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| The second mountain from the left...no, that one. |
David Brooks1 came to town last May to promote "The Second Mountain," his most recent book. I'd actually been to a book talk of his several years ago when "The Road to Character" came out and thought about picking up a signed copy, but the line was sufficiently long and the hour sufficiently late that I decided not to. This time it was a morning talk, so no such concerns!
Brooks can be quite funny. One of my favorite moments was when he told the story of being taken to Central Park when he was a child for a be-in (i.e. a time and place the hippies would go to "be"). Someone set a garbage can on fire and the crowd was throwing their wallets into it to demonstrate how little they cared about material things. The five-year-old Brooks saw a five dollar bill beginning to smolder so he broke through the crowd, reached in, grabbed it, and ran away – "and that was my first step toward conservatism."
How about the book?
The central premise of "The Second Mountain" is that people don't just discover the right path for themselves. Modern society says life is about forming an identity, making a mark, meritocracy, self-improvement, being successful. Through experience and disappointment and suffering many people find there's a hollowness to all of this. If they listen to and get to know their authentic selves they find that the things they truly want aren't the things others tell them to want.
According to Brooks, the first mountain is the attempt to build up oneself, to acquire, to set oneself above. The second mountain is about subsuming the self within some other cause or community. It's about giving oneself away. Brooks talks about what a second mountain life looks like when choosing a vocation, starting a family, coming to a philosophy or faith, and building a community, and concludes that a shared focus on second mountain values is the cure to many of our current culture's ills.
Here are a few passages that particularly struck me.
The person leading the aesthetic life is leading his life as if it were a piece of art, judging it by aesthetic criteria—is it interesting or dull, pretty or ugly, pleasurable or painful? ... 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. (17)Doesn't that sound like the typical life as portrayed on social media?
Tribalism seems like a way to restore the bonds of community. It certainly does bind together. But it is actually the dark twin of community. Community is connection based on mutual affection. Tribalism, in the sense I'm using here, is connection based on mutual hatred. ... 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. (35)That's a fantastic definition.
The paradox of life is that people seem to deliberate more carefully over the little choices than the big ones. Before buying a car, they read all the ratings, check out resale values on the Internet, and so on. But when it comes to choosing a vocation, they just sort of slide rather than decide. They slide incrementally into a career because someone gave them a job. They marry the person whom they happen to be living with. For many, the big choices in life often aren't really choices; they are quicksand. You just sink into the place you happen to be standing. (107)I've reflected before that knowing oneself is hard work. It's certainly much harder than reading reviews on the internet. The payoff is undoubtedly much bigger though.
Collective impact starts with a group of people who are driven, Kania and Kramer argue, by an urgency for change. ... They realize the complexity of their problem. They are not going to have a predetermined solution when they start. They're going to engage in a long, iterative process of action and response before they can figure out the right mix of programs. ... What they're investing in is a learning process. They're getting the whole community to look at a complex problem together from a lot of different vantage points and letting the solutions emerge from the ensuing conversations. The quality of their efforts is defined by the quality of their questions, such as, Why, despite our best efforts, have we been unable to make this situation better? (291)
I think we could make a lot of progress on a lot of problems if more people were less interested in learning to appear right and more interested in learning how to do the right thing.
Verdict: "The Second Mountain" was my favorite nonfiction book of 2019, beautifully illustrating the difference between a conventionally successful life and a personally significant one. Highly recommended.
This is an excellent review of the book, Paul. (As you know, I read it based on your earlier recommendation plus my having liked Brooks's previous book, "The Road to Character.") I would have liked "Second Mountain" better if someone like you had pared it down to a "Reader's Digest" condensation. You have a good start here with some of the best short passages. The first part I'd cut would be Brooks's long digression into his personal religious awakening (or re-awakening?), which has a suspicious connection to his growing infatuation with the younger woman who became his second wife and is therefore psychologically messy, as well as a jarring shift in style. He should have saved all that for a chapter in his memoir, if he ever writes one, so that this book could have remained as quirky, brilliant, and humorous-anecdotal as his other social-cultural analyses.
ReplyDeleteThanks! I think it's true what they say – that making cuts is the hardest part of writing.
DeleteMy take is that Brooks has spent decades thinking about society and just a few years discovering religion. Maybe by the time he gets around to writing his memoir his religious commentary will be on par with the rest.