Community Read With 2023 Commencement Speaker Danielle Allen

Welcome to Caltech's Community Read, featuring 2023 commencement speaker, Professor Daniel Allen and her book, Our Declaration of the Declaration of Independence and Defense of Equality. I am Ariel Tico, one of the senior class co-presidents for the class of 2023. I'm Anna Laptava, and I'm another of the senior class co-presidents. Daniel Allen is the James Bryant Conan University professor and director of the Edmund and Lily Safra,

Center for Ethics at Harvard University. She is a MacArthur Fellow and the recipient of the Library of Congress's Cluege Prize for the Achievement in the Study of Humanity. A leading scholar and political philosophy ethics and public policy, she offers a unique perspective on the critical importance of democracy and civic engagement. I know I for one and very excited to hear her speak at commencement next week.

Allen's multiple award-winning book, Our Declaration draws on her research and her experiences teaching the Declaration of Independence to illuminate our country's founding text. She makes the case that the Declaration is as much about equality as it is about individual liberty. Today's special event will be moderated by Caltech President Thomas Rosenbaum, Sonia and William David Owl, Presidential Chair and Professor of Physics. Throughout the discussion, we invite

you to submit your questions through the Zoom Q&A feature, and your professor, Allen and President Rosenbaum can address them towards the end of the conversation. You can also report any technical difficulties using the Q&A feature. Thank you very much for joining us today. We now invite on-screen Professor Danielle Allen and President Thomas Rosenbaum. Great. Welcome to everyone. And welcome Danielle. It's wonderful to see you. Thank

you for doing this. Oh, it's such a pleasure. Thank you so much, President Rosenbaum. And thank you, Anna and Ariel. What a lovely introduction. I really appreciate it. So I wanted to start our conversation about the actual writing of the book. And at the beginning, you write very movingly about learning from your students and a very broad class of students, different students in the classes that

you taught, and how the book emerged from those discussions. How did all that unfold? Well, the truth is, so I came to the University of Chicago as a youth. I was a young professor in, I think, January of 1998, something like that. And I loved it. I immediately found it in incredibly dynamic, intellectual environment. But at the same time, I was also slightly unsatisfied. And I

couldn't quite put my finger on my dissatisfaction until I was sitting next to what I had a meeting, a woman who ran the Illinois Humanities Council. And we were there talking before the meeting started. And she said to me that she was working really hard. And she was trying to start a humanities program for low income adults, folks who had fallen out of the education system.

And then we're trying to get their their lives back on track. She's working really hard to build this. And she'd been looking for university partners for months. And she hadn't found any university was willing to step up. And in that moment, I knew exactly what it was. I had been missing at the University of Chicago. Much as I love the students, much as I love the

intellectual dynamism. I really felt the sort of lack of reaching the whole swath of potential students who are out there. We have students who came from so many good schools, whether a public or private and the like, but so many others who were in our immediate surrounding area on the south side of Chicago had all kinds of talent, but no access to the same opportunities. So

in that moment, I said to her, look, you know, I think at the University of Chicago, we'd love to engage with the program like that. And so together we built the Odyssey project and had the University of Chicago Chicago Chicago step up as the first university to be a university sponsor. So then that meant that in addition to doing my day time teaching for the university,

I think it's a great way to get to know the University of Chicago. I was a brilliant University of Chicago students. I also found myself teaching a night course for brilliant adults who had fallen out of their educational pathway, but we're ready to try to turn their lives around. And it was just one of the most inspiring teaching experiences I've ever had. And the book and

the course came out of that context. Right. It's a wonderful story. And the book is diffused, I think, with that spirit and you are weaving in of personal and academic and connection to the world. The audience. In fact, there are a number of areas where, you know, the examples you pull are, you might say, prosaic. I mean, from everyday life. And I wonder if you talk

about how you thought about weaving those into what is a very otherwise close reading and technical argument in a lot of ways. Well, I'll tell you, so the interesting thing about teaching this adult education course, which was a course focused on the humanities. The idea was so much of the offerings for our low income people were vocational. You know, here's a computer skills course or here's

