The Pursuit of Happiness with Jeffrey Rosen

Even my name is Alan Price and I'm the director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum and it's great to have you here on behalf of all my colleagues at the library and the Foundation. I'm delighted to welcome everyone who's watching. tonight's show online, as well as those of you who braved traffic to be with us in person today. If you have any suggestions or comments, we have changed the rooms and this was an intentional experiment to have a more intimate conversation about this particular book, so if you have comments on this and want to pass them on to our fabulous Liz Murphy, who is our forum producer , let them know because a lot of times you'll see us at Smith Hall, but it's not the kind of intimate space. to have this conversation, so I thought this is the right place for it.

I would like to acknowledge the generous support of our lead sponsors of the Kennedy Library Forums, Bank of America, the LEL Institute, and CVS Health, as well as the Council for Mass Culture. and our media sponsor, the Boston Globe, welcome, don't worry. I would also like to start with a land acknowledgment to recognize that the land we stand and sit on was once managed by indigenous people, while a land acknowledgment is not enough. On its own, it is an important way to promote Indigenous visibility and serves as a reminder that we are on stolen and colonized Indigenous lands, and I invite you all to contemplate how to better support Indigenous communities and learn how to honor and care for communities natives. land that each of us inhabits I would like to thank you in advance for taking a moment to silence or turn off your cell phones, we have already heard several ringing and that interrupts the broadcast and the conversation that we look forward to. solid Q&A period tonight and you'll see full on-screen instructions for emailing your questions or comments on our YouTube page during the show and when the Q&A begins, we'll invite those of you who join us in person to continue. to the microphones in the hallways to ask your questions Jeffrey Rosen has kindly agreed to sign copies of his book after tonight's program, our bookstore has copies available if you are interested as we approach the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

I'm so glad to have this opportunity to reflect on what the

pursuit

of

happiness

meant to the founders of our nation and what that meant to the founding of our democracy with our distinguished guest tonight. Now I am delighted to welcome Jeffrey Rosen to the library tonight. He is president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, where he hosts We the People, a weekly podcast on constitutional debate. He is also a law professor at George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor at the Atlantic. He is the author of seven previous books. including the New York Times bestselling conversations with RBG Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg about life, love, freedom, and the law.

His essays and commentaries have appeared in the New York Times Magazine on NPR the New Republic, where he was Legal Affairs Editor, and in the New Yorker, where he has been an editor. His new book is The Pursuit of Happiness How Classic Writers About virtue inspired the lives of the founders and defined America and I have to congratulate them on an extraordinary book. It has been many years since I read Plato's phedis, and at the time, perhaps I was too young to fully understand how to connect the dots between Plato and the ideals of the nation's founders.

Jeffrey connects those dots with illustrative simplicity and many of you in the audience are familiar with this quote. by President Kenned the ancient Greek definition of

happiness

was the full use of one's powers in line with excellence Jeffrey Rosen as President Kennedy reminds us that if we are to pursue happiness we must spend some time reflecting on the definition of happiness, it is also It is a pleasure to welcome Mary Sarah Builder back to the library this afternoon. She is the founding professor of law at Boston College Law School, where she teaches in the areas of Property Trusts and Estates and American Legal and Constitutional History.

Author of three books, including most recently, The Feminine Genius Eliza Harriet and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution received the 2016 Bankof Prize for American History and Diplomacy for her book Madison's Hand Revisiting the Constitutional Convention Author of numerous articles and frequent, free speaker and commentator. She also served as Steven Spielberg's legal history consultant on Amistad. Please join me in welcoming our special guests. A special thank you to any of you who are members. If you are online and want to join as a member, you can find the link at the link. website so welcome tonight and thank you all for coming and thank you Jeff for joining us tonight to talk about this absolutely fantastic book.

I enjoyed every moment of reading it and I really encourage people to buy it and what I'm really saying is that I have to. I really love it and for the audience it is exceptionally readable. People might think that because it says classic writers and founders, it wouldn't be a super interesting Jolly book. But it is a super interesting book. You can read one chapter each. night, so I think according to one of the things that we're going to talk about, having a routine and I learned a lot from reading the book and it was actually one of those tasks that I really enjoyed and maybe You can start tonight by telling us a little bit about the book and then we'll talk from there.

Well, wonderful. Well, first of all, it's great to be here in Boston, uh, with you, Mary, I just admired her and learned. of your work and your amazing book The Hand of Madison is simply definitive, so everyone should check it out too and Alan, what a great quote from President Kennedy that sums up the classic definition of the

pursuit

of happiness, the full use of your talents of agreement with excellence and that meant that for the classical philosophers of iCal and for the founders happiness was not feeling good but being good, it was not the pursuit of pleasure but the pursuit of virtue and the pursuit of virtue, as the president said Kennedy, it has to do with yourself. -mastery of self-reliance, improvement of your character so that you can make the best use of your talents in accordance with excellence.

The definition comes most famously from Aristotle in Nicomaki and Ethics, where he defines happiness as an activity of the soul and that it conforms to virtue or Excellence, but because excellence and virtue do not define themselves, they really you need that idea that President Kennedy captured of developing your talents, cultivating your faculties to use Jefferson's words and that brings us to the fact that classical people thought that we had certain faculties of reason. in the head passion in the heart desire in the stomach and Pythagoras who turns out to be the great founder of moral philosophy, in addition to inventing the triangle and the harmonic system, it was he who had the idea that we should use our powers of reason to moderate or dominate our passions and irrational emotions so that we achieve the tranquility and self-control that defines happiness quickly about how I was given this incredible project that changed my life, changed my understanding of happiness and how to be a good person and a good citizen and it was just a series of unusual synchronicities what led me to it was during Co I saw that Benjamin Franklin, whom I knew, had made a list of 13 virtues to achieve moral perfection.

I knew about this system of Franklin's 13 virtues because I practiced it a couple of years ago on the recommendation of a local rabbi who recommended that a friend and I try the Hebrew version. It was translated into Hebrew in the 18th century and a friend and I tried it and every night you have to make a list of the virtues Temperance Prudence uh order and when you have fallen short you put a mark x we ​​tried it for a while it is an incredibly depressing system because there are all these brands xar and Franklin had the exact same experience he tried it for a while he had self-accounting tool.

Well, I knew the Franklin system, but I realized during Co that he chose it as his motto. a quote that said without virtue there can be no happiness and it was from this book by Cicero that I had never heard of called the Tusculan Disputes then a few weeks later I was at the Bor Head Inn in Charlottesville, Virginia, and on the wall is This on the UVA campus was a list of 12 virtues that Jefferson had made for his granddaughters and they looked almost exactly like Franklin's virtues Temperance Prudence uh Jefferson left out Chastity quite appropriately given his embarrassing uh records there, but so did Jefferson and this was the decisive factor that he chose as his motto a passage that he would send to anyone who asked him the meaning of Happiness when he was old and it was from Cicero and it was a little longer, it said he who has achieved a Tranquility of Soul nor uh elated by desire and exaltation or despondent by undoing depression he is the wise man we are looking for he is the calm man I thought I had to read this cisero because it was very important to Franklin and Jefferson what else to read then I found the reading Thomas Jefferson's list and when he was older and people knew that his kids were going to law school and they said what should we read to be an educated person, he would send out this reading list.

