Van ik naar wij – dat is de korstte samenvatting van dit boek, van de Amerikaanse schrijver en columnist David Brooks. Hij is bijzonder kritisch op de individualistische cultuur van vandaag – die maakt ons eenzaam, en brengt weinig vreugde in het leven, en nog minder ‘meaning’. Daarom pleit hij hartstochtelijk voor ‘samen’, voor commitment aan buurt, werk, partner/familie en geloof/zingeving.
In 2012 was ik op een conferentie van Qideas in Washington, waar David Brooks sprak. Toen al was hij een gerenommeerd columnist van de New York Times. Sindsdien ben ik hem blijven volgen – en nu las ik zijn interessante boek met bijzonder veel plezier. Zijn boek werd paginagroot besproken in NRC, geciteerd door Martin Sommer in De Volkskrant, en genoemd door Theoloog des Vaderslands Stefan Paas in De Ongelooflijke podcast.
Brooks is als columnist een analyticus, maar in dit boek geeft hij zichzelf ook bloot: hij betrekt de analyse ook op zichzelf. Hij was nogal trots op zijn carrière, maar zijn huwelijk ging stuk en hij vond een soort van vastigheid in het geloof, waarbij hij “amfibisch” joods en christen is. Over zijn geloofsweg maakte ik aan apart blog.
Het boek heet ‘The second mountain’ – dat slaat op de 3 e(!) fase in het leven van mensen, maar ook van organisaties en samenlevingen, en dat is, voor de duidelijkheid niet leeftijdsgebonden. De 1efase betreft het beklimmen van de 1eberg: carrière maken, min of meer gericht op de buitenkant, waarbij het ego en het geluk centraal staan. De 2efase is de vallei – er overkomt je iets, iets groots en bijzonders, of iets slepends, maar wel indringend. En dan beklim je de 2e berg – dan ga je van ‘ik naar wij’ – althans dat appel doet David Brooks op het individu, en op de hele samenleving.
Er was veel wat mij opviel tijdens het lezen:
On the first mountain, we all have to perform certain life tasks: establish an identity, separate from our parents, cultivate our talents, build a secure ego, and try to make a mark in the world. People climbing that first mountain spend a lot of time thinking about reputation management. (..) Then something happens. (..) People in the valley have been broken open. (..) The people who are made larger by suffering go on to stage two small rebellions. First, they rebel against their ego ideal. (..) Second, they rebel against the mainstream culture. (..) The people who have been made larger by suffering are brave enough to let parts of their old self die. Down in the valley, their motivations changed. They’ve gone from self-centered to other-centered.
The second mountain is not the opposite of the first mountain. To climb it doesn’t mean rejecting the first mountain. It’s the journey after it. It’s the more generous and satisfying phase of life. (..) The crucial way to tell whether you are on your first or second mountain. Where is your ultimate appeal? To self, or to something outside of self? (..) If the first mountain is about building up the ego and defining the self, the second mountain is about shedding the ego and losing the self. If the first mountain is about acquisition, the second mountain is about contribution. If the first mountain is elitist—moving up—the second mountain is egalitarian—planting yourself amid those who need, and walking arm in arm with them. (..) On the first mountain you tend to be ambitious, strategic, and independent. On the second mountain you tend to be relational, intimate, and relentless.
I’ve come to recognize first- and second-mountain organizations, too. (..) These institutions have a collective purpose, a shared set of rituals, a common origin story. They nurture thick relationships and demand full commitment. They don’t merely educate; they transform.
The first purpose of this book is to show how individuals move from the first to the second mountain. (..) The second purpose is to show how societies can move from the first to the second mountain. (..) Over the past sixty years we have swung too far toward the self. The only way out is to rebalance, to build a culture that steers people toward relation, community, and commitment. (..) The second-mountain life is a committed life. (..) People on the second mountain have made strong commitments to one or all of these four things: a vocation, a spouse and family, a philosophy or faith, a community.