an auto mechanics course and the like. But the conviction that we brought to building this program was that everybody needs the capacity to strengthen their own judgment to navigate all of life's challenges. And to be able to move even from one job to the next. I mean, the world is a very rapidly changing place. So we think the humanities are particularly good for that. So we

had then the job of trying to give an excellent humanities education to people who sometimes had and even finished a high school degree. So this was kind of a conundrum. Like, how could we meet the same standards for bigger as the University of Chicago, while, you know, folks maybe didn't even have that that background background or preparation. So the solution was that we would teach very

short texts. We wouldn't sacrifice the caliber of the text we taught, but we would teach short ones. So I began teaching the Declaration of Independence for the very simple reason that it was 1,337 words. Nobody was going to complain that the reading was too long. But then this magical thing happened, which is as I was teaching this text to my night students, and we always started

out by just reading it out loud together. It just came alive. They understood the text immediately. Because here were a group of people in, you know, 1775 to 76 who were saying, our life is not going the way we want. We want to change it. That's exactly what my night students were saying. So they were the ones really who introduced the everyday examples into the conversation

because they could immediately connect to the fact that they could actually connect to the fact that they were struggling to put the pieces of their life together. And we're trying to make a change. So from the get go, the conversation about the Declaration was really about how the ordinary experience of trying to change your life feels to people and why it's inspiring when people find the

agency and sense of empowerment to make those changes. And you, as you mentioned, this is nearly 1,337 words. But as you write, transforms the mass of people from one to the other. And then you can write something into another from a set of colonies into a nation of the United States. So can you talk a little bit about how this document, the string of words was

able to accomplish such a transformative act? Sure. So this is definitely one of the mysteries of the experience of the founding of this country. We are so used to being the United States of America, a single thing that it's hard for us to access the idea that the time that we're going to be able to do this is not just the beginning of the day, but

the time that we're going to be able to do this is not just the beginning of the day, but the beginning of the day. So the time, you know, 1775 before the revolution had officially started, the residents of different colonies literally thought of themselves as living in different countries. Massachusetts understood itself to be a different country from Virginia. So there's a real question, you know, when

there's that sort of sense of identity and separate communities of belonging, how on earth does that sort of, you know, confederation of units come to be a single political enterprise or undertaking. You're amazing thing about the story of the years leading up to the declaration is how much time residents in the colonies spent literally talking to each other. At the most basic level, they formed these

things called committees of correspondence. And in every quality, they would have people who would gather and talk about what's wrong with the king, you know, why is the king making us also angry what's he done lately, and then they would write letters to the other colonies and they compare notes and they together came up with a shared narrative. shared story about what they were experiencing. And

that shared story was in the basis for coming together in Philadelphia and the Continental Congress, where they decided to undertake decisions together. And at the end of the day, the Declaration of Independence is really reporting on that process, they had been at this point in conversation together for years, it started making decisions together. And now they had a job of explaining their values, what was the

common purpose that was actually making it possible for them to cooperate. So that's what the Declaration really does is explain, you know, the kinds of values that motivated a sense of common purpose. And it's the moment they can articulate those together and then unanimously support them that they become a single enterprise. So we don't have King George right now, fortunately. But we have a lot of

problems to solve in the world. And I wonder what what we might draw from this example of the declaration or let's say, there are students who are about to head out at commencement to how they approach affecting, affecting change, you know, drawing from experience and the style and the rhetoric of the Declaration. Yeah, no, I think that's such a powerful question. And it's so important in

this time, you know, we live in a time of so much anxiety and stress, a sense of the urgency of the problems that confront us, whether it's climate, whether it's the health of the economy, whether it's AI, I'll try to talk about that a little bit. And so we all need to find that capacity for responding to that sense of urgency and anxiety. I think the

Declaration does provide guidance. And I think it is in that idea of what does it take to find common purpose. I've been fortunate to be a part of a number of large cooperative enterprises that have brought people together across our ideological divides. And for every one of those efforts, one effort has been about how do we refer to that? We've always started the same way. We've

started by trying to craft a value statement. And it's interesting because that sounds really hard. You know, you'd think like in the times we live in our so divided, how can we possibly develop a shared value statement. But the truth is, if you can actually gather a group of people around a problem where everybody has a shared sense of urgency, you know, maybe it's gun violence.