It's incredibly rigorous. You have to get up before dawn. You have to read political philosophy and government in the morning, they allow you some history in the middle of the afternoon, literature in the evening, about 12 hours a day of reading, and then you start again the next day, but in the section on ethics or nature. religion I saw the sister book along with other moral philosophy books that I had never read before Epicus Marcus Aurelius Sia and some Enlightenment thinkers like Lord Bowling Brook and Hume and Lord CES um back in Boston uh I went to university here in the 80s um and when I had the most wonderful teachers at Harvard, I studied puritan theology with history by Sack Van Burkovich, well, I also laughed a little when I read about the pantheology, you know, saki, oh, blessed be his memory, just this wonderful teacher transformer. of puritanism I will share my story with him so I am studying puritan with puritanism with the great scholar of our time and I am not totally convinced of puritan theology because puritan theology says that you are randomly predestined at birth by God to Hell or heaven, nothing Whatever you do during your life, no amount of good works or even faith can determine your salvation, but you can also try to be a good person because good works follow, they do not precede justification, so if you act well, it could be Reassuring evidence that maybe you've been chosen for the right place, but you can count on it and this just wasn't enough for me, plus I'm Jewish so I was longing for the example of how you lead a good life and there was a moment in class where the one Sack Van Berkovich said he was reading the part where Jesus tells his disciples to be perfect even when they know God is perfect and Professor Burkovich said, wouldn't that be?

I shouldn't say. This is okay, shouldn't we try to be as perfect as Jesus, he said and it was this radical challenge in a secular age and I thought well, why should we achieve perfection or how do you achieve a purpose? -Life is driven by reason and reflection, not by blind faith or religious authority, and what I didn't realize was because, despite this wonderful education with these wonderful teachers, these books of classical moral philosophy ended from leaving the curriculum when I was in college. and what is amazing is that this was fundamental to the core curriculum, not only of the undergraduates and the large universities that I had the privilege of attending, but also of the high school law students, it was in McGuffy's readers taught it to Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglas.

On the frontier, this is central to what it meant to be an educated person or just go to school for most of American history and it just disappeared from the curriculum, so I'll end by saying that I feel that way. It's just that I'm going back to Boston. It's weird that when I was in college I was reading all this Pur in Theology stuff and I thought I'd love to write a book called Good and Evil and update what a moral framework is, that was the title, but I had nothing to say. at that time because I didn't know what the update was and I found out that there is no need to update it because the wisdom was there waiting to be rediscovered, so we will unzip everything.

So let's start with I mean, I love this idea that during Co, when other peopleThey were baking bread or taking care of their children, you decided that I checked, I checked it somewhere, I went to the library. I was inspired to see the life of Plutarch. It's very fine print, you read a lot of these types of books, so can you tell us a little about that? Because one of the things that's very interesting about this book and why it's a good read is Um, you decided to take notes by writing sonnets and there's a sonnet that Jeff wrote for each of the chapters, um and that's not the way that everyone would decide to read these books, so tell us a little about that. look, the whole project was extremely strange, admit I don't know where it came from, it was Co, we had free time, I think he was definitely the one who inspired me to get up before dawn, which I hadn't done and haven't done. this type of deep reading since university.

I had just kicked the habit. Because, um, but there's something about the discipline of getting up, reading, watching the sunrise and the sunrise is the most beautiful thing imaginable, it's so beautiful and every day you can look forward to reading the suns and then I I was moved to Simply summarize the wisdom in some kind of classical symmetrical harmonious form because a friend of mine who runs the World Shakespeare Theater in San Diego posted a video on YouTube about how to write a Shakespeare sonnet and you know meter is easy, but then en It was supposed to have a Volta or turn in third position.

I thought it was like I was moved to do it anyway, but then I found out that all kinds of people who read this stuff for a long time were also moved. write sonnets Phyllis Wheatley the great black poet Alexander Hamilton Merc Otis Warren but John Quincy Adams would wake up in the White House read Cicero in the original, write sonnets that are really good and then watch the sunrise and walk through the poica, so there something in the air about that, but the really transformative thing and this is the bottom line, if I can, if I can, if I can share it, I'm surprised that all the books were free and online, it's just my parents. that edition of plutar that was in his library and in fact I have it.

I never read it as a kid, it's long and like you say, the type is small now Addison's original translation, there are these Deli editions of out of print books for $1.99, whatever you want. I don't want anyone's complete works and when I was a kid I went to the Library of Congress with my mom and I was amazed to think that all the books in the world were in that beautiful building, the Thomas Jefferson building. Rebecca nods. I think it's the most beautiful building in DC and uh, but now I could read all the stuff sitting on my couch and all I needed was the self-discipline to read it and I think it was just the habit of getting up and having to do my reading before being allowed to browse, that did it so I created a rule for myself, you know, I woke up and of course I was tempted to browse or check email and I wasn't allowed to do that until I finished reading and that daily habit just changed everything and now I've gotten into the habit of reading in the morning and I'm writing another book and I'm reading and writing sonnets and actually writing songs now because you just put aside the morning time and it's like a creative time in the one you're not allowed to navigate and that's just kind of a Life Hack, but this was also the core of Pythagorean wisdom and it also comes from Franklin that virtue is about habits just daily habits it's about daily practice, all We fell short of course, but by trying daily you can become a little more perfect, yes, I mean, I have to say that if I had been really smart, I would have written a sonnet to read to him.

After reading the book, you know like I do. I had a great conversation with Jeff Goldberg from the Atlantic, we launched the book in Philadelphia and he asked GPT to write Sons sounded like me and they are much better than mine and I'm out of the sonnet business Chad gbt I actually really enjoyed the sonnets, um and it's the only book I know about the founders that includes poetry written by the author, so it's definitely an award-winning aspect of the book itself, you may be one of the things that I really loved at the beginning of the book, uh, and I also found it a little intimidating this sense of how many of them had these kinds of efforts to discipline or order their day and, um, and you talked a little bit about how you've managed to keep it.

In fact, I have to say I found it a bit depressing. I thought I could only do it for a day or two and how long could you? Maybe you can tell it to the audience because it's super interesting. Franklin tries. It occurs to everyone. this idea that they break up their day and make this list and aim and then, you know, how many of them do you think did it for a long time? Well, Adams and Jefferson are doing it until the end of their lives, I mean. that's the most beautiful thing despite everything, I mean, they fought in the revolution, they fell in the bloodiest political battle ever, they reconcile through Abigail and what they want to do with their writing, they talk about the books they're reading and it's so exciting.

Adams is very excited to learn that Pythagoras could have traveled to the East and read the Hindu lodes and then Adams with This brilliant, eclectic, synthetic impulse synthesizes the teachings of the Eastern and Western wisdom traditions into the idea of ​​loving God and all His creatures rejoice. in all things, which sounds a lot like Gandhi, to renounce and enjoy, and Adams notes the connection between the Gita and ancient wisdom in the same way that Emerson would later and was so influenced by the Bhagavad Gita, so I think which the reason why there is still and Jefferson diligently responds to almost every letter he receives and writes down the number of letters he has answered and Adam says oh you're licking me I'm only done you know a quarter of that but they're the youthful habits they had.

