The Second Mountain

There are parts of this book that are quite compelling - the memoir tinged section on faith, for example (I thought that was very well done). Or, the knowing description of the gap between what college students want upon graduation and what their commencement speeches (and the adults of their time) hand them.

There are parts of this book that are well ordered and clear - the final summary chapter and most of the section on community, for example.

There are other parts that feel insincere or somehow lack passion.

Unfortunately, at least for me, it all seemed to not really connect. The flow or glue did not gel in my head. Instead, I have several separate pieces.

I was somewhat reluctant to pick The Second Mountain up. I watched several interviews with him and many those interviews were interesting, but they seemed like they were talking about a couple different books, they range from personal self help book, to ‘an extended graduation speech', to a version of Richard Rohr's Falling Upward. Having finished the book, I understand all of those descriptions, but none of them were quite right. And while I am glad I read the book, I do think that is part of the problem of the book.

I was also reluctant because while I generally liked his last book Road to Charater, I thought there were significant weaknesses with the book and I did not want to relive a ‘do better' encouragement book. Once I decided to pick up The Second Mountain, I was pleased that he offered an apology for the weaknesses of the The Road to Character that roughly addressed my issues.

There are many great quotes in The Second Mountain. They are often even better in full context than as stand alone quotes. Like, “Happiness can be tasted alone, but permanent joy requires an enmeshed and embedded life.” He riffs off of CS Lewis' and others distinction between happiness and joy. The whole book is really about pursuing joy and the other deeper things in life and not just happiness and the other fleeting things in life. It is not that the fleeting things are unimportant, but that they are not fulfilling.

The book is really in two parts. The first part is making his argument for this concept of the Second Mountain. The first mountain is success in life while the second mountain is the pursuit of meaning. If you have read Richard Rohr's Falling Upward it is a similar, but not exactly similar point.

The second part is the four commitments that lead to the Second Mountain, but also are those things that fight against the hyper-individualism that is really the underlying theme of the book. The four commitments are to Vocation, Marriage, Faith (or philosophy) and Community.

Throughout the book Brooks uses his own story as an example, certainly not the only example, but an example both of why pursuit of the second mountain is needed, but also of how he has done it. This isn't a memoir, and it isn't intended to be a memoir. But I think many of the problems of the book I think are that is isn't a memoir.

The section on the commitment to faith is an explicit testimony of his conversion to Christianity. This is a book written for a secular audience primarily. And I think he hits on this section exactly right. It is his story of coming to Christianity, not an apologetic argument (really an argument against the way that apologetics is often used), but a story similar to Francis Spufford's take on faith in Unappologetic. Brooks is really making an argument not for Christianity in particular, but for the role of faith, or a philosophy of living, in general as a means to pull people into community. So this will not make everyone happy that wants him to give a full throated argument for Christianity. His point here is to show that in his life, Christianity has been what has pulled him toward the second mountain. (But also he explicitly says he is not leaving his Judaism behind, in some ways he feels more Jewish now because that is also part of his faith commitment that pulls him toward the second mountain.)

The problem with The Second Mountain is that I think it is trying to do way too much. Parts of it really do read like an extended commencement address. Other parts read like a book you give to someone that is facing a midlife crisis. And there are other parts that are straight self help and verge on the etherial ‘do better' advice. And while much of the advice in the marriage section really is very good marriage advice, it is marriage advice from a recently divorce and remarried man.

Part of my problem with the book is that it feels like a ‘recent convert' book. Not just the parts about Christianity (in fact the Christianity parts are probably where he sounds least like a new convert). The book as a whole is focusing on helping people focus on maturity. I am all for focusing on maturity. But the focusing on maturity is what he sounds like he has recently converted to. The book as a whole is a response to a personal breakdown about five years ago and his struggle back to health. While there is much good here, and I am saying that seriously, there really is much good here, it feels to me like he wrote this 5-10 years too soon.

I know that we all are impatient. We want to both learn quickly, skip steps, and get the silver bullet. Brooks is arguing that we can't skip the important parts. We have to invest in community, family, faith and work for the long haul. It is in the long haul that maturity comes. The good of the book affirms that long term, slow, don't skip steps, invest deeply, not widely, focus. But the book is also written only a few years after he had this insight and it feels too soon.

At the end of the book, when he is trying to distill the whole book down to a short manifesto, it was interesting that in more than a couple of ways, Brooks was saying very similar things to what Jonathan Walton was saying in 12 Lies That Hold America Captive, including the difference between conditional and unconditional love. Our society is currently focused on the conditional. I am not going to recount the ways that they go together, but the two books which are about fundamentally different issues, have remarkably similar conclusions.
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This doesn't really fit anywhere else, but In an interview with Collin Hansen on The Gospel Coalition podcast, Brooks makes a distinction between community and tribalism that I think is helpful, although not part of the common definition. He said that community is built around loving something in common and he contrasted that with tribalism that is build around the hatred or opposition to a thing or person or idea.

Originally posted on my blog at http://bookwi.se/the-second-mountain/