David Brooks’s Conversion Story

In 2013, the Times columnist David Brooks, then in his early fifties, divorced his wife of twenty-seven years, Sarah, and moved into an apartment in Washington, D.C. The personal crisis that ensued overlapped with a spiritual one. He was writing a book called “The Road to Character,” offering guidance, through biographical case studies, for how a person might engage in moral self-improvement, and two of the chapters made examples of Christian lives: St. Augustine’s and Dorothy Day’s. His correspondence with a young research assistant, a Christian woman named Anne Snyder, grew intense. Brooks was a practicing Jew, if one on the downslope of belief—his wife had converted and then become more Orthodox than he—and Snyder, in elegant memos and correspondence, worked to persuade him that his account of Day’s sense of Christian grace missed the sublime core. “The foundational fact,” Snyder reminded Brooks, “is you cannot earn your way into a state of grace—this denies grace’s power, and subverts its very definition.” For Brooks, this carried the clarity of revelation, and soon he let it be known, among his acquaintances, that he was experiencing religious curiosity. An informal competition opened for David Brooks’s soul. He received, by his own estimation, three hundred gifts of spiritual books, “only one hundred of which were different copies of C. S. Lewis’s ‘Mere Christianity.’ ”

One morning, passing through Penn Station at rush hour, Brooks was overcome by the feeling that he was moving in a sea of souls—not the hair and legs and sneakers but the moral part. “It was like suddenly everything was illuminated, and I became aware of an infinite depth on each of these thousands of people. They were living souls,” Brooks writes in his new book, “The Second Mountain.” “Suddenly it seemed like the most vivid part of reality was this: Souls waking up in the morning. Souls riding the train to work. Souls yearning for goodness. Souls wounded by earlier traumas. With that came a feeling that I was connected by radio waves to all of them—some underlying soul of which we were all a piece.” Brooks’s spiritual momentum was quickening. While attending the Aspen Ideas Festival, he hiked to the edge of American Lake, pulled out a book of Puritan prayers, and had a transcendent experience buttressed by the appearance of a “little brown creature who looked like a badger.” He eventually realized that he was in love with Snyder and confessed his love to her. (Eventually, they married; this, presumably, is what Alexander Portnoy’s parents so feared.) In the last third of the book, Brooks describes an interesting and irregular progress toward New Testament ideals, and, by the end, he sounds like a Christian, even if he isn’t quite ready to describe himself as one.

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For Brooks, this is a turn in both subtle and obvious ways: his point of view from early in his career was that of an affectionate theorist of social behavior, and that position depended upon the studied suppression of himself as a character. Although he came of age writing for The Weekly Standard, and has long held the amiable conservative’s chairs on “PBS NewsHour” and the Times opinion page, Brooks has never been an especially opinionated voice; in his best work, the details he notices seem to add up to a critique. “After four and a half years abroad, I returned to the United States with fresh eyes and was confronted by a series of peculiar juxtapositions,” he began his signature work, “Bobos in Paradise,” published in 2000. The Clinton era was in its evening, the meritocrats had the world by its lapels, and Brooks was a careful student of the manners of the end of history. “WASPy upscale suburbs were suddenly dotted with arty coffeehouses where people drank little European coffees and listened to alternative music. Meanwhile, the bohemian downtown neighborhoods were packed with multimillion-dollar lofts and those upscale gardening stores where you can buy a faux-authentic trowel for $35.99. Suddenly massive corporations like Microsoft and the Gap were on the scene citing Gandhi and Jack Kerouac in their advertisements. And the status rules seemed to be turned upside down. Hip lawyers were wearing those teeny tiny steel-framed glasses.”

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Pretty good! Brooks’s style goes down easy as always, and, though he might have overstated the significance of the Sharper Image catalogue, his main insight—that bourgeois and bohemian culture had collapsed into each other; that the powerful wanted to be cool and the cool wanted to be powerful—was dead on, not just as a document of a moment but as a lasting tendency in American life. You can trace what Brooks described as the Bobo ethos through early to mid-Silicon Valley era and the rise of Barack Obama. It comes pretty close to predicting the ascent in American culture of urban styles and values and the universalized taste of Airbnb. Maybe we haven’t changed so much in these past twenty years after all.

