump and the reasoning that supports Brexit,
[00:57:30.013]there's a difference between conservatism and reactionary.
[00:57:33.817]Being a conservative is being
[00:57:34.884]for gradual, incremental change,
[00:57:36.686]understanding that change is always necessary.
[00:57:39.489]Being a reactionary is imagining there was a golden period
[00:57:42.058]in the past and trying to do things
[00:57:43.793]that'll get you back to it, and that's what you can't do.
[00:57:47.564](applauding)
[00:57:54.537]MIKE: We've got a lot of questions about politicians
[00:57:56.840]on our Twitter feed this evening, David.
[00:57:58.308]"How can politicians create a society of intimacy?"
[00:58:01.344]DAVID: I didn't hear the last--
[00:58:02.879]MIKE: "How can politicians create a society of intimacy?"
[00:58:06.316]DAVID: There are bad ways that I can think of.
[00:58:08.384](laughing)
[00:58:12.755]Well, I would say I cover Washington politics,
[00:58:15.592]which is a lot more distorted
[00:58:16.759]than politics probably is here.
[00:58:19.162]But members of the U.S. Senate individually are good people.
[00:58:25.034]They went into it because they really cared
[00:58:26.502]about public service,
[00:58:29.405]but they float in little islands of solipsism
[00:58:31.708]surrounded by all these people who worship them,
[00:58:35.845]and they don't actually know their colleagues very well.
[00:58:39.515]Just off the Senate floor there's a little bar
[00:58:42.719]with these bottles of booze.
[00:58:45.321]When I walk by there I look to measure
[00:58:47.690]how much has been drunk, and not very much,
[00:58:52.896]because they're just not getting together with each other.
[00:58:56.499]And there are very few places
[00:58:57.834]where if you're a member of Congress,
[00:58:59.302]you can gather with people from the other party.
[00:59:00.803]The only one place is the gym where they work out.
[00:59:05.341]And so they're living very lives
[00:59:07.644]where they don't know each other
[00:59:09.879]and they don't meet each other.
[00:59:12.081]And when they get together,
[00:59:13.149]the code of competition is so brutal
[00:59:16.286]they just bruise up against each other.
[00:59:18.821]I was at something called the Civility Retreat,
[00:59:22.325]which was sponsored by the Annenberg Foundation,
[00:59:24.527]this great hotel in West Virginia, The Greenbrier.
[00:59:27.130]And I was walking down the hallway
[00:59:28.398]and this woman was crying in the hallway,
[00:59:31.801]'cause at the breakout session,
[00:59:33.069]one of the discussion sections,
[00:59:34.637]somebody had attacked her so viciously,
[00:59:36.839]she had left the room in tears.
[00:59:38.841]This was at the Civility Retreat.
[00:59:40.810](laughing)
[00:59:42.512]And so the code of manners has just changed and deteriorated
[00:59:46.416]and so you've got 100 lone,
[00:59:48.518]it's like the two years old at the preschool.
[00:59:50.386]What do they call 'em, solitary, parallel play?
[00:59:52.655]They're all doing that.
[00:59:53.923]And so just breaking down the barriers,
[00:59:57.293]the barriers of friendship, would be a big step forward.
[01:00:01.864]MIKE: Okay, David, there's a new freshman here
[01:00:04.400]at the University of Nebraska who could've chosen anywhere.
[01:00:06.903]He chose to come here.
[01:00:08.237]He would like to know,
[01:00:09.706]"What would you tell your freshman self, if you could?"
[01:00:11.841]DAVID: Oh, good question.
[01:00:13.876]Okay, I'm gonna give you a couple pieces of advice.
[01:00:15.912]I'll give you one.
[01:00:18.181]First, as I mentioned, the years,
[01:00:21.117]I'm gonna emphasize the years out of college.
[01:00:24.887]They're gonna suck. (laughs)
[01:00:27.323]There's gonna be real hardship.
[01:00:29.993]So one of the things I find my students do
[01:00:32.862]is they overvalue student organizations
[01:00:37.867]and they overvalue work and they undervalue friendship.
[01:00:42.038]And one of my students put it this way.
[01:00:43.673]He said, "My life is about putting out fires.
[01:00:47.243]"And sometimes if I have a paper due, that's a fire.
[01:00:50.913]"If I have to practices the SATs, that's a fire.