We have a lot of shared urgency around that. It turns out that we have a lot of energy and we have a lot of energy. And so it's easier to develop a shared value statement than you might think. And if you can do that work first, and then you start trying to work on solutions, then you have a sort of an anchor or something to refer

back to to help you navigate those points where you have conflicts about how to proceed or what to do. So you talk about the writing of the Declaration as a fascinating group project somewhat like what you're saying here in terms of starting with a value statement. So we have a collective intelligence. And there are very striking examples that you point out about references to God were

edited in and condemnation of slavery was alighted. Yeah. Can you describe a bit about the dynamics of the personalities who were engaged in this group think or group right. No, thank you. That's a great question. And that is one of the fun things about researching the 18th century is it is full of vivid personalities. So, I think that's a great question. And that is one of

the fun things about researching the 18th century is it is full of vivid personalities. So, and one has a chance to encounter them in studying the founding. So we often pay a lot of attention to Thomas Jefferson. You know, tall skinny red headed guy, very eccentric highly intellectual, but folks forget the fact that he was actually really kind of a recluse. He didn't really participate in

the social life of Congress. He resided in what would be equivalent to the suburbs of Philadelphia rather than in the city center itself. And he was therefore a great contrast to John Adams. Who was always in the thick of it. John Adams took rooms directly across from the city tavern, which was the place where the members of Congress gathered after meetings. And he was there every

night, you know, twisting arms, politics, getting things done. So very different personalities. And really, John Adams was the sort of motive force along with Richard Henry Lee from Virginia, who was a sort of very sort of dashing military kind of figure they Adams and Lee with a lot of force behind the move to independence. And the motive force behind the decision to draft this preamble statement

for why they would declare independence. And then, you know, they were also both really busy. They were on almost every committee Congress had, but there was this young guy Jefferson was not many committees at all. And also kind of a recluse, but he wrote really well. So their view was it would make sense to try to get him in the role of being the chair of

the drafting committee for the declaration. So it's funny how there are different skills and different personalities. Resultate and the kind of set of mutual complementarities for the process of getting this document drafted. But Jefferson didn't do it alone. Adam pitched in Benjamin Franklin pitched in Roger Sherman Robert Livingston as well as definitely a group effort. Yeah. So the two countries of Massachusetts and Virginia have to

both come to the same sense of what should be done for this to be effective. Exactly. And that's a really deep and important point. I mean, you alluded to some of the changes. The language and the conditionatra can be seen everywhere. That is important. This reminded us of800 such as confrontations. And that's not significant from theigger that we got. Several of these superfluous politicalisions and about

180 degrees and these that are primary and primary It's all about making a difference of how far away we are from. And I mean, the critical one the core seems to be a part of the I.n. anyway, I mean, Japan was so good there just was another eligible program for this, and that's why it's not exactly theTTare you cannot have a functional democracy without compromises. You

know, we finally just saw some for the first time in a long time with the you know bipartisan passage of the debt ceiling. That's what democracy should actually look like, you know, not like what we've mostly seen in recent years. But that said it's also important to say there's a difference between good compromises and bad compromises. And I think sometimes we get so focused on the

bad compromises that we lose side of how to get a good compromise. So I could just spend one minute on that. Let me just highlight, you know, what's the good compromise in the declaration and what's the bad compromise. So the good compromise is the one around religion and the bad compromise is the one around enslavement. So what's the difference and how can we tell. In the

religion case, what happened is they Jefferson had not put any religious language in the document. Congress added the language of supreme judge divine providence. Franklin and Adams had added the word creator. So you ended up with this mix where there was language that was both for people who were atheists or secularists and for people who were religious, the religious language did not connect to any specific

theological tradition. So in that regard, it is very open ended. Any of the major religions is it's a vocabulary that it applies to. So for the religion compromise there, you had an effect language that spoke to the positions. Of everybody in the colonies who was affected, the sort of whole kit and caboodle, all social positions, everybody's religious position was somehow captured in that compromise. The enslavement

compromise is different. In the context of the enslavement compromise, what happened was there was originally language condemning King George for continuing the slave trade. And that was taken out by Congress. That was a pro slavery edit. At the same time we have the phrase, the use of the word happiness instead of property was an anti slavery choice and edit. And that language, life, liberty, and the

