The United States, he writes, suffers from four “interrelated social crises”: loneliness, distrust, crises of meaning, and tribalism. “It has left people naked and alone.” He wants to replace it with a new one built on relationships (“the central journey of modern life is moving self to service”) and writes that he is calling us to “a better way to live.” The wry, observational tone that has been Brooks’s hallmark for decades is entirely gone. “There are four kinds of unkindness that drive couples apart.” Brooks, searching for a source of authority, mostly conjures a fog, thick enough that the durably geological image of the title sometimes disappears entirely. He describes a childhood in which a secular Jewish home life intersected with an Episcopal school and summer camp (“I grew up either the most Christiany Jew on the earth or the most Jewy Christian, a plight made survivable by the fact that I was certain God did not exist”), and, although he acknowledges that religious conviction seizes some converts suddenly and powerfully, his own experiences “have all been more prosaic and less convincing.” He relates the moment in Penn Station when he suddenly saw all the commuters as souls, and the one in Aspen, when he felt a sensation “like the sound of a really nice car door gently closing.” It’s “fair to ask, Did I convert?” Brooks writes. He recounts the story of his friend Fred Swaniker, born in Ghana, who leaves a job at McKinsey in order to build a pan-African network of universities. You can trace what Brooks described as the Bobo ethos through early to mid-Silicon Valley era and the rise of Barack Obama. In his introduction, Brooks quotes a Christian academic named Belden Lane, who wrote in a spiritual memoir, “Nothing so specific, it turns out. 20 September 2016. Brooks has chosen a dauntingly broad topic—more or less, what it might mean to live a conscious and virtuous life. Are they self-centered, too, and do they need to shed their “ego ideal,” or have they progressed to their second mountain, or is this story just about David and Kathy?
That experience matters is a universal vanity—that we get better at living as we go, that the second mountain (the second marriage) is richer and more rewarding than the first. YouTube.
The more Brooks works to describe the joy of second-mountain people, the more frankly sexual it sounds. Often, on Thursdays, Brooks visits the home of friends named Kathy Fletcher and David Simpson, who host dinners that include both their peers from “the emotionally avoidant world of Washington, D.C.,” and young people from more marginal places, many of them not white. “My conservatism was no longer the prevailing conservatism, so I found myself intellectually and politically unattached, too,” he writes.
“It’s gotten so I can recognize first- and second-mountain people,” he writes confidently. The second mountain is normally reached only after a period of suffering (“the valley”), and those who make it there come to focus on others. In the Bush years, Brooks sought to explain the conservative mood building in America’s outer suburbs by introducing the agreeable composite character of Patio Man, who wanted a society from the mid-twentieth century and grilling technologies from the twenty-second.
Named for philosopher Brooks met his first wife, Jane Hughes, while they were students at the University of Chicago. Not exactly. “A young man announces he’s bisexual, and another admits he is depressed.” The dinners at Kathy and David’s house, Brooks writes, “are what the second mountain looks like,” and yet the bisexual man and the depressed one are not named or described.
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