The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

“God is the ground of being”—that he’s not a big guy in the sky with a beard but a caring moral presence that pervades all reality, a flowing love that gives life its warmth, existence its meaning.

To be religious, as I understand it, is to perceive reality through a sacred lens, to feel that there are spiritual realities in physical, imminent things. Thomas Merton once wrote that “trying to solve the problem of God is like trying to see your own eyeballs.” God is what you see and feel with and through.

“Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man’s attitude toward history and nature,” Rabbi Heschel writes in God in Search of Man. “One attitude is alien to his spirit: taking things for granted.” There are holy sparks in every occasion and a cosmic universe in every person.

I want to reiterate that yes, grace is the central thing Christ offers, but that is the doorway. And it is to know him. I see lots of emphasis on striving in your note, and I appreciate its antidote to cheap grace. But the foundational fact is you cannot earn your way into a state of grace—this denies grace’s power, and subverts its very definition. Grace must reach out to the broken and undeserving. It must reach out to those recognizing plainly, vulnerably, their own need and emptiness. It can only find welcome in those sitting still.

“Our only truly essential human task here, Jesus teaches, is to grow beyond the survival instincts of the animal brain and the egoic operating system into the kenotic joy and generosity of full human personhood. His mission was to show us how to do this.”

The fuller answer is that the way I experience faith is not a block of concrete. Faith is change. Faith is here one moment gone the next, a stream that evaporates. At least for me. The novelist Frederick Buechner once observed that if he were asked what faith is, “it’s exactly the journey through space and time I’d talk about, the ups and downs over the years, the dreams, the odd moment, the intuitions….Faith is homesickness. Faith is a lump in the throat. Faith is less a position on than a movement toward, less a sure thing than a hunch. Faith is waiting.” I have to confess I don’t really resonate with most religious people I meet. I don’t want to use my doubts as a badge of honor to make me seem more reasonable or sophisticated before the world. I fully acknowledge that these doubts probably grow out of my own insufficiency, the years of living life on the upper level of the play. I will just say I don’t experience faith the way some people do, for whom God is as real as the table in front of you. For them, faith is wholehearted.

Water metaphors abound in religious talk because there is so much thirsting. God is said to be the stream of living water for which we pant, the way a deer pants for water in a brook. Faith is said to be a sip that arouses a thirst.

a commitment to faith is a commitment to stick with it through all the various seasons of faith and even those moments when faith is absent. To commit to faith is to commit to the long series of ups and downs, to intuitions, learning and forgetting, knowing one sort of God when you’re twenty-five and a very different God at thirty-five, fifty-five, and seventy-five. It means riding out when life reveals itself in new ways and faith has to be reformulated once again. To commit to faith is to commit to change. It includes moments of despair, or it is not faith.

you should wake up in your bed and ask, “Can I believe it all again today?” Or, better yet, ask yourself that question after you’ve scanned the morning news and seen all the atrocities that get committed. If your answer to that question of belief is “yes” every single day, then you probably don’t know what believing in God really means, Buechner writes. “At least five times out of ten the answer should be No because the No is as important as the Yes, maybe more so. The No is what proves you’re human in case you should ever doubt it. And then if some morning the answer happens to be really Yes, it should be a Yes that’s choked with confession and tears and…great laughter.” Commitment to faith, then, is persistence to faith through doubt; it is persistence in faith through suffering and anxiety; it is persistence in faith through struggle and persistence in faith through all the idiots and immoral cretins who speak for faith. It is persistence in faith despite the occasional idiocy of the synagogues, mosques, or churches that are supposed to be the homes of faith.

The first ramp is the ramp of ritual. Religion is filled with lighting candles, bowing down, standing up, processions, and the rest. These habits are collective enactments of the moral order and a sacred story. They are reminders of certain lessons and truths. In the Torah, the lighting of candles is coordinated with the burning of incense because in our lives the illumination of knowledge is connected with the experience of passion and the senses. We are not cold reasoners; we learn with passion.

So how is community restored? Basically, it’s restored by people who are living on the second mountain, people whose ultimate loyalty is to others and not themselves.

Within the reasonably small radius of our lives, behavior is highly contagious. Suicide, obesity, and social mobility happen in networks as people subtly shape one another’s behavior in ways that are beneath the level of consciousness.

The sin is partly my own. Mutual fallibility is one of the glues that hold community together. We understand that we’re all weak and selfish some of the time. We often contribute to the problems we ourselves complain about.

