The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

A commitment, on the other hand, changes who you are, or rather embeds who you are into a new relationship.

A covenant is about identity. It is about you and me coming together to form an ‘us.’ That is why contracts benefit, but covenants transform.” A committed person is giving her word and placing a piece of herself in another person’s keeping. The word “commitment” derives from the Latin mittere, which means “to send.” She is sending herself out and giving another person a claim. She is creating a higher entity.

the union you have both created—this new higher-level thing.

Though commitments are made in a spirit of giving, they produce many benefits. Let me spell out a few: Our commitments give us our identity. They are how we introduce ourselves to strangers. They are the subjects that make our eyes shine in conversation. They are what give our lives constancy and coherence.

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.

As the theologian Tim Keller puts it, real freedom “is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones.”

moral formation is not individual; it is relational. Character is not something you build sitting in a room thinking about the difference between right and wrong and about your own willpower. 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. When your life is defined by fervent commitments, you are on the second mountain.

Emotional combustion happens in the most mysterious ways. No one can really trace the chemical processes by which love bursts into flame in one community and not another.

To me, AOK is what the second-mountain life looks like. It is a life of love, care, and commitment. It is the antidote to much that is wrong in our culture.

they find joy in the light they bring others, and they know why they have been put on this earth. “This is not a job I’ll retire from,” says Sharon Murphy, who runs Mary House, a refugee-housing organization in Washington. “I love what I do. This kind of work is a way of being.” They can seem very altruistic. But it’s worth remembering, as Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out, that the concept of altruism was invented only in the eighteenth century. Once people decided that human nature is essentially egoist and selfish, then it was necessary to invent a word for when people weren’t driven by selfish desires. But before that, what we call altruism—living for relationships—was just how people lived. It wasn’t heroic or special.

There are many kinds of second-mountain people—men and women whose lives are defined by deep commitments. There are such people in business, in teaching, the arts, the military.

MORAL MOTIVATION That is the thing you notice about second-mountain people. There’s been a motivational shift. Their desires have been transformed. If you wanted to generalize a bit, you could say there are six layers of desire: Material pleasure. Having nice food, a nice car, a nice house. Ego pleasure. Becoming well-known or rich and successful. Winning victories and recognition. Intellectual pleasure. Learning about things. Understanding the world around us. Generativity. The pleasure we get in giving back to others and serving our communities. Fulfilled love. Receiving and giving love. The rapturous union of souls. Transcendence. The feeling we get when living in accordance with some ideal.

loving care is not on the fringe of society. It’s the foundation of society. These community builders are primarily driven by desires four through six—by emotional, spiritual, and moral motivations: a desire to live in intimate relation with others, to make a difference in the world, to feel right with oneself. They are driven by a desire for belonging and generosity. They exhibit bright sadness. I get the phrase from the Franciscan friar Richard Rohr and his great book Falling Upward, which is about finding meaning in middle age and beyond. When you are serving those in need you see pain and injustice close up. The closer you get to wisdom, Rohr continues, the more of your own shadow you see, and the more of other people’s shadow, and the more you realize how much we need each other. Hope gets infused with realistic awareness.

Our mature years are characterized by a bright sadness and a sober happiness, if that makes any sense.”

the hooks of commitment are set. Now you’ll do what needs to be done. At this point you just let go of the wheel. You stop asking, What do I want? and start asking, What is life asking of me? You respond. “A person’s life can be meaningful only if she cares fairly deeply about some things, only if she is gripped, excited, interested, engaged,” writes the philosopher Susan Wolf. Notice the verbs Wolf uses: “gripped,” “excited,” “engaged.” They describe response at some deep level, not a self-initiated conscious choice. These are the verbs our community builders use.

Community is woven through love-drenched accountability. The weavers talk a lot about how important it is to act and not just talk about things. They often describe themselves as GSD types—Get Shit Done. They publish the books of their lives with their actions. But they also put tremendous emphasis on listening and conversation. A lot of what they do is to create spaces where deep conversations can happen.

