David Brooks on Starting Weave: The Social Fabric Project
Q. David, you’ve spent most of your life as a journalist, an author and a columnist holding a mirror to society. What prompted you to join the Aspen Institute and lead a project aimed at shifting American culture?
Brooks: It’s clear that we have a crisis of connection in this country. I do a lot of reporting across the country and see firsthand the loneliness and division. So many people feel unseen and misunderstood. Blacks feel that whites don’t understand their daily experience. Democrats and Republicans glare at each other in angry incomprehension. There are teenagers in the basements across the country who feel that no one knows them well. There are seniors wondering what happened to the warm bonds they remember from the old days in their neighborhood. Our national problems are really relational problems. I realized that the solution wouldn’t come from Washington, DC. It had to happen in our neighborhoods.
Q. So how do we solve this crisis of disconnection? How do we envelop people in relationships?
Brooks: It’s already being solved. It’s being solved by people in neighborhoods everywhere. Our Weave team will go into a town and ask, “Who is trusted here?” Immediately people start reeling off names of folks who are really good at building community and deepening relationships. Sometimes the people they mention work at a suicide hotline or a mentoring program. Sometimes they run a coffee shop where everybody feels at home. Sometimes they are just the person on the block who invites everybody over for barbecue. Sometimes it’s a young woman in high school who sees someone alone and sits down to talk.
Q. And for you, these people are Weavers of their community.
Brooks: Yes, they are all very different from each other and yet they are the same in one way. Whatever they do, they lead with love. They create countercultural islands, where love and community are more important than ego and self. The problem is that so far, it’s just islands. So many places and people are left out. Our project began as a way to learn from the Weavers and spread their way of living. Relationships happen one on one. They don’t scale. Our goal is to spread this way of living, these social norms that prioritize relationships and community over striving just for yourself. The job is not just to heal division. It’s to find a better way of being.
Q. How do you do that?
Brooks: Our Weave Project does three things.
First, we illuminate Weaver stories and explain their values. Being around Weavers has inspired me to change how I live, to be more emotionally open, to live more as an active member of my communities. We use video, narratives and public appearances to bring the Weaver stories to millions of people, so they, too, will be inspired to live a little more in the Weaver way. Culture changes when a small group of people find a better way to live and the rest of us copy them.
Second, we bring Weavers together, online and through in-person convenings. We’ve learned that Weavers crave each other’s company. They want to know, “I’m not alone.” They want to meet other Weavers to laugh together, share each other’s burdens and learn from each other’s wisdom.
Third, we spread Weaver skills. Building good relationships is hard. How do I talk to someone with depression? How do I help people heal from trauma? How do I organize a community gathering and keep people engaged? How do I weave across racial or ideological lines? We want to spread the wisdom that’s already out there in the community.
Q. Aren’t there already many groups supporting community development and neighborhood organizations?
Brooks: Yes, and they’re great. But their work alone will never create the kind of society we dream of. Look back on the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s and 2000s. In those decades, there were foundations that spent hundreds of billions of dollars to build community and expand social mobility. There were millions of volunteers who dedicated hundreds of millions of hours to this work.
They did good work and saved some starfish. But the fundamental trends did not change. Social mobility declined. Social trust declined. Polarization got worse. All that work didn’t bend the curves.
They didn’t bend the curves because they focused on creating and scaling good programs. But 95 percent of Americans are not in programs. Ninety-five percent of the care in society is informal — friends, neighbors, relatives, teachers and parents.
If you really want to change society, you have to work to change the rest of us, the 95 percent. You have to change the culture. You have to change the norms. You have to change what people think is the normal way of being a neighbor and citizen, the way a good person should behave. If you’re not doing culture change, you’re not going to bend the curve and make fundamental change.
Weave’s hope is to be one of many organizations that shift people’s perceptions of how they want to show up in the world. What kind of person do I want to be? How can I live a more connected life, where I deeply see others and where I am deeply seen? How can I lead with love? Culture change is vital.
Q. Is cultural change on that scale really possible? Aren’t we too steeped in a culture of cell phones, social media and the pursuit of money and fame?
Brooks: It’s happened before and it’s happening now. Back in the 1890s, America was coming apart at the seams, just like now. But the Settlement House movement, the Social Gospel movement and the Progressive movement shifted culture and norms and produced 60 years of greater cohesion.
By the 1960s, people found those communities stifling, so they created a counter-culture that emphasized individualism, freedom from restraint and liberation. Think of all the old rock anthems: Free Bird, Rambling Man, Born to Run. They shifted culture again.
Today, individualism has gone too far. People acknowledge that. Now the tide is turning again. People from every walk of life, every ideology are talking about connection, relationship, interdependence. Culture change is already happening. People want to come together, to form new kinds of community. Weave is highlighting those who are on the leading edge of this new way of life.
Q. Is this an effort to save the country or is it an effort to save ourselves?
Brooks: It’s both. Social transformation and personal transformation have to go together. If we want to have a better society, we have to live better, more connected and more joyful lives. I was in Waco, Texas recently having breakfast at a diner with Mrs. Dorsey. She’s a formidable African-American woman in her nineties who was a school principal for many decades. I was a little intimidated by her. “I loved my students enough to be disciplined,” she told me, firmly.
As we were having breakfast, a friend of hers named Jimmy Dorrell, a warm, glowing white guy in his sixties came in and grabbed her by the shoulders and beamed into her eyes and said, “Mrs. Dorsey! You’re the best! I love you!” Her face lit up like a thousand suns. They were just there in that moment together, two old friends who were making their town a better place.
