The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

Every once in a while, I meet a person who radiates joy. These are people who seem to glow with an inner light. They are kind, tranquil, delighted by small pleasures, and grateful for the large ones. These people are not perfect. They get exhausted and stressed. They make errors in judgment. But they live for others, and not for themselves. They’ve made unshakable commitments to family, a cause, a community, or a faith. They know why they were put on this earth and derive a deep satisfaction from doing what they have been called to do. Life isn’t easy for these people. They’ve taken on the burdens of others. But they have a serenity about them, a settled resolve. They are interested in you, make you feel cherished and known, and take delight in your good.

I often find that their life has what I think of as a two-mountain shape. They got out of school, began their career or started a family, and identified the mountain they thought they were meant to climb: I’m going to be a cop, a doctor, an entrepreneur, what have you. On the first mountain, we all have to perform certain life tasks: establish an identity, separate from our parents, cultivate our talents, build a secure ego, and try to make a mark in the world. People climbing that first mountain spend a lot of time thinking about reputation management. They are always keeping score. How do I measure up? Where do I rank? As the psychologist James Hollis puts it, at that stage we have a tendency to think, I am what the world says I am. The goals on that first mountain are the normal goals that our culture endorses—to be a success, to be well thought of, to get invited into the right social circles, and to experience personal happiness. It’s all the normal stuff: nice home, nice family, nice vacations, good food, good friends, and so on. Then something happens. Some people get to the top of that first mountain, taste success, and find it…unsatisfying. “Is this all there is?” they wonder. They sense there must be a deeper journey they can take. Other people get knocked off that mountain by some failure. Something happens to their career, their family, or their reputation. Suddenly life doesn’t look like a steady ascent up the mountain of success; it has a different and more d...

Still others stay in their same jobs and their same marriages, but are transformed. It’s not about self anymore; it’s about a summons. If they are principals, their joy is in seeing their teachers shine. If they work in a company, they no longer see themselves as managers but as mentors; their energies are devoted to helping others get better. They want their organizations to be thick places, where people find purpose, and not thin places, where people come just to draw a salary.

That’s the crucial way to tell whether you are on your first or second mountain. Where is your ultimate appeal? To self, or to something outside of self?

Second-mountain organizations touch people at their depths and leave a permanent mark. You always know when you meet a Marine, a Morehouse man, a Juilliard pianist, a NASA scientist. These institutions have a collective purpose, a shared set of rituals, a common origin story. They nurture thick relationships and demand full commitment. They don’t merely educate; they transform.

People on the second mountain have made strong commitments to one or all of these four things: A vocation A spouse and family A philosophy or faith A community

I now think good character is a by-product of giving yourself away. You love things that are worthy of love. You surrender to a community or cause, make promises to other people, build a thick jungle of loving attachments, lose yourself in the daily act of serving others as they lose themselves in the daily acts of serving you. Character is a good thing to have, and there’s a lot to be learned on the road to character. But there’s a better thing to have—moral joy. And that serenity arrives as you come closer to embodying perfect love.

when I look back generally on the errors and failures and sins of my life, they tend to be failures of omission, failures to truly show up for the people I should have been close to. They tend to be the sins of withdrawal: evasion, workaholism, conflict avoidance, failure to empathize, and a failure to express myself openly.

Joy tends to involve some transcendence of self. It’s when the skin barrier between you and some other person or entity fades away and you feel fused together. Joy is present when mother and baby are gazing adoringly into each other’s eyes, when a hiker is overwhelmed by beauty in the woods and feels at one with nature, when a gaggle of friends are dancing deliriously in unison. Joy often involves self-forgetting. Happiness is what we aim for on the first mountain. Joy is a by-product of living on the second mountain.

there are different layers of joy. First, there is physical joy. There are moments when you are doing some physical activity, often in rhythm with other people, when you experience flow. In Anna Karenina, Levin is out cutting grass with the men who work on the farm. At first Levin is clumsy with his scythe, but then he learns the motion and cuts clean, straight rows. “The longer Levin mowed, the more often he felt those moments of oblivion during which it was no longer his arms that swung the scythe, but the scythe itself that lent motion to his whole body, full of life and conscious of itself, and, as if by magic, without a thought of it, the work got rightly and neatly done on its own. These were the most blissful moments.”