They fell short of their ideals in many ways, but they continued reading and writing to the end. I love that letter from Jefferson, that letter from Jefferson that I teach my students, we all decide if we would like to have done Jefferson's law school reading version or our own. and in that letter, Jefferson says that in the summer it's really great because you have extra time and then he says that you can read even more instead of thinking that most normal people would go out and enjoy the sun instead, but this is the ancient teaching um brandise who another was a jeffersonian and a great classicist was so excited to know that the greek word for leisure is unemployment or skoli said happy land because for brandise leisure is a time not so you can work less but more working on farming your powers of reason of deep reading and writing so that you can be your best self to use the modern phrase and there is something else, the examples are truly inspiring.

I read Jefferson and also Brandise and Somehow you want to be with them, yeah, so one of the things I loved about this book was that you take this set of habits that have order, have the desire to be better people and one of the things. What I think is very provocative about the book is that you compare it to the way people now want to practice mindfulness or have therapists, so maybe you can talk a little bit about what attracted you to all these guys' brains. . to wish for some understanding of the good life, well, their parents and their youthful reading are hitting them over the head.

I mean, think about John qu Quincy Adams, who to me is the most virtuous of the group, but he's also punishing himself. What I thought about most was that having a Jewish mother could be a challenge, imagine having a Puritan mother and Abigail is always on his tail, like you have to use your powers of reason to tame your irrational passions. There are women on the streets of Paris. You know you have that temptation lurks in every corner She loves to quote the proverb He who is slow to anger is greater than he who has conquered a villain and Joh tells her the same thing and exhorts her to read Cicero and there this incredible letter when he is something like 27 years old, he just turned down an appointment to the US Supreme Court he has been unanimously confirmed as ambassador to Russia and he doesn't want to leave and he said: I'm 27 years old, I haven't compliment. anything I'm wasting my life I'm wasting my talents I go to the theater too much and I drink too much and I get fat I have to do it, if I could just try hard and be hardworking I could do something for myself so part of it is his parents and then there's reading and I had the same reaction when you read this wisdom and what is very important to emphasize is that it is not just the Greek and Roman classics, but it is just one of the moral philosophies that the founders read there is also the Bible there are also Christian theologians like Willson and Tolson who are trying to reconcile Christianity and reason Blackstone's commentaries Wig writers K's letters all have the same lesson about the need to achieve self-mastery on a personal level so that you can achieve the self-government on a political level, so I think that completely defined their moral universe and they couldn't help but think about it all the time, yeah, I mean, I thought about the notion that, um, that they really emphasize in the book that the idea of happiness that we have, which is a kind of happiness of going do whatever you want, is very different from your idea of ​​happiness and that's a big emphasis in the book is that we sort of misunderstand what happiness is, e.g. in the Declaration of Independence means, I mean, it's the opposite when I was studying the Puritans and I was dissatisfied, it was the '80s, it was the decade of greed is good and all the things that were celebrated by pop culture like greed It's good or you do it. you or whatever, the Me decade is the opposite of what classical wisdom is now, like you said, modern mindfulness, uh, teaching is classical wisdom and I was so surprised that I mentioned that my father died at 95 years ago just when I was finishing the book there was a great hypnotherapist of the 20th century and after finishing it I learned that his wisdom about hypnosis captured in a quote from Paracelsus is how we imagine ourselves to be so we will be and we are what we imagine the incredible power of imagination to transform reality is Just like in Eastern traditions, we think that life is shaped by the mind and, uh, the emphasis on controlling the only thing you can control, which is your own thoughts and emotions and not the actions of others. others, which is Stoic and Hindu wisdom for For me, it was really just a change of perspective when I tried to disaggregate the virtues and how did I do with Prudence today or Temperance?

It's a disaster because you fall short on individual things, but when you realize that the pursuit and goal is a kind of peace of mind and avoiding unproductive emotions like anger, jealousy and fear, which is what the mother of Justice Ginsburg told him to avoid so that you can achieve the concentration and self-control that will allow you to do your best to use your talents to the best of their ability. your ability to be able to practice that because it's kind of a holistic state rather than any kind of more particular thing and it was really surprising to see how often the founders talk about tranquility and moderation and moderate virtues as a psychological state.

We're trying to achieve and also a political state, well, one of the things that I love about the book and I wrote it and I wrote it to be um, Jeff has this list of virtues and then he aligns them with the founders, so he just the I'll read, uh, that's where you tell us about these somewhat intimidating efforts to organize your whole life, but then we have Temperance with Ben Franklin, humility with John Adams, industry, Thomas Jefferson, frugality, James Wilson and George Mason, sincerity, uh, Phyllis Wheatley. and the enslavers avaresta resolution George Washington moderation Madison and Hamilton Tranquility Adams and Jefferson cleanliness cleanliness John quinsey Adams Justice Frederick Douglas and Lincoln and then silence today and we'll get to that, but we're going to ask you the question you say Jefferson left Chastity off um, most people try to put sex in their book, why did you just side with the one time you had?

I'll have a whole chapter on Chastity and none of these guys really followed it, but why didn't Chastity make the list here, you know, I guess I thought 13 chapters would be too long, I had to kill one of them and it seemed like the youngest one Your publisher's representative is here and she's like Jeff, the next book, don't you know? Me too Franklin half puts it on, he has little slogans for each of them and it's rarely used and in marriage or something um it wasn't something like that but in any case you know it's very good advice and we should all try to practice it, of course, yeah, how did you decide who went with which chapter it was you?

I hope it is a useful but loose build. Different people could go with other people, but uh, humility had to be Adams just because he had a lot of trouble practicing it, yeah, I liked it, I liked it, yeah, I mean, and then maybe we can talk about it because one of the things What I think is interesting about what you point out about classical writers and how people interpreted them was that, um. that what they found attractive about thisThe idea was not that it promised that human beings would be perfect or good, but rather that they thought that human beings struggled immensely and therefore you needed these kinds of virtues, you needed to be reminded of these examples in order to be able to It's kind of a help to dealing with internal struggle and that's why a lot of these chapters talk about um, not how someone achieved perfection with that virtue, but how they struggled with that virtue, so maybe we could talk a little bit about um, uh, something . of the struggles and Adams would be a great struggle we are in Massachusetts um uh with John Adams we know from many um Broadway shows two different Broadway shows that include John Adams that um that humility was not his strong point and yet You also sympathize with his fight for humility.

It's so endearing. It's so relatable. He is full of pride and ego. They make fun of him at the time because of his self-esteem. He wants the presidency to be called His Elective Majesty. They make fun of him. his the bluntness of him he's constantly like you've written so well, angry at people for not giving him credit for the American Revolution, talks about himself in the third person, you know, Adams really wrote the Declaration. Adams deserves all the credit and yet he knows it and the beautiful stories of his fights. and the reconciliations with Jefferson and the great Mercus Warren, which is another wonderful Massachusetts story, are so powerful.