Over the past few years, as a result of personal, national, and global events, I have become radicalized. I now think the rampant individualism of our current culture is a catastrophe.
The whole cultural paradigm has to shift from the mindset of hyper-individualism to the relational mindset of the second mountain. (..) Our society has become a conspiracy against joy. It has put too much emphasis on the individuating part of our consciousness—individual reason—and too little emphasis on the bonding parts of our consciousness, the heart and soul. We’ve seen a shocking rise of mental illness, suicide, and distrust. We have become too cognitive when we should be more emotional; too utilitarian when we should be using a moral lens; too individualistic when we should be more communal. (..) It’s important to make a distinction between happiness and joy. What’s the difference? Happiness involves a victory for the self, an expansion of self. We can help create happiness, but we are seized by joy. We are pleased by happiness, but we are transformed by joy. When we experience joy we often feel we have glimpsed into a deeper and truer layer of reality. (..) My core point is that happiness is good, but joy is better. Just as the second mountain is a fuller and richer phase of life after the first mountain, joy is a fuller and richer state beyond happiness.
The people who radiate a permanent joy have given themselves over to lives of deep and loving commitment. Giving has become their nature.
In an individualistic culture, the best life is the freest life. Spiritual formation happens in freedom, not within obligation. (..) There’s always a tension between self and society. If things are too tightly bound, then the urge to rebel is strong. But we’ve got the opposite problem. In a culture of “I’m Free to Be Myself,” individuals are lonely and loosely attached. Community is attenuated, connections are dissolved, and loneliness spreads. This situation makes it difficult to be good—to fulfill the deep human desires for love and connection. It’s hard on people of all ages, but it’s especially hard on young adults.
THE SOCIAL VALLEY
Individuals can fall into the valley, and whole societies can, too. In the early 1960s our culture began to embrace a hyper-individualistic way of life to help it address the problems of that moment. But after a few decades, that culture, taken to the extreme, produced its own crisis. (..) A half century of emancipation has made individualism, which was the heaven for our grandparents, into our hell. It has produced four interrelated social crises.
- THE LONELINESS CRISIS
Thirty-five percent of Americans over forty-five are chronically lonely. Only 8 percent of Americans report having important conversations with their neighbors in a given year. (..)
Since 1999, the U.S. suicide rate has risen by 30 percent. (..)
- DISTRUST
The quality of our relationships is worse. Distrust breeds distrust. When people feel distrustful they conclude that the only person they can rely on is themselves. (..)
- THE CRISIS OF MEANING
The third crisis is a crisis of meaning. It is a stunning fact of our age that, despite all we have learned about the brain, mental health problems, including depression, are rising, not falling (..)
- TRIBALISM
These three crises have given rise to a fourth one, which is not a facet of extreme individualism itself, but our reaction to it. Psychologists say the hardest thing to cure is the patient’s attempt to self-cure. People who are left naked and alone by radical individualism do what their genes and the ancient history of their species tell them to do: They revert to tribe. Individualism, taken too far, leads to tribalism. (..)
Whether the valley is a personal one or a societal one or both, there’s a lot of suffering. You’re enduring a season of pain, a season of feeling lost. This can be a period of soul-crushing anguish, but it can also be one of the most precious seasons of your life. (..) Suffering teaches us gratitude. Normally we take love and friendship for granted. But in seasons of suffering we throw ourselves on others and appreciate the gifts that our loved ones offer. Suffering puts you in solidarity with others who suffer. It makes you more sympathetic to those who share this or some other sort of pain. In this way it tenderizes the heart. (..) Climbing out of the valley is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don’t come out healed; they come out different. (..) The right thing to do when you are in moments of suffering is to stand erect in the suffering. Wait. See what it has to teach you. Understand that your suffering is a task that, if handled correctly, with the help of others, will lead to enlargement, not diminishment.
The valley is where we shed the old self so the new self can emerge. There are no shortcuts. There’s just the same eternal three-step process that the poets have described from time eternal: from suffering to wisdom to service. Dying to the old self, cleansing in the emptiness, resurrecting in the new.
