The Second Mountain

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).