54 pages • 1 hour read
David BrooksThe Second Mountain
David BrooksNonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3, Chapters 14-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “Marriage”
Chapter 14 Summary: “The Maximum Marriage”
Part 3, “Marriage,” is the second part of the book dedicated to an aspect of the committed life. It is subdivided into five chapters, and the first of these, “The Maximum Marriage,” sets the stages for Brooks’s basic views on the proper orientation to married life. According to Brooks, “Who you marry is the most important decision you will ever make” (138). He believes that those who have happy, long-term marriages are the luckiest people in the world (139). He then turns his attention to a cultural, intellectual “assault” on marriage as he sees it, i.e., the maximum marriage. For Brooks, a culture of individualism leads people to adopt a “safety-first attitude” in marriage, meaning that they never fully commit to live for the other person (141). Marriage and parenthood limit one’s abilities to pursue independent, autonomous goals, so an individualist view should not be adopted when engaged in either relationship. Instead, members of a family are dependent on one another, making marriage “a moral microcosm of life” (143). Brooks believes, then, that the most fundamental problem in married life is an individual’s proclivity toward self-centered behavior. Because of this, effort in marriage is a very high form of moral education (144). Dependence in marriage can be humiliating and thus humbling of the ego. “Marriage,” he writes, “is the sort of thing where it’s safer to go all in, and it’s dangerous to go in half-hearted” (146).
Chapter 15 Summary: “The Stages of Intimacy I”
Chapters 15 and 16 are jointly about the stages of intimacy. Brooks outlines these stages as they develop from the first glance lovers ever give one another to their joint lives in old age. The first stage is this “glance,” and love is gestured at through quality attention to the other (149). The next stage, curiosity, is expressed through the desire to learn more about the depths of the other, which quickly transmutes into stage three, dialogue. In dialogue, if the relationship is to advance, people come to know one another better and share in understanding. This eventually gets to the core of a person’s existence, Brooks argues, if love is to flourish for the couple (152).
Chapter 16 Summary: “The Stages of Intimacy II”
Chapter 16 opens with another stage: combustion. Combustion occurs when people rejoice in the freedom and ease with which they can openly discuss what’s in their hearts with their partner. “Combustion,” Brooks argues, “is also the phase of peak idealization” (156). It is the point during which lovers are most comfortable and relaxed around one another. After this, there is a “leap,” which Brooks describes as an unselfish act of faith the couple should lovingly do for each other (157). After this, there is a crisis moment revolving around a “central disagreement” that challenges the proclivity of the parties to trust one another (159). This is followed by an attitude of forgiveness that fuses accountability and clemency. Eventually love flourishes in the fusion of a decentered relationship that is neither wholly selfish nor selfless. Brooks ends this chapter with a series of extracts from canonical essayists, playwrights, and poets musing on the unity (fusion) of self and others in the experience of passionate love.
Chapter 17 Summary: “The Marriage Decision”
Chapter 17 focuses on the specific decision to get married. “The heart demands resoluteness,” Brooks writes, indicating the depth of the need for commitment (165). He mentions how abysmally bad marriages can impact health and happiness in life. He also laments the lack of cultural and intellectual attention paid to the marriage decision. Brooks, in line with the argument for maximal marriage, is totally against settling for someone. He provides a series of questions a person should reflect on before they decide to marry someone, and then he discusses psychological, emotional, and moral compatibility. Respect for the moral fortitude of a partner is crucial: “Disagreement is inevitable, and marriages survive it, but contempt is deadly and always kills a marital bond. So a crucial question is, Do I deeply admire this person?” (171). Brooks ends the chapter with an idea (as ancient as Plato) that two souls in love complete one another.