Mercus Warren, first of all, is another example of how women of the time, including Abigail, were not allowed to go to Harvard, which boys were, but those. those who received classical education were as brilliant as the boys and Mercy was educated with James Otis, she insisted on taking classics lessons with him and writes these spectacular poems and satires on the revolution that Adams hails and calls her The Genius of the Revolution. and she writes The Flatterer and other great poems that then fight over politics, his history of the US accuses him of being a monarchist, which was the standard of Jefferson in charge against Adams and Hamilton, but he gets angry and He says it's unfair and it's not. a royalist and they have a terrible fight, but then Abigail sends a lock of her hair to Mercy and they make up and apologize and Adams then has the humility to once again hail her poetic genius and she says: I only have one favor to ask of you.

I just went to the Boston athum and someone is taking credit for my play The Flatterer. Some guy put his name on the cover. You're the only one who knows I wrote it. Can you certify that he gets on a horse and travels to Boston? Goes to athum writes on the cover this was written by Mercius Warren just wonderful so he is self aware and in the end he mastered his temper and his vanity and kept his friendships, yes, and that is and that and they they die. on the same day, oh, like Jefferson, I mean, you can't, you know, it's just that everyone thinks it's Divine Providence and maybe it was yeah, yeah, Madison, they wanted him to die on the same day and he refused to take opioids to live enough. dying on the same day as Adams and Jefferson, um, and yeah, it's a good interesting plot for a movie, talking about another person that you fight to the point where I think their Virtue that you assigned them matches. above, you give Jefferson industry and yet he was industrious in all sorts of ways and yet you repeatedly point out that that was also a product of the fact that he was an enslaver, owned people and was never willing to basically say that. slavery was bad for freedom from, so maybe you can talk about the way Jefferson re-complicates the virtue of industry.

Jefferson does not stand up to close scrutiny and in many ways he is even worse about slavery the more you look at it. I was surprised to realize how none of the Virginia enslavers justified slavery at the time. Jefferson and the others said it was a violation of the natural rights declared evident in the Declaration. There's a really amazing quote from Patrick Henry where he says: Isn't it amazing that I myself, who think that slavery violates natural law, should have slaves? I won't justify it. I won't try it. It's simple greed. I can't stand the inconvenience of living without them and that moment of self-awareness.

Yes, it's wrong, but I like that the lifestyle summed it up and Jefferson said a version of the same thing. He would usually accuse others of greed. He went on to say that South Carolina and Georgia were greedy for not abandoning the international slave trade, while Virginia was willing to give it up, but I was simply referring to Jefferson's extraordinary lack of self-awareness and capacity for self-denial. who exalts industry, who tells his daughters to read and yet surrounds himself in Montello with this fantasy of a Palladian villa or a kind of Roman virtue that he only achieves by living wildly beyond his means and depending on work enslaved man and enslaved labor are his own children and he doesn't free them until his death fulfilling a promise to Sally Hemings uh and no he doesn't free anyone else and in the end everything has to be sold anyway CU despite having rebelled against death during his entire life and say that no generation can bind another with death and say that each Constitution must be reconceived every 19 years because the living cannot bind the dead Monello has to be sold anyway uh to pay his debts so um , it doesn't excuse it in any way, in fact, it may imply it more, but it is surprising that you saw it in classical terms as everyone did as a form of greed or avarice, yes, and you tell the story in a beautiful chapter here, which you labeled sincerity, where I really think it addresses in a very direct way the gap between what some of them wrote about slavery and bondage. and the race and the way that they themselves practiced it in their life and um, that's a beautiful chapter about Phyllis Wheatley, who is in Massachusetts again, so maybe you can tell us a little bit about Phyllis Wheatley, she's back, there's several great books about her and Exhibits um, but I think you do a lovely job of thinking about this, the tension between them and the teasing wasn't great in Washington, in fact, I recognized philis sweetle, uh, Jefferson, he's not so Well, it's another inspiring story from Massachusetts, it's so wonderful to be Masach, it all came. of and and that story comes in Chains and is carried by her master the and loves the Wheatley who decide for reasons not entirely clear to give her a classical education with her children and she reads us cisero and and zica and the classics and becomes the most poet great of her time, uh, into international celebrity, as Professor Gates put it in his great book about the Phis Wheatley trial, the Oprah Winfrey of her time, but first she has to overcome the racist vision in Boston that made her. actually writes her own poems for the city to hold a trial or at least an examination presided over by none other than John Hancock and he and the affairs and all the worthies of Boston examine her and somehow examine her uh and they ConEd conclude that she yes in fact, she writes her own poems, they certify it and she goes to London and meets the dukes and is acclaimed by everyone uh and finally agrees to return only on the condition that she is given her freedom because Lord Somerset Uh, the decision ends to take and if she had stayed in England she could have been freed, but apparently in exchange for a promise that she will be freed, she comes back and, as you said, sends her poem to George Washington and he hails her genius. he calls her a poetic genius and thanks her very sincerely and treats her with respect, but Jefferson has a very different reaction and it is simply shocking that in the notes on the state of Virginia he rants against Philis Wheatley and says that his poems are under contempt because they blacks are intellectually inferior basically he says this is just a suspicion he would like to be proven wrong but he says that unlike the slaves in Rome where the slaves were white, blacks in America cannot be good . poets because they are black is just shocking and a sign of the fact that he was really racist, yes, and his poems are brilliant, absolutely brilliant and, uh, incredible, particularly in the subject matter of the book where so many classical illusions often cleverly play with the idea of ​​Liberty in the Roman sense versus herself as a black poet, so, um, you do a beautiful job.

Let's talk about one more person who is in the Massachusetts book, John Quinsey Adams, who I have a feeling is your kind of hero, maybe your favorite. man on this um and I just have to start with um, well let's get to what this says about the government because that's a big theme of the book, but um, but there's a beautiful story that you tell here where he loses and passes. next year reading Cicero and Latin and I'm just learning Latin so I'm incredibly impressed doing that, but not everyone, not all presidents, when they lose, they read cisero in Latin, well, not all presidents are so aware of themselves. -mastery Quest nor as devastated as he was by his presidential defeat because his son had just committed suicide and because George Washington Adams, saddled with this impossible name, couldn't stand the pressure of being an Adams and John Quincy Adams had written to him these letters. his son from a Christian where, based on Quincy's close reading of the Bible, he is exhorting his son to do good and be perfect and it's too much and George Washington Adams becomes an alcoholic and jumps off a steamboat and Adams just gets crushed and walks around Harvard Square with his wife Louisa and they see a rainbow which is a ground for hope and then he lost the presidency and his whole world fell on him, so what does he do?

He reads Cicero, which he already read before with his father. but he rereads it in the original and is drawn in particular to the Tusculan Disputes, the book that inspired Jefferson and Franklin and chooses as the motto of the Tusculan Disputes a line that says: "I plant for the benefit of future generations, my seeds will only bear fruit." fruit in the future which, it just so happens, was Adam's house motto, my college dorm and I didn't know what it meant or anything, but that's what I mean, it's just the synchronicity of everything coming back. to that.

