The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

balances that worldview with a countervailing ethos that supplements, corrects, and ennobles. She walks in that world, with all its pleasures and achievements, but with a different spirit, a different approach, and different goals. She is communal where the world is too individual.

it feels like he has surrendered control. The most creative actions are those made in response to a summons.

It is you throwing yourself wholeheartedly for another and another throwing himself wholeheartedly for you.

He doesn’t just have opinions. He submits to a creed. He doesn’t just live in a place. He helps build a community. Furthermore, he is not just committed to this abstract notion of “community.” He is committed to a specific community, to a specific person,

His character is built through the habitual acts of service to the people he loves. His character is built by being the humble recipient of other people’s gifts and thus acknowledging his own dependency.

prioritize those actions that deepen commitment, build relation, and enhance human dignity: giving, storytelling, dance, singing, common projects, gathering, dining, ritual, deep conversation, common prayer, forgiveness, creating beauty, mutual comfort in times of sadness and threat, mutual labor for the common good.

There is the constant temptation to label and generalize. There is the constant temptation to reduce people to data and to see them as data points.

something that is unique and irreplaceable about each person that data cannot see. The relationalist tries to see each individual as a whole person—as

Sometimes what is deepest is related in the form of myth, story, and music. When communication fails or is corrupted, the French philosopher Emmanuel Mounier says, I suffer a loss of myself.

The practical workaday world primes the utilitarian lens. Consumerism calls forth a self that is oriented around material pleasure. Money has an anonymous power and tends to render the person on the other side of a transaction invisible. Workplace rivalries and modern politics require armored individuals—human

buy into a workaholic ethos that leaves us with little time for relationship. Most of us, from time to time, hue to a code of privacy that prevents us from actually knowing

Relationship, though, is inherently sticky and inefficient. Most of us, daily, slip back into self-absorption, succumb to the hunger for status, and have to recognize that and dive back into relation.

It’s always a competition between partial truths. It’s always an evolving conversation between self and society. It’s always balancing tensions and trying to live

Society and culture are prior to and more important than politics or the market. The health of society depends on voluntary unselfishness.

Whenever I treat another person as if he were an object, I’ve ripped the social fabric. When I treat another person as an infinite soul, I have woven the social fabric.

Whenever I see someone truly, and make them feel known, I have woven the fabric. Whenever I accuse someone of

maligning motives, I have woven it. The social fabric is created through an infinity of small moral acts, and it can be des...

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.

People within a moral ecology are given a million subtle nudges to either live up to their full dignity or sink to their base cravings.

It can create the material platforms on which relationships can be built. But the state can’t create the intimate relationships that build a fully functioning person. That can only happen through habitual personal contact.

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.

generosity that radiates out into the world. You see people giving of themselves, not even in the grand ways, but just in the small favors and thoughtful considerations.