The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

The crucial question at the depth of any relationship is not Is he crazy? It is What are the ways you are crazy? What parts of your life have been blocked by fear? How exactly do you self-destruct? In what ways have you not been loved?

They meet each other’s thoughts simply and guilelessly, the way a child meets reality. One makes an observation, and the other agrees and builds on

There’s a sense of sheer relief in being able to talk so freely without fear of being misunderstood. J. B

there is probably no talk quite so delightful as the talk between two people who are not yet in love, but who might fall in love, and are aware that each ...

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

But no, society is a massive conspiracy to distract you from the important choices of life in order to help you fixate on the unimportant

Everybody spends too much time appraising the other person when making marriage decisions, but the person who can really screw things up is you. These are questions such as:

Jane Austen thought it was “wicked” to settle, and I’m with her. If you marry without total admiration and rapture, you will not have enough passion to fuse you together in the early days,

you’re honest and tell him that, you’re introducing a fatal inequality into your relationship right away. If you don’t tell him that, you are lying to the person you are supposedly closest to in the whole world. Settling seems realistic, but only a love built on rapturous devotion is pragmatic in the end.

neuroticism to remain constant across the life span.”

Do I often second-guess his or her judgment?

The only way to thrive in marriage is to become a better person—more patient, wise, compassionate, persevering, communicative, and humble.

To create a safe haven for the expression of difference To keep alive the early idealized images of each other

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

marriage is a battleground in which two families send their best warriors to determine which family’s culture will direct the couple’s lives. Before you were

The more one lashes out, the more the other withdraws. Healthy couples step back from the cycle and help each other grow out of it. “The magic of a couple’s relationship is that, when

metis. That’s the Greek word for a kind of practical wisdom, an intuitive awareness of how things are, how things go together, and how things will never go together.

The university of marriage, at its best, teaches this form of emotional awareness, which can’t be reduced to rules or communicated in books, and which emerges as a sort of loving nimbleness.

marriages that succeed, Gottman has found, the couple experiences five toward bids for every one against or turning-away bid.

Divorce doesn’t generally happen when the number of conflicts increases; it happens when the number of positive things decreases.

contempt, criticism, defensiveness, and stonewalling.

“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.”

Remind the person that you hear and understand them (stroke); state your positions clearly (stand); find a way to meet in the middle (contract).

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

It’s the way we turn disagreement into a quest for superiority. It’s not I’m right / you’re wrong; it’s I’m better / you’re lesser, I’m righteous / you’re deplorable, I’m good / you’re contemptible. It’s the tendency to be quick to take offense in a way that declares your own moral superiority. Marshall McLuhan was harsh but not wrong when he observed, “Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.”

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.

pernicious.

Moral development is tremendously important, everybody acknowledged, but it’s something you sort of do on your own.

The universities, like the rest of society, are information rich and meaning poor.

But Western Civ was and remains radicalism—a subversive, revolutionary counterculture that makes it impossible to remain fat and happy within the status quo. Western Civ is Socrates, a man so dangerous, his city couldn’t tolerate him living within it.

Western Civ took me outside the assumption of my time, outside the values of the modern meritocracy and America’s worship of success. Western

history’s moral ecologies. All of us require a constructive philosophy of life, a set of criteria to determine what is more valuable than what. Fortunately, over the centuries human beings at different times and different places have come up with distinct systems of values and ways of finding meaning in the world.

Seeing well is not natural. It is an act of humility. It means getting your own self—your own needs and wishes—out of the way, so that you can see the thing you’re looking at as itself, and not just as a mirror of your own interests. Seeing well is a skill you learn from others who see reality clearly:

There is no such thing as thinking for yourself or thinking alone. All thinking is communication, and all the concepts in your head are inherited from a procession of thinkers stretching

We have to be taught the refined emotions: the tragic sadness that is appropriate when a good man is undone by his own flaw, the stubborn courage of Joan of Arc in the face of the fire, the disciplined joy that Mozart puts into his “Jupiter” symphony.

we come across a passage in a book that puts into words something we had vaguely intuited. When a poet captures an emotion perfectly,

We walk into a college, most of us, with a certain set of normal desires, most of them having to do with being well thought of. But if the college does its job, it reveals the inner self, or at least the possibility of the inner self.

The central message is to be watchful over what you love, because you become what you desire.

pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things—if they are where you tap real meaning in life—then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the

When I go back and think about our classroom discussions, the topics of our papers, and the rambling dining hall and bar-stool conversations, they were really about trying to figure out what was worth wanting,

The story was the landscape, the living creation, on which Jews lived out their lives.

the passage into adulthood, and a leap of faith, doesn’t happen when you are ready to make it. It happens, Zornberg says, when you are not quite ready.

Exodus is not just describing a ragtag group of people wandering around in the desert. It is describing how resilient people are made. It’s an eternal story of spiritual and moral formation that happens again and again and again.

He and his daughter, my mother, subtly communicated that immigrant mentality—the feeling of being an outsider, yet just a bit cleverer and more hardworking than those insiders. The culture of immigrant Jews instilled a burning hunger to make it. The hunger, once implanted, stays as you age, but the food it seeks changes. Success is no longer enough. We only said the Shema on the High

God is what you see and feel with and through. Most of us carry this

crucial lesson for anybody in the middle of any sort of intellectual or spiritual journey: Don’t try to lead or influence. Let them be led by that which is summoning them.

moral pride, the ego’s desire to escape moral insecurity by thinking it is better than other people, that it has earned its own salvation. In the grip of moral pride, we judge ourselves by a lax standard, which we surpass, and judge others by a strict standard and find them wanting.

There is also religious pride. This is the pride that afflicts people who think religion involves following the moral codes and who think highly of themselves because they follow those codes. Such a person may pray every day, but his real concern is self.

All pride is bloated and fragile, because the ego’s attempts to establish security through power, money, status, intellect, and self-righteousness are never quite successful.

by running after it, but nobody catches faith without running after it in some way. I know a lot of people who would prefer to have religious faith, but they just don’t. And I know others, no better and no worse, who do have faith, and perhaps sometimes wish they didn’t.