#518： The Quest for a Moral Life
Episode Stats
Summary
David Brooks joins me by phone to discuss his new book, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life. We talk about what he got wrong in his previous book, "The Road to Character," and how the Second Mountain expands his vision of the good life.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Do you ever feel like you're spinning your existential wheels in life, that outwardly
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you seem to be doing okay, but inwardly you feel kind of empty? I guess they would say
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that you've got to move on from trekking up life's first mountain to begin a journey up
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its second. His name is David Brooks, and he's the author of The Second Mountain, The
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Quest for Immoral Life. In that book, David makes the case that there are two mountains
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that we climb in life. The first is about the self, getting a college degree, starting
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your career, buying a home, and making a mark on the world. But at some point, that mountain
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starts to feel unfulfilling. That's when we discover there's a second mountain to ascend,
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the path of selflessness, relationships, and greater meaning. Today on the show, David tells
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us what he got wrong in his previous book, The Road to Character, and how the second mountain
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expands his vision of the good life. We then discuss why the first mountain of life gets
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more attention in the West, and how the hyper-individualism it encourages has led to an increase in loneliness,
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anxiety, and existential angst. David then walks us through how we shift courses from the first
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mountain of achievement to the second mountain of meaning by making commitments to things
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outside of ourselves. We then discuss the four commitments he thinks bring us real meaning
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and significance, and how we can seek and find them. After the show's over, check out
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our show notes at aom.is slash second mountain. David joins me now by phone.
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All right, David Brooks, welcome back to the show.
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So last time we had you on was a few years ago to discuss your book, The Road to Character.
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You got a new book out, The Second Mountain, The Quest for a Moral Life. Is this book a continuation
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of your thoughts that you fleshed out in The Road to Character, or is it something different?
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It's a bit of a correcting what went wrong with that one, or what are the limitations of that one.
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And so both books are sort of about how do we become better people. And when I wrote that,
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I wrote it about some amazing people. We still have a lot to learn from people like Dwight
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Eisenhower and George Marshall and Samuel Johnson and Dorothy Day. And so I don't renounce that other
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book. But when I was thinking about how people built their character, I think I was still stuck in
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an individualistic mindset. And so to me, the way you build characters, you identify your core sin,
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like you might have anger if you're Dwight Eisenhower, and then you work on it every day.
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And so character building is about inner conflict. And I think there's some bit of character building
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is about that. It's like you go to the gym, you work up your honesty muscle, your courage muscle,
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you get stronger at those things. The problem is, I don't think most of us have the willpower to do
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that. And so the question is, how do we really develop the willpower to become better people?
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And I think we do that by falling in love with something. So for example, when my first kid was
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born, we didn't know he had really low APGAR score. We didn't know whether he'd live or die that first night.
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And I remember thinking, would it be worth it for his mom and I to have a lifetime of grief for him
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to live just 30 minutes? And if you'd asked me that before he was born, I would have said, no way,
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what, you know, why should two people suffer a lifetime of suffering for 30 minutes if a creature
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doesn't even know he exists? But after the kid was born, I became aware of a level of commitment and
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love that I didn't even imagine existed beforehand. And when you become aware of that level of
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commitment and love, you want to make promises to the kid, I'll always be there for him.
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And you start behaving a little less selfishly than you would have before. You might want to go
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and play golf, but instead you care for the kid, push him around in the baby carriage, and you start
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doing things for other people. And over time, I think you get a little less selfish. And so now I
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think character formation is really about keeping up with our commitments. We fall in love with
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something. We make a promise to it. And then we try to live up to the promises we make. So it's
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much more relationship-centered and less individualistic. And did you have any experiences
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or was this, you know, just talking with people after you wrote The Road to Character, where you
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kind of realized that character formation is about relationships and about commitments and not
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just sort of this sort of Nietzschean, you know, will-to-power, ubermensch mission?
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Yeah. I mean, you get some stuff in books, but you only get a little, like books name things that
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you experienced. Somebody once said, you can be knowledge, knowledgeable with other men's
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knowledge, but you can't be wise with other men's wisdom. And you sort of have to go through stuff.
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And I went through a period just at the time I was finishing Road to Character,
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but I didn't really put it in the book because I couldn't understand what was happening to me.
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I just went through a bad period of life. And we all go through periods in the valley and some are
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not our fault. Like a couple of years ago, my mother died and that was a bad period in the valley,
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but some kind of are my fault. And in 2013, I went through one that was at least partially my fault
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and my marriage had ended and my kids were going away to college. And I had lost a lot of the
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friends that I used to have in the, more in the conservative movement. And I realized I had
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weekday friends, like the kinds I could talk to about work, but I didn't have that many weekend
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friends. And I'd sort of gotten to a place where week, where work and all the amount of work I did
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had sort of numbed over both the heart, the desire for connection with another and the soul,
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the desire of connection to be good. And so there'd been sort of a moral numbing and a relational
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numbing. And so I was down in the valley for a year or two and learned a few things down there.
