David Brooks' Lecture on Patriotism, Nationalism, and the Idea of America

our event tonight inaugurates the Institute speaker series for fall 2018 on the theme of patriotism nationalism and the idea of America as I've said in earlier notices of the Institute's fall program Donald Trump's presidential campaign and present presidency have urged in various moments a revival of American patriotism and nationalism his clarion call has been America first in this attitude is indicated in a range of policies and proposals related to immigration trade international security and other matters Donald Trump's election and presidency concur with other revivals of nationalistic spirit worldwide and prompt thoughtful Americans to consider carefully the idea of America the role of the United States and the international community and the obligations of American citizens to other citizens and to humanity at large few are as well positioned as our guest speaker to keynote the Institute's fall program with this theme widely regarded as one of the most engaging insightful and nuanced political commentators of our time David Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times a regular political analyst on the PBS Newshour and NPR's all things considered and the author of a number of rich and important books the most recent being the road to character published in 2015 he worked at The Wall Street Journal for nine years and has written for The New Yorker Forbes The Washington Post and many other periodicals he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and he teaches at Yale University some of his many other accomplishments are listed in the program that we have made available for the event tonight in his writing and commentary David Brooks has often reflected on the meaning of America in moments he has advocated what I would call a chastened nationalism one that celebrates the virtues of America but also worries about new forms of American tribalism both domestic and international he commends an American patriotism that prizes national unity but appreciates diversity within the nation and in the larger world he articulates a vision of the American dream that and I quote his own words says no to tribe and yes to the open future no to the fear-driven homogeneity of the old continent and yes to the diverse hopefulness of the new one Brooks's proposals here are controversial but they are civilly expressed and they invite civil conversation and debate in that spirit of civility will you please join me in welcoming our speaker tonight David Brooks [Music] they asked me to speak about patriotism nationalism but I thought they meant Norwegian patriotism but I'll switch over and do that one it's great to be back here in Minnesota I'm a frequent visitor here not to Canada it's my first time to campus but I'm in the Twin Cities all the time I spent a lot of time around Minnesota politicians for some reason I'm when I got this my current job in the New York Times I was given a good piece of advice which is to interview three politicians every day which I spent a lot of time doing I can tell you they're all emotional freaks of one sort or another they have what I call emotional or logorrhea dementia which is talking so much they drive themselves insane but I for some reason fell in with the the Minnesota mafia knew Orville and Connie Freeman back in the day it on Frasier if you remember that I got to know Dave Durenberger who's still up at st. Thomas early in my life he told me become a moderate Republican that's the future so that worked and I'm a big admirer and fan of Walter Mondale of course and a childhood hero of mine on my wall in my bedroom was a poster of Hubert Humphreys presidential campaign and the slogan on top was some do change some only talk change and so early on I realized I only wanted to talk change I didn't and now my one of my favorite senators is Amy Klobuchar and and I've told the story so many times I'm really not sure if it's true but I was flying back from the Twin Cities to DC and I was bumped up to first class and she was also bumped up to first class and the story is to illustrate that some senators you're a little afraid of them and but with Klobuchar she's like a normal human being and so because she's a senator we were sitting like in to a and B and she went back to work the room back in the back of the plane to shake hands meet people and then she came up back into the first-class cabin and the flight attendant said I'm sorry ma'am you're not allowed to come back up here and she looked at me pleadingly and and I said I've never seen this woman before in my life and so she represents like usually senators they have somewhat ego that someone said they don't have heads they have containers for heads because they but she is one of the just a normal good human being so I will talk about patriotism and American nationalism and really the state of society but I want to do it from a somewhat deeper level than I normally do I'm at a college and people know me as a somewhat bookish somewhat overly cognitive person when I was seven I wrote a I read a book called Paddington the bear and I realized at that moment I wanted to become a writer and I remember in high school I wanted to date some woman named Bernice and she didn't want to date me she wanted to date some other guy and I remember thinking what is she thinking I write way better than that guy and so that was the Cerebral start to my life the admissions officers at Columbia Wesleyan and Brown decided I should go to the University of Chicago and so and as you know about Chicago it's it's a Baptist School where atheist professors teach Jewish students st. Thomas Aquinas and so it is a bookish school and I was a bookish person there I majored a double majored in history and celibacy I was there and I actually did I became a boxing manager there I had a friend whom we were that he was the kosher killer but we didn't actually