54 pages • 1 hour read
David BrooksThe Second Mountain
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Brooks’s Personal Tribulations
Though direct references to his own life are only occasionally thematized in The Second Mountain (see Part 4), Brooks makes clear that his personal tribulations in the most recent decade of his life have led to a profound rewiring of his fundamental philosophical (and spiritual) perspective. It is this season of protracted existential crisis to which the ideas that produced The Second Mountain owe their fruition. Within the context of the second mountain analogy, we can safely refer to this period of Brooks’s life as “the valley” and a subsequent time of loss of ego in “the wilderness.” Brooks briefly discusses his divorce, his lack of meaningful friendships, and his developing sense of political alienation (Brooks is a conservative political pundit and writer; he has serious misgivings as to the direction of the Republican party). It is only from here that his personal ascent up the second mountain, and thus his desire to produce the book, can be fully understood.
In the introduction, Brooks writes of his dissatisfaction with The Road to Character, his 2015 book on forging the good life and becoming a morally praiseworthy person. He notes that since the publication of The Road to Character in 2015 he has undergone the most difficult and life-changing period of his life. Due to the personal transformation this period of his life required, Brooks believes he now sees life in a different way. “When I wrote The Road to Character,” he claims, “I was still enclosed in a prison of individualism” (xix). Indeed, when searching the table of contents of The Road to Character, one will find chapters titled “Self-conquest,” “Self-mastery,” and “Self-examination.” The individualized pursuit of self-determination is, from the second-mountain perspective, lacking and an obvious indication that the person in question is still tackling the first mountain. Where Brooks once held that the development of moral character was a personal, individual project, he now understands it as an interdependent process unfolding within a community. Brooks now finds the culture of “rampant individualism,” of which The Road to Character is an expression, a catastrophic problem.
In 2013, Brooks writes, his marriage, which had lasted 27 years, came to an end. He entered a period in which he felt “unplanted, lonely, humiliated, [and] scattered” (xxi). He realized that the life he had led up to that point left him isolated. Though he had been extremely successful in his career, he did not have strong friendships. A political advocate of a certain brand of conservatism, Brooks lost many connections during a period in which he felt the ethos of conservatism changing. Not only did he lose his wife and home, but he also became “intellectually and politically unattached” (xxi). In the next half-decade, Brooks underwent a profound spiritual awakening, remarried, and, among other things, dedicated himself to a new religious tradition. These serious, fundamental changes in his life, are (again, from the perspective of “the second mountain”) indications that Brooks realized the truth of his existential situation, i.e., that he is enmeshed in a social world and necessarily an interdependent player in that world. It is this existential realization following a difficult season of personal suffering that led Brooks to explicitly formulate, and consequently propagate, The Second Mountain. Readers of his more popular book The Road to Character should take special note of The Second Mountain’s fundamental difference in philosophical perspective.
Social Context: A Culture of Hyper-Individualism
Brooks, who has spent a lifetime in the public eye as a newspaper columnist, television pundit, and professor, is no stranger to sociological research and cultural criticism. Over the course of his career, he has written numerous essays and books on American culture. His experience and perspective are strongly informative of the cultural criticism that is equally at the heart of The Second Mountain as Brooks’s personal journey.
In Part 1 of The Second Mountain (discussed below), Brooks tells the story of the transformation of American culture in the 1960s, a legacy he believes Americans are still inheriting. Before the cultural overhauls in the mid-1960s, the country was defined by the culture of the “company man,” a culture in which individual expression and creativity were squashed by corporate expectations, etc. As a useful antidote to this, the cultural movement of the 1960s emphasized free individual expression, autonomous decision-making, and liberation from oppressive standards of civil conduct. The legacy of this “hyper-individualism,” which, Brooks argues, is expressed in different forms spanning various political ideologies, is extensive. Individualism now forms the basis of American values and has been taken to an extreme. In short, it has outlasted its welcome.
In various basic spheres of life, this individualist mentality has led to the corrosion of many traditional values and commitments. For instance, Brooks sees an “adventurer” mentality in many young persons, who are in a so-called “aesthetic phase” of life. In other words, they seek to collect exciting personal experiences to lead an adventuresome life. While this is not inherently wrong in his view, it is a poor substitute for a life of deep, long-term personal commitments.
Some of the personal commitments Brooks cares about most, like vocation and marriage, are threatened by hyper-individualist versions of these pursuits. In marriage, for example, divorce rates are skyrocketing as people see the value of their spouse in terms of the personal fulfillment this spouse provides them. Brooks, a proponent of “maximal marriage,” is diametrically opposed to this manner of thinking, which he believes is part of the problem with marriage in the 21st century. Similarly, careerist obsessions with advancing competitively in the workplace can undercut vocational callings to collaborate toward higher expressions of the good in question.
Additionally, Brooks is worried by what he sees as a crisis of loneliness, the exemplary expression of which comes in the form of deaths of despair. Brooks believes that rising rates of deaths by suicide, opioid overdoses, and mass shootings are symptomatic of a deep isolation inherent in the heart of American culture. Observing and worrying about these disturbing trends for decades, Brooks takes the general cultural climate of American society as indicative that a new cultural path forward is necessary for Americans.
This, expressed most precisely in his “Relationalist Manifesto” that concludes the book, is the second-mountain worldview. He reiterates that this should not be viewed as a return to the pre-1960s cultural world, which he finds problematic as well. That said, it does place more emphasis on collective goods and webs of interdependence. Part of this project, for Brooks, is based on the fact that American society is also deeply polarized on the political level. He hopes the relationalist view will show a moderate path forward that can unite across the aisle and undermine the divisiveness that can result from tribalism, which he sees as an unfortunate byproduct of individualism. The point is to bring people together at a level that heals and communicates underneath political and cultural divisions.
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