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So this idea of valley, this goes back to this metaphor that structures the book. You make the
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case that their life consists of two mountains. What's the first mountain like? And then let's talk
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about the second mountain after that. Yeah. The first mountain is the mountain society
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wants us to climb. You get out of school and you want to have a good career. You want people to
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think well of you and you want to carve out an identity and make a mark in the world. And this,
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this is what our meritocracy tells us to want to, you know, if I make enough money, if I have a good
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career, people will think well of me and I'll be happy. And I think that's a lie. I think there are
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certain lies embedded in our meritocracy. One is that career success leads to fulfillment. I can
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guarantee you that's not true for most people. The second is I can make myself happy. That
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happiness is an individual achievement. If I just lose a few more pounds, I get better at golf or
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something. But if you talk to people on their deathbed, they say, you know, I was happiest when
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I was least self-sufficient, when I was most dependent on others. And that's a living in
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relationship. And then there are a bunch of other lies that you're not a soul to be saved. You're a set of
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skills to be maximized. And the most pernicious lie of our culture is that people who have achieved
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a lot more and a little smarter are somehow worth more than other people. And so you, you fall for
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all these lies and, um, they sort of lead you in the wrong direction and they lead you thinking too
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much about the desires, the ego, which are pretty simple desires, but bad and not enough about the
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desires of the heart and the desires of the soul. So down in the valley, you sort of discover your
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better desires and try to align yourself with them. So this basically it's created,
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we have a culture of individualism. I mean, how did we, how did we get these assumptions in the
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West that individualism will bring happiness? What's the history of that? The social history of
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that? Yeah. Well, we've always been individualistic, like to talk, we'll talk about in the 1830s,
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but we've always had another ethos, which balanced that. And sometimes that ethos was religion,
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which was more about community and more about service to some good. Sometimes it was just like
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bohemianism that you served art. There were a lot of different things that balanced it.
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And in the 1950s, say we had a real belief in hanging together. We had to get through the war,
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we had to get through before that, the great depression. And so there was a culture of,
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we're all in this together. And if you grew up, say in Chicago, you didn't say I'm from Chicago.
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You said I'm from 59th and Pulaski because it was your little neighborhood that really defined your
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life. And that had some wonderful elements of really strong communities, but it became stifling
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to people. And people thought I'm just a soulless cog in this conformist society. And so they rebelled
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in the sixties and they said, I want to be free to be myself. And some of that started in the early
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sixties and some in the late sixties, the Woodstock, but it was symbolized by a moment very early in my
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childhood. The first football game I really paid attention to was Superbowl three.
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And on one side of the field was a guy named Johnny Unitas from the Baltimore Colts.
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And he was like a 1950s guy, very conformist, crew cuts, very unflashy. And on the other side
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of the field, there was a guy named Joe Namath for the New York Jets. And he was very flashy,
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long hair, $5,000 for coats. He wrote a memoir called, I can't wait until tomorrow because I get
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better looking every day. And that was the culture of let's rebel. Let's be expressive,
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not reticent. It's cooler to be young, not old. And so we created a much more individualistic
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culture. I'm free to be myself. And that had a right-wing version, which was the economic
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individualism of the 1980s. It had a left-wing version, which was the lifestyle individualism
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of the sixties and seventies. So, but it was all individualism. And when you have a culture really
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built on the self, self-satisfaction, self-sufficiency, self-happiness, you end up weakening
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the bonds between people. And that's more or less what we've done.
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And how is that manifesting itself in our culture today? What are you seeing? Like the downsides of
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Yeah. We don't just have as good connections as we do. And so if you ask people a generation ago,
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people entertained in their homes an average about 16 times a year. Now it's down to eight.
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Only 8% of Americans say they have important conversations with their neighbors. And if you
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ask people over 45, 35% of people over 45 say they're chronically lonely. If you look at the
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suicide rate, which is really a proxy for loneliness, it's up 30% in the last 20 years.
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If you look at the teenage suicide rate, it's up 70% in the last eight years. And if you ask people,
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do you trust your neighbors? A generation ago, 60% of Americans said that my neighbors are basically
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trustworthy. Now only 32% say that and 19% of millennials. So we've become a much lonelier culture.
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Much more distrustful culture. And a culture that's much nastier. We're nastier to each other.
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Right. You talk about the, also in the book, the rise of tribalism we're seeing in our political
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discourse. Yeah. Tribalism seems like community because it is a way of bonding with others.
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But to me, it's the dark side of community. It's not based on mutual affection for a town or
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something. It's based on mutual hatred of some other. And so it's a scarcity mentality. It's a
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zero sum mentality. It's always about fighting distrust and war. And that's pretty much defines
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our politics and a lot else. And do you think social media and the internet has amplified all
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these, these downsides? I do. I mean, I think when we're on social media, we're not really
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communicating out of our depths. We're either on Twitter, which is a lot of people saying I'm
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smarter than you are, or sometimes on Instagram, which is a lot of people saying I'm more fabulous
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than you are. And it's just a shallow form of communication. It's not a deep form of
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communication. And I think if you look at that teenage suicide rate increase, a lot of that
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has to be tied to the smartphone. It just correlates so perfectly with that. And not only just the
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actual technology, but the fact that it creates this mentality of I'm manipulating you to get
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a response. I'm competing to get a better response. And so it's just a shallow form of
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communication. I think the good news is we're trying to, I think we are figuring it out. Like
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we all know the upside of the social media and the technology. And I think people are now
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experimenting and trying to find ways where they can get rid of the downside by limiting the time
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they spend on their phones or limiting what they do on their phones or trying to turn the thing off
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one day a month. I have a friend who, he gets up and before he looks at any screen, he goes outside
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and just looks at the sky for a few minutes and has a few thoughts. It's just a way of getting
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things in the right order. But what's interesting, you, when I talk to people or whenever, you know,
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newspapers interview young people, you can tell there's like this desire for meaning and significance,
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but then you see how people look for that. It seems like they go about it at like trying to find
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meaning and significance using that first mountain response, right? They don't actually go to the
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second mountain. They think, well, I can just work really hard to find meaning. And that doesn't work.
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Right. Like it's a homework assignment. Yeah. No, because that's the language. If we're raised,
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you know, you started 15 or 16 and you get put in the college admissions process. And so you're
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raised in an ethos of, well, I have to earn it. It's all about, you know, work, doing my homework,
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working out. And then the thing that's, I think, most treacherous, or at least most treacherous for me
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is you get this productivity mindset. And so much of our day is taken up by email and stuff like
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that. So you're a little clock in your head says onto the next project, onto the next project.