The single phrase I heard most often from their lips was “the whole person.” Over the past few decades, our institutions have tended to divide human beings into slices. Schools treat children as brains on a stick and pump information into them. Hospitals treat patients as a collection of organs to be repaired; doctors don’t really know the people they are operating on. But community builders talk about the need to take a whole-person approach. When a child enters school, she doesn’t leave behind her healthcare issues, her safety issues, her emotional traumas, her nutritional needs, her need for purpose and meaning. Whatever sector one is working in, you have to be aware and connect to the whole person all at once.

And over it all is the spirit of loving-kindness.

Compassion is expressed in gentleness. When I think of persons I know who model for me the depths of spiritual life, I am struck by their gentleness. Their eyes communicate the residue of solitary battles

They are gentle because they have honestly faced the struggles given to them and have learned the hard way that personal survival is not the point. Their care is gentle because their self-aggrandizement is no longer at stake. There is nothing in it for them. Their vulnerability has been stretched to clear-eyed sensitivity to others and truly selfless love.

Some people never get themselves together; they live scattered lives. Some get themselves together but at a low level. Their lives are oriented around the lesser desires. Hillesum got herself together at a very high level. As the external conditions of her life became more miserable, her internal state became more tranquil.

The practical way we do that is through commitments—through making maximal commitments to things we really care about and then serving them in a wholehearted way. The core challenges of the second-mountain life are found in the questions, How do I choose my commitments? How do I decide what is the right commitment for me? How do I serve my commitments once they have been chosen? How do I blend my commitments so that together they merge into a coherent, focused, and joyful life?

When Orwell returned from Spain he was transformed. He had experienced his call within a call, that purifying moment when you know why you were put on this earth and you are ruthless about pursuing this mission. A friend remarked, “It was almost as if there’d been a kind of fire smoldering in him all his life which suddenly broke into flame.” He became angry at any injustice and coolly passionate. He was outraged by lies, but kindly toward people. He was fully engaged in fighting fascism, but always detached enough to be able to face the unpleasant truths about his own side.

He wasn’t always a joyful man to be around. He was wintry, bleak, prickly, independent, fierce, both shy and assertive.

In the vocation mentality, you’re not living on the ego level of your consciousness—working because the job pays well or makes life convenient. You’re down in the substrate. Some activity or some injustice has called to the deepest level of your nature and demanded an active response. Carl Jung called a vocation “an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from its well-worn paths….Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: He is called.”

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? Frankl realized that a psychiatrist in a concentration camp has a responsibility to study suffering and reduce suffering. “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?

“When an issue is less central to one’s identity, it’s possible to feel, for example, ‘I really should do more to help those in need, but it’s just too hard’ or ‘I just can’t find the time.’ But when the issue lies at the very heart of who one is, it becomes unthinkable to turn away.”

The summons to vocation is a very holy thing. It feels mystical, like a call from deep to deep. But then the messy way it happens in actual lives doesn’t feel holy at all; just confusing and screwed up.

This was what you might call Wilson’s annunciation moment. That’s the moment when something sparks an interest, or casts a spell, and arouses a desire that somehow prefigures much of what comes after in a life, both the delights and the challenges. Most days pass in an unmemorable flow, but, every once in a while, a new passion is silently conceived. Something delights you and you are forever after entranced by that fascinating thing.

When you hear adults talk about their annunciation moments, they often tell stories of something lost and something found.

As my friend April Lawson puts it, we were all missing something as children, and as adults we’re willing to put up with a lot in order to get it.

To feel wonder in the face of beauty is to be grandly astonished. A person entranced by wonder is pulled out of the normal voice-in-your-head self-absorption and finds herself awed by something greater than herself. There’s a feeling of radical openness, curiosity, and reverence. There’s an instant freshness of perception, a desire to approach and affiliate.

“Some of our most wonderful memories are beautiful places where we felt immediately at home,” John O’Donohue writes.

The Greek word for “beauty” was kalon, which is related to the word for “call.” Beauty incites a desire to explore something and live within

“I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart,” Vincent van Gogh wrote, in the middle of a life obsessed with beauty.

Recently I bought a Fitbit. It kept telling me that I was falling asleep between eight and eleven in the morning. But I wasn’t asleep; I was writing. Apparently writing is the time when my heartbeat is truly at rest; when I feel right with myself.