The next layer of joy is collective effervescence, celebratory dance. In almost every culture, stretching back through time, joyous moments are celebrated and enhanced with rhythmic dancing.

The third layer of joy is what you might call emotional joy. This is the sudden bursting of love that you see, for example, on the face of a mother when she first lays eyes on her infant.

The fourth layer of joy is spiritual joy. Sometimes joy comes not through movement, not through love, but from an unexpected contact with something that seems boundaryless, pure spirit. Joy comes with a sensation that, as the writer Jerry Root, citing C .S. Lewis, put it, all reality is iconoclastic—the world is enchanted by a mystical force.

This kind of spiritual joy often involves mystical attunement. Tolstoy’s mother died when he was a young boy, and before the funeral he found himself in a room alone with her open casket. He climbed up on a chair to look down on her and experienced a strange peacefulness. “Somehow as I gazed, an irrepressible, incomprehensible power seemed to compel me,” he later wrote. “For a time I lost all sense of existence and experienced a kind of vague blissfulness which though grand and sweet, was also sad.”

The fifth layer of joy is transcendent joy, feeling at one with nature, the universe, or God. In Backpacking with the Saints, Belden Lane describes the experience of hiking this way: Whenever I plunge into wilderness, my body and the environment move in and out of each other in an intimate pattern of exchange. I wade through water and inhale air filled with the scent of honeysuckle. I’m wrapped in cobwebs and pierced by briars. I swallow gnats drawn to the sweat on my body and feel the rocks on the trail through my boots. Where I “end” and everything else “begins” isn’t always clear. What seems to be “me” doesn’t stop at the fixed boundary of my skin.

the highest layer of joy, which I’ll call moral joy. I say this is the highest form of joy in part because this is the kind that even the skeptics can’t explain away. The skeptics could say that all those other kinds of passing joy are just brain chemicals in some weird formation that happened to have kicked in to produce odd sensations. But moral joy has an extra feature. It can become permanent. Some people live joyfully day by day. Their daily actions are aligned with their ultimate commitments. They have given themselves away, united and wholeheartedly. They are so grateful to have found their place and taken their stand. They have the inner light.

powerful moments of moral elevation seem to push a mental reset button, wiping out feelings of cynicism and replacing them with feelings of hope, love, and moral inspiration. These moments of elevation are energizing. People feel strongly motivated to do something good themselves, to act, to dare, to sacrifice, to help others.

There’s always something flowing out of the interiority of our spirit. For some people it’s mostly fear or insecurity. For the people we call joyful, it’s mostly gratitude, delight, and kindness.

“Joy is not merely external to the good life, a mint leaf on the cake’s whipped cream. Rather, the good life expresses and manifests itself in joy. Joy is the emotional dimension of life that goes well and that is led well, a positive affective response to life going well and life being led well.”

One of the greatest legacies a person can leave is a moral ecology—a system of belief and behavior that lives on after they die.

Moral ecologies subtly guide how you dress, how you talk, what you admire and disdain, and how you define your ultimate purpose. Moral ecologies are collective responses to the big problems of a specific moment.

There was a lot of commentary in those days about the soul-sucking perils of conformity, of being nothing more than an organization man, the man in the gray flannel suit, a numb status seeker. There was a sense that the group had crushed the individual,

The parade of moral ecologies is usually a story of progress, a rational response to the obsolescence of what came before. Nonetheless, this progress is a bumpy kind of progress.

