Before it became a catch-all term for the embarrassing antics of middle-aged men, “midlife crisis” meant something specific: that time, any time after age 35, when the goals you you’ve been chasing into adulthood seems like it’s not worth it anymore.
It’s bad enough if you haven’t achieved your career ambitions, earned the respect of your peers, or achieved a comfortable lifestyle. but in a way it’s worse if you’ve been successful, because then it’s all too obvious that those things don’t bring deep satisfaction.
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In David Brooks’ ruling metaphor, you’ve reached the top of life’s “first mountain,” only to find that the view isn’t really that great and you feel empty inside. the truly joyful people are those who, often driven by a shock like divorce or bereavement, find their second mountain, abandoning themselves to a greater cause, giving up the life they wanted for what the world needs of them.
Brooks’ poignant new book is in part a map for this journey: a self-help guide to escaping the prison of self.
but this is not the heart of your prospect. Nor would it explain Brooks’s status as the favorite punching bag of a generation of young American journalists, for whom the New York Times columnist and television pundit is an unbearable scolding: “the biggest windbag in the Western Hemisphere,” in the words by matt taibbi from rolling stone.
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(gawker, the decedent’s gossip blog, once described him with characteristic disdain as “basically the nice old man with alzheimer’s in the church that everyone chooses to leave alone as long as he doesn’t hit anyone.”)
his biggest argument, and for some much more irritating, is that this crisis of meaning is social. the modern world is collectively stranded on the first mountain, a culture of radical individualism dividing us into “insecure underachievers” and hopelessly left behind, the former only slightly happier than the latter, with tribal politics offering a one of the only ways to feel a sense of belonging.
Brooks, a centrist conservative, surprised many recently by endorsing the case for slavery reparations, but viewed through this moral lens, his position makes sense. if slavery was a sin, it demands atonement; to change its policy, a nation must attend to the stain on its soul.
The book builds its case through stories of people who took the key step up the second mountain, which is commitment: to a spouse, community, faith, or philosophy. “The world tells them to be good consumers, but they want to be the consumed one, for a moral cause,” Brooks writes. “The world tells them they want independence, but they want interdependence.”
When his first child was born, a friend sent him an email: “welcome to the world of inescapable reality,” and those he features as models take that logic to the extreme. Thus, for example, we know of 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 answering to the needs of their surroundings”, in a weekly dinner for 25 children, a home for several, plus an annual seaside vacation for up to 40. Such “radical hospitality” does not make for a life of freedom in the usual sense.
but it meets theologian tim keller’s definition of a deeper kind of freedom: “not so much the absence of constraints as finding the right ones.”
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the second mountain is also a memoir, with passages that will provide red meat to the brooks media mocking him as they describe how he left his wife of 27 years for a woman much younger than she had worked as his investigator. (There is also an ambivalent religious conversion, from Jew to Christian). To his credit, he’s as lacerating himself as any gossip blog.
“I was unplanted, alone, humiliated, scattered,” he writes. “I was giving myself needily to my friends in a way that is embarrassing now if I stop to remember them, which I try not to do… [I was] confronting the problems of a 22-year-old with the mind of a 52-year-old. -old.”
brooks has always included himself among his targets, ever since the excellent boobies in paradise (2000), which confidently took aim at “bohemian bourgeois” with their expensive kitchen appliances and “shabby” clothing and furniture. . (“Across the developing world, factory workers are busy banging on the products they’ve just made to please American consumers”), but we’re in more personal territory now.
The obvious criticism here, as in much of Brooks’s work, is that his conservative temperament blinds him to the role of large-scale political reform in solving the social ills that plague him. The risk of all this talk of compromise and charity between neighbors is to give the impression that structural problems – economic inequality, racism – could disappear if we all worked on our souls.
but while this objection has merit, it’s also an all too easy refuge for those who prefer not to look too far inside. asking for political change can be much less scary than asking if you might need to change mountains yourself.
Paraphrasing ts eliot, brooks writes that the main illusion of modern politics is “that you can build a system so perfect that the people in it don’t have to be good.” This powerful book, Brooks’s best to date, can be especially valuable to those who are convinced they don’t need it.
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