Summary

"Moral Ecologies," the title of Chapter 1 within Part I, called “The Two Mountains,” opens by describing Brooks’s interactions with his colleague and mentor, Jim Lehrer, founder of the PBS NewsHour, who signaled professional approval or disapproval with light upturns or downturns of his mouth. In this “subtle and wordless” way, Brooks was trained by a certain moral ecology - as we all are and always have been, from classical Greece to 1950s Chicago (3,4). But, Brooks explains, “over time, the ecology [can] become less relevant to new problems,” resulting in what Ruth Defries called, “ratchet, hatchet, pivot; ratchet” patterns, where “members of the counterculture take a hatchet” to the ecology, bringing change (7,8). For Brooks’s generation, that meant replacing the moral ecology of duty and convention with one of individualism and self-actualization, focused on creating your own meaning in life with achievements and...