The Second Mountain
The quest for a moral life
David Brooks
Having read it
★★★★☆
Started as a really interesting read. Very informative and some of its sections were matching my own thoughts about the same and similar subjects. Then it got a bit existential, which is surprising given I’ve always been a bit existential anyways! In the middle of the book the writer seemed to waffle on a bit too much – late in part one, most of part two and three – not really helping the second mountain theory.
It was helpful stuff, but could have been much shorter and would still have got the point across. To make up for that, its concluding manifesto was brilliant in its directness and honesty. Our hyper-individualistic society is broken and a relationalist approach to our lives will be much, much better.
As of August 2019, I’m still in the valley but I’ve had a look and walked a bit of the second mountain over the last eighteen months. I’d like to think I was sort of always seeking it because of my attitude and approach to work and helping others with my skills, but it’s certainly worth taking a bit more time and focus to climb up the second mountain. Worth it, certainly because I’ve now got a worthy reason and am slowly undertaking, cutting and reforming my approaches. (Curiously, despite this second mountain, nothing was mentioned about the number 42... strange!)
Still, overall a book worth reading. Plenty of food for thought for long-term endeavours, like life!
A good passage
The Internet is commanding you to click on and sample one thing after another. Living online often means living in a state of diversion. When you’re living in diversion you’re not actually deeply interested in things; you’re just bored at a more frenetic pace. Online life is saturated with decommitment devices. If you can’t focus your attention for thirty seconds, how on earth are you going to commit for life?
A second good passage
The meritocracy is the most self-confident moral system in the world today. It’s so engrossing and seems so natural that we’re not even aware of how it encourages a certain economic vocabulary about non-economic things. Words change their meaning. ‘Character’ is no longer a moral quality oriented around love, service, and care, but a set of workplace traits organised around grit, productivity, and self-discipline. The meritocracy defines ‘community’ as a mass of talented individuals competing with one another. It organises society into an endless set of outer and inner rings, with high achievers at the Davos centre and everybody else arrayed across the wider ring toward the edge. While it pretends not to, it subliminally sends the message that those who are smarter and more accomplished are actually worth more than those who are not.
A third good passage
The problem with systems, Block and McKnight argue [in The Abundant Community], is that they depersonalise. These organisations have to operate at scale, so everything has to be standardised. Everything has to follow rules. ‘The purpose of management is to create a world that is repeatable,’ they write. But people are never the same.