The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

“Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about—quite apart from what I would like it to be about.”

I have a friend named Pete Wehner who is an amazing listener. I’ll describe some problem to him, and he’ll ask me some questions. There comes a moment in the conversation, after he’s asked four or five questions, when I expect him to start offering his opinions and recommendations. But then he surprises me and asks six or eight more questions, before eventually offering counsel or advice. Real listening, whether to others or yourself, involves that unexpected extra round of questions, stretching the asking beyond what feels natural.

Listening to life means asking, What have I done well? What have I done poorly? What do I do when I’m not being paid or rewarded? Were there times when I put on faces that other people wanted me to wear, or that I thought other people wanted me to wear?

As the psychologist James Hollis puts it, “Your ego prefers certainty to uncertainty, predictability over surprise, clarity over ambiguity.8 Your ego always wants to shroud over the barely audible murmurings of the heart.” The ego, says Lee Hardy, wants you to choose a job and a life that you can use as a magic wand to impress others.

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernières described this last best stop on the journey of heart. An old guy is talking to his daughter about his love for his late wife. He tells her, “Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.”

Now, I don’t ask you to believe in God or not believe in God. I’m a writer, not a missionary. That is not my department. But I do ask you to believe that you have a soul. There is some piece of your consciousness that has no shape, size, weight, or color. This is the piece of you that is of infinite value and dignity. The dignity of this piece doesn’t increase or decrease with age; it doesn’t get bigger or smaller depending on your size and strength. Rich and successful people don’t have more or less of it than poorer or less successful people.

John Steinbeck put it beautifully in East of Eden: Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last …. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?

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.”

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.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks clarifies the difference: “A contract is a transaction. A covenant is a relationship. Or to put it slightly differently: a contract is about interests. 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.”

In living out a commitment, each party understands the fickleness of feelings, so they bind their future selves to specific obligations. Spouses love each other, but they bind themselves down with a legal, public, and often religious marriage commitment, to limit their future choices for those times when they get on each other’s nerves.

Thus, the most complete definition of a commitment is this: falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters.

That’s the paradox of privilege. When we are well-off we chase the temporary pleasures that actually draw us apart. We use our wealth to buy big houses with big yards that separate us and make us lonely. But in crisis we are compelled to hold closely to one another in ways that actually meet our deepest needs.

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.

Cellphones are banned (“Be in the now,” Kathy says). About a third of the way through the meal, we go around the table and each person says something they are grateful for, something nobody knows about them, or some other piece of information about their life at that moment.

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.

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.

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 tend to be hedgehogs, not foxes. In the famous formulation, the fox knows many things and can see the world with an opposable mind, from many points of view. But the hedgehog knows one thing, has one big idea around which his or her life revolves. This is the mentality that committed community weavers tend to have.

Connection happens at the nexus of truth and love, the founders say. Truth without love is harshness. Love without truth is sentimentality. But if you can be completely honest with somebody in the context of loving support, then you have a trusting relationship. Norms are enforced as people hold one another accountable for violating them. Community is woven through love-drenched accountability.

In prayer, she wrote, it is No longer: I want this or that, but: Life is great and good and fascinating and eternal, and if you dwell so much on yourself and flounder and fluff about, you miss the mighty eternal current that is life.11 It is in these moments—and I am so grateful for them—that all personal ambition drops away from me, and that my thirst for knowledge and understanding comes to rest, and a small piece of eternity descends on me with a sweeping wingbeat.

That meant doing what she could to care for her own people, to help the teenage girls who were now being rounded up. She was determined not to hate her oppressors, not to relieve her fear through hatred. She lectured herself to never hate the wickedness of others but to first hate the evil within herself.

He writes, he says, for four basic reasons. First, sheer egoism. The desire to seem clever and to get talked about. Second, aesthetic enthusiasm. The pleasure he gets from playing with sentences and words. But Orwell is nothing if not honest. And he has to admit that there are higher motives as well. Third, then, is the “historic impulse,” the desire for understanding. The desire to see things as they are and find out true facts. Fourth, his political purpose. The desire to push the world in a certain direction, and to alter people’s ideas of what sort of society they should strive for.

