In Waco, a number of people told me about a ninety-three-year-old Black woman named LaRue Dorsey. I reached out, and we arranged to get together over breakfast at a diner. She’d spent her career mostly as a teacher, and I asked her about her life and the communities she was part of in Waco.
Every journalist has their own interviewing style. Some reporters are seducers. They lure you into giving them information by showering you with warmth and approval. Some are transactionalists. Their interviews are implicit bargains: If you give me information about this, I’ll give you information about that. Others are simply delightful, magnetic personalities. (I have a theory that my friend Michael Lewis has been able to write so many great books because he’s just so damn likable that people will divulge anything simply to keep him hanging around.) My mode, I suppose, is that of a student. I’m earnest and deferential, not overly familiar. I ask people to teach me things. I generally don’t get too personal.
That morning over breakfast, Mrs. Dorsey presented herself to me as a stern drill sergeant type, a woman, she wanted me to know, who was tough, who had standards, who laid down the law. “I loved my students enough to discipline them,” she told me. I was a bit intimidated by her.
In the middle of the meal, a mutual friend named Jimmy Dorrell entered the diner. Jimmy is a teddy-bearish white man in his sixties who built a church for homeless people under a highway overpass, who leads a homeless shelter by his house, who serves the poor. He and Mrs. Dorsey had worked together on various community projects over the years.
He saw her across the room and came up to our table smiling as broadly as it is possible for a human face to smile. Then he grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her way harder than you should ever shake a ninety-three-year-old. He leaned in, inches from her face, and cried out in a voice that filled the whole place: “Mrs. Dorsey! Mrs. Dorsey! You’re the best! You’re the best! I love you! I love you!”
I’ve never seen a person’s whole aspect transformed so suddenly. The old, stern disciplinarian face she’d put on under my gaze vanished, and a joyous, delighted nine-year-old girl appeared. By projecting a different quality of attention, Jimmy called forth a different version of her. Jimmy is an Illuminator.
At that moment, I began to fully appreciate the power of attention. Each of us has a characteristic way of showing up in the world, a physical and mental presence that sets a tone for how people interact with us. Some people walk into a room with an expression that is warm and embracing; others walk in looking cool and closed up. Some people first encounter others with a gaze that is generous and loving; other people regard those they meet with a formal and aloof gaze.
That gaze, that first sight, represents a posture toward the world. A person who is looking for beauty is likely to find wonders, while a person looking for threats will find danger. A person who beams warmth brings out the glowing sides of the people she meets, while a person who conveys formality can meet the same people and find them stiff and detached. “Attention,” the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist writes, “is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being.” The quality of your life depends quite a bit on the quality of attention you project out onto the world.
The moral of my Waco story, then, is that you should attend to people more like Jimmy and less like me.
Now, you may think this is an unfair comparison. Jimmy had known Mrs. Dorsey for years. Of course he was going to be more familiar with her than I was going to be. Jimmy has a big, boisterous personality. If I tried to greet people the way Jimmy does, it would feel fake. It’s just not me.
But the point I’m trying to make is more profound than that. Jimmy’s gaze when he greets a person derives from a certain conception of what a person is. Jimmy is a pastor. When Jimmy sees a person—any person—he is seeing a creature who was made in the image of God. As he looks into each face, he is looking, at least a bit, into the face of God. When Jimmy sees a person, any person, he is also seeing a creature endowed with an immortal soul—a soul of infinite value and dignity. When Jimmy greets a person, he is also trying to live up to one of the great callings of his faith: He is trying to see that person the way Jesus would see that person. He is trying to see them with Jesus’s eyes—eyes that lavish love on the meek and the lowly, the marginalized and those in pain, and on every living person. When Jimmy sees a person, he comes in with the belief that this person is so important that Jesus was willing to die for their sake. As a result, Jimmy is going to greet people with respect and reverence. That’s how he’s always greeted me.
Now, you may be an atheist, an agnostic, a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Buddhist, or something else, but this posture of respect and reverence, this awareness of the infinite dignity of each person you meet, is a precondition for seeing people well. You may find the whole idea of God ridiculous, but I ask you to believe in the concept of a soul. You may just be chatting with someone about the weather, but I ask you to assume that the person in front of you contains some piece of themselves that has no weight, size, color, or shape yet gives them infinite value and dignity. If you consider that each person has a soul, you will be aware that each person has some transcendent spark inside them. You will be aware that at the deepest level we are all equals. We’re not equal in might, intelligence, or wealth, but we are all equal on the level of our souls. If you see the people you meet as precious souls, you’ll probably wind up treating them well.
