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.
Part 1, Chapters 5-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “The Two Mountains”
Chapter 5 Summary: “The Wilderness”
Chapter 5, “The Wilderness,” continues the metaphor developed through the first few chapters. After the “valley,” in which an individual suffers a prolonged period of deep and transformative suffering, comes a self-propelled journey into the wilderness. This is a wilderness that needs to be traversed before ascending the second mountain. Brooks believes that poets have perennially referred to a three-step process of moral growth toward the advent of wisdom: a period of suffering in which the ego-self is disrupted followed by an isolated period of deep self-reflection that then, finally, yields the insight of second-mountain communitarian zeal and love.
Brooks does not assume the period of self-reflection will spontaneously happen. An individual must actively go out into the wilderness. “The right thing to do when you are in moments of suffering,” Brooks writes, “is to stand erect in the suffering” (38). This resoluteness is the path forward. Brooks believes that the solitude imposed on the individual at this stage of their journey yields a different perspective on time, which he calls “kairos time” (40). This period is defined not by the active pursuit of a goal but rather by the resolve to listen to what life is asking of one and a growing appreciation for the fact of life. It is at this point that Brooks states what is, he claims, “the pivotal point, maybe of the whole book”:
On the surface of our lives most of us build this hard shell. It is built to cover fear and insecurity and win approval and success. When you get down to the core of yourself, you find a different, more primeval country, and in it a deep yearning to care and connect. You could call this deep core of yourself the pleroma, or substrate. It is where your heart and soul reside (42).
In short, this stage of growth peels away the facade of the ego-ideal and, for seemingly the first time, exposes a person’s heart and soul to their self.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Heart and Soul”
Chapter 6, “Heart and Soul,” serves to present a few fundamental axiomatic claims for Brooks’s projects. He believes that human values are guided by human emotions and that the ultimate desire of the human heart is deep intimate connections with other human beings. He calls this the “I-Thou” bond (45). He then asks his readers to accept the premise that there is a soul—some intangible, immaterial aspect to consciousness that is not reducible to anything else. Our souls require us to play parts in “moral dramas” and our awareness of these dramas can change with time. We may temporarily ignore the yearnings of our souls, which he compares to a stalking predatory cat, but we can never completely shake them. In the valley, a person is confronted with their soul and forced into a position of self-understanding. He ends the chapter by discussing Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the acclaimed Russian novelist. As a young man, Dostoyevsky was marched in front of a firing squad and granted clemency at the last second, staying his execution. Afterward, Dostoyevsky saw the value of life with totally new eyes.
Chapter 7 Summary: “The Committed Life”
“The Committed Life,” Chapter 7, is the first expression of the ascent up the second mountain. In short, this means practically dedicating “significant chunks” of one’s life to persons and projects that move one’s soul (53). Brooks particularly emphasizes marriage, vocation, community, and faith. Brooks contrasts the committed life to the “I’m Free to Be Myself” ethos, which further supports the theme of The Second Mountain Person: Relationality Over Autonomy. He defines a commitment as “a promise made from love” and proceeds to describe some of the benefits of choosing to embrace commitments (55). These include senses of identity and purpose as well as greater freedom and the possibility to develop a more moral character. “Steady dedication,” he writes, which is part and parcel of the committed life, will slowly (even unconsciously) transform a person. With time, the committed life brings a person into greater harmony with those around them. Brooks refers to commitments as “the school for moral formation” (59).
Chapter 8 Summary: “The Second Mountain”
Chapter 8 concludes Part 1 and shares a title with the book. Brooks discusses the lives of Kathy Fletcher and David Simpson, a couple who has decided to host large meals at their home for kids in need. Brooks regularly attends these meals and notices the communal spirit of love they entail. They built a nonprofit called All Our Kids, which Brooks finds exemplary of the second-mountain life. Brooks mentions his own program, Weave: The Social Fabric Project, which is designed to combat social isolation. He discusses the life “valleys” of some of the people he has met through Weave, describing the more shocking and disturbing cases. Confronted with these horrible life circumstances, some people became deeply motivated to overcome their obstacles. Brooks outlines six layers of motivational desires, hierarchically arranged. Higher-order desires include love for others and self-transcendence (67), which are both indicative of The Second-Mountain Person: Relationality Over Autonomy.
Chapters 5-8 Analysis
In the latter half of Part 1, Brooks turns his attention to the second mountain. It is important to keep in mind that the entirety of Part 1 is centered on a metaphorical narrative: the ascent up the first mountain, the descent into the valley, the isolation of the wilderness, and the resolve to climb the second mountain. Though Brooks allows for the possibility that some may climb the second mountain first, his narrative is not framed around this life path. The reasons for this are twofold, at the least. First, his personal life path began with the “first mountain,” and, for Brooks, the entire book is deeply personal. Second, given the cultural climate and typical Western norms, the trajectory Brooks emphasizes is, he claims, the norm and part of The Problems of American Culture.
It can be useful to understand the moving parts of the metaphor and the corresponding ethical/psychological development through their connections to one another. For instance, Brooks discusses how those who are lost in the wilderness can forge the resolve to reorient themselves in life to tackle the second mountain. Since the kind of self-generated willpower that energizes resolve is typically associated with first-mountain pursuit, one may infer that the virtues and character traits developed during the first-mountain phase of life can actually be implemented for use on the second mountain (at least to some degree). This means that the two mountains should not be seen as utterly disconnected. In the valley of suffering, a person learns of the serious insufficiencies of the character they developed to climb the first mountain, but this does not mean those character traits are useless or bad. They are simply insufficient for the heart and soul of life, according to Brooks.
Down in the valley, Brooks writes, people are confronted with the “primeval country” in their hearts, which exposes a fundamental longing to connect. Brooks universalizes that all humans are, at root, motivated by a heart that seeks connection and self-transcendence. This is perhaps part of why Brooks integrates the work of so many other authors, intellectuals, and religious figures from various traditions. The Second Mountain is not a memoir of his personal experiences, though they are not irrelevant. It is, instead, about a possible life trajectory, one that is in theory open to all people. The human existential position is not idiosyncratic but communicable to others.
Much of the second-mountain pursuit is about the choice to make and maintain lasting commitments. From this perspective, we can see the resolve forged in the wilderness and the willpower developed on the first mountain as proto-virtues that are useful for the strength needed to stay committed. The connection of these commitments is a central point of the relationalist view:
Character is not something you build sitting in a room thinking about the difference between right and wrong and about your own willpower. Character emerges from our commitments. If you want to inculcate character in someone else, teach them how to form commitments—temporary ones in childhood, provisional ones in youth, permanent ones in adulthood (59).
Commitments generate character, but they are not pursued to generate character, as a first-mountain person may think. Instead, they are forged out of passion for lasting connection. Brooks writes, “a commitment is a promise made from love” (55). Though Brooks does not explicitly state such, the two primary effects Brooks consistently emphasizes, love and joy, parallel two of his primary metaphysical realities, the heart and the soul. Brooks asks his readers to believe in the existence of a soul presumably because this belief serves as a kind of propositional, axiomatic base for practically engaging any of his other ideas or projects. This reveals just how metaphysically foundational the soul is for Brooks. He does not require that the reader believe in God. He does, though, claim that every human being has a soul and that this soul “is of infinite value and dignity” (46). The project of commitment, which is the foundation of the second-mountain endeavor writ large, is, in some implicit sense, deeply connected to this belief. Without a tacit belief in the soul, committed connections to others could be, philosophically speaking, incoherent.
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