The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

These community builders are primarily driven by desires four through six—by emotional, spiritual, and moral motivations: a desire to live in intimate relation with others, to make a difference in the world, to feel right with oneself. They are driven by a desire for belonging and generosity.

Compassion is expressed in gentleness. When I think of persons I know who model for me the depths of spiritual life, I am struck by their gentleness. Their eyes communicate the residue of solitary battles with angels, the costs of caring for others, the deaths of ambition and ego, and the peace that comes from having very little left to lose in this life. They are gentle because they have honestly faced the struggles given to them and have learned the hard way that personal survival is not the point. Their care is gentle because their self-aggrandizement is no longer at stake. There is nothing in it for them. Their vulnerability has been stretched to clear-eyed sensitivity to others and truly selfless love.

He realized that the career questions—What do I want from life? What can I do to make myself happy?—are not the proper questions. The real question is, What is life asking of me?

Life ultimately means taking responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which life constantly sets for each individual.”

He was overwhelmed by beauty. It touched him at the level of heart and soul. Suddenly a switch flipped inside: My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows Were then made for me; bond unknown to me Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly, A dedicated Spirit. On I walked In thankful blessedness, which even yet remains. His heart was full. He himself didn’t make a promise, but somehow “vows were made for me.” He was destined, he realized at that moment, to become a poet, a dedicated spirit, to spend his life capturing what he then felt. If he didn’t fulfill those vows, he would, he realized, be “sinning greatly.” He’d be denying his own nature and his own destiny.

annunciation moment. That’s the moment when something sparks an interest, or casts a spell, and arouses a desire that somehow prefigures much of what comes after in a life, both the delights and the challenges.

Nietzsche wrote that the way to discover what you were put on earth for is to go back into your past, list the times you felt most fulfilled, and then see if you can draw a line through them.

When the expert is using her practical knowledge, she isn’t thinking more; she is thinking less. She has built up a repertoire of skills through habit and has thereby extended the number of tasks she can perform without conscious awareness. This sort of knowledge is built up through experience, and it is passed along through shared experience.

“What we have loved, others will love, and we will teach them how.”

What most people seek in life, especially when young, is not happiness but an intensity that reaches into the core. We want to be involved in some important pursuit that involves hardship and is worthy of that hardship. The mentors who really lodge in the mind are the ones who were hard on us—or at least were hard on themselves and set the right example—not the ones who were easy on us. They are the ones who balanced unstinting love with high standards and relentless demands on behalf of something they took seriously. We think we want ease and comfort, and of course we do from time to time, but there is something inside us that longs for some calling that requires dedication and sacrifice. In this way, a lot of what mentors do is to teach us what excellence looks like, day by day. As Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “Moral education is impossible without the habitual vision of greatness.”

Mentors also teach how to deal with error. As you get more experienced, you get a lot better at recognizing your mistakes and understanding, through experience, how to fix them.

Finally, mentors teach how to embrace the struggle—that the struggle is the good part.

For many, the big choices in life often aren’t really choices; they are quicksand. You just sink into the place you happen to be standing.

By approaching the decision rationally, scientifically, you can break the decision-making down into clear stages. Decision-making experts fill books with clear decision stages: preparation (identify the problem; determine your objectives), search (assemble a list of the possible jobs or people that will help you meet your objectives), evaluation (make a chart and rate the options on a ten-point scale according to various features), confrontation (ask disconfirming questions; create constructive disagreement to challenge existing premises), selection (tally up the scores; build a consequences table that will help you envision the future outcome of each choice).

“Your emotional commitment to what you are doing will be translated directly into your work. If you go at your work with half a heart, it will show

A daemon is a calling, an obsession, a source of lasting and sometimes manic energy. Daemons are mysterious clusters of energy deep in the unconscious that were charged by some mysterious event in childhood that we imperfectly comprehend—or by some experience of trauma, or by some great love or joy or longing that we spend the rest of our lives trying to recapture.

theory of the orchid and the dandelion. Some kids are highly reactive (orchids) and either soar to extraordinary heights or plunge to depths, depending on their contexts. Other are less reactive (dandelions); even bad circumstances don’t bring them down.

