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 4, Chapters 19-22Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4: “Philosophy and Faith”
Chapter 19 Summary: “Intellectual Commitments”
Chapter 19, “Intellectual Commitments,” begins with Brooks’s description of his own, democratic socialist commitments as a young person. “I was committed to this kind of life: passionate intellectual engagement for the sake of justice and world historical change” (190). He describes his slow intellectual transformation after confrontations with Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, losing a debate with Milton Friedman, and getting employment with arch-conservative William F. Buckley. He comes to describe himself as a Burkean conservative. He then criticizes the modern “research” ideal of the university in favor of a humanistic approach and defends the value of “great books” and “Western Civ” (195). Brooks provides a set of intellectual virtues, each with its own short explanation. Intellectual life provides entry into multigenerational conversations, “a range of history’s moral ecologies,” perspectival understanding, intellectual courage, “emotional knowledge,” and ever-new objects of love and admiration (196-98). Brooks describes his indebtedness to professors at the University of Chicago who exposed him to masterpieces of history and created “an erotic atmosphere around them” (198). He ends by noting that “the educated life is a journey toward higher and higher love” (201).
Chapter 20 Summary: “Religious Commitments”
Chapter 20, “Religious Commitments,” is the first of three chapters on religion and Brooks’s spiritual journeys. He opens with a discussion of metaphysical significance in Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow. He then discusses the role of mystical experience and notes with surprise that many historical figures have had such experiences while in prison. Quoting Vaclav Havel, Brooks ties mystical experience to “a profound amazement at the sovereignty of Being” (205). He again makes use of Viktor Frankl. Frankl’s attempts to find meaning while suffering tremendously in a concentration camp focus on the “pouring forth” of “salvific” love. Synthesizing what he’s learned from various writers’ expressions of mystical experience, Brooks believes that the universe is alive and connected (210).
Chapter 21 Summary: “A Most Unexpected Turn of Events”
Chapter 21, “A Most Unexpected Turn of Events,” is the longest and most personal chapter of the book by a wide margin. Brooks discusses his long and winding path to Christianity. He outlines his Jewish upbringing, the essence of biblical narratives like the Exodus story, and his pride in Jewish achievements. The ethos of his “fantastically happy” childhood was the “semi-secular world of Jewish New York” (216, 219). He discusses the differences between the Christian ethos and the Jewish ethos, indicating that Christianity was never far from him. Brooks appreciates both the Christian and the Jewish perspective, especially as they express different orientations to goodness: Jewish loving-kindness and Christian “erasure of self in the gift of love” (222). Despite being a “border stalker” who appreciated both ways of life, Brooks writes that for much of his life he was “certain God did not exist, so the whole matter was of only theoretical importance” (224-25). Despite this, over time Brooks found that this disbelief began to wane, especially when he experienced “moments of spiritual transcendence […] as mesmerizing beauty” (228).
In 2013 Brooks got divorced, and things began to change more rapidly for him. He describes a mystical experience he had on the New York subway when everyone was illuminated before him as a living soul. Brooks expresses his growing sentiment that there is a force beyond material reality, that it cares about the world, and that its presence can be felt and known (233). He believes the proper, natural response to this is wonder and amazement. He then starts discussing a close working relationship with his research assistant Anne. She challenged many of his ideas and helped him progress along his spiritual journey. Along Brooks’s spiritual journey, he discovered that he was a proud man, and this was hurting him. Christianity helped him understand that. During this period Brooks fell in love with Anne and told her about this. She decided to quit working with him and moved away. Brooks notes that, as is the case with other commitments, his religious commitment to Christianity, to which he converted during this period of turmoil, came to him as a summons (244). He discusses Kierkegaard’s idea of the leap of faith and making choices in the face of uncertainty. He discusses other important religious figures, like Mother Teresa who continued to surrender herself to spiritual matters even when, for decades, she could no longer feel the presence of God. Brooks summarizes the thinking behind his ultimate decision to become a Christian:
At some point I began to realize I’ve inherited a narrative, and I don’t want to live a life that isn’t oriented toward that sublime beauty. I can’t control when I believe or when I don’t believe. I can only be faithful to the living stories and to persist in the bet that the sublime is real (251).