If you can attend to people in this way, you won’t be merely observing them or scrutinizing them. You’ll be illuminating them with a gaze that is warm, respectful, and admiring. You’ll be offering a gaze that says, “I’m going to trust you, before you trust me.” Being an Illuminator is a way of being with other people, a style of presence, an ethical ideal.
When you’re practicing Illuminationism, you’re offering a gaze that says, “I want to get to know you and be known by you.” It’s a gaze that positively answers the question everybody is unconsciously asking themselves when they meet you: “Am I a person to you? Do you care about me? Am I a priority for you?” The answers to those questions are conveyed in your gaze before they are conveyed by your words. It’s a gaze that radiates respect. It’s a gaze that says that every person I meet is unique, unrepeatable, and, yes, superior to me in some way. Every person I meet is fascinating on some topic. If I approach you in this respectful way, I’ll know that you are not a puzzle that can be solved but a mystery that can never be gotten to the bottom of. I’ll do you the honor of suspending judgment and letting you be as you are. Respect is a gift you offer with your eyes.
In the previous chapter, I listed some of the qualities that make it hard to see others: egotism, anxiety, objectivism, essentialism, and so on. In this one I’d like to list some of the features of the Illuminator’s gaze:
If you want to see a stellar example of how to illuminate people, go back and look at how Mister Rogers used to interact with children. Look at how Ted Lasso looks at his players on that TV show. Look at how Rembrandt rendered faces. When you are in the presence of a Rembrandt portrait, you’re seeing the warts and wounds of the subject, but you’re also peering into their depths, seeing their inner dignity, the immeasurable complexity of their inner lives. The novelist Frederick Buechner observed that not all the faces Rembrandt painted were remarkable. Sometimes the subject is just an old man or an elderly lady we wouldn’t look at twice if we passed them on the street. But even the plainest faces “are so remarkably seen by Rembrandt that we are jolted into seeing them remarkably.”
“Tenderness is deep emotional concern about another being,” the novelist Olga Tokarczuk declared in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “Tenderness perceives the bonds that connect us, the similarities and the sameness between us.” Literature, she argued, “is built on tenderness toward any being other than ourselves.” And so is seeing.
Being receptive means overcoming insecurities and self-preoccupation and opening yourself up to the experience of another. It means you resist the urge to project your own viewpoint; you do not ask, “How would I feel if I were in your shoes?” Instead, you are patiently ready for what the other person is offering. As the theologian Rowan Williams put it, we want our minds to be slack and attentive at the same time, the senses relaxed, open, and alive, the eyes tenderly poised.
You want to have an explorer’s heart. The novelist Zadie Smith once wrote that when she was a girl, she was constantly imagining what it would be like to grow up in the homes of her friends. “I rarely entered a friend’s home without wondering what it might be like to never leave,” she wrote. “That is, what it would be like to be Polish or Ghanaian or Irish or Bengali, to be richer or poorer, to say these prayers or hold those politics. I was an equal-opportunity voyeur. I wanted to know what it was like to be everybody. Above all, I wondered what it would be like to believe the sorts of things I didn’t believe.” What a fantastic way to train your imagination in the art of seeing others.
We children of the Enlightenment live in a culture that separates reason from emotion. Knowing, for us, is an intellectual exercise. When we want to “know” about something, we study it, we collect data about it, we dissect it.
But many cultures and traditions never fell for this nonsense about the separation between reason and emotion, and so they never conceived of knowing as a brain-only, disembodied activity. In the biblical world, for example, “knowing” is also a whole-body experience. In the Bible, “knowing” can involve studying, having sex with, showing concern for, entering into a covenant with, being familiar with, understanding the reputation of. God is described as the perfect knower, the seer of all things, the one who sees not only with the objective eye of a scientist but with the grace-filled eye of perfect love.
The human characters in the Bible are measured by how well they can imitate this affectionate way of knowing. They often fail during these dramas of recognition. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, an injured Jew lies beaten and left for dead on the side of the road. At least two other Jews, one of them a priest, pass him by, crossing to the other side of the street, not doing anything to help. They see him strictly intellectually. Only the Samaritan, a man from an alien and hated people, truly sees him. Only the Samaritan enters into the injured man’s experience and actually does something to help him. In these biblical cases, where someone sees another without really seeing, these failures of knowledge are not intellectual failures; they are failures of the heart.