[01:00:55.251]"My girlfriend is sometimes on fire.
[01:00:57.954](laughing)
[01:00:59.422]"My friends are never on fire, and so I neglect them."
[01:01:03.393]But a lot of your college impact 10 and 30 years out
[01:01:07.497]will be on how your friends supported you
[01:01:10.533]in the hard times right after.
[01:01:12.769]So working on that seems to me important.
[01:01:15.538]Second, one thing is I tell college freshmen
[01:01:17.774]and I tell all college students
[01:01:19.042]is I've seen a lot of you at age 30,
[01:01:21.878]and at age 30, 70% of you are gonna be more boring
[01:01:24.247]than you are right now.
[01:01:25.815](laughing)
[01:01:27.450]And so you're going to regard the future as a fear,
[01:01:34.323]but especially your first year out of college.
[01:01:37.727]Your only job that year is to widen your horizon of risk.
[01:01:42.865]Do something completely crazy,
[01:01:44.400]because forever after you'll go through life thinking,
[01:01:46.702]"I can handle that,"
[01:01:48.037]and your horizon of risk is out here.
[01:01:50.239]If you don't do it, your horizon of risk will be here.
[01:01:54.377]And then two more quick pieces of pompous advice.
[01:01:57.513](laughing) (applauding)
[01:02:01.918]And I don't say this from any spot of achievement,
[01:02:04.387]but the reverse.
[01:02:06.155]The most important decision you're gonna make
[01:02:07.790]in life is who to marry.
[01:02:11.961]All the courses you take in college,
[01:02:13.563]I tell college presidents this, they don't listen,
[01:02:15.631]it should be about the marriage decision,
[01:02:17.700]like the literature of marriage,
[01:02:19.202]the psychology of marriage, the sociology of marriage.
[01:02:22.738]Think about that problem a lot.
[01:02:24.874]And you don't have to think of it on your own.
[01:02:26.142]Read the masters.
[01:02:27.643]Read George Eliot, Jane Austen.
[01:02:29.145]They'll tell you how to think about that problem.
[01:02:32.448]And then the final thing...
[01:02:36.385]Well, I'll say,
[01:02:38.321]the final thing I'll say is we give a lot
[01:02:40.990]of crappy advice to college students.
[01:02:43.092]I may have just given a bunch.
[01:02:44.827](laughing)
[01:02:47.263]But one of them is "Follow your passion."
[01:02:50.967]80% of the people who graduate from college have no passion.
[01:02:53.569]They don't know what their passion is.
[01:02:55.638]Ask, "What does the world need?"
[01:02:57.106]Don't look within, look outside.
[01:03:00.042](applauding)
[01:03:06.349]Finally, we tell students to come up
[01:03:10.453]with their own philosophy of life.
[01:03:12.855]If your name is Aristotle, maybe you can do that.
[01:03:15.424](laughing)
[01:03:16.659]But most of us, we inherit it
[01:03:17.994]from people wiser than ourselves.
[01:03:20.263]So just read a bunch of different philosophies,
[01:03:22.198]whether it's Greek ancient philosophy
[01:03:24.834]or Christian philosophy or Jewish philosophy
[01:03:26.335]or Buddhism or rationalism.
[01:03:28.271]See what one fits so you have words to describe
[01:03:31.541]what's going on inside and what's right and wrong.
[01:03:34.677]MIKE: Thank you, "As a 20 year old,
[01:03:36.112]"I feel as though I'm slowly watching my generation
[01:03:38.147]"become more disconnected with each other,
[01:03:40.449]"politics, and the world.
[01:03:42.485]"How can a generation of disconnectedness
[01:03:44.987]"raise a generation that doesn't suffer the same fate?"
[01:03:48.858]DAVID: Well, I think it's your choice.
[01:03:51.894]As I said, among the Millennials
[01:03:54.130]there are some great things.
[01:03:57.133]In some ways, it's a very responsible generation.
[01:04:00.236]So if you look at all the social indicators
[01:04:02.605]that went south during the Boomer years,
[01:04:04.774]they're all going in the right direction now.
[01:04:07.009]Crime is down 70%.
[01:04:08.377]Domestic violence is down 50%.
[01:04:10.279]Abortion rates are down by 1/3.
[01:04:11.914]Teenage pregnancy is down by 1/3.
[01:04:14.483]Divorce rates are lower.