When you are looking for a vocation, you are looking for a daemon. You are trying to enact the same fall that is the core theme of this book—to fall through the egocentric desires and plunge down into the substrate to where your desires are mysteriously formed. You are trying to find that tension or problem that arouses great waves of moral, spiritual, and relational energy. That means you are looking into the unconscious regions of heart and soul that reason cannot penetrate. You are trying to touch something down there in the Big Shaggy, that messy thicket that sits somewhere below awareness.

When you raise children, you notice that their daemons are wide-awake a lot of the time. They have direct access to these deep realms. Moral consciousness is our first consciousness. But as adults we have a tendency to cover over the substrate, to lose touch with the daemon and let it drift asleep. Sometimes we do this by being excessively analytic about everything.

being so analytical I had lost the ability to have an authentic response.

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

If you really want to make a wise vocation decision, you have to lead the kind of life that keeps your heart and soul awake every day. There are some activities that cover over the heart and soul—the ones that are too analytic, economic, prudently professional, and comfortably bourgeois. There are some that awaken the heart and engage the soul—music, drama, art, friendship, being around children, being around beauty, and, paradoxically, being around injustice. The people who make the wisest vocation decisions are the people who live their lives every day with their desires awake and alive. They get out of boring offices and take jobs where the problems are. They are the ones who see their desires, confront their desires, and understand what they truly yearn for.

“One’s mind has to be a searching mind,” Thomas Bernhard writes of the person looking for a calling. “A mind searching for mistakes, for the mistakes of humanity, a mind searching for failure.”

The best advice I’ve heard for people in search of a vocation is to say yes to everything. Say yes to every opportunity that comes along, because you never know what will lead to what. Have a bias toward action. Think of yourself as a fish that is hoping to get caught. Go out there among the fishhooks.

raised some money from friends in Silicon Valley and went back to South Africa to launch the African Leadership Academy, with the goal of training six thousand leaders over a fifty-year period. ALA now takes some of the most talented students from across the continent, offers them a free education, and sends them to universities abroad so long as they promise to return to Africa to lead their lives.

Swaniker believes that we are defined by these moments of obligation, which are “usually caused by a sense of outrage about some injustice, wrong-doing or unfairness we see in society.” But he goes on to argue that “you should ignore 99% of these moments of obligation,” no matter how guilty it makes you feel. The world is full of problems, but very few are the problems you are meant to address. When you feel the tug of such a moment, Swaniker advises, ask three big questions: First, Is it big enough? Those who have been fortunate to receive a good education, who are healthy, and have had great work experiences should not be solving small problems. If you were born lucky, you should solve big problems. Second, “Am I uniquely positioned…to make this happen?” Look back on the experiences you have had. Have they prepared you for this specific mission? Third, “Am I truly passionate?” Does the issue generate obsessive thinking? Does it keep you up at night? If your answer to each question is not a resounding yes, Swaniker advises, you should ignore that idea.

A vocation decision is not about finding the biggest or most glamorous problem in the world. Instead, it’s about finding a match between a delicious activity and a social need. It’s the same inward journey we’ve seen before: the plunge inward and then the expansion outward. Find that place in the self that is driven to connect with others, that spot where, as the novelist Frederick Buechner famously put it, your deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger.

Martin Luther King, Jr., once advised that your work should have length—something you get better at over a lifetime. It should have breadth—it should touch many other people. And it should have height—it should put you in service to some ideal and satisfy the soul’s yearning for righteousness.

There’s a moment in many successful careers when the prospect of success tries to drag you away from your source, away from the daemon that incited your work in the first place. It is an act of raw moral courage to reject the voices all around and to choose what you have chosen before. It looks like you are throwing away your chance at stardom, but you are actually staying in touch with what got you there.

