(“Across the developing world, there are factory workers busy beating up the goods they have just made in order to please American consumers.”) But we’re in more personal territory now. “I was throwing myself needily upon my friends in ways that are embarrassing now if I stop to remember them, which I try not to… confronting the problems of a 22-year-old with the mind of a 52-year-old.”īrooks has always included himself among his targets, ever since the excellent Bobos in Paradise (2000), which took confident aim at “bourgeois bohemians”, with their overpriced kitchen appliances and “distressed” clothes and furniture. “I was unplanted, lonely, humiliated, scattered,” he writes. (There’s also an ambivalent religious conversion, from Jewish to Christian-ish.) To his credit, he’s as lacerating about himself as any gossip blog. ![]() The Second Mountain is a memoir, too, featuring passages that will provide red meat for Brooks’s media mockers, since they describe leaving his wife of 27 years for a much younger woman who’d worked as his researcher. Such “radical hospitality” doesn’t make for a life of freedom in the usual sense.īut it meets the theologian Tim Keller’s definition of a deeper kind of freedom: “Not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones.” Thus, for example, we meet a couple who began providing occasional meals to a classmate of their son, who might otherwise go to bed hungry, a gesture that snowballed, “simply by responding to the needs around them”, into a weekly dinner for 25 kids, a home for several, plus an annual seaside holiday for as many as 40. When his first child was born, a friend sent him an email – “welcome to the world of unavoidable reality” – and those he presents as paragons take that logic to its extreme. “The world tells them to want independence, but they want interdependence.” “The world tells them to be a good consumer, but they want to be the one consumed – by a moral cause,” Brooks writes. The book builds its case through stories of people who took the key step toward the second mountain, which is commitment – to a spouse, community, faith or philosophy. ![]() If slaveholding was a sin, it demands expiation to change its politics, a nation must attend to the stain on its soul. The modern world is collectively stranded on the first mountain, a culture of radical individualism dividing us into “insecure underachievers” and left-behind no-hopers, the former only slightly happier than the latter, with tribal politics offering one of the only ways to feel a sense of belonging.īrooks, a centrist conservative, surprised many recently by endorsing the case for slavery reparations, but seen through this moral lens, his position makes sense. His larger, and to some, vastly more irritating, argument is that this crisis of meaning is societal. (Gawker, the deceased gossip blog, once described him with characteristic scorn as “basically the nice old man with Alzheimer’s at church that everyone chooses to leave alone as long as he doesn’t hit anyone”.) Nor, for that matter, would it explain Brooks’s status as the favoured punchbag of a generation of younger American journalists, to whom the New York Times columnist and television pundit is an insufferable scold – “the biggest windbag in the western hemisphere”, in the words of Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi. ![]() In part, Brooks’s stirring new book is a map for this journey: a self-help guide to escaping the prison of self.īut this isn’t quite the heart of his outlook. The truly joyful people are those, often impelled by a shock such as divorce or bereavement, who find their second mountain, abandoning themselves to a greater cause, forgoing the life they’d wanted for whatever the world needs from them. In David Brooks’s governing metaphor, you’ve made it to the summit of life’s “first mountain”, only to discover that the view isn’t really so great and you feel empty inside.
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