David Brooks strives for the second mountain

I want to be there when everyone suddenly understands what it has all been for. All the religions of the world are built on this longing, and I am a believer.

Western society, then, doesn’t need another self-help manual. Nor a new Republic-cum-Macbeth rendering of veiled reality. People want to know if human suffering serves a higher purpose. Where is the Nietzschean why to ameliorate the terrifying how of genuine faith? Perhaps having a reason for why the leap is so absurd could make the transition to the second mountain less troublesome.

Alas, the dialectal quest for a basis to put heart before head and damn the consequences, what is alluded to today as spiritual but not religious, has arrived at a stalemate, in the form of acute ideological polarization.

The priestly class of global progressives, poor players who strut and fret upon the political and cultural stage, provides no hope for Ivan and other believers. Beholden to a materialism that is ineluctably contemptuous of a loving Creator, it would be heresy to fashion a theodicy. Of course, it is a plausible project for religious intellectuals. But most of these are either exhausted — man is done wrestling with God — or too consumed by the first mountain culture wars to contemplate an ironic interpretation of the activist sound and fury. Rather than see escalating illiberalism within the liberal order as goading those it persecutes, overly cognitive types on the Christian right, such as Sohrab Ahmari, double-down with a proposed return to theocracy.

Brooks is a theological Goldilocks, a well-educated centrist of good humour who doesn’t allow God-talk to crowd out his emotional awareness of the underlying game. He fits the bill when it comes to the cosmic promise of Western civilisation: a universal what’s-it-all-been-for story concerning our shared soul — no doubt a satire — that can redeem history once and for all.

As rewarding as The Second Mountain is, it therefore represents a missed opportunity.

Trouble is, you get the sense our hour upon the stage is almost up.