The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

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

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 change. It includes moments of despair, or it is not faith. By

“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.”

It’s a change in the quality of awareness. It’s a gradual process of acquiring a new body of knowledge that slowly, slowly gets stored in the center of your being.

Protestant evangelical variety, are plagued by the sensation that they are not quite as intellectually rigorous or as cool as the secular world. At the same time, many of them are inflated by the notion that they are a quantum leap or two more moral.

When you walk into the religious world and find even just a few people thinking and talking about these things subtly, intelligently, and carefully, it is tremendously powerful.

Maybe it’s time we began to see this as a war. On the one side are those forces that sow division, discord, and isolation. On the other side are all those forces in society that nurture attachment, connection, and solidarity. It’s as if we’re witnessing this vast showdown between the social rippers and social weavers.

Most of us buy into a workaholic ethos that leaves us with little time for community. Those of us in the media know that the way to generate page views is to offer Pravda-like affirmations of your tribe’s moral superiority. Most of us hew to a code of privacy that

Power is created out of nothing when invitations are issued and new people gather and act in new ways. “The future is created one room at a time, one gathering at a time,”

She is committed not to community in the abstract. She is committed to this one

Somebody shares a vulnerability and in that way assumes leadership. An ethos is established.

honest, brutal story is the kind of story that produces combustion. We spend much of our time projecting accomplishments, talents, and capacity. The confrontation with weakness can have this detonating effect.

The act of working on common projects redraws the boundaries between groups and redefines where someone is on the hierarchy.

But actual lives are lived cumulatively. It takes a whole series of shocks before a person becomes homeless—loss of a job, breakdown in family relationship, maybe

you abstract away from the cumulative nature of life and define the problem as one episode, you are abstracting away from how life is lived. All conversations are either humanizing or dehumanizing, and problem-centered conversations tend to be impersonal and dehumanizing.

Such a conversation doesn’t start with the impersonal question, How do we tackle homelessness? It starts with the personal question, What can we do to help Mary lead a life of stability, safety, and security in a home? When you envision success as biography—as one particular person living on a different life trajectory—you see, in very concrete ways, all the different factors that go into a better future.

social and emotional layer has to be acknowledged, even though the issue you are talking about is superficially only physical, like finding the homeless housing.

It distorts reality to try to chop a life up into distinct cause-and-effect slices, as if a human being were a billiard ball. We tend to understand this when talking about our own lives but we tend to objectivize things when talking about others, or groups of others. The question in a

You wind up with a community in which a random spray of programs are competing for a smallish pot of money, working independently and often at cross-purposes, exaggerating their successes and hiding their failures. And you sort of hope it all somehow works out. But in Spartanburg, the groups

Systems thinking is built around the idea that if you take the direct approach to any problem, you’re probably going to screw things up because you don’t see the complexity of the whole system.

People fight and sacrifice more for their buddies than for an abstraction,

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

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 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.

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.

have swung too far in the direction of individualism. The result is a loss of connection—a crisis of solidarity.

Hyper-individualism erodes our obligations and responsibilities to others and our kind.

central problems of our day flow from this erosion: social isolation, distrust, polarization, the breakdown of family, the loss of community, tribalism, rising suicide rates, rising mental health problems, a spiritual crisis caused by a loss of common purpose, the loss—in nation after nation—of any sense of common solidarity that binds people across difference, the loss of those common stories and causes that foster community, mutuality, comradeship, and purpose.

Hyper-individualism does not emphasize and eventually does not even see the other drives—the deeper and more elusive motivations that seek connection, fusion, service, and care. These are not the desires of the ego, but the longings of the heart and soul: the desire to live in loving interdependence with others, the yearning to live in service of some ideal, the yearning to surrender to a greater good.

hyper-individualism creates isolated, self-interested monads who sense that something is missing in their lives but cannot even name what it is.

Unbalanced capitalism turns people into utility-maximizing, speeding workaholics that no permanent attachment can penetrate.

It makes people extremely sensitive to the judgments of others and quick to take offense when they feel slighted.

series of experiences which may be pleasant, but which don’t accumulate into anything because they are not serving a large cause. Some people become insecure overachievers. They seek to win by accomplishing the love, admiration,

The tribalist is seeking connection but isolates himself ever more bitterly within his own resentments and distrust. Tribalism is the dark twin of community.

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,

Life is not a solitary journey. It is building a home together.

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.

Adult life is about making promises to others, being faithful to those promises. The beautiful life is found in the mutual giving of unconditional gifts.

The relationalist sees each person as a node in a thick and enchanted web of warm commitments. She seeks to build a neighborhood, nation, and world of diverse and creative people who have made commitments in a flowering of different ways, who are nonetheless bound together by sacred chords.

Life operates by an inverse logic. I possess only when I give. I lose myself to find myself. When I surrender to something great, that’s when I am strongest and most powerful.

We start out listening to the default settings of the ego and gradually learn to listen to the higher callings of the heart and soul.

relationalism asserts that there are other, deeper parts of ourselves. There are motivations that are even stronger than self-interest, even if they are more elusive.

The soul yearns for goodness. Each human being wants to lead a good and meaningful life, and feels life falling apart when it seems meaningless.

Our public culture normalizes selfishness, rationalizes egoism, and covers over and renders us inarticulate about the deeper longings of the heart and soul.

They achieve worldly success and find it unsatisfying.

They realize that only emotional, moral, and spiritual food can provide the nourishment they crave.

She has discovered, down at the substrate, her infinite ability to care. Relationalism guides us as we undertake this personal transformation, surpassing the desires of the ego and taking on a bigger journey.

To peer deeper into ourselves where we find the yearnings for others, and then outward in relationship toward the world. A person achieves self-mastery, Maritain wrote, for the purpose of self-giving.

I will root myself down. Society says, Try to rise above and be better than; she says, No, I will walk with, serve, and come in under. Society says, Cultivate with the self-interested side of your life; she says, No, I will cultivate the whole of myself.