pursuit of happiness became critical to the abolitionist movement starting right from 1777 actually. So you have both a pro slavery and an anti slavery moment in the declaration. But the failing of that compromise is that it did not take into account the interests of everybody who was affected by it. In particular, enslaved people were never included in the thinking about what might be a reasonable set

of positions there. So as in the present in our fractured times, we see compromise. What I always say to people is a good compromise will be one that with great discipline really does take the perspectives of all affected into consideration. That's hard work, but that's the standard we have to hold ourselves to. I was very much struck by your discussion of this anti slavery action. In

fact, it's so effective, you print as people have read the book now various sections with the edits. And you don't say much at the beginning. You just say, look how this is edited. Of course, it's completely removed. I mean, it's ex-sized. Yes. I wonder how the world would be different if this anti slavery language had remained. And you talk in chapter 18, I think, about the

misappropriation of the phrase separate and equal to equal but separate in terms of education and other treatment of enslaved people in this country. Yeah. The story of enslavement is one of the hardest and most painful stories in our country's history. And, you know, it's obviously it was a point of great contestation already in 1776. The interesting thing about the writing of the constitution, is that you

can think of a constitution as having been a hypothesis. And both of the two sides in the country, the two interests, the slave interest and the free interest, had a different understanding of the hypothesis represented by the constitution. The folks on the side of the free interest considered that the constitution would literally bring the end of enslavement. The folks on the slave interest side thought the

opposite. So they were both kind of testing the idea of, you know, which, which way would this go? We know which side one, but that victory was extremely painful to have the hypothesis borne out in the way that it was. And nobody at the writing of the constitution could have predicted the arrival of the cotton gin. This is really one of the most important parts of

our national story. So at the time that they wrote the constitution, they actually literally thought that enslavement was a dying enterprise. And that, so I apologize. Did my sentence? Yes, I think your sentence got cut off. So I was just talking about the arrival of the cotton gin and that the fact that it prolonged the existence of enslavement. It made the victory of the constitution over

enslavement longer and harder than those founders who believe the constitution would bring freedom expected. I wanted to shift gears a little bit. And I was also struck by how your book elevates the concepts of politics and government, neither of which are so popular these days. In fact, in chapter 30, if I can quote you back to yourself, you start with all people are created equal. This

means equal and being in doubt with capacities to pursue their individual and collective safety and happiness through politics. Through the instrument of government, do you see us recapturing this part of our history as a nation, given how fractured we are now and how little esteem these elements are helping? That's a great question. I think there are sort of two pieces to your question, really. One, the

ideals of freedom and equality and what they mean to us. And then the second piece of the thought that we have now is this. The question sort of how, what are our prospects for actually realizing those ideals in present circumstances. And I will say that with regard to the first, I actually feel quite hopeful and optimistic. When I published the book, which is almost a decade

ago, sort of surprising to me. I published it into a context in which our national politicians were routinely talking about freedom, but rarely talking about equality. And I would go around and give talks about the book. People take you, aren't you a communist talking about equality? And I say, well, what are you kidding? You can talk about, you know, as our founding documents take equality as

a core ideal. How can we have lost the ability to talk about equality in our public life? And over the last decade, I think we actually have recovered the ability to invoke the ideal equality and to talk about it. So I feel very good about it. I feel like the actual sort of spirit of democracy where we need to be a community of free and equal

self-governing citizens is actually getting stronger. It's healthier, in fact, than it was a decade ago. But then there's the actual fact of our politics. And can we transfer that commitment to those ideals into reality? There, I honestly think we have a long, long way to go. The simple fact of the matter is that our political institutions are under great strain. There are many challenges in the