“companionate marriages.” The couple gets along. They parent together. But the passion has faded. They may or may not have sex, and if they do, it is rare. Work and parenting become the most important part of the spouses’ lives, and the marriage comes in third, or fourth, or fifth. An academic friend of mine observed over lunch recently, “I don’t really know of many happy marriages. I know a lot of marriages where parents love their kids.” In such a marriage, you learn to live in an arrangement that really doesn’t occupy your interest or your energies.

a maximal marriage is viewed the way the scholar of myth Joseph Campbell viewed it, as a heroic quest in which the ego is sacrificed for the sake of a relationship. In the ethos of commitment, marriage is a moral microcosm of life, in which each person freely chooses to take on responsibility for others, and become dependent on others in order to do something larger. In this understanding of marriage, people don’t become lovely by loving themselves; they become lovely by loving others, by making vows to others, by taking on the load of others and fulfilling those vows and carrying that load. All the dignity and gravity of life is in this surrender.

Great marriages are measured by how much the spouses are able to take joy in each other’s victories.

Stendhal once described a salt mine near Salzburg, Austria. The miners would stick small, leafless branches down into the salt mines and leave them there for a time. When they would retrieve them, the branches would be covered with a shining layer of diamond-like crystals that shimmered in the light. Stendhal said that enchanted lovers crystallize each other in this way, their adoring eyes scattering diamonds on every virtue of the beloved. The more they idealize each other at this phase, the more lasting their marriage is likely to be in the decades to come. Love relies a bit on generous idealizations. Judith Wallerstein, the marriage counselor, observes, “Many of the divorced couples I’ve seen appear to have never idealized each other.

The process of rigorous forgiveness begins with a gesture by the one who has been wronged. Martin Luther King, Jr., argued that forgiveness isn’t an act; it’s an attitude. We are all sinners. So the person with a forgiving attitude expects sin, empathizes with sin, and is slow to think him- or herself superior to the one who has done the sinning. The forgiving person is strong enough to display anger and resentment toward the person who has wronged her, but she is also strong enough to put away that anger and resentment. She is strong enough to make the first move, even before the offender has asked. She resists the natural urge for vengeance and instead offers the offender a welcoming context in which the offender can confess. “He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love,” King wrote. Once the victim has created the context for forgiveness, the offender is obliged to get out in front of the process. To confess. To show penitence. At this stage, total honesty is the hardest course; we all want to rationalize our wrong. My tendency is to let my sins dribble out in a gradual way, so they won’t seem so wrong and they won’t scare off the other person. But the act involves probing down to the root of the error, offering a confession more complete than expected. It involves an act of pure submission. Then it is the moment for judgment. A wrong is an occasion to reevaluate. What is the character of the person in question? Should a moment of stupidity e...

When marriages break down, it’s because one or both partners feels unknown and misunderstood. When people feel unknown or misunderstood, they minimize and excuse their own failings: “Okay, I’m screwed up, but you don’t see and understand me!” They shift the blame onto the other person and reinforce their own worst traits. Marital love is a seeing love. John Gottman, the dean of marriage scholars, grasped the essence: “Happy marriages are based on a deep friendship. By this I mean mutual respect for and enjoyment of each other’s company. These couples tend to know each other intimately—they are well versed in each other’s likes, dislikes, personality quirks, hopes, and dreams. They have an abiding regard for each other and express this fondness not just in big ways but in little ways day in and day out.” Marital love is understanding the other person’s patterns. In Things I Wish I’d Known Before We Got Married, Gary Chapman describes a variety of different personality types that can coexist in marriage. There are painters and pointers. In conversation, painters describe an elaborately detailed picture of an event. Pointers just get to the nub. There are organizers and free spirits. The organizer sweats the details.

Words are the fuel of marriage. “Everything else is transitory,” Nietzsche writes, “but most of the time you are together will be devoted to conversation.” The quality of the conversation is the quality of the marriage. Good conversation creates warmth and peace, and bad conversation creates frigidity and stasis. Conversation is how marriage partners rub off on each other.