just learn boxing we just read books about boxing and then he entered the Chicago Golden Gloves and because of a freakish a bunch of injuries he got to by all the way up to the semi-finals so he comes out swinging his arms over his head because he's never boxed in his life the other boxer shoots back into the corner and realizes 92 seconds in well this guy's his head down one under over uppercut ends this fight which is what happened but that was our Chicago Way of conquering the world and it was bookish and then I got a job even on TV it was a bookish show that I'm on I'm on show called the NewsHour with a guy named Mark shields we have a segment called shields and Brooks we should have called the Brooke Shields it would have been better and it is I think a more civil and cerebral kind of show compared to the other TV shows we have a certain demographic if a 93 year old lady comes up to me in the airport I know what she's going to say I don't watch your show but my mother loves it we're very big in the hospice community so and so even that's Bush bookish and then I I got a job writing a column for The New York Times I'm the conservative columnist of the New York Times which is a job I liken to being chief rabbi and Mecca not a lot of company there and so that's all just writing and reading books and as you get older your your tastes get a little more feminine I think a little more sensitive and so I'm the only American man who finished that book Eat Pray Love figure I read that book by b.i page hundred twenty-three I was actually lactating which was amazing and then I wrote a book about emotion called the social animal and my friends joke to me writing a book about emotion was like Gandhi writing a book about gluttony it's not the natural thing because I'm not i'm ashleigh emotional and then most recently I wrote a book about character or book called the road to character and I learned writing that books that writing a book on character doesn't give you good character and reading a book on character doesn't give you a good character but buying a book on character does give you good recommend that so all this is to say I'm here at a college campus it's a bookish place I'm a bookish person and yet I do think that our cognitive rational brain is the third most important aren't part of our consciousness and that the first is the desiring heart I read a story about a guy not long ago who bought a house and there was a bamboo stand growing by the driveway in the front yard and he didn't like bamboo and so he chopped it down he took an axe to the root system he dumped a bunch of plant poison he covered the hole over with three foot of gravel and six inches of cement and two years later Little Chute a bamboo coming up through this amendment and I think we have that in ourselves which shows our desire st. Agustin had a right we're not primarily cognitive creatures were primarily desiring creatures you become what you love there were orphanages in Nevada where they took kids who were two-and-a-half years old or zero to two and a half and they wanted to give them nutrition and they want to give them health care but they did not want to touch them because they don't get germs this is back in the 40s and the kids had a 38% mortality rate because it's a physical touch and affection that literally wires the fibers of the brain together the grant study this great longitudinal study done at Harvard found that men who had no love in their homes as children were three times more likely to suffer from mental illness 2.5 times more likely to suffer from dementia and they made 50% less money over the course of their careers so it is the nature of how much love is poured into us that determines how we do in life and what our heart primarily wants is fusion with another person is intimate connection the kind of connection that Louisa Bernier described in his book Captain Corelli's Mandolin in that book there's an old guy talking to his daughter about his late wife and he says to her love itself is what is left over when being in love is burned away and this is both an art and a fortunate accident your mother and I had it we had roots that grew towards each other underground and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found out that we were one tree and not two I think that's what we want to fuse with one another the second most important quality is the yearning soul now I don't ask you to believe in God or not believe in God that's really not my department but I do ask you to believe that there's a piece of you that has no shape size or color or weight but is of infinite value and dignity that rich and successful people don't have more of this and poor or less successful older people not more than younger people that slavery is wrong because it's an obliteration of another human being soul that rape is not just an attack on a bunch of physical molecules but it's an obliteration of another person's soul and so obscenity is anything that covers over another soul and what the soul mostly does the yearns for righteousness it learns yearns for goodness I've covered crimes I've covered wars I've met people who have committed genocide and killed hundreds of thousands of people I've never met anybody who didn't secretly want to be good prisoners want to be good if we feel that our life is not good and meaningful our life has a tendency to fall apart and so what Plato said what we do and we get when we're educated is we we naturally climb a ladder of young of Love's Plato said if you want to educate the young show them a beautiful face and they'll see the the beautiful face is a beautiful thing but there's a higher beauty which is a beautiful personality and when they see the higher beauty of a personality they'll see there's a higher beauty than that which is a beautiful society which is justice and when they see the beauty of that they'll realize there's even higher susp UT which is truth in the search