The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

This combination can lead, for example, to the first wall: the siege mentality. Many Christians notice that there are widening gaps between their values and secular values, especially on matters of sexuality. This can slip quickly into a sense of collective victimhood. The “culture” is out to get us. We have to withdraw into the purity of our enclave.

The second wall is the wall of bad listening. There are a certain number of religious people who come into each conversation armed with a set of off-the-shelf maxims and bumper-sticker sayings. Instead of actually listening to the questions from the people in front of them, they just unfurl the maxims regardless of circumstances.

Some people use the cover of faith to get in other people’s business when they have not been asked. They tell themselves they are just showing compassion and care.

The fourth wall is the wall of intellectual mediocrity. I teach at Yale. When Yale professors discuss one another’s manuscripts, they are brutal. But they are brutal in search of excellence. Sometimes Christians are not brutal to one another. They want to be nice; they want to be affirming, and that softens all discussion.

In Madame Bovary, Flaubert writes that “human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”

Over time prayer reorients the desires. The very act of talking to God inclines a person in a certain way; you want to have a conversation appropriate to Him; you want to bend your desires to please and glorify Him.

As Augustine put it, “Where there’s humility there is majesty; where there’s weakness, there’s might; where there is death, there’s life. If you want to get these things don’t disdain those.” T. S. Eliot once captured the ideal of religious life: “A condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything).”

You’ve probably heard the starfish story. There’s a boy on the beach who finds thousands of starfish washed ashore, dying. He picks one up and throws it back into the ocean. A passerby asks him why he bothered. All these thousands of other starfish are still going to die. “Well,” the boy responds, “I saved that one.”

“Don’t let your neighbor drift along in lanes of loneliness,” Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik writes. “Don’t permit him to become remote and alienated from you.”

She plants trees that will bear fruit she will never eat, and cast shade she will never enjoy.

Hermann Hesse wrote a short story called “Journey to the East,” in which a group of men take a long journey. They are accompanied by a servant named Leo who does the menial chores and lifts the group’s spirits with his singing. He takes care of the little things. The trip is going well until Leo disappears. Everything falls into disarray, and the trip is abandoned. Many years later, one of the men stumbles into the organization that had sponsored the journey and discovered that Leo is, in fact, the leader of this great organization and not some functionary. This story inspired the concept of servant leadership.

Why should the building of this one structure—with specific instructions about the length of the beams and all the different woods and ornaments—require such minute attention? It’s because the Israelites are not yet a people. They are an oppressed and disparate group of tribes and individuals. As Sacks puts it, “To turn a group of individuals into a covenantal nation, they must build something together.” A people is made by making, Sacks continues; a nation is built by building.

A flock of birds has the astonishing ability to travel together and shift course without the individual birds bumping into one another. They do it, scientists have learned, because each bird follows three simple rules: maintain minimum distance between you and the neighboring bird; fly at the same speed as your neighbor; always fly toward the center of the flock.

Jonathan Haidt of NYU advises that if you want to create a thick institution, you should call attention to the traits people have in common, not the ones that set them apart. Second, exploit synchrony. Have people sing or play or move together. Third, create healthy competition among teams, not individuals. People fight and sacrifice more for their buddies than for an abstraction, so embed people in team relationships.

“The secret of life,” the sculptor Henry Moore once said, “is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of every day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.”