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.

The second thing you notice about the Orwell story is that he had a presentiment of his vocation when he was young. But then he walked away from it. Maybe he forgot about it. Maybe he couldn’t figure out how to make a living. He had to go through a period of wandering before he settled back into the vocation that called him all along. This, too, is not uncommon. Often people feel a call but don’t really understand it, or they forget the call or just wander off.

My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows Were then made for me; bond unknown to me Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly, A dedicated Spirit. On I walked In thankful blessedness, which even yet remains.

Calvert readjusted his will so that Wordsworth would get £900 on the event of his death. Calvert serves as the patron saint of a rare sort of social type: the person who can see a gift in others, push that person toward their vocation, and provide practical assistance to make it happen.

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 it. Children put posters of their obsessions on the wall. They draw images of them in art class and on the covers of their notebooks. “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.

“Only those who realize the immense efforts and, above all, the devotion without which pioneering work in theoretical science cannot be achieved are able to grasp the strength of the emotion out of which alone such work, remote as it is from the immediate realities of life, can issue,” Einstein wrote.4 “The scientist’s religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law.”

In the fifty years since I read that opening scene of A Bear Called Paddington, there probably haven’t been two hundred days when I didn’t write something or at least prepare to write something. 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.

In his essay “Schopenhauer as Educator,” 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.

“Let the young soul survey its own life with a view to the following question: ‘What have you truly loved thus far?5 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.”

“Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him,” Walker Percy observes.

A pitcher who is thinking about how he is pitching cannot pitch well. His focus is on self, not the task. “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.”

Life is filled with vampire problems. Marriage turns you into a different person. Having kids changes who you are and what you want. So does emigrating to a new country, converting to a different religion, going to med school, joining the Marines, changing careers, and deciding on where to live. Every time you make a commitment to something big, you are making a transformational choice.

For example, when you are considering quitting your job, apply the 10-10-10 rule. How will this decision feel in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years? That will help you put the short-term emotional pain of any decision in the context of long-term consequences.

But 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.

Robert Greene gets at the core truth in his book Mastery: “Your emotional commitment to what you are doing will be translated directly into your work.4 If you go at your work with half a heart, it will show in the lackluster results and in the laggard way in which you reach the end.”

When a person or a community touches its peculiar daemon, when it confronts some unresolvable tension, the creativity can be amazing, like some kind of nuclear explosion. When a person or culture is outside its daemon, then everything becomes derivative and sentimental. A person or culture that has lost touch with its daemon has lost touch with life. Look at Florentine art just a century later.

When you are looking for a vocation, you are looking for a daemon. You are trying to enact the same fall that is the core theme of this book—to fall through the egocentric desires and plunge down into the substrate to where your desires are mysteriously formed.

Matthew Arnold, without the advantage of modern cognitive science, put it best: Below the surface-stream, shallow and light Of what we say we feel—below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel—there flows With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed.

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.

C. S. Lewis: 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.

There are some activities that cover over the heart and soul—the ones that are too analytic, economic, prudently professional, and comfortably bourgeois. There are some that awaken the heart and engage the soul—music, drama, art, friendship, being around children, being around beauty, and, paradoxically, being around injustice.

At that point a feeling of certainty clicks in. When that happens, you aren’t asking, “What should I do with my life?” Instead, one day you wake up and realize the question has gone away.

The best advice I’ve heard for people in search of a vocation is to say yes to everything. Say yes to every opportunity that comes along, because you never know what will lead to what. Have a bias toward action. Think of yourself as a fish that is hoping to get caught. Go out there among the fishhooks.

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What do I enjoy talking about? If it’s motorcycles, maybe your work is mechanics. When have I felt most needed? If it was protecting your country as a soldier, maybe your vocation is in law enforcement. What pains am I willing to tolerate? If you’re willing to tolerate the misery of rejection, you must have sufficient love of theater to go into acting. Or there’s Casey Gerald’s question: What would you do if you weren’t afraid? Fear is a pretty good GPS system; it tells you where you true desires are, even if they are on the far side of social disapproval.

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.”