Dr. Ludwig Guttmann was a German Jew who escaped Nazi Germany in 1939 and found a job in a hospital in Britain that served paraplegics, mostly men injured in the war. When he first started working there, the hospital heavily sedated these men and kept them confined to their beds. Guttmann, however, didn’t see the patients the way the other doctors saw them. He cut back on the sedatives, forced them out of bed, and started throwing balls at them and doing other things to get them active. As a result, he was summoned to a tribunal of his peers, where his methods were challenged.
“These are moribund cripples,” one doctor asserted. “Who do you think they are?”
“They are the best of men,” Guttmann replied.
It was his generosity of spirit that changed how he defined them. He continued organizing games, first at the hospital, then for paraplegics around the nation. In 1960 this led to the Paralympic Games.
A great way to mis-see people is to see only a piece of them. Some doctors mis-see their patients when they see only their bodies. Some employers mis-see workers when they see only their productivity. We must resist every urge to simplify in this way. The art historian John Richardson, Pablo Picasso’s biographer, was once asked if Picasso was a misogynist and a bad guy. He would not let his subject be oversimplified or robbed of his contradictions. “That’s a lot of nonsense,” he replied. “Whatever you say about him—you say that he’s a mean bastard—he was also an angelic, compassionate, tender, sweet man. The reverse is always true. You say he was stingy. He was also incredibly generous. You say that he was very bohemian, but also he had a sort of up-tight bourgeois side. I mean, he was a mass of antitheses.” As are we all.
As the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy once wrote:
One of the commonest and most generally accepted delusions is that every man can be qualified in some particular way—said to be kind, wicked, stupid, energetic, apathetic and so on. People are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic or vice versa; but it could never be true to say of one man that he is kind or wise, and of another that he is wicked or stupid. Yet we are always classifying mankind in this way. And it is wrong. Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently he is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.
Being an Illuminator is an ideal, and one that most of us will fall short of a lot of the time. But if we try our best to illuminate people with a glowing gaze that is tender, generous, and receptive, we’ll at least be on the right track. We will see beyond the cliché character types we often lazily impose on people: the doting grandmother, the tough coach, the hard-charging businessperson. We will be on our way toward improving how we show up in the world.
“Every epistemology becomes an ethic,” the educator Parker J. Palmer once observed. “The shape of our knowledge becomes the shape of our living; the relation of the knower to the known becomes the relation of the living self to the larger world.” Palmer is saying that the way we attend to others determines the kind of person we become. If we see people generously, we will become generous, or if we view them coldly, we will become cold. Palmer’s observation is essential, because he is pointing to a modern answer to an ancient question: How do I become a better person?
Over the centuries, male writers and philosophers—think of Immanuel Kant—have built these vast moral systems that portray moral life as something that disinterested, rational individuals do by adhering to abstract universal principles: always treat human beings as an end in themselves, and not as a means to something else. That emphasis on abstract universal principles is fine, I suppose, but it’s impersonal and decontextualized. It’s not about how this one unique person should encounter another unique person. It’s as if these philosophers were so interested in coming up with coherent abstract principles and philosophically impregnable systems that they became afraid of particular people—messy creatures that we are, and the messy situations we find ourselves in—and the personal encounters that are the sum and substance of our daily existence.
Along comes the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch in the second half of the twentieth century, offering us something else. She argues that morality is not mostly about abstract universal principles, or even about making big moral decisions during climactic moments: Do I report fraud when I see it at work? Morality is mostly about how you pay attention to others. Moral behavior happens continuously throughout the day, even during the seemingly uneventful and everyday moments.
For Murdoch, the essential immoral act is the inability to see other people correctly. Human beings, she finds, are self-centered beings, anxiety-ridden and resentful. We are constantly representing people to ourselves in self-serving ways, in ways that gratify our egos and serve our ends. We stereotype and condescend, ignore and dehumanize. And because we don’t see people accurately, we treat them wrongly. Evil happens when people are unseeing, when they don’t recognize the personhood in other human beings.
By contrast, the essential moral act for Murdoch is being able to cast a “just and loving attention” on another person. “Love is knowledge of the individual,” she writes. That doesn’t mean you have to romantically swoon for everybody you meet. It means that a good person tries to look at everyone with a patient and discerning regard, tries to resist self-centeredness and overcome prejudice, in order to see another person more deeply and with greater discernment. The good person tries to cast a selfless attention and to see what the other person sees. This kind of attention leads to the greatness of small acts: welcoming a newcomer to your workplace, detecting anxiety in somebody’s voice and asking what’s wrong, knowing how to host a party so that everyone feels included. Most of the time, morality is about the skill of being considerate toward others in the complex situations of life. It’s about being a genius at the close at hand.