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And so you never actually sit down and have time for real relationships, which do take
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incredible patience and time. And I found in my worst, I value productivity over people,
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which is an illusion. But I would say among my students, I teach college, you know, they say we're
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so hungry, like they're very open that we are so hungry for some sort of spiritual nourishment,
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but we're not sure we have the vocabulary. We're not sure we've been given the path.
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And I do think that's the fault of my generation. Frankly, we haven't passed along how to do the hard
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things like have a good character, have good relationships. And often on the most important
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subjects of life, we really don't know what to say.
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Well, you mentioned the valley that you went through to get on to the second mountain.
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Does everyone have to go through that valley, like a dark time in their life when they realize
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that they're, they were, they weren't on the necessarily on the wrong mountain, but it's like,
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Yeah. I don't think they have to. I know a lot of people, my wife included, who she started on her
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second mountain, like the second mountain, the first mountain is, is about building up your ego and
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acquiring things. The second mountain is about contributing things and giving things back.
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First mountain, you're just trying to earn a good reputation. The second mountain, you're just
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trying to pour forth and you get joy from the happiness you bring to others. And a lot of people
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are just good somehow, just all the way through there. They were born in an environment, in a family
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that emphasized the right values, that put relationship before self. And they're lucky ones to grow up in a,
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in a nurturing family, nurturing culture. But I will say, I don't know anybody in life who hasn't
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gone through hard times of one sort or another. And I was with a 94 year old guy not too long ago
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who said, you know, when I look back on my life, I realize I'm, my whole life is defined by how I
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reacted to my moments of adversity. And I do think that's true. And you ask people, you know, what made
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you, if I asked you what, what was the event that really made you who you are? Most people point to a
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moment of struggle and how they reacted to it. So I would point to my vow. I would point to two
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things and one is good and one is bad. Now that I think about it, I went to a great summer camp from
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age five to age 23 with the same group of people every summer for two months. And that was a great
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relationship because it surrounded me in, in friendships, friendships I still have today.
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And so that was, that was one thing that made me who I am and gave me a viewpoint. And then the
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second was this valley I went through in 2013. And that was a hard thing I had to get through.
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Yeah. And you give examples of different valleys people can go through. It could be a divorce. It
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could be a sickness, could be a job loss, but it could also be, you know, your first mountain life
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is great. Everything's on lockdown, but you just feel that existential angst or that soul sickness
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that you think there's something more and then it knocks you off. And then you, you find that second
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mountain. Yeah. There's a great concept that was popular in the middle ages, but we sort of don't talk
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about it today, even though it's very common called acedia. And that's the loss of desire.
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And some people like they were just climbing and they were hungry to get to the top.
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And then somehow they just can't care anymore. They just, the passion is gone. And then they're
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sleepwalking. I had a friend who was being interviewed for a job and he turned around at the end and asked
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the interviewer a question. And the question was, what would you do if you weren't afraid? And the woman
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burst out crying because if she wasn't afraid, she wouldn't be doing HR at that company,
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but she doesn't know what to do with her life. And so she's just trudging through a life she
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doesn't actually enjoy. That doesn't arouse her high desires. And I think there are people like
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that. And there are people who, who, you know, feel, I don't quite know what to do. I'm kind of
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stuck here. And that's a version of a valley and other valleys, you know, everything's going well,
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but you get hit by something that wasn't part of the original plan. You know, you get a cancer
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scare, you lose a loved one. And when you're in suffering over grief or something like that,
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the desires of the first mountain, the desires of the ego, they just don't seem that important
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anymore. And you have trouble mobilizing your whole life around. So you argue the second mountain is
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all about commitment. It's the committed life. And this goes contrary to what our individual culture
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tells us will bring us happiness. So how does, how does binding ourself through commitments give life
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meaning and bring us joy? It's really the two mountain metaphors really, uh, as really about
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two different value systems. And one value system is the individualistic one. And the second one
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is the one where you, we make promises to each other. And so in my view, we're not going to go back
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to the 1950s. You know, I defer to their organization. I defer to authority. We're not going back to that
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culture, but we could build a culture around commitment making that our life is really defined by
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the commitments we make. And so most of us make commitments to a several of four things or maybe
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all four things to a spouse and family, to a community, to a vocation and to a philosophy or
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faith. And my argument is that the fulfillment of our lives depends on how well we make and choose
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those commitments. So a lot of the book is just asking basic questions like, how do you choose a
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marriage partner? How do you figure out who to marry? And then once you've married them, how do you
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figure out how to behave? So you make the marriage a full marriage or how do you choose
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your vocation? How do you know what job is the right life fulfilling career for you? And not
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things like that. How do you, how do you come to faith? How do you find a philosophy? How do you
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serve your town? And so these are all very just practical questions of how you lead life. That's
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about really committed to really buried life where you've, you've, you've chained yourself down to
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something you really care about and you dedicate yourself to that thing year after year.
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And what's interesting is you highlight in the book, as you commit yourself to something
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bigger than yourself, you can actually, that's how you find yourself. I think oftentimes in
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America, we think, well, I'm going to go off into, I'm going to drive in a van, sleep in
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a van. I'm going to find myself that way. But really, no, it's, it's submitting yourself to
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something larger is how you can develop an identity.
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Yeah. And everybody says you should serve a cause larger than yourself, but cliche is always
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around, but nobody tells you exactly how, and you got to realize you have to chain yourself
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down. And so there are two, um, two definitions of freedom that are out in the world. One is
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freedom as absence of restraint. I can do whatever I want. And then freedom as freedom of capacity.
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To have the freedom to play piano, you have to chain yourself down and practice so you can really
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play. And a lot of your life is determined by what sort of definition of freedom you have
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unconsciously in your head. And so, you know, I'm, I'm a writer, so I pay attention to how other
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writers work. And one of the things they do is they tend to have very rigid routines. They get up
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at nine. I think it was Toni Morrison used to go to a hotel room. She kept in the hotel room. There
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were only four things. There was a typewriter, a Bible, a desk, and a bottle of brandy. And she just
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locked herself in the room and wrote all morning. And that commitment to writing seemed like a
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restraint. And it was a restraint, but it really set her free to, to do what she was meant to do.
