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 5, Chapters 23-25Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 5: “Community”
Chapter 23 Summary: “The Stages of Community Building I”
In Chapter 23, Brooks uses a myriad of examples to muse about the values of good neighborhoods in the first of two chapters focusing on community building. He discusses the value of a “rich community” (266). This is not a wealthy community but one with tight social bonds where people care about one another, watch each other’s children, etc. In opposition to this, there are communities in which no one really knows anyone else and don’t care to. Brooks connects this to the suicide epidemic, chronic loneliness, and political polarization. He believes American culture might be a war between “social rippers” (first-mountain proponents) and “social weavers,” i.e., community builders working on local levels. He notes that this battle occurs, in large part, within the human heart (269). He discusses the “sticky and inefficient relationships” of communities and neighborhoods, that they are bound by more than the parameters of individual optimization. Despite this, Brooks believes that the neighborhood is “the unit of change” and focuses his efforts on building communities at the local level (272). He notes that philanthropists attempt to have “impacts” on communities, but there is no “silver bullet,” and the endless number of positive relations available in good communities is a better pathway for change. Brooks focuses a lot of attention on specific people, organizations, and events aimed at community building. Occasionally he documents the changes that occur as a result of this. Most especially he discusses Thread, a program for social outreach with a useful app called Tapestry. He reintroduces the idea of combustion (from the discussion on marriage) to explain the confluence of positive sociality that can occur in a healthy community.
Chapter 24 Summary: “The Stages of Community Building II”
Brooks continues his discussion of community building. He writes about the importance of community-based narratives and projects. “One of the most important tasks of a community,” he writes, “is to create its story” (283). These stories are usually intergenerational epics. He then describes the “code of the neighbor” and outlines several basic aspects of this code: The community is enough to address its own problems; the group is more important than the individual; good neighbors initiate contact with one another; people develop long term projects and plans; everyone is individually responsible for the success of the neighborhood; and neighbors are “radically hospitable” (285). He also notes that leaders shouldn’t be afraid to do menial work and that the people most in need should be best cared for. “The community is the expert,” Brooks writes. The members of a neighborhood know their needs the best. He notes the importance of community focus on the possibilities for their future and not merely the current problems they face. Communities, he believes, should invent their own traditions. He reiterates the importance of thinking in terms of systems. He ends by describing the “thickening” of relationships created over the course of the committed life.
Chapter 25 Summary: “Conclusion: The Relationalist Manifesto”
The final chapter of the book summarizes the main themes and conclusions of the book in manifesto form. This “Relationalist Manifesto” advocates for relationalism and reiterates Brooks’s strongest objections to the hyper-individualism of American first-mountain culture. Among other things, he notes how consumerism and meritocracy “amputate” what is most important in life for personal gain (298). Hyper-individualism only leads to conditional love, i.e., no love at all. He notes that relationalism, on the other hand, is the paradoxical condition under which the individual is “strongest and most powerful” (301). He discusses the processes, experiences, and decisions that help someone develop the character of the relationalist. He reiterates many aspects of the good life, all of which are fundamentally related to the second-mountain approach of a committed life. Brooks ends the book with a short “Declaration of Interdependence” in which he reflects on community, moral joy, sacrifice, and freedom from the ego.
Part 5, Chapters 23-25 Analysis
Note Brooks’s examples of the two neighborhoods, which are meant to get at the heart of the difference between first- and second-mountain cultures. In one instance, the neighbors all came together to make sure that a young woman was not being harmed by an older man. In the other, a mother is looking for her child, but no one tries to help her. In both instances, everything turned out okay, but only in the former case does the community display the “richness” and communitarian ethos that Brooks thinks is a necessary ingredient to a moral social order. Building on this, he writes in the “Relationalist Manifesto”:
In this day and age, our primary problems are at the level of the foundations. They are at the level of the system of relationships. Our society had been spiraling to ever-higher levels of distress, ever-higher levels of unknowing and alienation. One bad action breeds another. One escalation of hostility breeds another (308).
The move, then, should be to establish and maintain systems of close connections and loving relationships. He labels people like this “social weavers.” In relation to this topic Brooks’s understanding of the culture wars reaches a fever pitch:
Maybe it’s time we began to see this as a war. On one side are those forces that sow division, discord, and isolation. On the other side are all those forces in society that nurture attachment, connection, and solidarity. It’s as if we’re witnessing this vast showdown between the social rippers and social weavers (269).
It’s ironic that a second-mountain climber such as Brooks would view this contest as a war. He also believes this is a war in everyone’s heart. At some, wider, more universal level, then, Brooks is discussing what he believes are universal moral truths and ethical systems. They may be applicable to diagnoses of cultures and social institutions, but they are not reducible thereto.
Another important aspect of moral change must occur on the community level, according to Brooks. The highest form of moral change, he argues, occurs on a systematic and structural level. For Brooks, it is certainly possible and good to effect change as an individual, but the individual problem-solving approach has severe limitations that are avoided by systematic community building. The tendrils of community interactions are multifaceted and infinite. The intuitive connections based on love and community stretch beyond anything possible for philanthropy and the individual effort involved in altruistic but distant behavior.
“The relational life is a challenging life but ultimately it’s a joyful life, because it is enmeshed in affection and crowned with moral joy” (307). The challenge comes from all the difficulties that arise between people. Emotions flare and selfishness causes divisions. Still, overcoming the urge to run from meaningful relationships (because they are, in a sense, emotionally unsafe) is the wrong approach. “Relationships do not scale,” he writes. “They have to be built one at a time, through patience and forbearance. But norms do scale” (309). In other words, individual personal relationships will not create a good society by themselves, though they may forge better lives for the people in the relationships. However, they do have the power to indirectly create large-scale change by instituting new kinds of norms. These norms extend beyond the particular people and communities that express them. Therefore, for Brooks, local systemic changes can have larger, national effects.
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