The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

we try to teach what it is that we really need to learn.

Our society has become a conspiracy against joy.

When I meet people leading lives of deep commitment, this fact hits me: Joy is real.

Happiness often has to do with some success, some new ability, or some heightened sensual pleasure.

We can help create happiness, but we are seized by joy. We are pleased by happiness, but we are transformed by joy. When we experience joy we often feel we have glimpsed into a deeper and truer layer of reality.

When people make generosity part of their daily routine, they refashion who they are.

Many young people are graduating into limbo. Floating and plagued by uncertainty, they want to know what specifically they should do with their lives. So we hand them the great empty box of freedom! The purpose of life is to be free. Freedom leads to happiness! We’re not going to impose anything on you or tell you what to do. We give you your liberated self to explore. Enjoy your freedom!

What they’re looking for is direction.

If you don’t know what your life is for, how does it help to be told that your future is limitless?

The person leading the aesthetic life is leading his life as if it were a piece of art, judging it by aesthetic criteria—is it interesting or dull, pretty or ugly, pleasurable or painful?

If you spend your days merely consuming random experiences, you will begin to feel like a scattered consumer.

A life of commitment

means saying a thousand noes for the sake of a few precious yeses.

When you’re living in diversion you’re not actually deeply interested in things; you’re just bored at a more frenetic pace.

If you can’t focus your attention for thirty seconds, how on earth are you going to commit for life?

Political freedom is great. But personal, social, and emotional freedom—when it becomes an ultimate end—absolutely sucks. It leads to a random, busy life with no discernible direction, no firm foundation, and in which, as Marx put it, all that’s solid melts to air. It turns out that freedom isn’t an ocean you want to spend your life in. Freedom is a river you want to get across so you can plant yourself on the other side—and fully commit to something.

The meritocracy’s soul-flattening influence is survivable if you have your own competing moral system that exists in you alongside it, but if you have no competing value system, the meritocracy swallows you whole.

Centuries ago there was a common word for what these people are going through: acedia.

Acedia is the quieting of passion. It is a lack of care. It is living a life that doesn’t arouse your strong passions and therefore instills a sluggishness of the soul, like an oven set on warm. The person living in acedia may have a job and a family, but he is not entirely grabbed by his own life. His heart is over there, but his life is over here.

When you have nothing but your identity and job title to rest on, then you find yourself constantly comparing yourself to others.

This is a telos crisis. A telos crisis is defined by the fact that people in it don’t know what their purpose is.

faith in that giving-getting compact has broken down. Now it is assumed that if you give, they will take. If you sacrifice, others will take advantage. The reciprocity is gone, and people feel detached from their neighbors and disgusted by the institutions of public life.

When you take away a common moral order and tell everybody to find their own definition of the mystery of life, most people will come up empty.

Individualism, taken too far, leads to tribalism.

Tribalism seems like a way to restore the bonds of community. It certainly does bind people together. But it is actually the dark twin of community. Community is connection based on mutual affection. Tribalism, in the sense I’m using it here, is connection based on mutual hatred.

Once politics becomes your ethnic or moral identity, it becomes impossible to compromise, because compromise becomes dishonor. Once politics becomes your identity, then every electoral contest is a struggle for existential survival, and everything is permitted. Tribalism threatens to take the detached individual and turn him into a monster.

The right thing to do when you are in moments of suffering is to stand erect in the suffering. Wait. See what it has to teach you. Understand that your suffering is a task that, if handled correctly, with the help of others, will lead to enlargement, not diminishment.

There’s just the same eternal three-step process that the poets have described from time eternal: from suffering to wisdom to service. Dying to the old self, cleansing in the emptiness, resurrecting in the new.

A lot is gained simply by going into a different physical place.

there are huge benefits in leaving the center of things and going off into the margins.

suffering that is not transformed is transmitted.

Frederick Buechner wrote. “See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”

Real listening, whether to others or yourself, involves that unexpected extra round of questions, stretching the asking beyond what feels natural.

The wilderness teaches negative capability, the ability to rest in uncertainty, to not jump to premature conclusions.

This is the pivotal point, maybe of this whole book. On the surface of our lives most of us build the hard shell. It is built to cover fear and insecurity and win approval and success. When you get down to the core of yourself, you find a different, more primeval country, and in it a deep yearning to care and connect. You could call this deep core of yourself the pleroma, or substrate. It is where your heart and soul reside.

It’s at this deep level that you sense a different life, one your ego cannot even fathom. There’s something in you that senses, as C. S. Lewis wrote, “the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

The ultimate heart’s desire—the love behind all the other loves—is the desire to lose yourself in something or someone.

But I do ask you to believe that you have a soul. There is some piece of your consciousness that has no shape, size, weight, or color. This is the piece of you that is of infinite value and dignity. The dignity of this piece doesn’t increase or decrease with age; it doesn’t get bigger or smaller depending on your size and strength.

When this relinquishment of the ego self and emergence of the heart and soul has happened, people are ready to begin the second mountain. Except they don’t describe it as another climb. They describe it, often enough, as a fall.

You don’t have to be in control. You don’t have to impress the world. You’ve got the skill you earned on the first mountain and the wisdom you earned in the valley, and now is the time to take the big risk.

Individualism says, Shoot for personal happiness, but the person on the second mountain says, No, I shoot for meaning and moral joy.

On the first mountain, a person makes individual choices and keeps their options open. The second mountain is a vale of promise making. It is about making commitments, tying oneself down, and giving oneself away. It is about surrendering the self and making the kind of commitment that, in the Bible, Ruth made to Naomi: “Where you go, I will go, and where you stay, I will stay. Your people shall be my people and your God my God. Where you die, I will die and there I will be buried.”

There is something that feels almost involuntary about a deep commitment. It happens when some person or cause or field of research has become part of your very identity.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks clarifies the difference: “A contract is a transaction. A covenant is a relationship. Or to put it slightly differently: a contract is about interests. A covenant is about identity. It is about you and me coming together to form an ‘us.’ That is why contracts benefit, but covenants transform.”

Spiritual people may experience transcendence, but understand that for most people spirituality lasts and deepens only if it is lived out within that maddening community called institutionalized religion.

the most complete definition of a commitment is this: falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters.

On the second mountain it is your chains that set you free.

Once a kid is born you’ve been seized by a commitment, the strength of which you couldn’t even have imagined beforehand. It brings you to the doorstep of disciplined service.

In my experience, people repress bad desires only when they are able to turn their attention to a better desire.

Most of our conversations are pure affirmation; people have had enough crap in their lives and need to hear how valuable they are, how much they are loved and needed.