Going back to the Tusculan disputes and everything to that line that we don't work with expectations about the immediate fruits of our actions, we can't control those things, we just do the best we can in the hope that they will happen. Maybe it will pay off in the future, so Adams is my favorite. I guess because that's the way it is, he grows and learns and grows so significantly. He's so diligent and serious and communicating between Washington and Boston while he's in the uh. while in Washington as Boston's first professor of rhetoric at Harvard where he writes this collection of essays on Cicero's oratory that John sends to Thomas Jefferson as a peace offering that restores their friendship but the poignant thing about John Quincy Adams is after having gone through These are the tests of self-control and being president and losing and losing his son, then he becomes the greatest abolitionist of his time and is based partly on his reading of Cicero and partly on the Bible and on his own reading thorough I think.

I have not seen anyone else propose a passage that says Jesus will set all captives free, apart from a prophecy from Isaiah, he believes that all captives mean slaves and that it is prophesied that slavery will end with the divine sanction of his eradication So, based on that, he denounces the gag law that prohibits the introduction of abolitionist petitions. He comes up with the original reading of the Declaration that Lincoln later channels that says it prohibits slavery and insists on the power of prohibiting slavery. extension of slavery in the Missouri Compromise and introduces a constitutional amendment to end slavery and then has the most surprisingly dramatic and moving ending where he votes against the war with Mexico and then collapses on a couch in the house where he is serving . and his last words are I am composed and it is a quote from Cicero, the perfectly serene man has achieved the Tranquility of soul that the Tusculan dispute says is the essence of happiness I mean, it is um and he is the only president who returned to enter The Congress walked directly into the chamber and, with great humility, the entire party system is at stake.

His Republican Party has collapsed. The federalists are gone. He reinvents himself as a wig and Frederick Douglas hails him as the greatest American president, the model of himself. -dependency and the greatest friend of abolitionism and it is his arguments against secession and on the indissolubility of the Union on which Daniel Webster relies to oppose the secession channeled by John Calhoun and Jefferson uh, he is the great nationalist, he is simply incredibly meaningful, I mean one of the parts of the book that I think you do a beautiful job with is where you emphasize that what they took from the classic writers was not just the idea of ​​living their own lives this way, but this is what What did the people in the government think?

We should do that, that the American system of government was built on the idea that the people and the government were going to follow these ideas, so maybe you can talk a little bit about how this idea of ​​reason, moderation of diligence influences . your understanding of how you willrun the government well, let's talk about it in relation to Madison and I love your thoughts because you are the world expert that Madison is getting at Princeton, uh, and his name is and he uniquely applies the psychology of the faculty from the point of view staff. self-government to political self-government eh, he is not the only one who does that, but he is more aware than the others and says that just as Plato found reason, passion and desire in the head, the heart and the stomach, we can find A similar reflection of the powers in the state constitution and the president who presides over the Senate, the House and the Judiciary can reflect the powers and the checks and balances through the theory of contrary passions, which is the phrase of Hamilton, you can guarantee that ambition is used to counteract ambition, we don't assume that men or Angels uh because then government uh wouldn't be necessary but you need some virtue or else government wouldn't be possible so Madison designs the whole system to slow down deliberation so that factions or mobs cannot form factions or groups animated by Passion rather than reason dedicated to self-interest rather than the public good.

They have seen Greece and Rome fall. Madison read the trunk full of books that Jefferson sent from Paris that says that classical republics when their democracies fall into the hands of demagogues in all the great Assemblies of any character composed, passion never ceases to rest the scepter of reason, he says in Federalist 55, even if all Athenians were Socrates, Athens would still have been a mob, so the Constitution prevents mobs from forming because it's a really big country, by the time the mobs meet, they'll get tired or go home. Additionally, Madison is optimistic about this new media technology, the press that will allow people to present complicated arguments like The Federalist Papers. the newspapers that will spread slowly throughout the country, people will discuss them in cafes and talk about it with their representatives, who will gradually return to Washington and the reason spread by this class of journalists whom he calls the literati will guarantee that let's have a republic of reason, so, you know, of course, era X and whatever it's called, Instagram and Twitter look very different, but how creative was Madison in making that leap?

The classic version was that virtue was especially necessary in a republic. Oligarchies or oligarchic aristocracies are governed by honor, monarchies by fear and republics by virtue, but Madison is mixing with the French physiocrats with this new theory of public opinion to say that citizens have to be owners of themselves and not tweet too much if they want to have a successful Republic, how creative was he, yeah, look, this is usually me being in that seat and Jeff being in this seat and then no matter what book I write, Jeff is like, let's talk about Madison, you know, and I always learn from you about this, no.

I mean, I love this idea that I think his book really emphasizes, something that I think is not as obvious in the 21st century as it would have been to previous people: that the system is based on an assumption about human beings. behavior that is that human behavior, um, struggle with ambition, struggle with advice, so at the end of the day you wait for people or you demand of people or you try to guide people to behave well and so Therefore, the system also has to be full of controls. and balances and separations because that's the only way you can reinforce that too, but I have to read a quote, you have a quote here that says that Adams wrote that he agreed with Sir Edward Cook that only sad men were fit to be elderly legislators. men who had been shaken and buffeted in the vicissitudes of life, forced into deep reflection by pain and disappointment and taught to control their passions and prejudices and it is a beautiful um quote um but a complicated quote for here in this building where we have a very young president and we know we have older people running for office right now, so maybe you can talk a little bit about how they thought about age, how they thought, what age brought to government, what people learned along of their life. what a great question, I mean, it's really significant, isn't the Tusculan Disputes, which is his favorite manual on happiness, is an essay about grief and Cicero writes it when he lost his daughter Tullia and is trying to console himself by withdrawing to his Tusculan Villa and pain is something that comes with age and that is why Adams thought that sad men should be legislators and that is why the Talmud says that only elderly judges can judge death penalty cases because only they will have known the joys and difficulties of raising children and you must have been experienced by age to have the wisdom necessary for all these virtues moderation calm you know Tranquility sincerity all self-control is a search, as you said, it is a struggle, that's why all sources use the phrase The pursuit of happiness is not something you can obtain, it is something you strive for daily and only later in life do you find the pursuit.

I have to say, by the way, it was very exciting because all the sources are online just to do word searches and I see that they all contain the phrase the pursuit of happiness, it was not a secret phrase that Jefferson invented, it was the idea of quest as Kennedy put it using your talents to the best of their ability, but it's also for self-mastery. and that just comes with age, so you know, that's why the Senate was supposed to be the wisest elders and I guess our first presidents were old enough by the standards of those days, what would they have made of the era of antibiotics when people live to be 80 uh is another question so you have a part where you talk about Franklin's epitaph and he writes uh something more perfect that he thinks when he looks back on his life, I'm paraphrasing here that life is almost like a manuscript that you could revise to make it more perfect and that reminded me that you have, you know, you run the National Constitution Center and that, of course, is in the Preamble and do you think there was a connection for Franklin between your way of thinking about life? as something he wished he could revisit and refine in his thinking about the country, well, it's a wonderful metaphor, isn't the printing age so appropriate for a printer and the fact that he attributes any success he has achieved? in life to his conciliatory temperament, think of him, the most famous man in the world hailed with Vol as someone who has tamed the skies and brought the Gulf Stream and, uh, the great Franklin, but he says this is his conciliatory temperament and the fact that he learned not to assert his opinions too strongly but to say: it occurs to me or it may be like this or I think maybe this and it is his conciliatory temperament that allows him to be a conciliatory force of the constitutional convention and inspire engagement, so it has to come from that background, yes, in the end, you have a very useful list of likes, if you want to read these people, good additions.