When people come together to build something, they make implied promises to one another. They promise to work things out. They promise to do their fair share or more of the work. They promise to follow through on the intention to build something new.

This is possibility thinking. If you want to shift the culture, you’ve got to have a conversation you haven’t had before, one that is about long-term possibilities. What can this place be like in 2049?

When a community begins to build together, they don’t just create new stuff; they create new norms. They make a contribution to the community, and over time that contribution becomes the thing everybody is expected to do. For example, my friend Rod Dreher had a sister named Ruthie who lived in a small town in Louisiana. Ruthie was a teacher, one of those people who radiate an inner light. Tragically, she died of cancer at forty. More than one thousand people came to her funeral. Ruthie loved to go barefoot, so the pallbearers, from the local fire department, where her husband worked, carried her casket to the grave barefoot. Ruthie always thought the dead of her town should be remembered on Christmas, so she created a tradition. Every Christmas Eve she would go to the town cemetery to put a lit candle on each gravestone. Ruthie happened to die just before Christmas, and as the family was sitting around on that Christmas Eve, Rod asked his mother if she would like to do what Ruthie used to do—to light a candle on each gravestone. His mother replied that maybe in other years that would be good, but this year it was just too tough. That evening Rod’s parents attended mass and drove home, early evening, by the cemetery. They looked over and gasped. There were hundreds of lights. Somebody else had put a candle on every gravestone. That’s how community works. Somebody starts something. A new tradition is established. Other people step in and carry it on.

On the first mountain, the emphasis is on the unencumbered self, individual accomplishment, creating a society in which everyone is free to be themselves. This is a fluid society, and over the short term a productive society, but it is a thin society. It is a society in which people are only lightly attached to each other and to their institutions. The second-mountain society is a thick society. The organizations and communities in that society leave a mark. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes an organization thick or thin. The thick communities have a distinct culture—the way the University of Chicago, Morehouse College, the U.S. Marine Corps do. A thick institution is not trying to serve its people instrumentally, to give them a degree or to simply help them earn a salary. A thick institution seeks to change the person’s whole identity. It engages the whole person: head, hands, heart, and soul. Thick institutions have a physical location, often cramped, where members meet face-to-face on a regular basis, such as a dinner table or a packed gym or an assembly hall. Such institutions have a set of collective rituals—fasting or reciting some creed in unison or standing in formation. They have shared tasks, which often involve members closely watching one another, the way hockey teammates have to observe one another on the ice. In such institutions people occasionally sleep overnight in the same retreat center or facility, so that everybody can see each other’s r...

University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth adds that thick institutions almost always have a clearly defined shared goal, such as winning the Super Bowl or saving the environment. They have initiation rituals; a sacred guidebook or object passed down from generation to generation; distinct jargon and phrases that are spoken inside the culture but misunderstood outside it; a label, such as being a KIPPster for a KIPP charter school student; and they often have uniforms or other emblems, such as flags, rings, bracelets. Jonathan Haidt of NYU advises that if you want to create a thick institution, you should call attention to the traits people have in common, not the ones that set them apart. Second, exploit synchrony. Have people sing or play or move together. Third, create healthy competition among teams, not individuals. People fight and sacrifice more for their buddies than for an abstraction, so embed people in team relationships. Thick institutions are oriented around a shared moral cause. They don’t see their members as resources to be exploited but as fellow marchers in a holy mission. Thick institutions tear you down in order to build you up. They enmesh you within long traditions and sacred customs that seem archaic a lot of the time. They ask you to bury your own identity in the collective identity. They point to an ideal that is far in the distance and can’t be achieved in a single lifetime. “The secret of life,” the sculptor Henry Moore once said, “...

The first mountain is the individualist worldview, which puts the desires of the ego at the center. The second mountain is what you might call the relationalist worldview, which puts relation, commitment, and the desires of the heart and soul at the center. My core argument has been that we have overdone it with the individualist worldview. By conceiving of ourselves mostly as autonomous selves, we’ve torn our society to shreds, opened up division and tribalism, come to worship individual status and self-sufficiency, and covered over what is most beautiful in each human heart and soul.

The world is in the midst of one of those transition moments. The individualistic moral ecology is crumbling around us. It has left people naked and alone. For many, the first instinctive reaction is the evolutionary one: Revert to tribe. If we as a society respond to the excesses of “I’m Free to Be Myself” with an era of “Revert to Tribe,” then the twenty-first century will be a time of conflict and violence that will make the twentieth look like child’s play. There is another way to find belonging. There is another way to find meaning and purpose. There is another vision of a healthy society. It is through relationalism. It is by going deep into ourselves and finding there our illimitable ability to care, and then spreading outward in commitment to others. In this manifesto, I try to make the case against the hyper-individualism of the current moment, and for relationalism, a better way to live.