[01:04:16.686]It's in some ways a very healthy and responsible generation
[01:04:20.256]and super hardworking.
[01:04:21.924]They're all gonna have the biggest midlife crisis
[01:04:23.526]in human history in about 10 years,
[01:04:24.927]but until then. (laughing)
[01:04:27.563]But I do think the problems I would worry about
[01:04:31.334]if I were 20 is the problem of attention span.
[01:04:36.239]I'm not a technophobe by any means,
[01:04:37.974]but these things are destroying our attention spans.
[01:04:41.110](applauding)
[01:04:45.314]And then I would just say, well, I mentioned the healers.
[01:04:49.051]Where can I go to be a healer?
[01:04:53.189]It's very to easy to think about having big impact.
[01:04:58.227]You know, be completely honest,
[01:05:00.463]and having a big audience,
[01:05:04.033]but I actually don't know any of your first names.
[01:05:06.969]And so there's a limit to how much impact I can have.
[01:05:10.306]And so I teach at a school with very small classes,
[01:05:13.776]and I go to these dinners,
[01:05:15.011]and I'm gonna set up this organization
[01:05:16.078]for people in their 20s,
[01:05:17.980]because to really have an impact
[01:05:19.715]you have to know the first name,
[01:05:21.250]you have to have touched them deeply,
[01:05:23.185]you have to be there when they're in misery,
[01:05:24.887]when they're in joy.
[01:05:27.223]And I've become a much bigger believer
[01:05:30.626]in focusing tightly on a small number of people,
[01:05:35.097]and anybody can do that.
[01:05:37.733]And if you look at the people
[01:05:39.335]who have really risen in the most unexpected ways,
[01:05:42.271]from extreme poverty, from drug, from child abuse,
[01:05:45.374]there was always one person in their lives
[01:05:48.911]that gave them love and that lifted them and changed them.
[01:05:52.381]And just anybody can do that.
[01:05:54.984](applauding)
[01:06:02.692]MIKE: "Is there a country or state that best embodies
[01:06:04.894]"the political environment where intimacy is strong?"
[01:06:08.030]DAVID: I should say Bhutan, I think they're very happy there.
[01:06:10.466](laughing)
[01:06:12.001]I once had a chance to sit at a lunch in Washington,
[01:06:17.139]of all places, with the Dalai Lama from Tibet,
[01:06:21.110]and he exemplified it.
[01:06:22.912]He was the most joyful person you could ever possibly meet.
[01:06:26.916]And he laughed at random moments.
[01:06:30.086]And so he just, I was sitting next to him,
[01:06:31.587]and he just burst out laughing.
[01:06:33.656]And I wanted to be polite, so I burst out laughing,
[01:06:36.158]and then he would laugh
[01:06:37.293]and I would laugh. (laughing)
[01:06:38.527]And I'm sorta awkward.
[01:06:40.496]He has this little canvas Dalai Lama bag,
[01:06:42.698]and I finally asked him, "You got any candy in your bag?"
[01:06:45.701]And he started pulling out the stuff from the bag,
[01:06:47.803]and it was all the stuff you get
[01:06:50.005]in the first class cabin of an international flight,
[01:06:52.274](laughing) like a little razor, earplugs,
[01:06:54.710]those eye patch...
[01:06:57.813]But he represented just joy.
[01:07:01.517]My own view on different governments is that
[01:07:05.721]each country gets a government, a style of government,
[01:07:09.592]that emerges from its culture.
[01:07:12.395]And so in Scandinavia, they're very cohesive societies,
[01:07:16.365]and so they have a much more cohesive, orderly government.
[01:07:19.502]In Russia it's very distrustful,
[01:07:20.970]so they have more authoritarian.
[01:07:23.339]We have this incredible tension
[01:07:24.874]between extreme ability to create associations
[01:07:27.810]and extreme individualism, and a high moralism,
[01:07:33.682]and so we've got a government
[01:07:34.884]that's sort of a weird mixture of things.
[01:07:37.453]But I would say in general,
[01:07:38.654]as you can tell from the last hour,
[01:07:40.456]I think we swing between excessive conformism
[01:07:43.592]and excessive individualism.
[01:07:45.728]And over the last 40 years
[01:07:46.929]we've swung a little over in this direction.
[01:07:48.464]We need to pull it back a little.