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We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.
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And now back to the show. Well, let's talk about some of the commitments you talk about in the book.
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Uh, the first one's vocation. I think we've all heard that word before, but I think we often confuse
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our careers for vocation. Or in other words, we call our career, our vocation, but that's not,
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Yeah. A career is something you, you look at the skills you have and you look in the marketplace and
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you say, well, how can I get the most return on my skills? And so I'm good at math. Somebody needs
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to do accounting. So I'm going to become an accountant. And so that's a career and it doesn't
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really involve your heart and soul necessarily. It's how you trade your skills for money.
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But some people are called and in a vocation, you're not, it's not like a choice. You're called
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and you find something incredibly beautiful. I read about this guy, EO Wilson. When he was seven,
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he was out in the beach for the first time in his life. He got to see the ocean and he saw jellyfish
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and animals he'd never imagined. He saw stingrays and he was called by the beauty, like was entranced by
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the, what he found. And his whole life has been about becoming a naturalist. Read an interview
00:20:58.540
with a painter and she was asked, why'd you become a painter? And she said, I just love the smell of
00:21:02.980
paint. My daughter, when she was five, she went into an ice hockey rink. She just felt at home at a
00:21:08.320
rink and now she teaches hockey in California. It's more a sense that there's some beauty out there
00:21:13.680
that calls you to do what you were meant to do in your life. And it could be accounting. I mean,
00:21:18.160
it could be, I know a guy who just, he finds beauty in spreadsheets, just in the mathematical
00:21:24.620
elegance of the numbers being in the right place. But it's, it's not really a choice. It's more
00:21:30.060
submitting to something outside you that just seems entrancingly beautiful.
00:21:34.140
And your, your calling might not necessarily be the way you make your living. You might have a day
00:21:38.620
job, but then in the afternoon or the evening, you, you work on your calling.
00:21:42.280
Yeah. There's a great quote in the book that says, sometimes I've been paid for my work
00:21:46.840
and sometimes I haven't been paid for my work, but I'm always doing my work.
00:21:51.100
And I think that's a nice distinction. You know, I, I know some people who were,
00:21:55.360
they're just great at hospitality and sometimes they might do that as a job and say the hotel
00:22:00.260
business, but oftentimes they do it by organizing barbecues. And I have a friend who says that she's
00:22:06.160
aggressive. She's an aggressive friend. She's aggressively friendly. And that means she's in the
00:22:11.260
friend group. She's the one organizing everything. She's the one putting together the giving circle
00:22:15.480
or putting together the regular dinners that people have. And she just gets great pleasure
00:22:20.700
from cooking and hosting people. And you can do that as a career, or you can do that just for fun,
00:22:25.920
but it's still your vocation. And if you ask somebody like, who are you right down? Who are
00:22:30.960
you at, you know, if I, what's your identity? You know, I, part of my identity is being a writer and
00:22:36.480
sometimes I get paid for it. Sometimes I don't, but it's what I am.
00:22:40.180
Right. And I guess the way you figure this out is, you know, it, like you feel it, like,
00:22:44.000
you know, like EO Wilson, like you just feel entranced by the animals, like look for that thing.
00:22:48.420
And that's going to lead you to what your vocation possibly is.
00:22:52.340
Yeah. And Nietzsche said, write down the four most beautiful moments of your life and then see if you
00:22:58.100
can draw a thematic line through them. And that's how you discover that what he called the law of your
00:23:02.440
very nature. And so sometimes you get to the point of the double negative. It's like, I can't not do this.
00:23:08.860
This is why I'm a teacher. Like if you get called, you know, often we stumble into the things we do
00:23:14.420
because something happens to us. And sometimes it's a very bad thing. Like, you know, that we're in a
00:23:19.680
town and I know a woman, she was a healthcare executive in New Orleans and she got shot in the
00:23:25.780
face by two boys, 10 and 11 years old, who had to shoot somebody to be as part of their gang
00:23:31.740
initiation ritual. And she remembers she recovered and she remembers look at the look on their face just
00:23:38.020
before they shot her. And it was a look of pure terror. And she realized they were really terrified
00:23:44.180
too. They were put in a situation where to be in a gang and have friends, they had to go shoot some
00:23:49.320
random person. And she said, well, I was collateral damage, but they're the real victims. And so she
00:23:54.660
realized at that moment, her calling was to deal with boys and girls who were in gangs. And so she
00:23:59.680
quit her job as healthcare executive and now works with gang members and works for the city of New
00:24:03.860
Orleans. And sometimes you're just called by bad circumstances, but you get to the point where you
00:24:08.160
say, I can't not do this. So I'm going to do it. I think you talk about Viktor Frankl asking that
00:24:13.200
question, like, what's my responsibility here? Like, what is life asking you to do right now?
00:24:18.020
Yeah. And in commencement, we give a lot of garbage advice. And one of the pieces of garbage advice we
00:24:22.860
give is you should ask, what do I want from life? That's too vague a question. You never come up with an
00:24:28.860
answer. The better question, Frankl says, is what does life ask me of me? So what's the big problem
00:24:34.880
that my generation or I am called to deal with? And what problem am I uniquely suited to deal with?
00:24:43.020
And I gave a commencement this year and I said, listen, if you're graduating from college now,
00:24:47.600
the big problem your generation faces is the social fragmentation, the political division,
00:24:53.440
lack of connection. So some generations are called to fight wars or battle depressions,
00:25:01.620
but your generation is called to build really strong relationships with one another. That's
00:25:06.560
a pretty good calling. That's a pretty good responsibility to have. It's hard to do, but
00:25:11.720
it's better than some of the alternatives that earlier generations are called to have.