for truth and when they see that they'll see there's the highest beauty from which nothing can be added and nothing can be taken which is the beauty of the whole universe and we all have that yearning to have higher loves and the highest thing the soul Yong's longs for I think is to be connected and pursuing some ideal often in connection with someone other people and so there's a passage from rabbi wolf Kelman who marched in Selma with Martin Luther King and he describes what it was like to march across the bridge with King he said we felt connected in song to the transcendental the ineffable we felt triumph and celebration we felt that things change for the good and nothing is concealed forever that was the warmest transcendental spiritual experience meaning and purpose and mission were beyond exact words meaning was the feeling the song the moment of overwhelming spiritual filmand and so to me everything I say follows from this seeing human beings not just as cognitive heads but as hearts and I souls and one of the things hearts and souls do and minds and one of the things we do collectively is we create cultures we create norms and a culture is a collective enterprise to solve the problems of the day and I'd like to walk us through three cultures up to where we are three cultural moments and the first is the culture between 1932 and 1968 that was a generation that had to face some big problems that oppression the world wars and they built a moral culture organized around big institutions and collectivity they built a culture around a phrase that you might say we're all in this together it was a very communal culture if you grew up on the Chicago Southside you probably went to a big employer the rme labor unions IBM if you grew up in a certain neighborhood you probably went to the Des Bisco plant where your father and your grandfather worked you probably joined the same big Union if you lived in a neighborhood there and here too in the Twin Cities you were part of a tight community if somebody asked you where are you from you didn't say I'm from Chicago you said I'm from 59th and Pulaski because the tight neighborhood defined your people and there were babysitting cooperatives there were coffee klatches there were barbecues it took an enormous amount of effort to be a loner in that community there was no TV and no air-conditioning so people were running into each other's houses the kids and they had a really tight community if he went into politics like much else you didn't to do it as an individual you did it as part of an organization in Chicago of course it was boss Daly's machine you worked for the Machine there was a guy named John Ferry who's who joined the machine boss Daley sent him to Springfield to the Illinois State Legislature he served for 20 years and then at the end boss Daley said I'll reward him I'll send up the US Congress in Washington just so he can say was a congressman and the reporters asked Ferry how you gonna vote when you get to Washington and ferry replied I will go to Washington to help represent Mayor Daley for 21 years I represented the mayor in the legislature and he was always right and so that's deference to Authority and this culture had a lot of good things sense of modesty sense of community sense of humility and a very clear awareness of what the American story was a coherent view of the nation in the 1950s there was a series of historians called the consensus historians and they saw America as this great coven ental project European European Puritans came to our shores in the 17th century and they saw massive abundance in front of them say they saw flocks of geese so big it took them 45 minutes to turn off to take off they would actually shoot cannons into the flocks of geese just to see if they could alter their direction and two thoughts came to them one that God's plans for Humanity could be completed on this continent and two they could get really rich in the process and so this was a country of moral materialism and this was a country in an eschatological country a country where the future was always more important than the present because it was a country being created it was an exodus story it was people who'd left the old world the tyranny had crossed the wilderness and were coming to build the Promised Land the Senators this settlers would go west and they'd passed by perfectly good farmland in Ohio because they were convinced something even better was further down the road there's a novel I'm sure you all know called Giants of the earth said I'm not too far from here and if you remember this novel there's a scene where the farmers taken around a visitor to his farm and he says this is our farmland this is the out the pastures are gonna be this is everything and the visitor says I don't see any barns or anything and the host says well we haven't built it yet but he's seeing the present from the vantage point of the future and that was a classically American thing and my the Puritans came up with the idea that we are in exodus country the founders Ben Franklin wanted to put Moses on the great sea of the United States because we are an exodus country my immigrant ancestors came here seeing this as an exodus country Martin Luther King spoke of the exodus more than he spoke of the New Testament and that was the story of America a covenant 'el nation the last best hope of Earth and there was a great national consensus about that there were weaknesses to that culture to some of the weaknesses were racism sexism anti-semitism emotional coldness really boring food and so people decide to chop up that culture people felt oppressed it was too conformist to organization man they couldn't express themselves in 1960 to a bunch of young people got together in Michigan and created the Port Huron Statement which says I want to be free to be myself I'm sick of this tight community we have too much community in this country and so there was a cultural