[01:07:51.233]MIKE: All right, thank you, one of our audience members
[01:07:52.601]here at the Lied Center asks,
[01:07:54.603]"Does our media fail us, the politically uneducated,
[01:07:57.840]"by failing to teach us the things that matter
[01:08:00.242]"so that we can select better leaders?"
[01:08:03.512]DAVID: Nah, your media is awesome.
[01:08:05.514](laughing)
[01:08:10.152]I guess I would say,
[01:08:12.788]again, it's what is the media?
[01:08:17.225]Two things.
[01:08:19.295]My newspaper and papers like us,
[01:08:21.630]we have big blind spots.
[01:08:24.834]We tend to, I grew up in New York,
[01:08:27.368]I grew up and I went to school in a city,
[01:08:29.171]I've spend most of my life in cities.
[01:08:31.273]I've had to yank myself out
[01:08:32.508]to introduce myself to the rest of America.
[01:08:34.310]And we have gigantic blind spots and biases.
[01:08:38.514]But I would say most of the people I work with
[01:08:41.417]are really interested in the craft of journalism
[01:08:43.986]and getting it right,
[01:08:45.621]and so a lot of the biases are unconscious.
[01:08:49.125]But then there are parts of the Internet,
[01:08:50.626]and certainly my own family members,
[01:08:52.528]my kids are a little like this,
[01:08:54.196]where it's just one conspiracy after another.
[01:08:57.533]And conspiracy has become the lingua franca of the Internet.
[01:09:01.403]And there's some great stuff on the Internet,
[01:09:02.770]some horrible stuff.
[01:09:04.340]I would say there's, if you wanna find out great stuff,
[01:09:07.309]you're at the best spot in American history,
[01:09:12.515]where there's some magazines, like Medium or The New Yorker,
[01:09:16.886]The Atlantic, that are producing some
[01:09:18.720]of the best online forms of essays,
[01:09:21.156]long form essays that we've ever had.
[01:09:23.692]I always recommend two websites
[01:09:25.261]if you're interested in finding these things,
[01:09:27.662]one called Arts and Letters Daily,
[01:09:29.698]and especially one called The Browser,
[01:09:31.332]which is put out of England,
[01:09:32.734]where they just take the best essays in the world
[01:09:34.603]in the English language every day and they link to them.
[01:09:38.207]And if you care, just go on there
[01:09:39.408]and you'll find great stuff to read.
[01:09:42.144]But then there's the flow of Reddit and 4chan
[01:09:44.913]and all of the conspiracy theories that are flowing through.
[01:09:47.448]So we're trying to, we as the media,
[01:09:50.419]are trying to offer you what we can.
[01:09:53.322]It's up to you to choose it.
[01:09:55.457]It's up to us all.
[01:09:57.092]MIKE: All right, so you suggested we're too connected, perhaps.
[01:10:01.163]"Do you think it's possible that social media
[01:10:03.032]"could connect people in intimate ways?"
[01:10:06.569]DAVID: Well, people have done studies on this,
[01:10:08.203]and basically the things that matter is face-to-face.
[01:10:13.509]And people who use Facebook, for example,
[01:10:15.778]to arrange face-to-face meetings
[01:10:17.513]and to augment their friendships, it's great.
[01:10:21.016]But people who use Facebook as a tool
[01:10:24.353]to mask their loneliness, it's horrible.
[01:10:28.223]So the technology is simply a tool.
[01:10:31.393]But it's has been a clear evidence of the research
[01:10:35.030]that having relationships strictly online
[01:10:37.499]is not satisfying relationships.
[01:10:40.502]It has to be face-to-face.
[01:10:42.137]Somebody did a study which illustrated this.
[01:10:44.840]I think it was the University of Michigan.
[01:10:46.542]They gave a bunch of groups math problems,
[01:10:49.445]and some of the groups just met online through Skype,
[01:10:54.350]and some met face-to-face.
[01:10:56.352]The ones who met face-to-face solved the problems
[01:11:00.389]with no problem.
[01:11:02.391]The groups that met on Facetime and Skype,
[01:11:04.860]they could not solve the problems.
[01:11:06.362]They broke apart before they could solve the problems.
[01:11:09.465]That's because so much of our communication is nonverbal.
[01:11:13.068]It's through the process of gesture, tone.
[01:11:16.972]Actually, the thing we don't think about much is smell.
[01:11:20.476]We're still mammals.