The revolution will be moral, or it will not be at all. Modern society needs a moral ecology that rejects the reigning hyper-individualism of the moment. We need to articulate a creed that puts relation, not the individual, at the center, and which articulates, in clear form, the truths we all know: that we are formed by relationship, we are nourished by relationship, and we long for relationship. Life is not a solitary journey. It is building a home together. It is a process of being formed by attachments and then forming attachments in turn. It is a great chain of generations passing down gifts to one another. The hyper-individualist sees society as a collection of individuals who contract with one another. The relationalist sees society as a web of connections that in many ways precedes choice. A hyper-individualist sees the individual as a self-sufficient unit; the relationalist says, a person is a node in a network, a personality is a movement toward others. As a child, each person’s emotional and spiritual foundation is formed by the unconditional love of a caring adult. Each person’s attachment style is formed by the dance of interactions between herself and a loving adult. “We” precedes “me.” As adults, we measure our lives by the quality of our relationships and the quality of our service to those relationships. Life is a qualitative endeavor, not a quantitative one. It’s not how many, but how thick and how deep. Defining what a quality relationship looks like is ...

A child is born with both ego and heart and soul on full display. But for many people, around adolescence, the ego begins to swell, and the heart and soul recede. People at this age need to establish an identity, to carve a self. Meanwhile, our society tells adolescent boys to bury their emotions and become men. It tells little girls that if they reveal the true depths of themselves, nobody will like them. Our public culture normalizes selfishness, rationalizes egoism, and covers over and renders us inarticulate about the deeper longings of the heart and soul. But eventually most people realize that something is missing in the self-interested life. They achieve worldly success and find it unsatisfying. Or perhaps they have fallen in love, or been loved in a way that plows open the crusty topsoil of life and reveals the true personality down below. Or perhaps they endure a period of failure, suffering, or grief that carves through the surface and reveals the vast depths underneath. One way or another, people get introduced to the full depths of themselves, the full amplitude of life. They realize that only emotional, moral, and spiritual food can provide the nourishment they crave. When a person has undergone one of these experiences, which can happen at any age, she is no longer just an individual; she has become a person. Her whole personhood is alive and engaged. She has discovered, down at the substrate, her infinite ability to care. Relationalism guides us as we undert...

The Good Life The relationalist is not trying to dominate life by sheer willpower. He is not gripping the steering wheel and trying to strategize his life. He has made himself available. He has opened himself up so that he can hear a call and respond to a summons. He is asking, What is my responsibility here? When a person finds his high calling in life, it doesn’t feel like he has taken control; it feels like he has surrendered control. The most creative actions are those made in response to a summons. The summons often comes in the form of love. A person falls in love with her child, her husband, her neighborhood, her calling, or her God. And with that love comes an urge to make promises—to say, I will always love you. I will always serve you and be there for you. Life is a vale of promise making. Or a summons may come in the form of a need. There is some injustice, some societal wrong, that needs to be fixed. A person assumes responsibility—makes a promise to fight that fight and right that wrong. When a summons has been felt and a promise has been made, a commitment has been sealed. The life of a relationalist is defined by its commitments. The quality and fulfillment of her life will be defined by what she commits to and how she fulfills those commitments. A commitment is a promise made from love. A commitment is a promise made without expecting any return (though there will be returns aplenty). A committed relationship is a two-way promise. It is you throwing yoursel...

Relationships do not scale. They have to be built one at a time, through patience and forbearance. But norms do scale. When people in a community cultivate caring relationships, and do so repeatedly in a way that gets communicated to others, then norms are established. Trustworthy action is admired; empathy is celebrated. Cruelty is punished and ostracized. Neighborliness becomes the default state. An emergent system, a culture, has been created that subtly guides all the members in certain directions. When you create a norm through the repeated performance of some good action, you have created a new form of power.

There comes a moment, which may come early or later in life, when you realize what your life is actually about. You look across your life and review the moments when you felt more fully alive, at most your best self. They were usually moments when you were working with others in service of some ideal. That is the agency moment. That is the moment when you achieve clarity about what you should do and how you should live. That is the moment when the ego loses its grip. There is a sudden burst of energy that comes with freedom from the self-centered ego. Life becomes more driven and more gift. That is the moment when a life comes to a point.