shift the shift is symbolized to me in a great event of my childhood which was Super Bowl three in 1969 or seven-day two quarterbacks faced each other in this Super Bowl why the Baltimore Colts played the New York Jets and they both grew up within about five or ten miles of each other in western Pennsylvania but ten years apart one of them was a guy named Johnny Unitas typical 1950s guy crew-cut high-top shoes played football like a plumber a really good player but just workmen like and boring on my side of the field the New York Jets was a guy named Joe Namath he had long hair $5,000 fur coats posed for pantyhose ads he was a big swinger he wrote a memoir called I can't wait until tomorrow because I get better-looking every day honey and I just would not have written that memoir and so there was a shift in culture suddenly it was cool to be young not old expressive not reticent casual not formal a rebel not a conformist an individual and not institutional the idea was liberation liberation from the bonds of religion liberation from the bonds of class liberated to a sexual express yourself as you wanted and liberated by technology and was about individual liberation and it brought us a lot of great things when culture shift there's usually a region culture shift by a habit one social theorist called the ratchet hatchet pivot ratchet process the culture is a problem so they create a new culture and you ratchet up words you solve it after a while it runs out of steam it becomes more obsolete and so people hatchet it up and so the human ingenuity is important so people pave it over and then they solve the problem again and they ratchet up again and so we move upwards this way and so we got the civil rights movement out of this shift in culture we got feminism out of this shift in culture we got rock and roll out of the shift in culture I don't think we could have had the creative individualism of Silicon Valley that rebel culture that we hadn't shifted to a more individualistic culture so it worked for a while it also over time produced some bad things first a rise in narcissism yeah essence something that the answer to all your problems are inside yourself be true to yourself you do you do your own thing so there's a thing called the narcissism test where they ask people I'm gonna read you a bunch of statements does it apply to you and their statements like I find it easy to manipulate people because I'm so extraordinary and or somebody should write a book about me I like to look at my body and the media isn't narcissism score has risen thirty percent in the last twenty years there's a study done and with that cuz gonna desire for fame there's a study done where they ask people would you like to be president of Harvard or celebrities personal assistant Justin Bieber's personal assistant and by three to one people would rather be Justin Bieber's personal assistant than president of Harvard though to be fair I asked the president Harvard and she would rather be Justin Bieber and so we've had a run of about 60 years of individualism and it's had some when you run it when you take any true idea and to pursue it to its extreme it becomes false and we've taken individualism and pushed it pretty far and the first bad result is isolation in nineteen eighty twenty percent of Americans reported feeling lonely now twice as many do thirty five percent of people over forty five are chronically lonely in 1970 married couples entertained their friends on average of fifteen times a year now it's only eight times a year only eight percent of Americans report having significant conversations with their neighbors the fastest-growing political party is unaffiliated the fastest growing religious movement is unaffiliated nine million men have dropped out of the labor force suicide rates have been rising since nineteen ninety nine when your former guest Jonathan Hite told me the other day that over the last fifteen or twenty years teenage male suicide rates have gone up 25% and teenage female suicide rates have gone up 70% and suicide is a proxy for loneliness 45,000 people die of suicide every year 55,000 people die of opiate addiction every year an opioid addiction is just slow-motion suicide the second is an institutional crisis a crisis of trust if you ask people back in that we're all in this together era do you trust the institutions of your society 80% said yes now it's down to about 20% massive decline in trust in our institutions if you ask people in that era do you trust the people around your trustworthy about 60% said yeah my neighbors are trustworthy now if you ask that question 32% say yes including 19 percent of Millennials trust in institutions one away all at once in Vietnam and Watergate trust in each other has been going down steadily over the last few decades so the younger you get the more distrustful you are and as Robert Putnam of Harvard said it's not perceptions reality people are less trusting because people are worth are less trustworthy a third crisis is a crisis of amputation we truly divided ourselves and our meritocracy we treat ourselves as brains and talents and human resources to be harvested not on soul not as souls to be realized our brain our schools often treat our students as brains on a stick and ignore the rest and we go amputate that part of reality you leave a lot of people who are good at figure out how what to do but not good at finding what to do or why they're doing it and that leads to the fourth crisis which is a crisis a meaning a crisis of purpose and Tilos it's amazing to me that mental health problems are rising not falling that depression rates are rising not falling I see them my students they graduate from school they hit a crisis at 25 which is bound to happen and they crater and why does that happen Nietzsche says he was a why to live for candid or anyhow he was a why to live for can endure anyhow if you don't know why you're living then when the hard