[01:11:23.312]And people who lose the sense of smell
[01:11:24.813]suffer a greater social deterioration
[01:11:26.582]than those who lose other senses,
[01:11:29.084]because we're constantly sending ourselves signals.
[01:11:31.720]One other gross experiment on this front.
[01:11:34.323](laughing)
[01:11:35.424]This was a German experiment.
[01:11:36.892]They took gauze pads, taped it under people's arms,
[01:11:40.629]and had some of them watch a horror movie
[01:11:42.264]and some watch a comedy.
[01:11:44.233]And then they had other research subjects,
[01:11:45.934]who I hope were extremely well-paid,
[01:11:49.204]sniff the gauze pads (laughing)
[01:11:51.940]and predict whether the person watched the comedy
[01:11:53.942]or the horror movie,
[01:11:55.277]and they could predict way above chance.
[01:11:57.246]They got it right most of the time.
[01:11:59.782]And so we just need to be in face-to-face contact,
[01:12:02.418]a real human relationship.
[01:12:05.387]I don't know why I had to bring in that gauze pad thing.
[01:12:07.289](laughing)
[01:12:09.692]MIKE: David, one of our audience members says,
[01:12:11.326]"I'm a public school teacher
[01:12:12.728]"with at least one student here tonight.
[01:12:14.496]"How do I help create buy-in to relationships
[01:12:16.665]"with our society?"
[01:12:18.400]DAVID: Part of the problem, I think, well, one of the things.
[01:12:20.569]I've covered school reform since the '80s.
[01:12:23.272]1983 there was a thing called the Nation at Risk Report.
[01:12:26.675]And we as policymakers and people who write about it
[01:12:29.912]have tried to rearrange the bureaucratic boxes,
[01:12:33.982]and big schools, small schools, charters, vouchers,
[01:12:37.986]and it's had relatively little effect,
[01:12:40.389]and that's because what matters in education
[01:12:42.524]is the individual love between a teacher and a student.
[01:12:45.561]And if you're ignoring that core relationship,
[01:12:47.262]you're really ignoring education.
[01:12:50.332]And so somehow,
[01:12:52.167]and even with the testing regimes we have in,
[01:12:54.636]the busyness, somehow there has to be a way
[01:12:57.239]to allow those relationships to nurture.
[01:13:02.778]And I'll just say two things, one that's affected me.
[01:13:05.647]I might as well say it, what the heck?
[01:13:07.683]And the other, which is more general.
[01:13:11.186]I teach at a college in New Haven, Connecticut
[01:13:13.856]some of you may have heard of.
[01:13:16.191]And I have my office hours at a bar
[01:13:20.596]between 9:30 and one in the morning,
[01:13:22.731]and there'll be 15 students,
[01:13:23.932]we'll have a bottle of wine or two,
[01:13:25.400]nobody has more than one drink, and we'll just talk.
[01:13:29.605]And we'll talk about Dostoevsky,
[01:13:32.441]we'll talk about student life, we'll talk about careers.
[01:13:35.410]But it's a way for me to get to know them
[01:13:37.079]in a way that's beyond just in the classroom.
[01:13:40.115]So when they graduate in years hence,
[01:13:42.117]I keep some of those friendships.
[01:13:44.753]But it's now considered like an unsafe space
[01:13:47.389]to have a meeting like that.
[01:13:50.092]And so in order to protect any thought of any impropriety,
[01:13:54.863]we erase the venue where we actually get
[01:13:57.966]to know each other best of all,
[01:14:00.502]and we become a little fearful about that.
[01:14:04.139]And so somehow taking the time out outside the classroom
[01:14:07.509]seems to me a core part of creating a real relationship
[01:14:10.312]between teacher and student, within bounds.
[01:14:13.182]The second thing, I had a great e-mail
[01:14:16.118]from a veterinarian in Oregon a couple years ago.
[01:14:19.087]And I was complaining in my column about how hard it was
[01:14:21.557]to get students to think about morality.
[01:14:24.893]And this guy, a very wise man
[01:14:26.128]from Oregon named Dave Jolly,
[01:14:29.698]said, "You're never gonna teach them
[01:14:31.767]"through sermons or lectures.
[01:14:34.303]"They're thinking about their girlfriends
[01:14:36.638]"or their boyfriends or their grades
[01:14:38.307]"or what they're gonna do after school."