This perspective was, mercifully, gentle to the red and purple states, too. In the Bush years, Brooks sought to explain the conservative mood building in America’s outer suburbs by introducing the agreeable composite character of Patio Man, who wanted a society from the mid-twentieth century and grilling technologies from the twenty-second. “I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed the expression of a man who is about to buy a first-class barbecue grill,” Brooks wrote. “He walks into a Home Depot or Lowe’s and his eyes are glistening with a faraway zeal, like one of those old prophets gazing into the promised land.” The details mount: the “citrus-tarragon trout filets” that await on his deck, the male friends, dressed in Tommy Bahama shirts, who are “no more than 25 pounds overweight.” Brooks imagines Patio Man’s unease around immigrants, which helped to nudge him out into the far suburbs, but also the cohesion of the community he built there, one based on an idealized small town, an “old fashioned place out of modern materials,” whose political ideals are “responsibility, respectability, and order.” Brooks’s characterizations are broad, but his keel is even.

Brooks, who greeted the dawn of the Obama era with affecting admiration and enthusiasm, always wrote from Washington and in some way about the political divide, but he mostly worked hard to see the commonalities. These themes had enough staying power to become a slightly stale shtick: in the summer of 2017, Brooks wrote of taking a friend with a high-school education to a gourmet sandwich shop, where the list of offerings (capicollo, soppressata) made the friend’s “face freeze up” with anxiety. Clichés like this indicated the limits of Brooks’s work as a social critic: you can miss a lot if you mainly study the manners of élites. Patio Man may have been in conservative places for benign reasons—in church on Sundays for the sense of spiritual order, and watching Fox News for the valorization of the Navy SEALs—but the politics he encountered in those places were not benign. Focus on the contours of the lid and you risk missing the boiling pot over which it has been lowered.

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“The Second Mountain” is Brooks’s first book to be written in the Trump era—and although politics are not its subject, they supply some of its psychological atmosphere. As a conservative who had been publicly horrified by Trump’s ascendence, Brooks found himself isolated after the President had triumphed, a historical trauma that came not long after the personal one of his divorce. “My conservatism was no longer the prevailing conservatism, so I found myself intellectually and politically unattached, too,” he writes. “Few people confided in me.” The experience separates Brooks from his old allies. If, early in the Trump era, other conservatives were discovering the comforts of vice, he would explore the possibilities of virtue.

The book takes its title from a heuristic that Brooks developed to differentiate the people he wanted to be like from those he didn’t. “It’s gotten so I can recognize first- and second-mountain people,” he writes confidently. Those on their first mountain of life tend to focus on themselves: on establishing an identity, on managing their reputation, on status and reward. The second mountain is normally reached only after a period of suffering (“the valley”), and those who make it there come to focus on others. “The second mountain is about shedding the ego and losing the self,” about contribution rather than acquisition, egalitarianism rather than élitism, Brooks writes. The satisfaction of second-mountain people is deeper (it is a “bigger mountain”) and leads not to happiness but to joy. The more Brooks works to describe the joy of second-mountain people, the more frankly sexual it sounds. “It’s when the skin barrier between you and some other person or entity fades away and you feel fused together,” Brooks writes. In his introduction, Brooks quotes a Christian academic named Belden Lane, who wrote in a spiritual memoir, “Backpacking with the Saints,” “Whenever I plunge into the wilderness, my body and the environment move in and out of each other in an intimate pattern of exchange.” In the margin, I wrote, “Brooks, is this book about humping?”

Nothing so specific, it turns out. Brooks has chosen a dauntingly broad topic—more or less, what it might mean to live a conscious and virtuous life. As a committed generalist, his sources of authority are wide-ranging: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian, is mined for insight on the same page as the prosperity pastor T. D. Jakes, and on the following page George Eliot, and on the page after that “the management experts Chip and Dan Heath.” Brooks punctuates a chapter on finding your vocation with a long quotation by H. A. Dorfman, “one of the great baseball psychologists.” To manage this material, Brooks, as is his tendency, categorizes relentlessly. The United States, he writes, suffers from four “interrelated social crises”: loneliness, distrust, crises of meaning, and tribalism. “In my experience,” he writes, “a telos crisis comes in two forms, walking and sleeping.” Couples experience eight stages of intimacy. “There are four kinds of unkindness that drive couples apart.” Brooks, searching for a source of authority, mostly conjures a fog, thick enough that the durably geological image of the title sometimes disappears entirely. All the abstraction makes you pine for the solidity of the $35.99 faux-authentic trowel.

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