00:25:15.880
So the next commitment is marriage. And it's not just marriage. You say we need to commit
00:25:20.160
ourselves to maximum marriage. What do you mean by maximum marriage?
00:25:24.560
Yeah, there's a style of marriage that's prevalent today that sociologist Eli Frankl calls
00:25:30.060
it's sort of a minimal marriage, the self-expressive marriage. That's two people. We care for each
00:25:36.680
other and we both have our individual projects in life that we're going to do. And we're going to get
00:25:41.920
married and we're going to help each other on our individual projects from time to time. But our life
00:25:46.580
is still mostly about the individual projects. And I'm not sure marriage can survive that. I think
00:25:51.280
marriage is tough and you have to be all in. Tim Keller is a pastor in New York says,
00:25:57.100
when you're in marriage, you get into marriage and about two years in, you realize that the person
00:26:02.120
you married, who you thought was completely perfect and completely wonderful, is actually kind of
00:26:06.500
selfish. And as you're making this realization about her, she's making it about you. And so you have
00:26:12.540
a decision to make, you can either have a truce marriage, in which case you won't talk about each
00:26:16.780
other's flaws and you'll just have a kind of superficial marriage, or you can decide you're
00:26:22.840
going to deal with the flaws, but you're going to realize that, you know, she seems kind of selfish,
00:26:27.180
but actually my own selfishness is the core problem here. I'm going to be alert to my own selfishness.
00:26:32.820
It's my own selfishness is the only selfishness I can control. And Keller says, when you have two people
00:26:37.780
who see their own selfishness as the core problem in the marriage and who are working on it, then you
00:26:43.340
have the makings of a great marriage. But that requires you like to totally throw yourself into
00:26:47.840
it to defeat the ego, to serve the marriage. And that's a tough thing to do, but that is the
00:26:52.680
essential moral challenge of marriage. And do you have any, based on your research and your writing
00:26:57.420
and talking to people, any advice for people who aren't married, but want to get married to find that
00:27:02.200
kind of marriage partner who also wants a maximum marriage? Yeah. The first thing I always tell my
00:27:07.620
students is marriage is a 50 year conversation. So you have to be able to talk to the person
00:27:12.020
forever. And so you better have very pure communication. It should be the sort of person
00:27:17.260
that you just love talking to on the phone for hour upon hour. But then there's obviously been
00:27:23.080
a ton of research on how to make this decision and it falls into three buckets. The first is the
00:27:29.600
psychological bucket. What traits does the other person have? And the shorthand answer is go for
00:27:36.260
kindness and avoid neuroticism. And kindness doesn't seem particularly exciting. Sometimes
00:27:41.380
we're attracted to the bad boys or the bad girls, but it's really useful in a marriage. And neurotics,
00:27:47.180
people are making drama out of everything. The research suggests those people never change.
00:27:51.880
They never stop making drama. So kindness is really valuable. Then there's the passion lens,
00:27:58.820
which is what kind of love do you have for this person? And the Greeks used to say there are three
00:28:04.080
different kinds of loves. There's philia, which is friendship. There's eros, which is real passion,
00:28:10.660
lust, and that kind of thing. And then there's agape, the desire to give your selfless love away
00:28:15.300
to the person. If you just have philia and maybe some lust, then you have a relationship, but you
00:28:21.000
don't have a marriage. If you just have agape, you really want to give yourself to this person,
00:28:25.800
but you don't have lust, then you just have sort of admiration. It's best to have all three kinds
00:28:31.320
of loves. And then the final lens is the moral lens, which is, you know, love is going to come
00:28:37.140
and go, but admiration is pretty stable. And do you admire the person? Do they do things that you
00:28:43.320
find morally admirable? A marriage can survive a lot of things, but one thing it cannot survive
00:28:48.520
is disrespect and contempt. So pick someone you really admire. And then the one other good piece
00:28:53.880
of advice I was given was, you know, when we think about getting, marrying someone, we ask a lot of
00:28:59.780
questions about the other person. Are they the right person? We don't ask enough questions about
00:29:04.080
ourselves, which is really, am I ready for this? Am I ready to lead a very different kind of life?
00:29:10.560
Because until you get married, you can live with the illusion that you're easy to live with.
00:29:15.440
But when you get married, somebody is watching you and you become aware of exactly all the ways
00:29:19.860
you're crazy and selfish. And so you got to be willing to be changed.
00:29:24.100
And I imagine as if you've been married for a while, being, keeping that idea or being willing
00:29:30.860
to change, keeping that up will help strengthen your marriage as the years go on.
00:29:35.480
Yeah. Some of it is just like practical stuff. Like I pass a lot in the book. I take a lot of
00:29:40.180
the best bits of advice I've read from others and I just pass them along. And one of the things I read
00:29:45.060
was like, sometimes when you're in a relationship, they say never go to bed mad, but sometimes you're
00:29:50.560
just tired. So you just go to bed and that's, you know, go to bed tomorrow. You wake, make waffles
00:29:56.000
together. Things will seem better. Another bit of advice I got for women in marriage was if you feel
00:30:01.880
encouraged to bitch about him to somebody, bitch to his mom and not to yours because his mom will
00:30:08.320
forgive him, but yours never will. And so these are just like little practical things and commitments
00:30:13.240
are lived out every day. And so there's just got to be practically committed to not just, it's not just
00:30:19.020
theory. So the third commitment is to philosophy and faith. And you make the case that reading the
00:30:25.620
great books of Western civilization or just studying Western civilization can be a way to commit yourself
00:30:30.820
to the intellectual life. How so? And how can that, how can that transform you? Yeah. So I happened to
00:30:36.240
go to college where they taught the great books. It was the University of Chicago. And so we read like
00:30:41.000
Tolstoy and Aristotle and Plato. And the thing about the geniuses of those times is in some ways they
00:30:48.080
are very different, but in some ways they know us better than we know ourselves. And so they really
00:30:53.840
broke things down. How do you become a virtuous person? How do you do forgiveness? How do you
00:30:58.060
experience grace? Or even like George Eliot or Jane Austen, like, how do you think through the
00:31:02.820
marriage decision? George Eliot wrote a lot about that. And so they are very practical advice.
