The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

These seasons of suffering have a way of exposing the deepest parts of ourselves and reminding us that we’re not the people we thought we were. People in the valley have been broken open. They have been reminded that they are not just the parts of themselves that they put on display. There is another layer to them they have been neglecting, a substrate where the dark wounds, and most powerful yearnings live.

The people who are made larger by suffering go on to stage two small rebellions. First, they rebel against their ego ideal. When they were on their first mountain, their ego had some vision of what it was shooting for—some vision of prominence, pleasure, and success. Down in the valley they lose interest in their ego ideal. Of course afterward they still feel and sometimes succumb to their selfish desires. But, overall, they realize the desires of the ego are never going to satisfy the deep regions they have discovered in themselves. They realize, as Henri Nouwen put it, that they are much better than their ego ideal.

“A life of ease is not the pathway to growth and happiness. On the contrary, a life of ease is how you get stuck and confused in life.”

The problem is that the person in the aesthetic phase sees life as possibilities to be experienced and not projects to be fulfilled or ideals to be lived out. He will hover above everything but never land. In the aesthetic way of life, each individual day is fun, but it doesn’t seem to add up to anything. The theory behind this life is that you should rack up experiences. But if you live life as a series of serial adventures, you will wander about in the indeterminacy of your own passing feelings and your own changeable heart. Life will be a series of temporary moments, not an accumulating flow of accomplishment. You will lay waste to your powers, scattering them in all directions. You will be plagued by a fear of missing out. Your possibilities are endless, but your decision-making landscape is hopelessly flat.

involved in making or breaking any transaction or relationship approach zero. The Internet is commanding you to click on and sample one thing after another. Living online often means living in a state of diversion. When you’re living in diversion you’re not actually deeply interested in things; you’re just bored at a more frenetic pace. Online life is saturated with decommitment devices. If you can’t focus your attention for thirty seconds, how on earth are you going to commit for life?

Hannah Arendt noticed the phenomenon decades ago. When she looked into the lives of people who had become political fanatics, she found two things: loneliness and spiritual emptiness. “Loneliness is the common ground of terror,” she wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Tribalism seems like a way to restore the bonds of community. It certainly does bind people together. But it is actually the dark twin of community. 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 tribalist worldview. Tribalism is community for lonely narcissists.

Once politics becomes your ethnic or moral identity, it becomes impossible to compromise, because compromise becomes dishonor. Once politics becomes your identity, then every electoral contest is a struggle for existential survival, and everything is permitted. Tribalism threatens to take the detached individual and turn him into a monster.

Many bad things happen in life, and it’s a mistake to try to sentimentalize these moments away by saying that they must be happening to serve some higher good. But sometimes, when suffering can be connected to a larger narrative of change and redemption, we can suffer our way to wisdom. This is the kind of wisdom you can’t learn from books; you have to experience it yourself. Sometimes you experience your first taste of nobility in the way you respond to suffering.

The normal reaction to a season of suffering is to try to get out of it. Address the symptoms. Have a few drinks. Play a few sad records. Move on. The right thing to do when you are in moments of suffering is to stand erect in the suffering. Wait. See what it has to teach you. Understand that your suffering is a task that, if handled correctly, with the help of others, will lead to enlargement, not diminishment.

Obscenity, the philosopher Roger Scruton teaches, is anything that covers up another person’s soul.

Mostly, what the soul does is yearn.

"You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you." (Augustine)

And then there are moments, maybe more toward middle or old age, when the leopard comes down out of the hills and just sits there in the middle of your doorframe. He stares at you, inescapably. He demands your justification. What good have you served? For what did you come? What sort of person have you become? There are no excuses at that moment. Everybody has to throw off the mask.

The British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge put it bluntly, maybe a little too bluntly: “I can say with complete truthfulness that everything I have learned in my 75 years in this world, everything that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence, has been through affliction and not through happiness, whether pursued or attained.”

He immediately wrote a letter to his brother: “And only then did I know how much I loved you my dear brother!” All the small questions that used to concern him fell away. “When I look back on my past and think how much time I wasted on nothing, how much time has been lost in futilities, errors, laziness, incapacity to live; how little I appreciated it, how many times I sinned against my heart and soul—then my heart bleeds.” His life, he felt, would begin again. “Never has there seethed in me such an abundant and healthy kind of spiritual life as now….Now my life will change, I shall be born again in new form….Life is a gift. Life is happiness, every minute can be an eternity of happiness….Life is everywhere, life is in ourselves, not in the exterior.”

Once the heart has fallen in love and has acknowledged that love, then the soul feels a powerful urge to make a promise to it. Once love strikes, there is an urge to say, “I will always love you.” That’s because the very essence of love is dedication. As Dietrich and Alice von Hildebrand once wrote, “A man who would say: ‘I love you now, but how long it will last I cannot tell,’ does not truly love; he does not even suspect the very nature of love. Faithfulness is so essentially one with love, that everyone, at least as long as he loves, must consider his devotion an undying devotion. This holds good for every love, for parental love and filial love, for friendship and for spousal love. The deeper a love, the more it is pervaded by fidelity.”

As Rabbi David Wolpe once wrote, “Spirituality is an emotion. Religion is an obligation. Spirituality soothes. Religion mobilizes. Spirituality is satisfied with itself. Religion is dissatisfied with the world.”

needs. Our commitments allow us to move to a higher level of freedom. In our culture we think of freedom as the absence of restraint. That’s freedom from. But there is another and higher kind of freedom. That is freedom to. This is the freedom as fullness of capacity, and it often involves restriction and restraint. You have to chain yourself to the piano and practice for year after year if you want to have the freedom to really play. You have to chain yourself to a certain set of virtuous habits so you don’t become slave to your destructive desires—the desire for alcohol, the desire for approval, the desire to lie in bed all day.