“ratchet, hatchet, pivot; ratchet” pattern. People create a moral ecology that helps them solve the problems of their moment. That ecology works, and society ratchets upward. But over time the ecology becomes less relevant to new problems that arise. The old culture grows rigid, and members of a counterculture take a hatchet to it. There’s a period of turmoil and competition as the champions of the different moral orders fight to see which new culture will prevail. At these moments—1848, 1917, 1968, today—it’s easy to get depressed and to feel that society is coming apart at the seams. There are gigantic and often brutal wars of consecration, battles about what way of life is admired most. Eventually society pivots over and settles on a new moral ecology, a new set of standards of right and wrong. Once that’s in place, there is a new ratchet of progress, and the stumble of progress takes another step.

As Joseph Campbell put it in an interview with Bill Moyers, there are two types of deed. There is the physical deed: the hero who performs an act of bravery in war and saves a village. But there is also the spiritual hero, who has found a new and better way of experiencing spiritual life, and then comes back and communicates it to everyone else. Or, in Iris Murdoch’s words: “Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture.”

living life in a pragmatic, utilitarian manner turns you into a utilitarian pragmatist. The “How do I succeed?” questions quickly eclipse the “Why am I doing this?” questions. Suddenly your conversation consists mostly of descriptions of how busy you are. Suddenly you’re a chilly mortal, going into hyper-people-pleasing mode anytime you’re around your boss. You spend much of your time mentor shopping, trying to find some successful older person who will answer all your questions and solve all your problems. It turns out that the people in your workplace don’t want you to have a deep, fulfilling life. They give you gold stars of affirmation every time you mold yourself into the shrewd animal the workplace wants you to be. You’ve read those Marxist analyses of the bosses exploiting the workers. Suddenly it occurs to you that you have become your own boss and your own exploiter. You begin to view yourself not as a soul to be uplifted but as a set of skills to be maximized.

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. Desire makes you adhesive. Desire pushes you to get close—to the person, job, or town you love. But lack of desire makes you detached, and instills in you over time an attitude of emotional avoidance, a phony nonchalance. In short, the meritocracy encourages you to drift into a life that society loves but which you don’t. It’s impossible to feel wholehearted.

When you have nothing but your identity and job title to rest on, then you find yourself constantly comparing yourself to others. You are haunted by your conception of yourself. People who live in this way imagine that there are other people who are enjoying career splendor and private joy. That loser in college who did nothing but watch TV is now a big movie producer; that quiet guy in the training program is now a billionaire hedge fund manager. What does it profit a man to sell his own soul if others are selling theirs and getting more for it?

A telos crisis is defined by the fact that people in it don’t know what their purpose is. When this happens, they become fragile. Nietzsche says that he who has a “why” to live for can endure any “how.” If you know what your purpose is, you can handle the setbacks. But when you don’t know what your purpose is, any setback can lead to total collapse.

a telos crisis comes in two forms, walking and sleeping. In the walking form, the sufferer just keeps trudging along. She has been hit by some blow, or suffers from some deep ennui, but she doesn’t know what she wants or how she should change her life, so she just keeps on doing what she was doing—same job, same place, and same life. She is living with the psychological awareness that she is settling. I had a friend named Casey Gerald who was being interviewed for a job. At the end of the interview he turned the tables on the interviewer and asked her a question: “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” The interviewer burst out crying. If she wasn’t afraid, she wouldn’t be doing HR for that company. That’s a walking telos crisis. The second kind of telos crisis is the sleeping kind. In this version, the sufferer is just laid low, crawls into bed, and watches Netflix. His confidence is shot. He is paralyzed by self-focus. He has this weird and unwarranted conviction that it’s too late for him; life has passed him by. Other people’s accomplishments begin to bring real pain, as the distance between their (apparent) swift ascent and his pathetic stasis begins to seem hopelessly wide.

Eventually there’s no escaping the big questions. What’s my best life? What do I believe in? Where do I belong?

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. They will not have a compelling story that explains the meaning of their life in those moments when life gets hard.

