The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

“Compassion is always, at its most authentic, about a shift from the cramped world of self-preoccupation into a more expansive place of fellowship.”

One of the greatest legacies a person can leave is a moral ecology—a system of belief and behavior that lives on after they die.

Community is

connection based on mutual affection. Tribalism, in the sense I’m using it here, is connection based on mutual hatred.

Community is based on common humanity; tribalism on common foe. Tribalism is always erecting boundaries and creating friend/enemy distinctions. The tribal mentality is a warrior mentality based on scarcity: Life is a battle for scarce resources and it’s always us versus them, zero-sum. The ends justify the means. Politics is war. Ideas are combat. It’s kill or be killed. Mistrust is the...

Suffering teaches us gratitude. Normally we take love and friendship for granted. But in seasons of suffering we throw ourselves on

others and appreciate the gifts that our loved ones offer. Suffering puts you in solidarity with others who suffer. It makes you more sympathetic to those who share this or some other sort of pain. In this way it tenderizes the heart. Suffering calls for

the surface of our lives most of us build the hard shell. It is built to cover fear and insecurity and win approval and success. When you get down to the core of yourself, you find a different, more primeval country, and in it a deep yearning to care and

connect. You could call this deep core of yourself the pleroma, or substrate. It is where your heart and soul reside. After her first daughter was born,

make four big commitments over the course of our lives: to a vocation, to a spouse and family, to a philosophy or faith, and to a community. We

Character emerges from our commitments. If you want to inculcate character in someone else, teach them how to form commitments—temporary ones in childhood, provisional ones in youth, permanent ones in adulthood. Commitments are the school for moral formation.

learned to never underestimate the power of a dinner table. It’s the stage on which we turn toward one another for love like flowers seeking the sun.

I’ve never seen a program turn around a life. Only relationships turn around lives.” That’s what’s happening

Relationship is the driver of change. Think of who made you who you are. It was probably a parent, a teacher, or a mentor. It

wasn’t some organization that was seeking a specific and measurable outcome that can be reduced to metrics. It wasn’t a person looking to create a system of change that could scale. It was just a person doing something intrinsically good—making you feel known, cared for, trusted, unconditionally loved—without presuming to know how that relationship would alter the trajectory of your life. In her book, The Fabric of Character,

fact, the tricky part of an annunciation moment is not having it, but realizing you’re having it. The world is full of beautiful things and moments of wonder. But

sometimes they pass by without us realizing their importance. Often, we’re not aware of our annunciation moments except in retrospect. You look back and realize, “Okay, that’s when this all started….That was the freakishly unlikely circumstance that set things off on this wonderful course.” The best thing about an annunciation moment is that it gives you an early hint of where your purpose lies.

mentors who really lodge in the mind are the ones who were hard on us—or at least were hard on themselves and set the right example—not the ones who were easy on us. They are the ones who balanced unstinting love with high standards and relentless demands on behalf of something they took seriously. We think we want ease and comfort, and of course we do from time to time, but there is something inside us that longs for some calling that requires dedication and sacrifice. In this way, a lot of what mentors

“The big choices we make are practically random.”

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable,

impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

The people who make the wisest vocation decisions are the people who live their lives every day with their desires awake and alive.

One of the best pieces of advice for young people is, Get to yourself quickly. If you know what you want to do, start doing it. Don’t delay because you think this job or that degree would be good preparation for doing what you eventually want to do. Just start doing it.

Before you are married, as Alain de Botton notes, you can live under the illusion that you are easy to live with. But to be married is to volunteer for the most thorough surveillance program known to humankind.

But ultimately joy is found not in satisfying your desires but in changing your desires so you have the best desires. The educated life is a journey toward higher and higher love.

Christians are commanded to live in a way that doesn’t make sense unless God exists. Sometimes