I almost wish you had a like, top 10 advice from the founders based on the Classic period because I started keeping a little list and that was one of them like trying to be more conciliatory well, Frank Franklin has those little Legends determined to do what you must and do what you resolve uh or Jefferson, you know by the silence if you are angry. count to 10 if you're really angry 100 is definitely yes, that might be the smartest thing to do. Great idea Jefferson, just wait before you tweet is very yeah, yeah, wait before you tweet, yeah, yeah, X Auto founder, think about that, yeah, maybe you could.

I will read his book and I want to say that it strikes me a lot not that human nature has changed but that this was a world in which, when they thought about the past, they thought that there were people in the past who had also shared the struggles. . and you could turn to them for guidance and wisdom and I think there's something very appealing about that and you say in this book that you were an English learner and I was an English learner and yet English learners do right and the Lial arts. In some ways, this is a book that really resonates with the importance of the liberal arts and with the centrality of the liberal arts tradition in terms of how our system of government is based and maybe you could talk a little bit about that.

I feel very honored to be here in Boston and talk about the great teachers who inspired in me this conviction that the liberal arts are necessary to learn to live, besides Sack Van Bur. I studied English with the great Walter Jackson Bat, who was a great humanist who wrote The Great Biography of Samuel Johnson of His Time, which I recommend, and taught this wonderful course on the Johnson era that taught the pros of the 18th century that was so balanced that the greatest flights of human imagination not from pleasure to It's a pleasure, but from Hope to hope, you only hear its musicality.

He wrote a great book called Critique, the main text that collects classical Greek and Enlightenment literary theory and they are just great essays that even then we didn't read as much. uh, all the main people, uh, and we're all jumping from Homer's idea, the purpose of the humanities is to instruct and delight in teaching us how to live, but in a pleasant, beautiful, harmonious or fun way that appeals to us and The overwhelming need to discover what can be used, what was Samuel Johnson's phrase, permeates this entire moral philosophy of the Enlightenment that channels the classics, how we live, what the mottos are, what we do when we get up, what is the path , not just not just to be like Jesus and Socrates, like Franklin said, but like we as human beings, how can we use our talents to the best of our ability and that's why I'm so determined to be a crusader for radicals. self-empowering act of deep reading.

I mean, that's exactly what the project did for me, it's like reacquainting me with the joys and meaning of daily reading and things that are not directly related to what I have to do for my job and are things that everyone we have under our control the texts are all online we the political system is more polarized than ever we are extraordinarily challenging serious times for the world there are so many things that we cannot control but we have the ability to control our own reading and personal improvement and I am too a crusader and I think from getting this in college to the really empowering nature of primary texts, going back to the text itself, not the way other people read. them or the debates about them, but just and everything is online, it's very exciting, so that's what we're doing at the Constitution Center, trying to inspire children and learn from all ages to do a reading depth of the main text we are.

By putting many of them online as part of a new Founders Library curated by liberal and conservative historians, we have free Constitution 101 classes on the basic principles of the Constitution and declared a new partnership with Khan Academy to put all of this online in its great platform. so hopefully we'll reach hundreds of thousands of kids when we launch it next year and I'm just inviting all of you, you're obviously readers because you've come to this beautiful place. uh a to for this conversation, join the Radical Empowerment Act of daily reading and let's be as perfect as we can, yes, it's just a wonderful, chalky book full of interesting anecdotes and stories and also, like I say, it will make everyone want to read , but not more about the founders, but more about various classic writers and we'll move on to the questions in a minute and while people can think of your question, that's a sign, think of a question, okay, there are microphones, here to ask.

I'm going to ask you one last question, if you could only take one of the classic writers you read to a desert island, who would it be? You'd get a book, not your Kindle, one of my favorite shows is the BBC's Desert Island Discs, he began. in the '50s, you know, and everyone from the '50s onwards is given their favorite music and that's the question at the end, which book do you want? No Bible in Shakespeare is what it always is, can I have Enlightenment people? No, you get only one person. classic I'm going to go with the difficult I have to go with the difficult because I wanted some poetry like Alexander Pope or something like that, yes, no, I know you would like Alexander pop and I don't read, I don't read Homer in the original.

I could have guessed that Happ, I mean, look, I the most practical of the group is the most accessible is Marcus Aurelius, yes, so I carry him, yes, you carry Marcus Aurelius with you, yes, yes. I loved the fact that on Jefferson's list Jefferson wasn't a He's a big fan of educating women or he's not a big fan of it, but on his reading list, the two books were translated by women, one of Elizabeth Carter and another Sarah Fielding, so women were influencing him even if he wasn't giving them their due.credit. and your upcoming book on Katherine MCCA will show how big her influence was yes yes very interesting yes well we are going to take some questions from the audience and hopefully you will stand there and be able to ask a question in front of the microphone and Everyone will look a little like God, because you are beautifully illuminated by the lights.

First, thank you very much for your wonderful and enlightening presentation. I have to say, it's incredibly depressing to hear you talk about all these wonderful flaws of the Founders. True, but they are people who are trying to be self-aware to pursue that happiness they tried to impart to us all. The question I have is where today in our current political system do we look for hope for our lives in the future? in some ways they reflect all the wonderful thoughts and aspirations of our founding fathers, it's an important question, um, uh, one thing that's so inspiring about the founders and so much of American history is what deep readers they all were and they express thoughtfully. and beautifully its clash of ideas, we have readers today in our political system and the standard of political discourse when you get past the and classes that I have the incredible privilege of moderating at the Constitution Center.

What an extraordinary job this is. Each week on the podcast I get to convene the country's leading liberal and conservative scholars to In a thoughtful debate about the constitutional issues in the news last week, we made the case for section three, the Supreme Court case Trump v. Anderson. Michael McConnell and Mark Graber, the leading liberal and conservative historians on this issue, ended up agreeing on a substantial part of why they thought the court was wrong, they respectfully disagreed and the entire discussion was civil and that's what happens every time. weeks, they are serious people who disagree but have a civil dialogue and then there are these amazing classes.