times come you crater and so these three or four crises have produced a further crisis psychologists say the hardest thing to cure is the patient's attempt to self cure and when you leave people naked and alone which the 60 years of individualism has done it's left us making it alone people do what their evolutionary roots tell them to do they revert to tribe and that's essentially what's happened over the last 15 years to our politics we have what we call negative polarization do you like your own party not particularly do you hate the other party totally and so what we have is a tribal mentality now tribalism is community for narcissists tribalism is not built on mutual affection it's built on mutual distrust and so it's a certain sort of mentality it's us versus them friend enemy distinction life is conflict politics is war society is tribal build walls erect barriers believe conspiracies make accusations I spent some time not long ago with Steve Bannon and I found it fascinating it was like being with Trotsky in 1905 and he has like a hundred year plan he doesn't believe in diversity he has thinks Donald Trump was only a piece of his plan he's gonna take over this institution that institution he's either crazy or genius I don't know I'm hoping before the first one but I don't know but he does understand that this kind of tribalism is on the mark she's got to send them international allies and he does understand the current moment we're in this one of those hatchet moments like 1848 1905 1932 1968 and if you had to bet which way society would go right now you'd say we once we're in a culture that says we're all in this together then we shifted into a culture that says I'm free to be myself the individualistic culture and based on current trends you'd have to say that our coming future is revert to tribe I was a foreign correspondent 1950s 1950s I wasn't poor and then believe me in the 1990s and I covered a lot of good news I covered the fall of Soviet Union the fall of the Berlin Wall reunification of Germany Mandela coming out of prison South Africa the Onslow peace process it was nothing but good news people coming together the triumph of the liberal democratic order the last thing I covered was the Yugoslav civil war I didn't really pay much attention to it because he seems so small compared to everything else I covered in retrospect that was the most important event I covered because the last 25 years have been the rise of ethnic nationalism the rise of tribalism the rise of strong and politics all around the world and the societies figuring out how do we find a new equilibrium where we can actually believe in each other and reverting to to nationalism and so to me we're at one of these pivot points in history you know when George HW Bush crushed the Yale campus in 1941 he heard about Pearl Harbor and he walked across the recruiting station and listed he had a sense of faith in America today we don't have as anything as dramatic as Pearl Harbor but when 55,000 people die every year of opioids that seems to me a silent Pearl Harbor when classes fight each other and grow further apart that seems like a silent Pearl Harbor when 45,000 people kill themselves every year it seems like a silent Pearl Harbor and it seems like a moment to do something more than what we normally do like this Institute to create a sense of cohesion and national purpose and what's been lost in the atomization of our society is a sense of a national story I go around to the college where I teach in other colleges and I ask young people about the national story I tell them my story I tell them the story my grandfather told to me this Exodus story we are the we won the lottery of life to be born here because this is the greatest nation history the earth and in my generation about 70 percent believe that that America is the greatest land on earth among the current college student generation 22% believe that and so there's been this traffic will decline and that's in part because I tell them the story of Exodus we left depression cross the womanís came to build the Promised Land and they look at me and they say you are crazy that's the story rich white man tell and there's some truth to what they're saying and they just don't believe my story and they don't believe the inherited story it just doesn't seem real to them and at some point you have to respect that that's what they believe I think the educational system whoever decided we should stop teaching American history in high schools did a very effective job but it's still you have to accept the fact okay so what story can we tell together what is our news story that we can all believe in so I've spent a lot of time studying when the societies turn around how do you take a society that's spinning out of control in an individualistic way how do they come back together and there are two examples of this in history I used to say well it really helped you know Wars the classic case where countries come back together and I used to say well it'd be nice if we got invaded by Canada but now that might actually happen so I don't say that it's happened twice than my knowledge I only know a small part of the world it happened in England between 1810 and 1848 and happened in this country between 1890 and 1910 in 1890 in this country we had a big economic transition to industrialization we had a wave of immigration we had political corruption we had a lot of the same problems and what happened first there was a religious revival the social gospel movement which was very collective replaced the social Darwinist movement which was very individualistic second we had a Civic revival within five years a whole burst of institutions came into being to bind the communities together the Boys and Girls Scouts the boys in those clubs the n-double-a-cp the labor unions the settlement house movement the environmental movement the temperance movement they all bound communities together