Then came World War II and the Nazi occupation. Frankl found himself thrown into a concentration camp. He realized that the career questions—What do I want from life? What can I do to make myself happy?—are not the proper questions. The real question is, What is life asking of me?

“It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us,” he realized. “We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which life constantly sets for each individual.” The sense of calling comes from the question, What is my responsibility here? Frankl went on to work as a psychotherapist in the camp, reminding despairing prisoners that the world still expected things of them. They still had responsibilities and purposes to pursue.

Sometimes it’s the whole totality of bourgeois life that covers over the deep regions. We’re just going about life, doing our normal prosaic things like shopping and commuting, and a film of dead thought and clichéd emotion covers everything. Ultimately, you get used to the buffer you’ve built around yourself, and you feel safer leading a bland life than a yearning one.

Nobody makes a conscious decision to entomb the heart and to anesthetize the daemon; it just sort of happens after a few decades of prudent and professional living.

“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.”

The mind is focused when it is going forward in a straight line, he argues. The discipline is to put the task at the center. The pitcher’s personality isn’t at the center. His talent and anxiety aren’t at the center. The task is at the center. The master has the ability to self-distance from what he is doing.

Springsteen grew up in the height of the “I’m Free to Be Myself” era. Rock music was the classic expression of that ethos. Springsteen himself sang about escaping and running away to total freedom. But personally, he never fell for that false lure. He went back deeper into his roots, deeper into his unchosen responsibilities, and to this day lives ten minutes from where he grew up. “I sensed there was a great difference between unfettered personal license and real freedom. Many of the groups that had come before us, many of my heroes, had mistaken one for the other and it’d ended in poor form. I felt personal license was to freedom as masturbation was to sex. It’s not bad, but it’s not the real deal.” Springsteen felt accountable to the people he’d grown up with, few of whom had been to college, most of whom were struggling, and so he went back and planted himself in that ground.

At the end of the day there is the brutal grinding effort of surrendering the ego to the altar of marriage, giving up part of yourself, the desires you have, for the larger union.

“What greater thing is there for two human souls,” George Eliot wrote in Adam Bede, “than to feel that they are joined for life—to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of last parting?”

One problem with the individualistic view, as always, is that it traps people in the small prison of the self. If you go into marriage seeking self-actualization, you will always feel frustrated because marriage, and especially parenting, will constantly be dragging you away from the goals of self. 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. In the committed life, a maximal marriage is viewed the way the scholar of myth Joseph Campbell viewed it, as a heroic quest in which the ego is sacrificed for the sake of a relationship. In the ethos of commitment, marriage is a moral microcosm of life, in which each person freely chooses to take on responsibility for others, and become dependent on others in order to do something larger. In this understanding of marriage, people don’t become lovely by loving themselves; they become lovely by loving others, by making vows to others, by taking on the load of others and fulfilling those vows and carrying that load. All the dignity and gravity of life is in this surrender.

“Suffering makes immature love grow into mature love,” Walter Trobisch writes. “Immature unlearned love is egotistic. It’s the kind of love children have, demanding and wanting—and wanting instantaneously.” But the love that comes after forgiveness is marked by empathy, compassion, understanding, and inexplicable care. As Thornton Wilder once put it, “In love’s service only the wounded soldiers can serve.”

Love decenters the self. It teaches us that our riches are in another. It teaches us that we can’t give ourselves what we truly need, which is somebody else’s love. It smashes the walls of ego and leaves a pile of jagged stones.

Love wakes us up. It exposes the fact that the chasms within us cannot be filled by the food the ego hungers for. “The unrelated human being lacks wholeness,” Carl Jung wrote, “for he can achieve wholeness only through the soul, and the soul cannot exist without its other side, which is always found in a ‘you.’ ” Every lover in the throes of love knows this.

Since this is the most important decision of your life, you would think society would have prepared you for this moment. You would think that the schools would have provided you with course after course on the marriage decision, on the psychology of marriage, the neuroscience of marriage, the literature of marriage. But no, society is a massive conspiracy to distract you from the important choices of life in order to help you fixate on the unimportant ones.

“You can’t worship love and individuality in the same breath.”

Pride of self comes in many forms. Among them is the pride of power, the illusion that you can gain enough worldly power to make yourself secure. This is the pride suffered by those who seek to control others or to dominate other nations. There is also intellectual pride, the pride suffered by those who try to organize life into one all-explaining ideology that allegedly explains away all mystery. Every form of fanaticism, Niebuhr says, is an attempt to cover over existential insecurity. Then there is moral pride, the ego’s desire to escape moral insecurity by thinking it is better than other people, that it has earned its own salvation. In the grip of moral pride, we judge ourselves by a lax standard, which we surpass, and judge others by a strict standard and find them wanting. There is also religious pride. This is the pride that afflicts people who think religion involves following the moral codes and who think highly of themselves because they follow those codes. Such a person may pray every day, but his real concern is self. Is God listening to my prayers? Is God answering my requests? Is God granting me peace? Is everyone seeing my goodness, and am I being rewarded for my righteousness? All pride is competitive. All pride contains a hint of malice. All pride is bloated and fragile, because the ego’s attempts to establish security through power, money, status, intellect, and self-righteousness are never quite successful. In the regular world, pride is often rewarded,...