The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

I’ll describe some of the experiences people have on their way to more fulfilling lives, and share the important truths they discover. Most of us get better at living, get deeper and wiser as we go, and this book seeks to capture how that happens.

Our society has become a conspiracy against joy. It has put too much emphasis on the individuating part of our consciousness—individual reason—and too little emphasis on the bonding parts of our consciousness, the heart and soul. We’ve seen a shocking rise of mental illness, suicide, and distrust.

Emotional joy can often happen early in a romantic relationship. Fresh lovers glow at each other across a picnic blanket. Or it can happen later. Old couples can feel like they are deeper in each other than they are in themselves. You’ll hear people in happy marriages talk this way: When I make love to her, I disappear.

I just want to emphasize that the march toward freedom produced many great outcomes. The individualistic culture that emerged in the sixties broke through many of the chains that held down women and oppressed minorities. It loosened the bonds of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia. We could not have had Silicon Valley or the whole information age economy without the rebel individualism and bursts of creativity that were unleashed by this culture. It was an absolutely necessary cultural revolution.

Fulfillment and joy are on the far side of service. Only then are we really able to love. Only then are we able to begin the second journey.

As the theologian Tim Keller puts it, real freedom “is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones.” So much of our lives are determined by the definition of freedom we carry around unconsciously in our heads. On the second mountain it is your chains that set you free.

“In any hard discipline, whether it be gardening, structural engineering, or Russian,” the philosopher and motorcycle mechanic Matthew Crawford writes, “one submits to things that have their own intractable ways.”

The more creative the activity is, the more structured the work routine should probably be. When she was writing, Maya Angelou would get up every morning at 5:30 and have coffee. At 6:30 she would go off to a hotel room she kept—a modest room with nothing in it but a bed, a desk, a Bible, a dictionary, a deck of cards, and a bottle of sherry. She would arrive at 7:00 A.M. and write every day until 12:30 P.M.

H. A. Dorfman is one of the great baseball psychologists. In his masterpiece, The Mental ABC’s of Pitching, Dorfman says that this kind of structured discipline is necessary if you want to escape the tyranny of the scattered mind. “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.”

Work is the way we make ourselves useful to our fellows. “There may be no better way to love your neighbor,” Tim Keller put it, “whether you are writing parking tickets or software or books, than to simply do your work. But only skillful, competent work will do.”

The most important factor in when you think about marrying someone is, Would I enjoy talking with this person for the rest of my life?

Steven Pinker of Harvard summarized the research ethos of the modern university: “I have no idea how to get my students to build a self or become a soul. It isn’t taught in graduate school, and in the hundreds of faculty appointments and promotions I have participated in, we’ve never evaluated a candidate on how well he or she could accomplish it.”

Fifth, they gave us emotional knowledge. To read Whitman as he exults in joy, to be with Antigone as she struggles to bury her brother, to travel with Galileo as he follows his discoveries wherever they may take him, to be with the mathematician Pascal as he feels the direct presence of God, or to travel with Sylvia Plath into the depths of madness is not necessarily to learn a new fact, but it is to have a new experience.

It was like suddenly everything was illuminated, and I became aware of an infinite depth in each of these thousands of people. They were living souls. Suddenly it seemed like the most vivid part of reality was this: Souls waking up in the morning. Souls riding the train to work. Souls yearning for goodness. Souls wounded by earlier traumas. Souls in each and every person, illuminating them from the inside, haunting them, and occasionally enraptured within them, souls alive or numb in them; and with that came a feeling that I was connected by radio waves to all of them—some underlying soul of which we were all a piece.

They are in it with all their soul. In Varieties of Religious Experience, William James quotes a woman who can’t imagine dallying with doubt and all this head scratching. “The very instant I heard my Father’s cry calling unto me, my heart bounded in recognition. I ran, I stretched forth my arms, I cried aloud, ‘Here, here I am, my Father.’ ”

If you read the accounts of faith by even the most profound believers, you see there are dry spells, agonies, and moments of profound challenge. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik notes that “Religion is not, at the outset, a refuge of grace and mercy for the despondent and desperate, an enchanted stream for crushed spirits, but a raging, clamorous torrent of man’s consciousness with all its crises, pangs and torments.” It is precisely the journey down these rocky rapids that purges faith of its superficiality, Soloveitchik argues. It’s not easy and comforting. As Wiman puts it, if God is supposed to be a salve to heal psychic wounds or an escape from the pains of life, “then I have to admit: it is not working for me.”

“The church is both my greatest intellectual and moral problem and my most consoling home. She is both pathetic whore and frequent bride,” the Franciscan monk Richard Rohr writes. And still faith is the center and joy of his life.

Relationalism asserts that human beings are both fundamentally broken but also splendidly endowed. We have egoistic self-interested desires, and we need those desires in order to accomplish some of the necessary tasks of life: to build an identity, to make a mark on the world, to break away from parents, to create and to shine.