and then eventually after those two things happened there was a political movement the progressives and America really did recover and came back together and we had the American century the 20th century today I don't know if we're seeing a religious revival I lived ten bucks from the US Capitol I guarantee you we're not seeing a political revival but I do think we are seeing a Civic revival there's a sentence at the end of one of Walker Percy's novels there's only one thing I can do listen to people see how they stick themselves into the world and hand them along and that sentence that see how they stick themselves into the world that was frayed frankly something people in the individualistic era were not good at planting themselves down sticking themselves into the world so they're committed and planted and settled my wife and I travel around the country and what we find everywhere we go is people who have stuck themselves down we're part of a community in DC called a okay it's a couple in who could just live in home in DC they had a kid who went to the public schools and he had a friend named James who didn't have a place to really live and he his mom had some health and other issues and so they said James can stay with us and then that kid had a friend and that kid had a friend and when I first went to their house about four or five years ago there were 15 or 20 mattresses on the floor we went to their home at Thursday night there were 26 kids around the table I walk in there I'm a reticent and I might as well have been born in the Midwest I'm not a real physical for a huggie guy kind of guy I walk in to shake like one of the kids hands he says we don't shake hands here we hug here and so every Thursday night we gather we go around the table we say what we're grateful for we say what we're worried about kids talk about their depression their health issues their victories and it is a as tight a community as you can possibly imagine I grow my there and she said that's the warmest place I've ever been we brought a friend named Bill Milliken who's been doing youth work for 50 years he said you know people often ask him what programs turnaround lives he said I've been doing this all this time I've never seen a program turnaround the life it's only relationships that turnaround lives and they're reen itting an extended family at that home there's a woman we know named Sarah Hammond jur who she was from the Midwest she when she was a kid her dad reported on the church pastor for embezzling money instead of getting rid of the pastor they they ostracized her whole family so she spent eight years ostracized as a kid alone she went to Johns Hopkins she noticed a lot of kids in the streets of Baltimore ostracized and alone she created an organization called threat where they take the lowest performing kids in Baltimore schools and they put they have four volunteers where they're really their parents and four more their grandparents in a circle more to help them so each kid is suddenly surrounded by a web of relationships and these people are surrounded with each other whenever the kids need a volunteer their phones get next to each other and that contact point gets recorded on her app which he calls the Fitbit of social relationship she can tell when there's been a touch when there's been three hours between a touch she's created a community so what these two organizations are doing is taking the excesses of the of the Age of individualism the way we're isolated from one another and they're building rebuilding community at the bottom level at the heart and the soul level and in my view before we can have Civic civil conversations with each other we've got to have some level trust down at the foundations I hang around politicians all day and they do not understand the kind of problem we have there you some decades are defined by a foreign invasion some by a financial crisis in other words their problems of the market or their problems of the state and we take but those two institutions rest on a nest of more fundamental level substrate and that substrate is human relationship social trust basic decency to one another and our problems these days are down in the foundation and people have to deal with the problems down at the foundations not at the level of law not at the level of market and frankly not at the national level there's a phrase in the book of Job and the sparks fly upward and that's house the solution is going to have to come at the local level community by community as the sparks fly apart and the problem with relationships is that they don't scale relationships are built slowly every day one by one but you have enough of these people around the country what they're doing is they're creating a new culture not a culture of individualism that says it's all about me not a culture of collectivism where the individual is lost in the collective but a culture of personalism a culture that says each individual human being is a person of infinite depth but when you're gonna get down to that deep level of each person what you find is a longing for relationship or a longing for relationship with each other and along with the relationship with the good and that is the heart and soul and so what I find in these people these community builders all around the country is is desire to go deep into themselves and to go deeply vulnerable with each other they have them they have a whole culture which is just trying to come into being they are morally motivated they don't are not primarily interested by money status and power they want connection they want to feel right with the world they're deeply relational they want to get intimate with each other they've invented technologies of intimacy to get intimate with each other there is an organization called becoming a man in Chicago where they take gang members on the west side they bring them into a thing called the checkup and each kid has to say has