Chapter 22 Summary: “Ramps and Walls”
In Chapter 22, “Ramps and Walls,” Brooks completes his discussion of religious commitments. He describes the selfishness standard in normal human psychology and critiques over-dedication to one’s own will. Instead, he argues, one should put their own will in a participatory relationship with the will of God. Brooks believes there are “walls” to entering Christendom that he finds troubling. The walls are the product of human beings. These include a “siege mentality” among some Christians who perceive themselves as victims of a culture war, bad listening skills, the “invasive” sense of care, and “intellectual mediocrity” (256-57). That said, he also believes there are several useful “ramps” that help give one access to the Christian life. These include rituals, “unabashed faith,” prayer, spiritual consciousness, moral language (particularly about good and evil), and the fact of endless spiritual shock (257-59). Brooks ends the chapter, and thus Part 4 of the book, by writing about his reconnection with Anne. After moving away for a few years, Anne came back into his life, and they got married.
Part 4, Chapters 19-22 Analysis
As with previous sections, there is something akin to linear progression within the account of intellectual and religious commitment. Brooks’s insistence on the spiritual insights that lead to a transformation of faith reveals it to be a higher calling closer to the ground of reality than the adamant promotion of ideas in the intellectual realm. That said, he is far from disparaging intellectual life and sees great value in it if undertaken properly.
Part of Brooks’s discussion in the chapter on intellectual commitment suggests that he thinks it’s not undertaken properly, especially as we advance further into the first-mountain ethos in American culture. With Kronman, Brooks discusses the difference between humanistic and research ideals at the university. He notes the emphasis the research ideal places on critical thinking but the neglect of emotional and moral emphasis on appreciation. The proper intellectual ideal understands that there is a zealous dedication to ideas, which sounds proto-religious. Note how Brooks describes the responses of two important mentors and the question he posed them:
When they were old and near death, I asked both Friedman and Buckley if they felt content. They had each changed history in ways more profound than they could have expected when they set out. Did they feel they could rest now and be at peace? Neither man even understood what I was talking about. There was so much for them left to do. Until the day they died, they pushed ideas, lived for ideas, and tried to bend the world a little in the direction of their ideas (192).
For Brooks, this is exactly how intellectual commitments express themselves: a second-mountain commitment in which one surrenders themselves to an infinite task. This is not only a commitment but also, as a call back to the chapter on mastery described in the section on vocation, an expression of depth of understanding: “As artists get better at their craft, their vision of what they are capable of dashes out even further ahead” (201). All second-mountain pursuits seem to have a similar feature. They describe an infinite task one is never finished unpacking.
Mystical experience also plays a fundamental role in the development of Part 4. “The Sovereignty of Being” is a phrase Brooks adopts to express something like the living essence of the fundamental substrate underlying material reality. He notes Frankl’s encounter with the woman who spoke to trees in the concentration camp: “That transcendent connection with eternal life,” Frankl wrote, “explained the young woman’s tranquility and good cheer in the face of death” (208). For Brooks, the upshot of so many experiences like this is the sense of connection it brings to life post-experience. In other words, experiences of transcendent realities bind us to the transcendent, and this ought to be expressed in a variety of commitments, projects, and loves. For Frankl in the concentration camp, this attitude helped him overcome the dread and horror of his daily life.
Note, again, the temporal dimensions of Brooks’s virtue ethics. There is a wisdom in the perspectival change that should come with age,” he writes, “We get smaller and our dependencies get bigger. We become less fascinating to ourselves, less inclined to think of ourselves as the author of all that we are” (212). Relatedly, he writes, “Through Jesus, Christians believe, the world of eternity stepped into time” (234). This expresses precisely how Brooks views the second-mountain life. Eternal goals, projects, and tasks are endlessly present in lived experience for such a person.
The criticism of the will in “Ramps and Walls” gets to the heart of the matter. The most fundamental difference between the first and second-mountain person is that the former worships at the altar of their own will, an entity Brooks describes as “voracious” and “narcissistic” (254). By contrast, the second-mountain person places their will in a participatory relationship with the will of God, acting on behalf of and in response to that higher calling. It is telling that Brooks uncovers these doctrines within a discussion of this particular kind of commitment, i.e., faith. Religious commitments are aimed at a relationship with the most fundamental transcendent reality conceptually possible: God. God, as the “ground of being,” as Brooks writes, quoting Paul Tillich approvingly, is the central force. The most fundamental detachment and alienation in life, then, is separation from this ultimate source of love and truth. Note that Christianity reverses the moral order from a first to a second-mountain perspective. Those who are strong, powerful, and self-willed are further from God than the meek, humble, and downcast (241).
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