In ‘The Second Mountain,’ David Brooks Chronicles His Journey Toward Faith

Mark Epstein, The New York Times, May 1, 2019 In ‘The Second Mountain,’ David Brooks Chronicles His Journey Toward Faith; see also

Image from article: Credit Jesse Reed

THE SECOND MOUNTAIN
The Quest for a Moral Life
By David Brooks

The ego, a necessary construction, can also become a burden. In its unrelenting focus on power, achievement and sensual gratification, it breeds a culture, both inner and outer, of oppression, insecurity, addiction and loneliness. Enough is never enough. There is always someone richer, more accomplished and more successful than you are. Spiritual traditions across the world have offered counsel. The happiness that comes from accumulation is fleeting, they remind us. There is another kind of happiness, let’s call it joy, that comes from helping others.

David Brooks has a feel for the serenity such a passion can bring. He dubs it the second mountain. While self-satisfaction is the first mountain’s primary goal, gratitude, delight and kindness spring from a life devoted to service. “In the cherry blossom’s shade,” a Japanese haiku reminds us, “there’s no such thing as a stranger.” Surrender of self awakens love and connection.

Brooks is an unlikely avatar of interdependence. A prominent journalist and columnist at The New York Times, he is, by his own description, a workaholic and insecure overachiever. Part memoir and part manifesto, “The Second Mountain” is a chronicle of his gradual climb toward faith. In a sparkling and powerful introduction, Brooks equates the shortcomings of Western culture with his own failings as a husband. “My first mountain was an insanely lucky one,” he writes. “I achieved far more professional success than I ever expected to. But that climb turned me into a certain sort of person: aloof, invulnerable and uncommunicative, at least when it came to my private life. I sidestepped the responsibilities of relationship.” Brooks does not mince words here. The rampant individualism of our ego-obsessed culture is a prison, he declares, a catastrophe.

First mountain people are divided, alienated and insufficient. They suffer from “a rot” in their “moral and cultural foundations” that is mirrored by “the rot we see in our politics.” Second mountain people, having given themselves away, lead lives of deep commitment. For them, happiness is good but joy is better. “Happiness comes from accomplishments; joy comes from offering gifts. Happiness fades; we get used to the things that used to make us happy. Joy doesn’t fade. To live with joy is to live with wonder, gratitude and hope. People who are on the second mountain have been transformed. They are deeply committed. The outpouring of love has become a steady force.”

[ Read “The Moral Peril of Meritocracy,” an essay adapted from “The Second Mountain.” ]

This is beautiful stuff. In admitting to his failure as a husband, Brooks tantalizes with a promise to chronicle his own unsteady recovery. In this, he only partially delivers. As soon as he alludes to the problems in his marriage he offers a disclaimer. “My ex-wife and I have an agreement that we don’t talk about our marriage and divorce in public,” he writes. In what was initially a mea culpa, he offers the barest of apologies. “I prioritize time over people, productivity over relationship.”

But something severe must have happened to throw Brooks into the dark night of his soul. In 2013, his marriage of 27 years dissolved. He moved into an apartment. He missed his children, was lonely, ashamed and adrift. To set himself right, “having failed at commitment,” he decided to write about people who “do commitments well.” He does this with a feel for those who, rather than succumbing to their own personal traumas, turn toward helping others and, in so doing, renew the lost sense of community that afflicts an America whose churches, neighborhoods, mores and cultural institutions are all in decline. What follows reads, unfortunately, like one long commencement address.

Inspirational quotes from the likes of C.S. Lewis, Alain de Botton, Viktor Frankl, David Foster Wallace, Carl Jung, E.O. Wilson, William James and Abraham Lincoln recur while we hear about people who courageously send their children to public school and invite their neighbors over for dinner. Brooks believes in the ground-up remaking of community rather than in top-down government-inspired reform. He faults the culture’s freewheeling encouragement of rampant individualism for most of society’s ills and puts this blame squarely on “free-to-be-you-and-me” liberalism. His argument, inspiring in his introduction, quickly becomes repetitive and tendentious. He has a penchant for lists (the four commitments, the 10 personality traits of a suitable marriage partner, the six layers of desire), for italicized Greek and Hebrew words (chessed: Hebrew for loving kindness) and for the kinds of stories politicians often cite in proclaiming what they take to be the enduring goodness of their version of real Americans.

Through all of this we wonder, what about his own journey to faith? What really happened to get him there? Will his agreement with his ex-wife stop him from showing his face?

Finally, toward the end of the book, Brooks’s “aha!” moment is revealed. Hiking in Aspen in the throes of remorse over his failed marriage, he pauses to read a Puritan prayer. It speaks to him of the redemptive power of suffering, of grace and repentance, and he senses “the presence of the sacred in the realities of the everyday.” Something opens in him, such that he begins to notice a connection with his research assistant, a woman 23 years his junior. “Anne and I had worked together for three years, and I valued her work tremendously but barely noticed her as a person,” Brooks assures us. “I was an inept and absent colleague.” But after his epiphany, things begin to quicken between them. She resists and, for three years, moves away, but Brooks persists. In the spring of 2017 they are married. While his first wife had converted to Judaism and kept their home kosher, in this marriage Brooks hints of his own conversion to Christianity. He appears to still be wrestling with it. “Do I believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ?” he asks. “The simple, brutally honest answer is, ‘It comes and goes.’” This is the only time that this master of certainty expresses any doubt. His book would be immensely more powerful with more of it.

Nor is there any of the self-deprecating humor we might expect from someone who has climbed the second mountain. Brooks does remember a lunch with the Dalai Lama. “He didn’t say anything particularly illuminating or profound,” Brooks makes a point of telling us, “but every once in a while he just burst out laughing for no apparent reason.” Brooks was touched by the Dalai Lama’s infectious joy but does not return the favor. Despite lots of illuminating and profound quotes and stories, he never makes us smile. In trying to crack the hard shell of his ego, Brooks yearns to wake up his heart and soul. He looks to writing as his vehicle. He buys a Fitbit to keep an eye on himself. It keeps telling him he is sleeping between 8 and 11 in the morning when he is, in fact, writing this book. He takes this as a positive message, that he is relaxed and in the flow, but maybe the Fitbit was trying to tell him something. The Lord works in mysterious ways after all.

Mark Epstein is a psychiatrist in New York City. His latest book is “Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself.”

THE SECOND MOUNTAIN
The Quest for a Moral Life
By David Brooks
384 pp. Random House. $28.