00:31:09.020
And then they also, they, they touch you on a level that's deeper than, you know, I read for the
00:31:13.800
newspaper book. Newspapers don't really touch you on the level of your soul or your heart.
00:31:18.080
But if you hear, you know, Mozart's, you know, if you hear Ode to Joy, if you see Shark Cathedral,
00:31:24.460
if you've read, you know, Tolstoy, you've been touched on a much deeper level. And I think one
00:31:30.440
of the things they do is they educate the emotions. And so we all have some crude emotions, but when
00:31:37.120
you've touched, been touched by art, your emotions get much more refined. Now, here's one trivial
00:31:42.560
example. I once saw Taylor Swift interviewed on 60 Minutes and the interviewer said, you know,
00:31:48.940
you write a lot of sad songs. And she said, well, actually there are about 17 different kinds of
00:31:54.300
sadness. And she said, there's your boyfriend rakes up with you sadness. And she played a little tune.
00:31:59.120
Your mom is mad at you sadness. She played another tune. You've lost your dog sadness. She played
00:32:03.420
another. And she is an expert on sadness. And if you go through life, you want to go through life
00:32:08.580
with a lot of different repertoire of emotions. So you can feel the right kind of sadness and a
00:32:12.920
different kind of sadness. And you can understand your own feelings a little better. And that's what
00:32:17.020
I think happens with the great books. And you can do this together with other people. I mean,
00:32:21.520
one of the most significant things, you know, meaningful things I've done in my life in the
00:32:25.580
past few years is we have a men's group here in town in Tulsa where we've been reading the great
00:32:29.980
books and, you know, started at the Iliad. We're at Shakespeare now. And it's been great meeting with
00:32:34.220
these guys once a month to discuss these ideas. Yeah. And one of the phrases I passed along is
00:32:40.040
there's no such thing as thinking for yourself. Like even the language we think in is a creation
00:32:45.520
of the group. And when you get together and just debate these issues, that to me is one of the
00:32:50.600
great pleasures of life. And just having just you're in the moment and you each are building on
00:32:56.040
each other's thoughts. That's one of the great gifts of friendship. And I'm in a group like that.
00:33:00.260
And we're sort of sensitive that nobody should talk too much. And a lot of the book is a lot
00:33:06.240
of my book is just things we discuss together as, as a group of guys reading a bunch of books that
00:33:12.080
have made us a little less shallow than we otherwise would be.
00:33:14.860
Let's talk about the commitment to faith and religion, because that's a hard sell
00:33:18.080
in a culture that's becoming increasingly secular. I think the number of people who describe themselves
00:33:22.740
as none when it comes to religious affiliations, the highest it's ever been.
00:33:26.580
And how are you defining spirituality in this book? Are you advocating for something like,
00:33:32.280
you know, that spiritual but not religious? Or are you talking about religion as well?
00:33:37.300
I'm leaning toward religion. I get being a nun since I spent most of my life as a nun,
00:33:41.440
not believing in God, even though I was around a lot of organized religions. But I guess,
00:33:47.520
at least for me over time, my categories, which were pretty atheistic, became inadequate to
00:33:53.620
reality as I experienced it. And so there were just moments of time that seemed mystical,
00:34:00.220
that seemed like there was a presence that couldn't be explained by just material causes.
00:34:06.640
And often that presence was in other people, like I'm a journalist, I cover other people's lives.
00:34:11.940
And I just couldn't care about the stories I write about if people were just sacks of genetic
00:34:17.260
material or being blown around by evolutionary forces. I see them as creatures with souls that
00:34:24.200
have something in them that is of infinite value and dignity, something in them that gives them
00:34:29.560
moral responsibility to either behave well or behave badly. And so I said, you know, the people I read
00:34:35.400
about have souls. And we all have souls. And you don't even have to believe in God to believe that
00:34:40.800
there's some invisible piece of yourself that has no size, weight, color, or weight,
00:34:45.560
but that gives you infinite value and dignity, that slavery is wrong because it cuts over another
00:34:51.100
person's soul, and that the soul yearns to lead a good life, which I think we all want to lead a
00:34:58.260
good life. We all want to lead a meaningful, purposeful life. And so once you get that sense
00:35:02.760
that other people have souls, and at every second of every day, their souls are either getting a
00:35:08.440
little more holy or a little more degraded, their souls are getting sick, their souls are yearning,
00:35:12.780
then it's a short step, or at least it was for me, to believe, well, maybe the material world is not
00:35:18.600
the only world, but there's something else as well. And so in the book, I just try to describe
00:35:27.340
And what does that commitment to faith look like, for you at least?
00:35:31.680
Well, partly it's faith is change, as one of the writers I quote says. It's not like,
00:35:37.400
you know, some people, when they talk about God, they say, you know, I prayed and God told me to
00:35:41.600
move to Arizona instead of Nevada. And I respect people who feel they have that contact with God.
00:35:48.280
I can't tell you I've ever felt it that specifically. To me, it's seeking the beauty
00:35:53.460
of certain things. Like, there are certain stories in the Bible that are just morally very beautiful.
00:36:00.320
And I'd like to have opinion my life more on the beauty that are in some of these stories,
00:36:05.820
rather than the ugliness that's in the world. And so I have a sense of what grace is. I just,
00:36:10.500
this joyous love that you can't earn. And I'd rather pin my life toward that than pin it toward,
00:36:17.180
you know, going to the casino and hitting the jackpot. And I don't know, it's an aesthetic
00:36:22.760
sense of what is truly morally beautiful. And I make a distinction in the book between happiness
00:36:27.600
and joy. And happiness happens when you get a promotion, your team wins the Super Bowl,
00:36:32.360
it's the expansion of self. Joy happens when the barrier between you and something you really care
00:36:39.120
about disappears. And so there's joy when you're with your kids and you're just playing. Sometimes
00:36:43.780
there's joy in work, where you totally lose yourself in your work and you experience flow.