[01:14:41.343]But then he said, "What a wise person says is the least
[01:14:45.247]"of that which they give.
[01:14:47.816]"What gets communicated is the totality
[01:14:49.818]"of their being in the smallest gesture.
[01:14:52.721]"Never forget, the message is the person."
[01:14:56.658]And what he meant by that,
[01:14:58.160]when we communicate with each other, it's not what we say.
[01:15:00.162]It's the small acts of kindness,
[01:15:01.964]the small acts of generosity, the small acts of empathy
[01:15:05.868]that actually communicate how to act.
[01:15:08.971]And the guy who comes to mind in this vein is Pope Francis.
[01:15:13.342]So I'm not Catholic.
[01:15:14.877]I don't know what he's done for the church, pro or con.
[01:15:17.813]But he seems to act in a way that is admirable.
[01:15:22.084]And in his case the message is the person.
[01:15:24.786]And I think that can be true of teachers.
[01:15:27.022]God is now punishing me.
[01:15:28.423](laughing)
[01:15:31.159]MIKE: Perfect timing.
[01:15:32.628]Ladies and gentlemen, before David takes his final question,
[01:15:35.163]I'd like to remind each of you to mark your calendars
[01:15:37.065]for the next E.N. Thompson Forum.
[01:15:39.001]It will be given by Sonia Shah on global pandemics,
[01:15:42.037]November 9th at seven p.m. here in the Lied Center.
[01:15:44.740]We hope to see you then.
[01:15:45.908]And, David, one final question.
[01:15:47.509]Thank you again for sharing your perspective
[01:15:49.011]with your readers and with us here tonight in Lincoln.
[01:15:51.346]"Obviously it's too late for this presidential election.
[01:15:54.216]"Where do we go from here?"
[01:15:56.418](laughing)
[01:15:58.120]DAVID: So it's easy in this presidential,
[01:16:00.322]here I'll actually address the subject of the talk.
[01:16:03.091](laughing)
[01:16:04.960]MIKE: Thank you.
[01:16:07.329]DAVID: Why it's better than it seems.
[01:16:10.699]So we have a political problem.
[01:16:11.900]Our political system is not working.
[01:16:13.969]And we do have a social isolation problem.
[01:16:16.672]But as I mentioned,
[01:16:18.707]our social indicators are moving in the right direction.
[01:16:22.411]We do have people, young and old,
[01:16:24.646]who are healers in every community.
[01:16:27.249]We're binding people together.
[01:16:29.885]We have the most innovative economy in the world.
[01:16:32.454]We're still a magnet for people around the world.
[01:16:34.823]Believe me, if you travel,
[01:16:36.291]I hope everybody gets to do some travel,
[01:16:39.695]there's no place you ever go where you think,
[01:16:42.798]"Well, these people are better positioned than we are."
[01:16:45.834]It's just not true, we're still best positioned.
[01:16:48.370]And so while I'm pessimistic about government and politics,
[01:16:52.941]especially over the next little while,
[01:16:54.643]and it's been hard to cover this campaign,
[01:16:57.679]I'm still long-term super optimistic about the country,
[01:17:01.049]just 'cause of the people you meet in every town I go to
[01:17:03.952]and the innovation and the creativity.
[01:17:06.888]Alexis de Tocqueville came here in the 1830s,
[01:17:10.125]and he found an America that still is basically us,
[01:17:14.429]the spirit that he found, the spirit of energy,
[01:17:17.733]of hyperactivity, of openness.
[01:17:22.604]I had no ancestors here then,
[01:17:25.140]but we're still basically us.
[01:17:29.077]And I have such elemental faith
[01:17:31.313]in the culture that's been handed down to us
[01:17:33.448]that we embody, that we live out every day,
[01:17:35.417]building new suburbs, creating new stores,
[01:17:37.753]creating great institutions, and these things'll be here.
[01:17:41.123]They were here before we were born,
[01:17:42.324]they're gonna be here after we're gone.
[01:17:44.092]And they just are pillars of strength,
[01:17:46.661]some invisible, some spiritual, some material.
[01:17:49.965]And it's never a good idea to think
[01:17:53.402]that we're in some sort of national decline,
[01:17:55.203]'cause we're just not.
[01:17:57.005]Thank you.
[01:17:57.839](applauding)
[01:18:03.011]MIKE: Thank you.

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It's Better Than It Looks: Election 2016

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