At the moment when you are most confused about what you should do with your life, the smartest bet is to do what millions of men and women have done through history. Pick yourself up and go out alone into the wilderness.
This is the pivotal point, maybe of this whole book. On the surface of our lives most of us build the hard shell. It is built to cover fear and insecurity and win approval and success. When you get down to the core of yourself, you find a different, more primeval country, and in it a deep yearning to care and connect. You could call this deep core of yourself the pleroma, or substrate. It is where your heart and soul reside.
In the valley, if you are fortunate, you learn to see yourself as a whole person. You learn you are not just a brain and a set of talents to impress the world, but a heart and soul—primarily heart and soul. Now everything you do for the rest of your life is likely to be testimony to that reality.
You’ve got the skill you earned on the first mountain and the wisdom you earned in the valley, and now is the time to take the big risk.
The lesson is that the things we had thought were most important—achievement, affirmation, intelligence—are actually less important, and the things we had undervalued—heart and soul—are actually most important.
Individualism says, Shoot for personal happiness, but the person on the second mountain says, No, I shoot for meaning and moral joy. That individualism says, Celebrate independence, but the second-mountain hero says, I will celebrate interdependence. I will celebrate the chance to become dependent on those I care for and for them to become dependent on me. Individualism celebrates autonomy; the second mountain celebrates relation. Individualism speaks with an active voice—lecturing, taking charge—and never the passive voice. But the second-mountain rebellion seeks to listen and respond, communicating in the voice of intimate exchange.
In 2007, the Gallup organization asked people around the world whether they felt they were leading meaningful lives. It turns out that Liberia was the country where the most people felt a sense of meaning and purpose, while the Netherlands was the place where the lowest percentage of people did.
The core challenges of the second-mountain life are found in the questions, How do I choose my commitments? How do I decide what is the right commitment for me? How do I serve my commitments once they have been chosen? How do I blend my commitments so that together they merge into a coherent, focused, and joyful life?
The second-mountain life is a spiritual adventure, but it is practically day by day.
The paradox of life is that people seem to deliberate more carefully over the little choices than the big ones.
The best advice I’ve heard for people in search of a vocation is to say yes to everything. Say yes to every opportunity that comes along, because you never know what will lead to what. Have a bias toward action”
What would you do if you weren’t afraid? (..) two final features of the vocation decision. First, it’s not about creating a career path. It’s asking, What will touch my deepest desire? What activity gives me my deepest satisfaction? (..) Second, it’s about fit. A vocation decision is not about finding the biggest or most glamorous problem in the world. Instead, it’s about finding a match between a delicious activity and a social need. It’s the same inward journey we’ve seen before: the plunge inward and then the expansion outward.
Who you marry is the most important decision you will ever make. (..) Marriage comes as a revolution. To have lived as a one and then suddenly become a two—that is an invasion. And yet there is a prize. People in long, happy marriages have won the lottery of life. They are the happy ones, the blessed ones. And that is in about 15 percent of marriages the passion never wanes. (..) When you look at the contemporary writing on marriage, you see a general effort to scale it back and shrink it down to manageable (and supposedly more realistic) size. Passion is temporary, the current thinking runs, so don’t trust it. A soul mate is an illusion; don’t think you’re going to find the One True Love. (..) The assault on maximal marriage comes from three directions. First, in a culture where divorce is common, and the effects often severe, many people adopt a safety-first attitude. (..) Second, many people find themselves in marriages that aren’t that great, and they embrace a definition of marriage that allows them to make do. (..) Third, the culture of individualism undermines the maximal definition of marriage. (..) One problem with the individualistic view, as always, is that it traps people in the small prison of the self. If you go into marriage seeking self-actualization, you will always feel frustrated because marriage, and especially parenting, will constantly be dragging you away from the goals of self. Another problem with the individualistic view is that it doesn’t give us a script to fulfill the deepest yearnings.