to check in and say how they're doing spiritually emotionally intellectually and physically and if the kid is not completely open the other gang members get all over them remember these are kids who were gang members that are armored up but they have to have intimacy there's radical mutuality there's a completely rejection of the idea that some of us are halves and somewhat er have-nots the ethos here's we're all broken we're all walking this together there's vocational certitude I've met thousands of these people now building community all around the country and the one thing they all say without exception is I'm gonna die doing this they have no doubts that this is why they were put on this earth to build this community and to me we spend all our time debating Trump with the electrum poor not but to me that's not where the action is that action is happening on the local level all around the culture a new sort of ethos is being built a renegotiation power a knitting together of institutions a creating of thick institutions some institutions are thick and some are thin some you sort of work at a place you go to college and you sort of pass through and you don't know they don't really affect you you you went to the college you needed a degree you got out of it fine you get your degree but some institutions are really thick they transform who you are if you're a marine a Morehouse man a Juilliard pianist and these thick institutions have a clear purpose they know why they're there what exactly transformation they're trying to do they have a cramp physical location they involve face-to-face communication usually over a dinner plate at the table there's always music involved because if there's if you've danced with somebody it's hard to stay distant from them there's a sacred origin story a moment when they nearly failed they often have overnights so they can see each other after dinner and before they wait before they have breakfast before they put on their makeup there's a sacred guidebook an object passed along my college was a thick institution have changed me forever I go to a lot of colleges that are thick institutions swanee University Kenyon College I think this is a thick institution they change wherever you are because they're not afraid to be themselves to stand out and when I look at these community builders I see them not as people only reweaving the fabric of society I see them creating a cultural revolution cultures change when people on the margins of society find a superior way to live and other people want to follow them and when I see these people working these local organizations they've got a better way to live and they point to a new American story it's not the exodus story it's not building the Promised Land it's a redemption story it's a story that we are part of a great experiment it's still a very young experiment we've screwed it up big time but it can come back the great piece of literature of the redemption narrative is Lincoln's second inaugural when he delivered it he knew the North was gonna win the Civil War so it could have been a moment of triumph we were right you were wrong we won you lost it was the exact opposite the key words in that story are us all an hour there are collective words he didn't say slavery was a southern institution he said it's an American institution and the wages of this sin correctly fall on all of us and so it's a great rebinding around the story of a true failure and redemption and so to me what interests me about these community builders and about that kind of story it's a fusion story it's about transcendence it's about when one person comes together with somebody completely opposite and they fuse in this age of individualism we spent a lot of time talking about happiness we've got happiness research happiness books when we use the word happiness it seems to me we're actually talking about two different things the first is individual happiness and that kind of individual happiness flows out of a personal enlargement you feel happy when you win some victory you get a promotion you graduate you make progress toward your goals your team wins a football game and that's the enlargement of self but there's a different kind of happiness which is about the erasure of self it's when you fall into and fuse with another person and when you think about that kind of happiness we don't really call it happiness we call it joy and joy is different than happiness and I think we all understand that I think we all understand the joy is better than happiness because it involves something emotional where you're fusing with another person and something spiritual there's something spiritual about joy and so I spend a lot of time thinking about joy and collecting examples and descriptions of joy and they're like different levels of it there's like spiritual joy or her physical joy I was talking to some of the students today and I mentioned to them this quote from the novel is ad Smith and she is a good description of what physical for joy what collective effervescence feels like she's in London in 1999 and she's at a nightclub she's lost her friends she was looking for a handbag when suddenly the hip-hop artist q-tip can be heard rapping over the sound system and she writes a real thin man with enormous eyes reached across a sea of bodies for my hand he kept asking me the same thing over and over you feel in it I was my ridiculous heels were killing me I was terrified I might die yet I felt simultaneously overwhelmed with the light that can I kick it should happen to be playing in this moment of history on this sound system and was now morphing into smells like teen spirit I took the man's hand the top of my head flew away we danced and danced we gave ourselves over to joy that's losing yourself in the moment the second is what you might call emotional joy the kind of joy you feel when your heart is really bonded with another person one of my