00:36:49.260
Sometimes there's joy with someone you love, and you're just so delirious to be together.
00:36:55.420
Sometimes there's joy in nature. You feel part of the natural surroundings. You become one with
00:37:00.220
the forest as you're hiking through it. And one of the messages in the book is happiness is good,
00:37:05.700
but joy is better. And the ultimate joy is transcendent joy when you've surrendered yourself
00:37:11.480
to some pure good. And you're not even thinking about yourself anymore. You're doing something
00:37:16.100
just because you think it is morally beautiful.
00:37:18.780
Yeah. And I imagine the faith you're talking about too, the examples you gave, it was all about
00:37:24.500
leading back to other people, right? Even the faith you're talking about is not sort of this
00:37:29.480
personal salvation. It's a faith that leads me towards action that transcends myself and wants
00:37:37.400
me to love others and love my group, love my family, whatever that is.
00:37:41.980
Yeah. I had a camp counselor who then became a friend who was an Episcopal priest. And he was just
00:37:47.540
like a holy child almost. He lived till about 60 and he saw some really hard things. He worked in
00:37:54.680
Honduras among the poor. He worked with women who suffered domestic violence, but he spoke in this
00:38:00.040
enthusiastic, he would always interrupt his sentences, whistles and pops and laughs. And he
00:38:06.220
just didn't think about himself. He was just grateful for every person he met and he treated every person
00:38:11.520
he met as sort of a miracle. And so he really did live a life of selfless love. And I run to such
00:38:18.720
people who are just glow with joy, maybe once a month or so. I get to work, I've got this project
00:38:24.920
at the Aspen Institute and I get to work with Yo-Yo Ma, the cellist. And that guy is just happy all the
00:38:30.880
time. And he just delights in his work. He delights in the people he meets. He's filled with gratitude and
00:38:36.720
you know, he's got as much fame and money as he could ever handle. And so he's going around the world
00:38:41.980
playing in order to bring angry people together and out of anger. And it's, I'm sure it's hard to be
00:38:47.800
traveling around the world all that time, but he's serving a cause he really believes in and he's
00:38:52.760
just happy. He's just laughs a lot. It's amazing. All these individuals, they're there, you can tell
00:38:56.900
they're outside of their head. Like they're not neurotic. They're not constantly thinking about
00:39:00.320
themselves. And whenever you see that, you're like, I want, I want that too. I don't want, I'm tired of
00:39:05.660
like journaling about my, my terrible thoughts. I just don't want to even have to think about it
00:39:09.000
anymore. Yeah. I think, you know, one of the things I learned as I described this in the moments in the
00:39:13.760
Valley is people go out into the wilderness. And if you're the sort of person who's spent a lot of
00:39:20.220
life, you know, trying to be popular, wanting to be liked and performing for others out in the
00:39:24.520
wilderness, the rocks don't care. So there's nobody left to perform for. And then you, if you get
00:39:29.940
called to do a task, maybe you call to be a community worker in something, maybe you're called,
00:39:36.320
you love a certain company you're starting up and you think it'll really do some good in the world.
00:39:39.900
You're so busy caring about the commitment you've made. You yourself seem much less important.
00:39:45.680
And I've always thought that you can't replace a bad with a, but you can't replace one thing with
00:39:50.900
nothing. You have to replace it with a better thing. And so finding a better love, like something
00:39:55.480
you love more than you love yourself is just the way to do that. Let's talk about the last commitment,
00:40:00.280
which is to community. You mentioned earlier that you think that the rebuilding community is
00:40:06.440
probably the great challenge of my generation. What for you, what does an ideal community look
00:40:13.360
There was a book by a woman named Jane Jacobs, which was written somewhere around 1962 called
00:40:18.060
The Death and Life of Great American Cities. And she lived in Greenwich Village in New York in a
00:40:22.960
little, little community, a little neighborhood there, which was then a middle-class neighborhood.
00:40:26.260
Now it's really rich, but back then it was middle-class. And she was looking out her street,
00:40:31.440
at her street from her second story window. And she realized that her street was like a ballet.
00:40:36.440
That early in the day that people picking up the trash would come by, then the people would
00:40:41.680
taking their kids off to school would come by, then the shopkeepers would open their shops.
00:40:46.220
And it was like all this movement on the block. And there was always something happening,
00:40:50.900
teenagers hanging out, people heading off to the bars. And she said, all this movement is just
00:40:56.600
like a ballet. We're all sort of moving around each other and keeping an eye on each other.
00:41:00.320
And at one point she's looking out her window and she sees a guy tugging on a nine-year-old girl,
00:41:08.280
pulling her to where she doesn't. The girl clearly does not want to go.
00:41:12.300
And Jane Jacobs wonders, am I watching a kidnapping? And she's about to go down and intervene.