But this kind of attention also does something more profound. To use grand, old-fashioned language, casting this kind of attention makes you a better person. In her celebrated lecture “The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts,” Murdoch describes a mother-in-law, whom she calls M, who has contempt for her daughter-in-law, D. The mother-in-law is always perfectly polite to D, but inside, she looks down on her.
But M is aware that she can be a bit superior, conventional, and old-fashioned. M is also aware that she probably harbors some sense of rivalry with D; they’re competing for her son’s time and affections, after all. Perhaps, she realizes, she is seeing D in a way that is unworthy. So one day, as an act of intellectual charity and moral self-improvement, she decides she’s going to change the way she sees D. Before she saw D as “coarse,” but now she resolves to see her as “spontaneous.” Before she thought D was “common,” but now she will see her as “fresh.” M is trying to purge herself of her snobbery and become a better person. This has nothing to do with her outer behavior, which has remained exemplary. It has to do with the purification of who she is inside. Good and evil, Murdoch believes, begin in the inner life, and M wants her inner life to be a little nicer and a little less mean.
Murdoch’s emphasis on how we attend to people is personal, concrete, and very actionable. “Nothing in life is of any value except the attempt to be virtuous,” Murdoch writes. We can, Murdoch writes, “grow by looking.” I find this philosophy of moral development tremendously attractive and compelling.
Let me give you an example of somebody who embodies the “just and loving attention” that Murdoch is writing about. I’ve interviewed a therapist and author named Mary Pipher a couple of times over the past few years, to get a better idea of how she goes about the business of getting to know people. Pipher has had professional training, of course, but she told me that her trick when doing therapy is to have no tricks, to just engage in a conversation with the patient. Being a therapist, she argues, is less about providing solutions and more “a way of paying attention, which is the purest form of love.”
She grew up in a town on the Nebraska prairie, amid clashing points of view. She had a rich aunt who was a liberal and a farmer uncle who was a conservative. Her family members ran the gamut from the emotional to the reserved, the travelers to the stay-putters, the sophisticates to the provincials. An education in human variety prepares you to welcome new people into your life.
“In therapy, as in life, point of view is everything,” Pipher writes in her book Letters to a Young Therapist. In her practice, she projects a happy realism. The old grand masters of her field, like Freud, saw people driven by dark drives, repressions, and competitive instincts, but Pipher, who cut her professional teeth as a waitress, sees vulnerable, love-seeking people sometimes caught in bad situations. She tries to inhabit each person’s point of view and see them, sympathetically, as those who are doing the best they can. Her basic viewpoint is charitable to all comers.
Some therapists try to separate patients from their families. Pipher says that they are quick to see the problems in a family, give it a label—dysfunctional—and then blame the family for whatever is afflicting the patient. And, of course, in many cases, families really are abusive and the victims need to break free. But Pipher, characteristically, looks for the good. “While families are imperfect institutions, they are also our greatest source of meaning, connection, and joy,” she writes. “All families are a little crazy, but that is because all humans are a little crazy.” After one difficult family session, she overheard a father offering to take his family out for ice cream. Pipher called them back into her office to congratulate him on being so generous and kind and watched his eyes well up with tears.
She doesn’t feel the need to fill the air with a constant stream of words. “Inspiration is very polite,” she writes. “She knocks softly and then goes away if we don’t answer the door.” The questions she asks are intended to steer people toward the positive: Isn’t it time you forgave yourself for that? When you and your parents are close again, what will you want them to understand about this time in your life? Early in her career, she tried to understand people by asking how others treated or mistreated them. As she matured, she found it more useful to ask, How do you treat others? How do you make them feel?
She is offering the kind of attention that can change people.
Pipher tells the story of another therapist who was working with a mother and daughter who were chronically furious with each other. During one session, they were again going after each other hammer and tong, their comments laced with resentment, criticism, and blame. Then there was a brief silence. The mother broke it by saying, “I’m thinking of the phrase ‘paint oneself into a corner.’ ” The daughter was shocked. That was the exact phrase that had been circling around in her own mind as she’d tried to think about how she and her mother had gotten themselves into this situation. At that moment, after all the strife, they both cast down their weapons and saw each other differently. The therapist congratulated the mother and said, “I’ll just leave you two alone to talk about this further.” That’s a moment of illumination.