favorite descriptions - that's from a heroine of mine named Dorothy day she was about to give birth when she realized that all the accounts of birth she'd ever read were written by guys so 40 minutes after literally giving birth she sat down and wrote a beautiful essay what it felt like and a lot of it is violent to the pain of it this was back in them like 1920s or so but then her essay finishes with this passage if I had written the greatest book composed the greatest symphony or carved the most exquisite figure I could not have felt the more exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms no human creature could receive or contain so vast a flood of love and joy as I felt after the birth of my child with this came in need to worship and to adore try and send a moment of fusion with the new daughter another layer is what you might call spiritual joy connection with the natural world the transcendent order I have a friend who's a poet named Chris Wyman and Chris is the kind of guy who in his early adulthood he lived in a lot of places a lot of odd places and you ask him why do you live in Buffalo he'd say well there's a girl there and then he said well watch you live in Prague oh there was a girl there and so he just chased girls around through his 20s not a bad way to spend your 20s but he was in Prague one day and he was working working on his poetry in the kitchen table and suddenly a falcon landed on the windowsill and he was transfixed by this Falcon it was just like three feet from him didn't notice him yet it was just looking scanning the street and Wyman called in to his girlfriend come here come here and she was in the shower so she runs out dripping wet and naked and they stare looking at this bird and then the bird turns his head and locks eyes with women and they're all just frozen and his girlfriend says wish for something like take advantage of this moment and wimonrat later wrote a poem about it which includes this stanza and for a long moment I'm still in I wished and I wish and I wished that the moment would not end and just like that it vanished and sometime the difference about joy is happiness we create but joy were seized by it's something that sweeps over us and to me the highest form of joy is not even spiritual joy its moral joy and this is a joy of people and I bet you met them I meet them like once for frequently these days who for them joy is not an experience it's an outlook it's the way they see the world they radiate goodness they care about you they don't care about themselves they've moved I think of this from Ptolemy to Copernicus telling me the universe is all revolving around us Copernicus were revolving around others and they really live a life that's where they've given themselves over to selfless service and when they do then they forget the needs and desires of the ego they really become joyous I was with the Dalai Lama a few months ago or years ago now and I was sitting next to him and he just radiated joy he lasts for no apparent reason like he's just bursts out laughing for no reason and I wanted to be polite so I started laughing and then he laughed and I laughed he just radiates joy he's a celebrity I was up in Frederick Maryland with some ladies who teach immigrants English and how to read they just were patient and good and gentle and they just radiated that joy and it's because they're really not thinking about themselves at all they're not asking am I happy they're just giving and that is how community gets thickened and to me the country is now in a valley in one of these Hatchett moments where we're lost in our own self conceptions and our hostilities and our resentments but I have total faith in human nature to be ingenious and for people to come together and these people I think are leading a cultural revolution if we would only pay attention to them and learn from them that will really to renegotiation of power and a recumbit to gether of people and a redemption of nation one of the things I'll end on is that the country can seem so divided but there have been other times in division where people became aware of the things that actually unite us and how these things stretch back in history for hundreds and hundreds of years I'm gonna read a letter a part of a letter that I'm sure many of you know but I like reading it it was written on July 14th 1861 on the day of the First Battle of Bull Run which is one of the early in the Civil War just outside of DC some of you probably know this letter it was written by a guy named Sullivan Ballou who was an officer from Rhode Island and he had lost his parents when he was young and he knew what it was like to grow up in an orphanage so he writes to his wife Sarah and he said I really do not want to die about but and he wrote to you her my love for you is deathless it seems to bind me to you with mighty cables that nothing but omnipotence can break yet my love of country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistible on with all these chains to the battlefield he felt a great indebtedness to the past I know how strongly American civilization now leans upon the triumph of the government and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and suffering of the revolution and I am willing perfectly willing to lay down all my Joy's in this life to help maintain this government and to pay that debt now of course he then did die the next day in the battle but he illustrates to us the things that we forget in moments of normalcy that that chord brought all our ancestors here is still a binding chord that can be reinflates if the connections of community and heart and soul are bound together thank you very much you

Channel: St. Olaf College

Views: 11,290

Keywords: St. Olaf, College, Institute, Freedom and Community, Politics, Lecture, New York Times, Northfield, Minnesota

Id: w2mduh-8pbA

Length: 53min 56sec (3236 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 27 2018