ISBN:
0812993268
Title: The Second Mountain Pdf The Quest for a Moral Life
Author: David Brooks
Published Date: 2019
Page: 384
Praise for David Brooks’s The Road to Character “A hyper-readable, lucid, often richly detailed human story.”—The New York Times Book Review “This profound and eloquent book is written with moral urgency and philosophical elegance.”—Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree and The Noonday Demon “The voice of the book is calm, fair and humane. The highlight of the material is the quality of the author’s moral and spiritual judgments.”—The Washington Post “A powerful, haunting book that works its way beneath your skin.”—The Guardian (U.K.) The Social Animal “Provocative . . . seeks to do nothing less than revolutionize our notions about how we function and conduct our lives.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer “[A] fascinating study of the unconscious mind and its impact on our lives.”—The Economist “Compulsively readable . . . Brooks’s considerable achievement comes in his ability to elevate the unseen aspects of private experience into a vigorous and challenging conversation about what we all share.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Brooks surveys a stunning amount of research and cleverly connects it to everyday experience. . . . As in [Bobos in Paradise], he shows genius in sketching archetypes and coining phrases.”—The Wall Street Journal David Brooks is one of the nation’s leading writers and commentators. He is an op-ed columnist for The New York Times and appears regularly on PBS NewsHour and Meet the Press. He is the bestselling author of The Road to Character; The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement; Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There; and On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Everybody tells you to live for a cause larger than yourself, but how exactly do you do it? The author of The Road to Character explores what it takes to lead a meaningful life in a self-centered world.
Every so often, you meet people who radiate joy—who seem to know why they were put on this earth, who glow with a kind of inner light. Life, for these people, has often followed what we might think of as a two-mountain shape. They get out of school, they start a career, and they begin climbing the mountain they thought they were meant to climb. Their goals on this first mountain are the ones our culture endorses: to be a success, to make your mark, to experience personal happiness. But when they get to the top of that mountain, something happens. They look around and find the view . . . unsatisfying. They realize: This wasn’t my mountain after all. There’s another, bigger mountain out there that is actually my mountain.
And so they embark on a new journey. On the second mountain, life moves from self-centered to other-centered. They want the things that are truly worth wanting, not the things other people tell them to want. They embrace a life of interdependence, not independence. They surrender to a life of commitment.
In The Second Mountain, David Brooks explores the four commitments that define a life of meaning and purpose: to a spouse and family, to a vocation, to a philosophy or faith, and to a community. Our personal fulfillment depends on how well we choose and execute these commitments. Brooks looks at a range of people who have lived joyous, committed lives, and who have embraced the necessity and beauty of dependence. He gathers their wisdom on how to choose a partner, how to pick a vocation, how to live out a philosophy, and how we can begin to integrate our commitments into one overriding purpose.
In short, this book is meant to help us all lead more meaningful lives. But it’s also a provocative social commentary. We live in a society, Brooks argues, that celebrates freedom, that tells us to be true to ourselves, at the expense of surrendering to a cause, rooting ourselves in a neighborhood, binding ourselves to others by social solidarity and love. We have taken individualism to the extreme—and in the process we have torn the social fabric in a thousand different ways. The path to repair is through making deeper commitments. In The Second Mountain, Brooks shows what can happen when we put commitment-making at the center of our lives.
A Little Late to Preach About Moral Joy. Unctuous self-justification from the too lately enlightened Right Wing. Although the book has some nice observations and many nuggets of truth, it manages to construe selflessness as another achievement of the ego. America could use a whole lot less selfishness, I agree, but a lecture on the joy of giving from one who was the emissary of the acquisitive doctrine of benign Capitalism, well, it's difficult to stomach. A come-to-Jesus volume, but Jesus left the building long ago.Another thread of "The Privatization of Hope" There's a good deal to like about Brooks' newest run at "character." Unfortunately, my quibble isn't with what Brooks says; it's with what he doesn't say. Once again, FTM: Follow The Money.There's a huge, concerted, well-funded effort in this country to promote the very elements that Brooks belatedly laments. The corporate, right-wing, "conservative" view is to bash anything and everything about government programs, social organizations, community organizations, unions, religious efforts at social justice (well, except the fundamentalist "prosperity Gospel" idea that society does best when you get rich, of course), and every other collective effort to support the broader society. Unfortunately, Brooks (willfully, I believe) ignores this pernicious activity. That message is, "Have a problem? Don't look to government. Have issues in your life? It's your problem; don't look any farther than your own nose because it's your fault. Concerned about society as a whole? There's no solution outside of the individual--don't look to an organization to help you do anything about it."People lamenting the cult of individualism need to look to the sources of--and the huge amounts of money and power behind--the messaging of individualism, and the denigration of social and community institutions that have been the bedrock of American democracy.For a great article on this intentional social destruction, go to bostonreview dot net and search on The Privatization of Hope by Ronald Aronson. He writes..."What a spectacle is offered by the privatization of hope: the displacement from the social to the individual, the growth of the personal at the expense of the social, and the remaking of the social into the biographical. These are driven, among other things, by relations of power and domination and by the overwhelming force exerted on every aspect of our beings by the economy and its priorities. Under these conditions, basic social impulses such as the need to contribute to a wider community become other than themselves without completely losing their original character, which abides in a repressed form. We can imagine a rebalancing of the social and the personal as a kind of “return of the repressed” but only through a transformation of the economic order that has been driving it."That order has imposed a deliberate ideological and political project aiming to erode social connectedness and conviction. The first politician who sought to implement this revived Hobbesianism was British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: “There is no such thing as society, only individuals and families,” she famously declared, which turned out to prophesy this transformation. Economics was a method whose “object is to change the soul.” A generation later in the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere, that object appears to have been realized."We have witnessed an immensely effective, well organized, and lavishly funded effort to reshape values, ideas, and attitudes. Writers working for right-wing think tanks such as the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation have implored us to turn away from treating the public realm as a terrain for improvement and change. They have been teaching cynicism about collective action and encouraging instead individual responsibility, personal initiative, and the centrality of private activities."I wish Brooks would accept responsibility for his "conservative" bretheren's contributions to--and support of--this mess instead of blaming the victims once again.
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