I remember thinking, I want to be able to do that. I want to be so emotionally open and so caring toward people that I can make heart-to-heart connections with a friend even when I’m just walking into a diner. I want to be so deeply connected and so gift-giving that I radiate joy, the way Jimmy Dorrell does, the way the Weavers do.
That’s what this is all about. Weaving is not some complicated legislative agenda. It’s us creating connections that make our hearts glow and souls shine. It’s us spreading that kind of love and care to the people around us, who may be lonely, stressed, or marginalized. It’s us creating a culture where that seems normal, a culture in which it is easier to be good.
10 Comments
Sharon Wood
David Brooks,
Thank you very much for your candid answers and thank you again for starting Weave, the social fabric project “Lead with Love”. I totally agree with you in regards how it starts within our own communities in reaching out.
Eve Konstantine
I am a Weaver.
My daughter is a Weaver.
My son is a Weaver.
Carolyn Laughlin
Thank you, David Brooks, for seeing this need and addressing this in such a powerful way!
Jan Ables
Thank you David Brooks. You speak to my heart . You speak to my soul . I have been a weaver my entire life . I was shaped as a child by my mothers devastating mental illness . Her illness isolated her and stigmatized her and our family . Yet it shaped my life in ways that drove me to give back to the emotionally wounded . Those who live on the fringe need us desperately .
Kindness heals . Heart to heart connections heal .
I see suicidal people living the worst day of their lives in the psychiatric ER . They are frightened and many have given up hope . I sit with them I hear them and I acknowledge their pain . I look them in the eye and No matter how compromised they are – we feel a connection . They are not alone .
It is absolutely amazing to see that just that small act of kindness can transform them even in the midst of anxiety, fear and hopelessness .
The covid19 crisis has interrupted our face to face work but we will find a way to let these vulnerable people know that we want to be there for them .
Acts of kindness are like gold to them . These acts are as important as their medical care .
We cannot forget them .
Brad Stroup
Thank you, David! i have followed your work for years. The Weaving Project is your best yet. Today is Mother’s day. And I am ninety one this month, have friends, associates, former employees and neighbors everywhere. I share with them what I do and ask for their work as well. I cannot see them but I feel close to them. I told my wife, two daughters, one son, four adopted children in India what a wonderful day it is today. Tomorrow will be better still.
Jonni Gray
Mr. Brooks, I read your book “The Second Mountain” because of my commitment to my book club. You blame the 60’s counter-culture for hyper-individualism but they formed communes, promoted peace, love and brotherhood.
In your book you state that capitalism must be “balanced.” Wouldn’t that balance have to be regulation to protect people from soulless, deathless corporations whose only goal is profit?
Please consider that the root of the crisis you describe, is Lewis Powell’s 1971 confidential memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce describing how to protect corporations from the growing attack on “the free enterprise system” from the Civil Rights Act, the War on Poverty, the Great Society and the EPA. The billionaire families who financed the implementation of Powell’s dismantling of our democracy are the narcissistic, ego driven sociopaths you describe. Their divide and conquer tactics are the reason we must weave ourselves together again, not 60’s counter-culture. Their’s is the “cruelty” to be “punished and ostracized” as you proscribe in your book.
Eric Janik
Too often we look to one side of popular culture to find the root of a pathology, or we attribute a single pathology to that movement. The ’60s gets a lot of blame for this. We forget that besides self-I ndelgence, it opened our vision for civil rights.
We igore the social and environmental factors. People were raised in broken homes, or dysfunctional homes that stayed together. We dwell in a man-made geography the fosters isolation. It is unlikely we can change this geography, but we can all learn to understand it, assert ourselves, and listen to each other without judgement.
Len
Yes, beginning in the late 1960s (coinciding with the anti Vietnam War movement), membership in traditional social, educational, and
religious organizations (without naming names, generally annual dues collecting organizations) gradually dwindled with some no longer in existence. While these “traditional organizations” were aimed 90% at internal missions and identities, there was that 10% outreach. We have not recovered from this loss. And we need modern equivalents. We do have new special interest fund raising organizations (food banks, etc.) that bombard our emails and postal mailboxes. Giving money to good causes and charities is good but is not the equivalent to social outreach.
Robert Lettau
I believe that David’s observations of relational disconnection in American society is genius. Edwin McManus described genius beautifully, with an emphasis on creating change. “The genius does not always have the highest IQ, the best education, or even the most comprehensive knowledge of their field. But their combination of originality, imagination, creativity, perspective, passion, and intelligence merge together to help them see the world differently – and then create a different world.”
Weavers are geniuses who are creating a better world. David’s vision has illuminated the need to unite our communities on a human level (in addition to programs), and he has brought together cultural, societal, and relational weavers who are removing significant barriers.
“We need a cultural and relational revolution,” is the clarion call from David in his TED Talk, and this enmeshing of weavers is ushering in a revolution. I applaud everyone who has been weaving, who supports current weavers, and those who are interested in weaving. True geniuses lead with love. 🙂 It is my prayer that more people will catch the vision.
Nattie
I come from a family of super achievers. They are, indeed, amazing people with notable credentials. And good people. I am not a super achiever.
My small focus has always been to reach out to people, to acknowledge others equally. I have felt that THAT is my “success”.
I think that, as a culture, we tend to ignore/dismiss/undervalue the importance of all different kinds of people and learning from each other. Not just musing over uniqueness from our comfortable positions but recognizing our true NEED for each other and how our lives are enriched through engaging with one another.
Success in life, to me, is loving not just who you know or who ranks. It is recognizing commonality and uniqueness and honoring both. Being grateful for both.
We are all valuable.
There is great beauty everywhere.
I love this profound, fundamental endeavor.
Weaving.
There is intention but also personal freedom and even serendipity. It is creation.