Chapter 18 Summary: “Marriage: The School You Build Together”
Chapter 18, “Marriage: The School You Build Together,” is the final chapter of Part 3. Brooks believes that a thriving marriage necessitates personal moral growth (174). He implicitly endorses a list of achievements of a functional marriage as presented by Blakeslee and Wallerstein (174-75). Good, enduring marriages generate “empathic wisdom” between the partners, and they avoid common forms of communication issues, such as the “demand-withdraw cycle” (176). Brooks writes, “people in an enduring marriage achieve metis. That’s the Greek word for a kind of practical wisdom, an intuitive awareness of how things are, how things go together, and how things will never go together” (177). He underlines the essential value of high-quality conversation and general communication. Marriages end, he believes, not solely (or even predominantly) because the couple is fighting often but because contempt, defensiveness, and related problems are endemic. Brooks notes that continual recommitment is also important, especially after the birth of children and in the “doldrums” of midlife because these times often strain relationships (179). Despite this emphasis on recommitment, Brooks is aware that some marriages cannot be saved. He ends by noting that there is a second love that can occur late in life when the couple has already survived much of life together. This he calls catharsis, which he deems an emotional and moral harmony at the end of a marriage (184).
Part 3, Chapters 14-18 Analysis
For Brooks, marriage is not simply another aspect of the committed life. It is the deepest and most significant interpersonal commitment in an individual’s life. Marriage, properly understood and undertaken, is fundamentally antithetical to the first-mountain ethos and is appreciated in contrast with this. He writes, “At the end of the day, there is the brutal grinding effort of surrendering the ego to the altar of marriage” (138). Surrender is an underdeveloped but recurring theme in The Second Mountain. Brooks holds that surrender occurs when a person humbly gives themselves over to a commitment. This “giving over of the self” is the literal de-emphasizing of egoic needs for the sake of others. In the marriage context, this is only undertaken in the “maximal” marriage.
Brooks’s ongoing criticism of the self-involved moral ethos of contemporary Western society extends deeply into his discussion of marriage. He adamantly opposes the logical, practical motivations of marriage of individual reasoners and instead insists on the moral superiority of “maximal marriages”: “If the maximum definition of marriage is to be flesh of my flesh, then the individualist definition of love is autonomy but support” (142). The depth of love expressed in the religious language “flesh of my flesh” is meant to indicate a radical connection deeper than that possible by two agents determined to maintain their autonomy. In line with this view, Brooks is strongly opposed to the concept of “settling.” Settling for someone, as Brooks makes evident in “The Marriage Decision,” is simply another expression of the overarching individualistic ethos of the age. Such a person simply shows that they are able to pragmatically determine what they think will be valuable for themselves in the long term.
One should note that, like vocations, there are meaningful stages along the expanse of a love affair and marriage. Brooks makes use of this progressive development throughout his various presentations of second-mountain commitment. This reveals the temporal dimensions of the expression of wisdom, understanding, and love that unfold over a lifetime. Within this context, the most crucial stages in the path to moral development are from freedom to crisis to an attitude of forgiveness. It is this attitude of forgiveness that eventually, Brooks believes, creates the conditions for a long-term, cathartic, successful marriage.
Fittingly, this is also the part of the books wherein Brooks most directly thematizes love. Readers should note, though, that much of what he writes about love is just as directly applicable to the other commitments he expounds. On love, Brooks writes, “it is both a selfish desire and a selfless gift. It fills us up and reminds us of our own incompleteness. Love plows open the hard crust of our personality and exposes the fertile soil below. Love decenters the self” (161). With G. K. Chesterton, Brooks notes, “Love is the opposite of blind. It is supremely attentive” (162). In short, then, love is the direct attentive behavior directed toward another (lover, child, friend, etc.). As such, the very act of love, which is indicative of second-mountain living, is anti-egoic. Love, for Brooks, as many have claimed before him, is an antidote for a selfish world.
This sense of love is deeply connected to the capacity for just forgiveness and compassion for human fallibility. It is both the expression of and pathway to moral development. Brooks writes, “The only way to thrive in marriage is to become a better person–more patient, wise, compassionate, persevering, communicative, and humble” (174). One of the paradoxes of marriage, Brooks believes, is that “it’s a sacred institution built out of crooked timber” (183). He continues: “There’s no room for perfectionism when you’re dealing with something as broken as real human beings, only bemused affection” (183). Perfectionism, we come to understand, is another self-directed element of the first mountain.
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