00:41:17.960
And then she says, oh, wait. And she sees that the fruit vendor has stepped out of his store. The
00:41:23.320
locksmith has come out of his store. Two other people have come out. And she says, the guy didn't
00:41:28.340
realize, but he was surrounded. And there were just eyes on the street. We're all watching each
00:41:32.660
other. We're all taking care of each other. And it turned out to be only a dad pulling on his nine-year-old
00:41:37.200
daughter to do something. But that's to me what a community is. It's like a ballet, a collection of
00:41:43.720
people who are moving together organically and dynamically, but keeping an eye on each other
00:41:48.280
and helping each other out when that has to happen. And I'm afraid what's happened in our societies,
00:41:53.640
we don't have a lot of those dense places where people live on a street and really can look at each
00:41:58.040
other. We're locked in the privacy of our own homes. And I don't know about your neighborhood,
00:42:02.420
but in my neighborhood, if you went on to somebody's home unannounced at 830 at night and knocked on the
00:42:07.900
door just to hang out, that would be considered an amazing violation of privacy. And so we've put
00:42:13.880
privacy above community and sometimes work above community. And so as a result, the social capital
00:42:19.440
is much lower. And what I admire are people who go out of their way to build community. And sometimes
00:42:26.340
they do it by organizing annual dinners or your book club or there are a zillion ways that you can
00:42:33.480
have a whiskey club and that's a fun way to have community. Community should be fun and not just
00:42:37.780
like a chore. Yeah, I definitely think it's going to be, it's a skill that has to be relearned because
00:42:42.060
I think a lot of particularly young people, they don't know how to do this stuff. Here's a pretty
00:42:45.780
great example. My mom, my parents still live still in the neighborhood that I grew up in when I was a
00:42:50.700
kid. And when I was a kid, there was a very active mother's association. So there was Christmas parties,
00:42:55.060
Easter parties, 4th of July parades, Halloween parties. And then after all the kids my age
00:43:01.100
graduated and left home, that stuff stopped and it wasn't there for 25 years. And so my mom,
00:43:09.240
so they're all grandmas now, my mom and all her friends in the neighborhood decided we got to get
00:43:13.340
this going again. So they started the mom's organization again. There's these grandmas and
00:43:18.620
they're teaching these young millennial moms how to organize an Easter party or an Easter parade.
00:43:24.120
And like, they're loving it. And these, these young moms are like, we don't know how to do this.
00:43:27.520
We're so grateful that you're showing us how to do this.
00:43:30.000
That is great. I've never heard of anything quite like that, but that is fantastic.
00:43:33.720
There are just tricks people can do to build community. I have a friend who was in college,
00:43:37.280
he's probably 34 now. And he said, I've got a really good group of friends here in college.
00:43:42.580
I'm terrified I'm going to lose them as we, you know, we drift apart in life.
00:43:45.660
And one of his professors said, well, start a giving circle. All of you put money into a pot
00:43:49.640
every year and every year get together for four days and decide where you're going to donate that
00:43:56.140
money. And the charity is sort of the pretext together to get together. But the reality is
00:44:00.760
they are now 13 years out of college and every year they get together and they're
00:44:05.780
walking through life together. And so you got to invent something. There's got to be some
00:44:09.520
technology of convening that will pull you into community. But it's just a question of finding
00:44:15.080
what your best technology is. Does a person need to like have all four commitments in their life to
00:44:20.060
have a meaningful life or is it, it can just have one or two or there's going to be, you know, one
00:44:25.040
in one part of your life and another part in your other life? Yeah. I mean, a lot of people never get
00:44:29.440
married and they live very fulfilled lives. So I would not say you have to have all four. And then
00:44:33.960
sometimes are in different phases. Some people really serve their communities. You know,
00:44:40.480
they work at the Y or do something later in life. And sometimes, especially if you have small kids,
00:44:46.260
that swallows up your life. So that's a commitment that swallows up a lot of time. But I do think
00:44:51.620
being committed to something all the way through and a commitment is to me, the best definition of a
00:44:56.920
commitment is falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for
00:45:01.300
those moments when love falters. Because we all, you know, we all have moments where we're feeling dry.
00:45:05.820
We don't want to go to church or we don't really care about the mentoring program we're in. But if
00:45:12.060
you build habits around that thing and you just go by the habits, it'll carry you through those
00:45:16.640
moments. So I always say Jews love their God, but they keep kosher just in case, just because the
00:45:22.520
structure of kosher law sort of pulls them through the moments when, you know, they don't feel the
00:45:27.720
presence of God and they're just going about their way. It's about instilling habits.
00:45:31.880
And you also talk about this in the book, create an environment where it makes those habits are
00:45:35.760
easier to follow through on. So have a community where you can, where you have that social pressure,
00:45:41.860
where it's just the normal thing to do. And you're going to do it because you're with those group of
00:45:47.380
Yeah. I mean, this is sort of the model of Al-Anon or anything else, or probably even your book club,
00:45:52.760
like, would you really read the book? But if you got to go talk about it with your friends,
00:45:56.440
well, I'll show up and read the book. And so with, and that's, I think people who are dealing
00:46:02.920
with addiction find the same thing that they're really doing it because they, they care about
00:46:07.780
those people. They don't want to let them down and they want to set a good model for the people
00:46:11.680
they're in group with. And we're just such contagious creatures that if six people around
00:46:17.580
you gain weight, the odds that you're going to gain weight are extremely high. If they start smoking,
00:46:22.060
you'll probably start smoking. If they stop drinking, you'll probably stop drinking. We're
00:46:25.980
very, we think we're not connected creatures, but we're extremely connected to each other.
00:46:30.200
Plato says we're mimetic animals, mimesis. We copy others. Right. Well, David, where can people
00:46:37.820
Well, they can go to the Amazon webpage to get the book. And then the community stuff,
00:46:42.120
I've got an organization at the Aspen Project called Weave, the Social Fabric Project,
00:46:46.460
and they can go to weareweavers.org. And that's there they can learn about some of the most
00:46:51.460
amazing people I've met over the last few years who really are building community on the ground
00:46:56.580
level and leading really lives that I would love to copy. Well, David Brooks, thanks so much for
00:47:01.380
your time. It's been a pleasure. Oh, thank you. My guest name is David Brooks. He's the author of
00:47:05.200
the book, The Second Mountain, The Quest for Immoral Life. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores
00:47:10.160
everywhere. Check out our show notes at aom.is slash second mountain, where you find links to
00:47:14.440
resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.
00:47:21.460
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website at
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