A well-mannered conversation is shaped by what John Gottman calls the pattern of bids and volleys. Let’s say you are reading the paper at the dining room table and your partner comes up and says, “Look at the beautiful blue jay on the tree outside the window.” That’s a conversational bid. You might look up and exclaim, “Wow, that is beautiful. Thanks for pointing it out.” That’s a “toward bid.” With your remark, you are moving toward your partner. Or you could respond, “I was reading the paper; would you please let me finish?” That would be an “against bid.” Or you could just grunt and ignore the remark or change the subject with a non sequitur. The would be a “turning-away bid.” In marriages that succeed, Gottman has found, the couple experiences five toward bids for every one against or turning-away bid. The people Gottman calls “relationship masters” go out of their way to store up chits in their emotional bank account. “There’s a habit of mind that the masters have, which is this: they are scanning the social environment for things they can appreciate and say thank you for….Disasters are scanning the social environment for partners’ mistakes,” Gottman said in an interview with Emily Esfahani Smith for The Atlantic.

there are four kinds of unkindness that drive couples apart: contempt, criticism, defensiveness, and stonewalling. The rule of their research is pretty simple: If you’re tired and your partner makes a bid, turn toward in kindness. If you’re distracted, turn toward in kindness. If you’re stressed, turn toward in kindness. Relationship masters also learn how to communicate well in times of triumph and conflict. Moments of triumph would seem to be the easy part of a relationship. But Shelly Gable, a psychologist at UC Santa Barbara, found that those are the moments that often drive people apart. One spouse comes home reporting some promotion at work, but the other person can’t simply join in the happiness because he is too focused on self, so he a) changes the subject to some triumph of his own; b) acknowledges the triumph with a grunt and then gets back to his own business; or c) belittles the triumph by asking, “Are you sure you’ll be able to handle this new job?”

Masters also learn never to sulk. Sulking consists of feeling angry about something but determined not to communicate about it. “The sulker,” Alain de Botton writes, “both desperately needs the other person to understand and yet remains utterly committed to doing nothing to help them do so. The very need to explain forms the kernel of the insult: if the partner requires an explanation, he or she is clearly not worthy of one.” The sulker is returning to childhood, and dreams of finding a mother who understands what he wants without words or explanation. Nobody becomes more reasonable when they are blamed and attacked. Nobody becomes mature because their spouse, in the middle of an argument, screams at them to “Grow up!” The advice books offer a better formula, even if it is hard to follow while angry. First, try to state the problem in neutral terms. Then, stroke, stand, and contract. Remind the person that you hear and understand them (stroke); state your positions clearly (stand); find a way to meet in the middle (contract).

There are two classic crisis periods in marriage—just after the children are born and in the doldrums of middle age. In the former, the temptation is to replace the complicated and difficult relationship you have with your spouse for the joyous and captivating love you have with your children. In the latter crisis, people in middle age are haunted by a feeling of generalized sadness and incompleteness. There’s a sense that life is slipping away, and a tendency to see the spouse, with all of their flaws and negativity, nagging and unhappiness, as the real problem, the real anchor that is holding you back from your fullness. During these crisis moments, there’s a tendency to recoil, to distance yourself from your partner. You begin to dissociate and withdraw. You construct parallel lives with outside interests and separate friend groups. You get used to marriage without intimacy—the marriage bed, as they say, where the spouses are a centimeter apart and a million miles away. You use drugs, booze, work, or the care of your children to occupy the psychic space formerly filled by the marriage. In a study at Cameron University in Oklahoma, Joanni L. Sailor interviewed people who had fallen out of love. The quotes she collected are a searing testimony of how horrible it is to be in a relationship after the fire has died: “During sex there was no kissing. I remember just craving to be kissed, but not by him.” “The pain is so overwhelming.” “I think I cried for a year.” “Yes, it wa...