Imagine gathering in Zoom classes from California and Ohio and debating constitutional issues and having kids brainstorm, always thoughtful. civilized, it is simply extraordinary and all it takes is time to create platforms where people have time to deliberate and have the license to listen carefully to the arguments of both sides before making a decision, so I am hopeful that if we can do exactly what we're doing, which is creating these enclaves of reason so that there can be some hope of salvation, and you and you have done a great job at the Constitution Center and really talking to school kids. about that and I know the JFK library now has kids back and I know in Massachusetts there's a great tradition here, maybe you don't know, this is coming and being in the Senate, right, there's a little model Senate and I know my Mmm , all my kids did that and kind of stepped away like maybe one day I might want to run for office, you know, because I think and believe that the educational role that institutions like these play is very important.

I'm sure everyone will read Plutarch's book. live but but hopefully along the way yeah any kind of deep breathing is good yeah we have another question thank you for joining us. Actually, I have two questions for you, I'm the representative of your online group, cool, I don't think so. Benjamin Franklin included patience among his 12 virtues. Can you shed some light on why how the pursuit of happiness has changed in the big changes in our country? Emancipation Proclamation Industrial Revolution becoming a major political player on the international stage Etc. two big questions I think patience was definitely in the spirit of the classical virtues which, after all, were prudence, temperance, courage and justice, and Franklin It talks about tranquility and moderation, etc., and I was trying to approximate what I was reading in Pythagoras and silence encompasses that as well. idea of ​​waiting, so you are absolutely right in pointing out the importance of patients, but I think he may have been trying to understand it using other phrases.

A really important question about the evolution of the idea of ​​the pursuit of happiness since the Emancipation Proclamation. From the Industrial Revolution to today, what I found so surprising is that the classic definition that we heard President Kennedy use persists and is such an apt quote because whatever it was in the early '60s, it persists to the end, so it starts at the foundation. era then Quincy Adams applies it to abolitionism Frederick Douglas which we have not talked about in should because it is so central defines self-reliance as the pursuit of happiness through education and self-perfection toille in the 19th century his famous definition of self-interest adequately What is understood is that his definition of the pursuit of happiness is resisting immediate impulses to achieve long-term goals and persists throughout the Industrial Revolution in the spirit of capitalism.

Vber says that kind of self-discipline and puritanical work ethic is crucial to the success of capitalism and then we get to the modern era and Elena Roosevelt still uses it. She did a big event at the Roosevelt House in New York last week and Harold Holzer, the wonderful boss there, found Elanar Roosevelt describing the pursuit of happiness. like industrious self-control so that you can be a useful citizen the question is why and this is the question why he gave up in the '60s and I don't have a sure answer for that, but here are some possibilities David Brooks, uh, who's been writing great things about the character blame Freud and the substitution of character for personality, George, at an event about the book we did a few weeks ago, will blame the romantic era of the 19th century and GTA and let everything hang and autonomy versus whatever, sincerity, authenticity versus Sincerity um James Davidson Hunter blames post-structuralism and the decline of faith in the individual or liberal ideal, but I'm interested and this is just a thought when I was in college Daniel Bell wrote this great book about the cultural contradictions of capitalism where he said Capitalism is based on self-control, but it has to create a consumer culture to create a market for its goods and therefore encourages the kind of reckless consumerism that the production of goods he wants to deny.

Then I heard a really interesting talk at UVA from a guy who recently said that the Internet has made it a lot worse and that by creating filter bubbles and echo chambers and algorithmic R rabbit holes, the whole system is designed to turn us from citizens into consumers who constantly They demand immediate gratification from our most selfish selves. desires, so there's something to that too, but whatever the real cause, once pop culture started exalting immediate gratification over self-denial, then it was game over, yeah, big big question, another question , welcome back to Boston, thank you, my grandfather Joe Plank was one. of those people who had that kind of classical education and became a very prominent public figure, as a lawyer advising judges, etc., and it made me read Cicero growing up in Michigan, okay, wonderful, you know, I love it what what you're doing and I have an old print of Pythagoras on my it's like water damaged, but I have it on my w so, yeah, I mean, there's a lot here, what's it doing in the print?

What is the image of him? a is a portrait of him is a portrait of grandfather that I had found in an old bookstore somewhere in Philadelphia um my question has to do with how do we not only cultivate those habits of the heart and mind that speak to virtue and civic virtue in in particular, but how we export them or incorporate them or integrate them into our institutions. I've spent the last four decades analyzing this Continuum of Money and Morality and have taught courses on it at Harvard Divinity School. I had the honor of being able to write the Preamble.

As Watertown, Massachusetts, the new new town, Charter, and Watertown and Boston will celebrate their 400th anniversary in 2030, the challenge before us is not only to cultivate those habits of heart and mind through reading, but also to immerse ourselves deeply in these historical themes. figures and make it real like you've done in your wonderful book, uh, but also thinking about not only how we use our reason but also how we use our imagination to change the existing structures that we have or come up with new ones and one of the things in that I'm working with um officials in Watertown in Boston.

I'm trying to build this demonstration project at Lance in Michigan and Massachusetts that looks at how a civic fiduciary becomes a reality and how we build a culture of equity. This comes to the Preamble. again because I think the preambles that you know, the US Constitution are based on what we had here in Massachusetts and Franklin was influenced by the iry conf Federation, so as you know, the classicist, how can we take this important ignored statement that often precedes the Letters? or the preambles of constitutions, which are a declaration of public virtue and value, how can we make them real and ensure that they have force and how can we cultivate among the general public the ability to do civic moral reasoning in addition to thinking in the policies we make? that is the real-time educational task that I hope we can all begin to come together and do more in these very impoverished and broken times, as Michael Sandal would beautifully say, and thank you for his important work in inspiring this kind of civic practice .

Leading a movement for the revival of these values ​​is something the Constitution Center is thinking a lot about because this is our mission: to educate the public about the constitution in a nonpartisan way. Surprisingly there is a division. It's not surprising that it's there. Everything is there. are polarized and there is a division on how to teach civics and some want to teach civic virtues by actively teaching virtue and the neo-Augustinian trend of conservatism says that there is one truth and that people should be motivated to embrace revealed truth that is not consistent with the liberal tradition and therefore is not the best way to do it.

I think the founders thought that the way to teach civic virtue in particular had to teach two things first: the substance of the knowledge of liberty. Because unless people knew what freedom was, they wouldn't know it. defending it and supporting habits of deliberation, how to disagree without being disagreeable, that's why George Washington wanted to create a National University that would bring together people from different states to put aside their sectional differences so they could converge around principles constitutional and learning the habits and That is why much of what we are doing at the NCC is simply modeling dialogue.

Mary, you have participated in these discussions that bring together liberal and conservative historians. The podcast shows people that it is possible to have thoughtful agreements and that disagreement is incredibly meaningful. for people to model it in their own lives so I don't have any questions but I think sometimes it's important for people in your position to know how it affects everyday people so I'm a retired nurse practitioner but I'm passionate about history. As soon as the Edward M Kennedy Institute opened I became a volunteer and the experience for people to come and unfortunately it closed in 2020 and they haven't brought us back but I learned a lot and my experience is in the top three. women senators you've never heard of and in my retirement I work for a company called senior U and we go to libraries and the Council on Aging and we give we don't play maang and we don't knit, we're learning things and I give these talks but in Co I found the Constitution Center and it has become so important in my life that now I have three grandchildren, ages 13, 10, and five, and I give them a book and my granddaughter says who am I going to read about this.