Community is based on common humanity; tribalism on common foe. Tribalism is always erecting boundaries and creating friend/enemy distinctions. The tribal mentality is a warrior mentality based on scarcity: Life is a battle for scarce resources and it’s always us versus them, zero-sum. The ends justify the means. Politics is war. Ideas are combat. It’s kill or be killed. Mistrust is the tribalist worldview. Tribalism is community for lonely narcissists. These days, partisanship for many people is not about which political party has the better policies. It’s a conflict between the saved and the damned.

Many bad things happen in life, and it’s a mistake to try to sentimentalize these moments away by saying that they must be happening to serve some higher good. But sometimes, when suffering can be connected to a larger narrative of change and redemption, we can suffer our way to wisdom. This is the kind of wisdom you can’t learn from books; you have to experience it yourself. Sometimes you experience your first taste of nobility in the way you respond to suffering.

After seasons of suffering, we see that the desires of the ego are very small desires, and certainly not the ones we should organize our lives around. Climbing out of the valley is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don’t come out healed; they come out different.

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.

eternal three-step process that the poets have described from time eternal: from suffering to wisdom to service.

You see that you are called to go toward solitude, prayer, hiddenness, and great simplicity. You see that, for the time being, you have to be limited in your movements, sparing with phone calls, and careful in letter writing….The thought that you may have to live away from friends, busy work, newspapers, and exciting books no longer scares you….It is clear that something in you is dying and something is being born. You must remain attentive, calm, and obedient to your best intuitions.

“Your pain is deep and it won’t just go away,” Nouwen continues. “It is also uniquely yours, because it is linked to some of your earliest life experiences. Your call is to bring that pain home. As long as your wounded part remains foreign to your adult self, your pain will injure you as well as others.” As the saying goes, suffering that is not transformed is transmitted.

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.

The ultimate desire is the desire for fusion with a beloved other, for an I–Thou bond, the wholehearted surrender of the whole being, the pure union, the intimacy beyond fear.

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. Rich and successful people don’t have more or less of it than poorer or less successful people. The soul is the piece of your consciousness that has moral worth and bears moral responsibility. A river is not morally responsible for how it flows, and a tiger is not morally responsible for what it eats. But because you have a soul, you are morally responsible for what you do or don’t do. Because you have this essence inside of you, as the philosopher Gerald K. Harrison put it, your actions are either praiseworthy or blameworthy.

Obscenity, the philosopher Roger Scruton teaches, is anything that covers up another person’s soul.

Mostly, what the soul does is yearn. If the heart yearns for fusion with another person or a cause, the soul yearns for righteousness, for fusion with the good. Socrates said that the purpose of life is the perfection of our souls—to realize the goodness that the soul longs for. Everyone I’ve ever met wants to lead a good and meaningful life.

contracts benefit, but covenants transform.”

“Spirituality is an emotion. Religion is an obligation. Spirituality soothes. Religion mobilizes. Spirituality is satisfied with itself. Religion is dissatisfied with the world.”

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.

unavoidable reality.” You can be late with a work assignment and you can postpone a social occasion, but if your kid needs feeding or has to be met at the bus stop, you’re in an unavoidable reality. Parents groan under the burdens they took on with the commitment of parenthood, but how often have you met a parent who wished they hadn’t done it? A thick life is defined by commitments and obligations.

When we are well-off we chase the temporary pleasures that actually draw us apart. We use our wealth to buy big houses with big yards that separate us and make us lonely. But in crisis we are compelled to hold closely to one another in ways that actually meet our deepest needs.

Character is not something you build sitting in a room thinking about the difference between right and wrong and about your own willpower. Character emerges from our commitments. If you want to inculcate character in someone else, teach them how to form commitments—temporary ones in childhood, provisional ones in youth, permanent ones in adulthood. Commitments are the school for moral formation. When your life is defined by fervent commitments, you are on the second mountain.