Nietzsche wrote that the way to discover what you were put on earth for is to go back into your past, list the times you felt most fulfilled, and then see if you can draw a line through them. He writes, “Let the young soul survey its own life with a view to the following question: ‘What have you truly loved thus far? What has ever uplifted your soul, what has dominated and delighted it at the same time?’ Assemble these revered objects in a row before you and perhaps they will reveal a law by their nature and their order: the fundamental law of your very self.” In 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.

graduate school or what jobs to take. Good mentors teach you the tacit wisdom embedded in any craft. Any book or lecture can tell you how to do a thing. But in any craft, whether it is cooking or carpentry or science or leadership, there are certain forms of knowledge that can’t be put into rules or recipes—practical forms of knowledge that only mentors can teach.

When the expert is using her practical knowledge, she isn’t thinking more; she is thinking less. She has built up a repertoire of skills through habit and has thereby extended the number of tasks she can perform without conscious awareness. This sort of knowledge is built up through experience, and it is passed along through shared experience. It is passed along by a mentor who lets you come alongside and participate in a thousand situations. This kind of pedagogy is personal, friendly, shared, conversational—more caught than taught. A

This kind of habitual practice rewires who you are inside. “The great thing in all education,” William James wrote, “is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.”

Wordsworth writes in The Prelude, “What we have loved, others will love, and we will teach them how.” And that is something that most young people, and maybe all of us, want to be taught. What most people seek in life, especially when young, is not happiness but an intensity that reaches into the core. We want to be involved in some important pursuit that involves hardship and is worthy of that hardship. The 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 do is to teach us what excellence looks like, day by day. As Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “Moral education is impossible without the habitual vision of greatness.”

The way to acquire a good taste in anything, from pictures to architecture, from literature to character, from wine to cigars, is always the same—be familiar with the best specimens of each.”

One of the things good writing mentors do, for example, is to teach you not to be afraid to write badly. Get the first draft out even if it’s awful. Your ego is not at stake.

there is something in us that seems to require difficulty and the overcoming of difficulty, the presence of both light and darkness, danger and deliverance. “But what our human emotions seem to require,” he wrote, “is the sight of struggle going on. The moment the fruits are being merely eaten, things become ignoble. Sweat and effort, human nature strained to its uttermost and on the rack, yet getting through it alive, and then turning its back on its success to pursue another [challenge] more rare and arduous still—this is the sort of thing the presence of which inspires us.” At their highest, James argued, human beings are ideal-forming animals. And their lives go best when they are lived in service to an ideal.

The last thing a mentor does, of course, is send you out into the world and, in some sense, cut you off. My mentor early in my career was William F. Buckley, Jr. I worked for him at his magazine for eighteen months, and during this period he taught me what excellence looked like. Then he sent me off, and I never really was close to him again.

When making the big choices in life, as L. A. Paul puts it, “You shouldn’t fool yourself—you have no idea what you are getting into.” No wonder so many people have commitment phobia. No wonder some people are so paralyzed by the big choices that they just sort of sleepwalk through them. The paradox of life is that people seem to deliberate more carefully over the little choices than the big ones.

if you are trying to discern your vocation, the right question is not What am I good at? It’s the harder questions: What am I motivated to do? What activity do I love so much that I’m going to keep getting better at it for the next many decades? What do I desire so much that it captures me at the depth of my being? In choosing a vocation, it’s precisely wrong to say that talent should trump interest. Interest multiplies talent and is in most cases more important than talent. The crucial terrain to be explored in any vocation search is the terrain of your heart and soul, your long-term motivation. Knowledge is plentiful; motivation is scarce.

The Greeks had a concept, later seized by Goethe, called the daemonic. A daemon is a calling, an obsession, a source of lasting and sometimes manic energy. Daemons are mysterious clusters of energy deep in the unconscious that were charged by some mysterious event in childhood that we imperfectly comprehend—or by some experience of trauma, or by some great love or joy or longing that we spend the rest of our lives trying to recapture. The daemon identifies itself as an obsessive interest, a feeling of being at home at a certain sort of place, doing a certain activity—standing

When you see an individual at the peak of her powers, it’s because she has come into contact with her daemon, that wound, that yearning, that core irresolvable tension. This is especially obvious in writers and academics. There’s often some core issue that obsesses them and they scratch at it for their entire lives.