In the United States, nearly 40 percent of marriages end in divorce. Another 10 or 15 percent of couples separate and do not divorce, and another 7 percent or so stay together but are chronically unhappy. In other words, more than half of the people who decide to marry, presumably driven by passionate love, wind up unhappy. The odds are worse for couples that marry before age twenty-five.
In our society is a massive conspiracy to distract you from the important choices of life in order to help you fixate on the unimportant ones. (..) Students are taught to engage in critical thinking, to doubt, distance, and take things apart, but they are given almost no instruction on how to attach to things, how to admire, to swear loyalty to, to copy and serve. The universities, like the rest of society, are information rich and meaning poor.
Ultimately joy is found not in satisfying your desires but in changing your desires so you have the best desires. The educated life is a journey toward higher and higher love.
A community is healthy when relationships are felt deeply, when there are histories of trust, a shared sense of mutual belonging, norms of mutual commitment, habits of mutual assistance, and real affection from one heart and soul to another.
(..) The suicide epidemic is one manifestation of social isolation. (..) The rising levels of depression and mental health issues are yet another manifestation. (..) Maybe it’s time we began to see this as a war. On the 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. (..) And here’s the hard part of the war: It’s not between one group of good people and another group of bad people. The war runs down the middle of every heart. Most of us are part of the problem we complain about.
How is community restored? Basically, it’s restored by people who are living on the second mountain, people whose ultimate loyalty is to others and not themselves. (..) Radical hospitality. Robert Frost wrote, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” When someone is in need, the code of the neighbor says hospitality is first, judgment and everything else comes later. The neighbor is like the father of the prodigal son who races out to greet him without asking questions. Grace and forgiveness first, then we can think about what went wrong and heal whatever breach. (..) The better community-building conversations focus on possibilities, not problems. They are questions such as, What crossroads do we stand at right now? What can we build together? How can we improve our lives together? What talents do we have here that haven’t been fully expressed?
On the first mountain, the emphasis is on the unencumbered self, individual accomplishment, creating a society in which everyone is free to be themselves. This is a fluid society, and over the short term a productive society, but it is a thin society. It is a society in which people are only lightly attached to each other and to their institutions. The second-mountain society is a thick society. The organizations and communities in that society leave a mark. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes an organization thick or thin.
The first mountain is the individualist worldview, which puts the desires of the ego at the center. The second mountain is what you might call the relationalist worldview, which puts relation, commitment, and the desires of the heart and soul at the center.
The best adult life is lived by making commitments and staying faithful to those commitments: commitments to a vocation, to a family, to a philosophy or faith, to a community. Adult life is about making promises to others, being faithful to those promises. The beautiful life is found in the mutual giving of unconditional gifts.
Relationalism is a middle way between hyper-individualism and collectivism.
The central journey of modern life is moving self to service.
The heart is that piece of us that longs for fusion with others. We are not primarily thinking creatures; we are primarily loving and desiring creatures. We are defined by what we desire. We become what we love. At the deepest center of each person there is what we call, metaphorically, the heart and soul.
The movement toward becoming a person is downward and then outward: To peer deeper into ourselves where we find the yearnings for others, and then outward in relationship toward the world. A person achieves self-mastery, Maritain wrote, for the purpose of self-giving.
The life of a relationalist is defined by its commitments. The quality and fulfillment of her life will be defined by what she commits to and how she fulfills those commitments. (..) A commitment is a promise made from love. A commitment is a promise made without expecting any return (though there will be returns aplenty). A committed relationship is a two-way promise. It is you throwing yourself wholeheartedly for another and another throwing himself wholeheartedly for you.
The health of society depends on voluntary unselfishness. (..) The call of relationalism is to usher in a social transformation by reweaving the fabric of reciprocity and trust, to build a society, as Dorothy Day put it, in which it is easier to be good.
The social fabric is not woven by leaders from above. It is woven at every level, through a million caring actions, from one person to another. It is woven by people fulfilling their roles as good friends, neighbors, and citizens.
The crucial question is not, Who I am? but, Whose am I?
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