A David Brooks Admission: Reflection #2 on Perspective-Taking

So already, in his March 18 op-ed piece entitled "No, Not Trump, Not Ever," David Brooks does two things that many self- and other-professed public intellectuals seldom do: first, he admits that he got something wrong; and second, he explains how he got it wrong and what he needs to do in the future so as not to make a similar mistake.

What he did right was to recognize the perspective of those who support Donald Trump, identify them as a group characterized by their disappointment in their experiences as Americans; what he did wrong was to take their perspective insufficiently, leading him to false assumptions about how they would communicate their dissatisfaction.

Before jumping into his discussion of why Trump is the wrong person to become president of the United States, Brooks shows respect for Trump's supporters and takes responsibility for his own journalistic lapses:

"Well, some respect is in order. Trump voters are a coalition of the dispossessed. They have suffered lost jobs, lost wages, lost dreams. The American system is not working for them, so naturally they are looking for something else.

"Moreover, many in the media, especially me, did not understand how they would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country." 

The source of Brooks' misunderstanding: a lack of "social intermingling" with Trump supporters and, in connection to that, a failure both to listen enough (little intermingling = little listening opportunity) and "to listen carefully enough."

That's the thing about taking perspectives versus recognizing and identifying them: invariably, one must encounter the voice(s) of the other(s) and must overcome the tendency to listen to and for what one expects/wants to hear so that one can hear what else there is to know and understand.

But that social intermingling problem is worrisome. My fantasy is that even in groups including people who represent a range of perspectives and experiences, David Brooks would be quickly surrounded by those who think well of him and/or of themselves. I'm not sure how much intermingling he'd get to do without being downright rude to those who had eagerly, confidently approached him hoping to talk to him.

The Boston Globe recently ran an interesting article about Greater Boston's increasing segregation by income. In it, David Scharfenberg provided data that showed significant growth in the richest and poorest segments of many communities, and the marked shrinking of the historically largest group in between them, the middle-income sector. In contrast to the case in the past, these distinct economic groups are highly likely to live in neighborhoods populated exclusively by people of their same economic category.

Given the geographical separateness of these neighborhoods, members of these various groups have little chance of listening carefully to one another because they interact less frequently if at all:

"Blue- and white-collar families who once lived close enough to bump into each other in the aisles of the local hardware store or chat in the pews of the neighborhood church live in much more homogenous places now. 

"Low-income people can go an entire day without talking to someone who has a college degree or a job in a downtown office. And for the affluent, handing a credit card to the gas station attendant or grocery clerk may be their only weekend brush with blue-collar America.

"Robert D. Putnam, a Harvard social scientist, argues that the biggest threat to national cohesion is not the income inequality that has drawn so much scrutiny from the news media and the political class, but the social segregation that inequality has helped to create — in where people live, where they go to school, and whom they marry. 

"'We just don’t know how the other half lives,' said Putnam, whose book Our Kids traces the growing class divide in his hometown in Ohio. 'It constrains our sense of reciprocity. It constrains our sense of what we owe to one another. We are less and less a community.'"

Even when we have opportunities to engage with others, it's difficult to listen well enough to learn enough*** about them to be able to take their perspectives humbly and knowledgeably. Fewer opportunities to be at the table with others whom we recognize as having different perspectives will not up our chances of either getting better at perspective-taking or recognizing the need for and importance of it.

When I taught Hermann Hesse's Demian at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, I always shared with my students a section of M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth that I hoped might shed some light on the narrator's process of self-discovery. Peck describes an essential practice for personal growth--and, in my opinion, for authentic perspective-taking**** that he calls "bracketing"****:

"Bracketing is essentially the act of balancing the need for stability and assertion of the self with the need for new knowledge and greater understanding by temporarily giving up one's self--putting one's self aside, so to speak--so as to make room for the incorporation of new material into the self" (73).*****

He then quotes from Sam Keen's To A Dancing God," referring to the two crucial simultaneous actions as "'silencing the familiar'" and "'welcoming the strange'" (73).

When it comes to taking perspectives,****** as opposed to cultivating personal growth, "silencing the familiar" might better be paired with "welcoming the stranger"--who may prove to be surprisingly not so "strange" in some ways, and strange or stranger in others.

Social intermingling is key. But what I would really hope is that the first place groups and/or individuals "socially intermingle" not be at that table where the goal is exploring their differences and words are their sole means of communicating their perspectives. Lots can be learned by being places together, doing things together, exchanging words while focusing on something other than ourselves, laughing or crying at something together.

Our economic separateness is definitely having a negative impact on groups' and individuals' efforts at and opportunities for perspective-taking and all the benefits that accrue from such good-faith endeavors. The more difficult--logistically, emotionally, intellectually--perspective-taking becomes, the more essential it also becomes.

Brooks, D. (2016, March 18). No, not Trump, not ever. Retrieved March 23, 2016, from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/opinion/no-not-trump-not-ever.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share&_r=0 
Scharfenberg, D. (2016, March 6). Boston’s struggle with income segregation. The Boston Globe, pp. A1, 7-8. Retrieved March 23, 2016, from http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/03/05/segregation/NiQBy000TZsGgLnAT0tHsL/story.html  
*** The whole question of whether we can learn enough to claim to take that perspective will be discussed in a later blog post, I hope.
**** Yes, I believe there is some superficial perspective-taking (as opposed to deep-enough-to-be-authentic perspective-taking) out in the world that masquerades ingenuously and overconfidently--and is therefore potentially very dangerous.
***** Peck, M. S. (1978). The road less traveled: A new psychology of love, traditional values, and spiritual growth. New York: Simon and Schuster. 
****** Rayburn, J. (2012, July 30). [Illustration-"in your shoes" pragmatic language activity]. Retrieved March 23, 2016, from http://thespeechroomnews.com/2012/07/in-your-shoes-pragmatic-language.html