Grandma time, I'm always looking for you to understand the story and I'm a Disney kid so Johnny Train was just one of my favorite stories and I gave it to my 10 year old grandson and it's written in some old English so We are reading that together and I have friends coming to my house to listen to one of your talks. I just want you to know that what you do is real, it leaks out and as a nurse practitioner, when I find myself. Someone in Triple A who says, "Oh, Miss Bishop, do you remember me?" and it means a lot.

I just wanted to let you know that you are an essential part of my life. Thank you very much for sharing that beautiful thing. I appreciate it very much and thank you. Thank you very much for sharing this love of History with your children and grandchildren, it is so significant, you know that you are transforming their lives by sharing those stories. I am very glad that NCC resources are significant and I, I, I. I feel like I meet people from all over the country who are having similar experiences and I think look at all these wonderful lifelong learners that are coming out because CU history is important to their lives and it'ssatisfying, and we also know it feels that way.

You are using your talents better when you learn and grow rather than surf and navigate, so I am very grateful and will always remember what you said. Thank you very much and I would just say this is great. The important thing about his book is that his books really model all kinds of people of this generation who throughout their lives felt that they should continue learning, they did not believe that they learned it when they were young, they know particularly John Quinsey Adams and Adams, who at the same time At the end of their lives they come back, reread and visit these things again.

Ken Burns' definition of udonia or the classic definition of uh is to be a lifelong learner and maybe you know if older people make the best politicians the glory of aging according to Classical wisdom is that that is the time when you can start focusing on lifelong learning and instead of just working for a living, use your golden years to learn and grow, and it's a great privilege and it's very inspiring because as long as we have our faculties. We can all do it, yes, but we have another question, we have two more, so from our online audience, okay, read one at a time and then we will have Jeff read them that way.

Sonnets during Co. Were you watching Sir Patrick Stewart read a Shakespeare Sonnet every day. I didn't hear him read other things, but I hope to see his children. He has a very beautiful voice and I'm sure he reads them wonderfully. It was the search for happiness that he asked for. the founding fathers simply a goal for something that can never be achieved completely achieved absolutely the goal and the quest is in the seeking, not the obtaining, by definition we will never be perfect, only Jesus, Socrates, Pythagoras and a handful of wise men can begin . to achieve that kind of perfection, but with full recognition and complete humility of our inability to reach the final destination, the joy is in the search, we have more, if you want, yes, how has social media affected the search for the happiness of American citizens? citizens of the world, all the increasingly familiar evidence shows that social media use increases depression, isolation, anger, all the unproductive emotions that ancient wisdom tells us to moderate.

Social media companies emerged on the scene around 2010 and all of those factors started to increase dramatically. Jonathan height and Greg lukinov show all of that and then there's the effect on our politics and you know, I talked about the difference between the thoughtful vision of Madison citizens and coffee shops reading complicated federalist documents and the world of Factors that social media platforms reward, which are anger, polarization of immediate gratification, are the opposite of what the founders aspired to. The simplest act of life is to simply turn off the damn devices at least for a little while every day so we can do some deep reading instead of browsing or downloading one of these fantastic books and the weather for free from your local library. it opens up, you know, tusculan, you know, or I mean, it's just amazing, the actual books that Adams read, his copy of Priestly on Massachusetts Historical Hinduism, they put it online, Google Books digitized it, you could see it the marginal notes by Adams, it's just mind-blowing and think how hard they had to fight for access to the books and Frederick Douglas oh just I was in New Haven last week and David Blight the great biographer Frederick Doug brought out a copy of the Colombian speaker a first edition that was the book that inspired Douglas and Douglas had to buy this book on the streets of Baltimore with bread and he also had to use his bread to pay street children to teach him to read because his evil teacher He had forbidden him to learn to read because that makes him want to be free and you think about what Douglas did to learn to read and obtain the book that totally transformed his life and determined him to become a freedom fighter.

All we have to do is press the button and click yes, yes. no, you can read the entire Boston Public Library, uh, the John Quinsey John Adams Library online, so there's something good about the online world, but maybe it's not the EXP part of the social media part, absolutely , brings up another question here, yeah, right? I think the decline in the pursuit of happiness is perhaps because people are turning to other philosophical schools of thought such as nihilism or perhaps, on the other hand, existentialism or, potentially, it could be that they are seeking pleasure and not following stoic beliefs in which to have that discipline to do that learning, yes, you expressed it so well, and those are great philosophical challenges to ancient wisdom, nihilism and existentialism are versions that reject classical learning or simply resort to immediate pursuit of pleasure, which, of course, everyone has always done throughout history because it is very rewarding and without some kind of cultural and also spiritual framework, it is more difficult to resurrect these ancient things.

You know, obviously my reading project was unusual and strange and there's a degree to which when you get it outside of a spiritual tradition, which I am, and many have to find it on your own, but it's also surprising that a lot of the approaches Modern mindfulness practices channel the ancient wisdom and wisdom of Emotional and cognitive-behavioral intelligence therapy is based on the Stoics and confirms the ancient wisdom. The Eastern teaching of mindfulness focuses on focusing on the only thing you can control, which is your own thoughts, and much of the literature on happiness and the entire psychology of happiness confirms what the Ancients knew. is that happiness is in relationships and doing for others and being the best we have, it sells well and I think one of the things that many readings of classic writers did for this group of people is also that those people lived in terrible times and I've lived through terrible times and, strangely, I wonder if there wasn't something a little reassuring for people that other people had survived terrible times and there were some sort of habits of mind to help you get through that, I mean, the Stoicism arose during a time of plague.

Aurelius wrote during the Great Plague to console us for what we cannot control and the terrible plagues of the founding and its smallpox epidemics and the wars and the fact that his children were dying so young and politics was in danger of collapsing and there it was tyranny everywhere made this wisdom so necessary, it has been humanity's destiny from the beginning during covid apparently there was a renewal of interest in pismo and I think I came to it literally by coincidence or accident. I wasn't looking for it, but it is a very comforting philosophy for difficult times.

We're going to take one last question from our Zoom audience, uh, and then we'll wrap up. Are Jeffrey Rosen familiar with the early 1990s book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People? was a key book in my own development of a positive Beautiful Mind habit. I'm uh, although not close, you've inspired me to re-read it and I think unknowingly, check it out, let's find out who Steven CV's influences were and it may have been that there were some stoic predecessors. Dale Carnegie's habits of highly effective people were based on Stoicism and Franklin and there's just a really unbroken line of great self-help literature that often goes back to the beginning of, well, I want to finish. with a sonnet that you wrote while reading the meditations of Marcus Aurelius and this ends, do the work patiently and the industry finds satisfaction in what you are doing now, free from fear or hope of publicity, but I think your book deserves a lot of publicity and uh, and I'm really glad that the fear isn't that much, but I hope your book gets a lot of publicity. um.

I want to thank you for joining us tonight. Jeff Rosen. I want to thank the JFK Library and the audience here. watching us from home thank you very much thank you Mary thank you all for being here thank you very much