During these low moments, it is helpful to remember that marriage is not just a relationship; it is a covenant. It’s a moral promise to hold fast through thick and thin. Both people have vowed to create this project or cause, the marriage, that is more important than each person’s emotional weather. Of course, there are times when divorce is the right and only course, but there are other times when the sentiment that guides Parker Palmer comes in handy: “If you can’t get out of it, get into it!” If you can’t easily walk away from something, then the only way forward is to double down. When the well of love dries up, it takes an act of will to dig a little deeper. “It is a deliberate choosing of closeness over distance, of companionship over detachment, of relationship over isolation, of love over apathy, of life over death,” Mike Mason writes.

The experts are aligned when it comes to how to recommit: Don’t expect some ultimate solution to the big disagreement in your marriage. Overwhelm the negative by increasing the positive. Swamp negative interactions with the five love languages: words of affirmation, acts of service, gifts, quality time, and personal touch. Recommitment is the time for “Can we take a walk this afternoon?” and “You relax. I’ll vacuum.” This is the time for what Abraham Joshua Heschel called “an ecstasy of deeds.” You do a mitzvah, a good deed, and then you do another, and each one creates “luminous moments in which we are raised by overpowering deeds above our own will, moments filled with outgoing joy, with intense delight.” It is an immemorial law of human nature that behavior change precedes and causes attitudinal change. If you behave kindly toward a person, you will become kind and you will cherish them. Sex heals a lot of wounds in marriage, or at least provides a start to their healing. There is an ancient wisdom in the Jewish belief that a marriage without sex is not a marriage. “The ethic of marriage is hedonistic, not monastic,” writes Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik; it is dangerous to be too spiritual about it.

ultimately joy is found not in satisfying your desires but in changing your desires so you have the best desires. The educated life is a journey toward higher and higher love.

A surprising number of history’s great figures have had mystical experiences while in prison. The experience of being imprisoned takes away everything else—material striving, external freedom, their busy schedules. For at least a few people, inner experience and spiritual states become all that they have. The realization dawns upon them that these inner states are actually the essential experience in life, and everything else is secondary.

Frankl discovered that while the body grows according to what it consumes, the soul grows by the measure of love it pours out.

For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understand how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.

the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”

Really? You have never felt overwhelmed by, and in some way inadequate to, an experience in your life, have never felt something in yourself staking a claim beyond your self, some wordless mystery straining through words to reach you? Never? Religion is not made of these moments; religion is the means of making these moments part of your life rather than merely radical intrusions so foreign and perhaps even fearsome that you can’t even acknowledge their existence afterward. Religion is what you do with these moments of over-mastery in your life.

the stories of our people and our identity. They helped me understand the consistency of my group across the vast horizon of time. Then, in college and early adulthood, I began to use them as wisdom literature, as tools for understanding and solving the problems of life. The characters in the Bible are normal, mottled human beings who are confronted with moral challenges. The key question is whether they respond to the challenge with the right inner posture—whether they express charity when it is called for, forgiveness when it is necessary, and great humility before goodness. David shows us what bravery looks like in the face of Goliath. Solomon illustrates wisdom before the women and the baby. Boaz exemplifies loving-kindness toward Ruth. During this phase I held these stories at arm’s length, to see what useful information they might have. I was big, and the stories were small, just an old book in my hands to be used by me in leading my life.

at some point I had the sensation that these stories are not fabricated tales happening to other, possibly fictional, people: They are the underlying shape of reality. They are renditions of the recurring patterns of life. They are the scripts we repeat. Adam and Eve experienced temptation and a fall from grace, and we experience temptation and a fall from grace. Moses led his people from bondage meanderingly toward a promised land, and we take a similar spiritual journey. The psalmist looked into himself and asked, “Soul, why are you so downcast?” and we still do that. The prodigal son returned, and his father, infused by grace and love, ran out to meet him. Sometimes we, too, are outrageously forgiven. These stories are not just about common things that happen to people. They are representations of ongoing moral life.