The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

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.

“Self-discipline is a form of freedom,” he writes. “Freedom from laziness and lethargy, freedom from expectations and the demands of others, freedom from weakness and fear—and doubt.”

many artists have trouble disappearing naturally into their lives. They feel separate from others and want to be connected somehow. It’s precisely the lack of social and emotional flow that can propel creativity. As the poet Christian Wiman puts it, “An artist is conscious of always standing apart from life, and one of the results of this can be that you begin to feel most intensely what you have failed to feel: a certain emotional reserve in one’s life becomes a source of great power in one’s work.”

Another problem with the individualistic view is that it doesn’t give us a script to fulfill the deepest yearnings. The heart yearns to fuse with others. This can be done only through an act of joint surrender, not through joint autonomy. The soul desires to chase some ideal, to pursue joy. This can happen only by transcending the self in order to serve the marriage.

People talk about “settling down.” But, in fact, marriage is a hopeful revolution two people undertake together, without any real idea of what’s on the other side. It involves a set of far-reaching personal reforms, so that you might become the sort of person with whom it is possible to live. It is a dangerous thing not to be aware of the crisis-like nature of marriage, Mason continues. “Whether it turns out to be a healthy, challenging, and constructive crisis or a disastrous nightmare, depends largely upon how willing the partners are to be changed.”

We think of laughter as the way we respond to jokes, but only about 15 percent of the comments that trigger laughter are funny in any way. Instead, laughter is a language that people use to bond. It is what bubbles up when some social incongruity has been resolved or when people find themselves reacting in the same way to some emotionally positive circumstance. Laughter is the reward for shared understanding.

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. I’ve learned to ask myself about a divorcing couple (obviously I can’t ask it directly), was there ever a marriage here? Was there ever love, joy, hope, or idealization in this relationship? Often, I’m hard put to find it. Divorce does not always represent an erosion of love or high expectations; in many cases the expectations weren’t high enough. Idealization of the other is part of every happy marriage.”

“He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love,” King wrote.

Marriage educates by throwing a series of difficult tasks in your path. Judith Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee list some of the most important ones: To separate emotionally from the family of one’s childhood To build intimacy combined with some autonomy To embrace the role of parents and absorb the impact of “Her Majesty, the Baby’s” arrival To confront the inevitable crises of life To establish a rich sexual life To create a safe haven for the expression of difference To keep alive the early idealized images of each other

Marital love is being aware of how the past is present in the marriage. Psychologists joke that a marriage is a battleground in which two families send their best warriors to determine which family’s culture will direct the couple’s lives.

A marriage partner with metis knows when to give space and when to intrude, when to offer the surprise gift and when not to tell the teasing joke. 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.

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

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.

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.

When they were old and near death, I asked both Friedman and Buckley if they felt content. They had each changed history in ways more profound than they could have expected when they set out. Did they feel they could rest now and be at peace? Neither man even understood what I was talking about. There was so much for them left to do. Until the day they died, they pushed ideas, lived for ideas, and tried to bend the world a little in the direction of their ideas. They were examples of what intellectual commitment looks like.

Students are taught to engage in critical thinking, to doubt, distance, and take things apart, but they are given almost no instruction on how to attach to things, how to admire, to swear loyalty to, to copy and serve. The universities, like the rest of society, are information rich and meaning poor.

John Ruskin once wrote, “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see.”

Emotional knowledge, Roger Scruton argues, is knowing what to feel in certain situations—so that you can be properly disgusted by injustice, properly reverent before an act of self-sacrifice, properly sympathetic in friendship, and properly forbearing when wronged.

I suppose this happens to most of us as we age: We get smaller, and our dependencies get bigger. We become less fascinating to ourselves, less inclined to think of ourselves as the author of all that we are, and at the same time we realize how we have been the ones shaped—by history, by family, by forces beyond awareness.

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.

For these religious realists, there is the struggle to be faithful to faith itself. For these people, faith comes as an expansion of consciousness that doesn’t last. You become aware of an extra dimension of existence, that, once experienced, feels like home, and then it’s gone.

Later in life, Buechner found himself amid young Christians who spoke confidently about God as if they talked to Him all the time, and He talked back. God told them to pursue this job and not that one, and to order this at the restaurant and not that. He was dumbstruck. He wrote that if you say you hear God talking to you every day on every subject, you are either trying to pull the wool over your own eyes or everybody else’s. Instead, he continues, 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.”

“pathological dualism,” a mentality that divides the world between those who are unimpeachably good and those who are irredeemably bad.

A community is healthy when relationships are felt deeply, when there are histories of trust, a shared sense of mutual belonging, norms of mutual commitment, habits of mutual assistance, and real affection from one heart and soul to another.

“Protracted loneliness causes you to shut down socially, and to be more suspicious of any social contact,” Hari writes. “You become hypervigilant. You start to be more likely to take offense where none was intended, and to be afraid of strangers. You start to be afraid of the very thing you need most.” This sounds like a pretty good summary of American politics today—and so, yes, polarization is a product of social isolation, too.

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.

Rebuilding community involves seeing that the neighborhood, not the individual, is the essential unit of social change. If you’re trying to improve lives, you have to think about changing many elements of a single neighborhood all at once.

in fact, the 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.

A community narrative has four parts, says Trabian Shorters, who leads a fellowship group for African American men out of Miami called BMe. There is framing (which defines the context), narrative (where we came from and where we are going), identity (who we are), and behavior (actions that define us). Community stories are almost always cross-generational. They start with the origin of a place, and then tell how it grew.

All conversations are either humanizing or dehumanizing, and problem-centered conversations tend to be impersonal and dehumanizing.

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 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.

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.

Hyper-individualism, the reigning ethos of our day, is a system of morals, feelings, ideas, and practices based on the idea that the journey through life is an individual journey, that the goals of life are individual happiness, authenticity, self-actualization, and self-sufficiency. Hyper-individualism puts the same question on everybody’s lips: What can I do to make myself happy?

hyper-individualism gradually undermines any connection not based on individual choice—the connections to family, neighborhood, culture, nation, and the common good. Hyper-individualism erodes our obligations and responsibilities to others and our kind.

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 numbs these deepest longings.

The uncommitted person is the unremembered person. A person who does not commit to some loyalty outside the self leaves no deep mark on the world.

As T. S. Eliot observed, the chief illusion of modern political activity is the belief that you can build a system so perfect that the people in it do not have to be good. The reality is that democracy and the economy rest upon a foundation, which is society. A society is a system of relationships. If there is no trust at the foundations of society, if there is no goodness, care, or faithfulness, relationships crumble, and the market and the state crash to pieces.

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.