21st century. Challenges of demographic change, of polarization, of a very significant increase in income and wealth inequality. Of social media, in many ways, our institutions are not quite designed to cope with the problems that we currently have. So I believe we really do need some significant institutional renovation. If we're going to be able to make good on that basic commitment to shared freedom and equality. So

do these notions help motivate your run for governor of Massachusetts? And what kind of feedback did you get? I mean, it's very humane to vision for where we go. Absolutely, for sure they did. Yes, I mean, you know, it's hard to take the declaration of independence seriously and not come to have a very powerful sense of civic duty and responsibility. I always like to invoke the

second sentence of the declaration. And I'll just remind people what's in it for a moment, if you'll forgive me. So we hold these truths to be self-evident. The all men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain in alienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just

powers from the consent of the governed. In whatever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principle and organizing its powers in such form. As to them, she'll seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness. Now, that's a long sentence. It moves

from our individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to what we do together, namely alter our institutions to secure our collective safety and happiness. And I take it that last phrase about the work we have to do when things aren't going right lays a heavy duty on each and every one of us. We have a heavy duty of, if we think something is

not quite going right to step up and say so and then contribute to trying to bring about the appropriate alteration. So that was very much the spirit that motivated me in running for governor. And I did as a candidate have not just housing agenda and a transportation agenda and an education agenda and a climate agenda, but I also had a democracy agenda because I do believe

that we need to do work on our democracy to make that opportunity for each of us to participate in self-government. And I think that's a very important, a true thing. Right now, many of us feel distant and disconnected. I do think we need to change that. So for me, having that democracy agenda was as important as having that housing agenda or that climate agenda. So, and

of course, this is a global issue too. And one of the powerful questions in the book, of course, is how can a people tell when a government is turning into a tyranny or king in this case, as you point out, there was a political attempt to lay it on that. And so what can citizens do around the world to understand the possible consequences of events that

are happening, how it affects their future, and when does it, when is their consensus or when are the value systems that you talked about before, pushing one towards responding to the path towards tyranny? That's a great question. And I think that's a great question. And I think that's a great question. And I recognize just how much complexity characterizes our world now. And it can feel overwhelming,

very hard to think one's way through analysis of where we are as a people in a society. I always divide things into three categories. Think about the political, namely our political institutions and how they operate. Think about the economy and think about society. And the question of whether or not each of those domains is healthy is, is a necessary one for understanding and evaluating where we

are. So at the end of the day, things like the Bill of Rights do give us a good framework for thinking about how well we're doing at protecting freedom or not. The question of whether or not our system of representation is responsive to us is another really important indicator. I think on this one, there's a lot of frustration right now. We look at our own system

and we know that the majority of Americans, for example, would like to see real change with regard to gun violence, but it doesn't happen. So when you have that kind of disconnect between where public opinion is and how your institutions are functioning, you know you have a problem. There's a long discussion then to be had about what we do about it, what each of us has

as a role in responding to that. But those are the kinds of indicators that are important to pay attention to. So we'll move to the audience or the virtual audience in just a second. The questions I wanted to ask about the illustrations. I love pictures from the Almanac. So did you go and do archival research and read all these Almanacs for the 1700s? It was fascinating.

So the secret is that I come from an unusual family. Everybody in my family is historians. I like to say, you know, my granddad helped found one of the first NAACP chapters in Northern Florida in the 40s. And we have a whole sort of line of people who have spent a lot of time, you know, adding Black history and African American history to whatever context they've

been in. My mom's side, my great grandparents helped fight for women's right to vote. My great grandmother ended up as president of the League of Women voters in the 30s. I still have her little sort of rules of order that she used for writing meetings of the league in the 30s. So I have both a mother and a father who are historians of the 18th century

in various ways. And my mother collects Almanacs as it happens. So I was lucky that the archive was no further than my mother's living room. But they are beautiful, beautiful objects. And they really do give you this sort of window into the horizons of imagination of the 18th century. And it's important that Almanacs and the Bible were the two books that most people who lived in

the colonies would have had access to. So if we really want to understand, you know, what was their perspective on the world, Almanacs is the right place to look. That's great. So actually the first question I'll take from Scott Branda, who's 74 MS alum in Geological and Planetary Sciences, connects to this. And he writes that Neil Postman argues that 18th century everyday people in the colonies

were information literate in ways that modern Americans are not. Postman maintains today that we are people largely tied to information. For amusement. Have you encountered this with your students? Oh wow. That's that's funny and tough. So I mean our information circumstances are in some ways quite different from the 18th century. And then in some surprising ways similar. Let me start with the similarities. The circulation of

misinformation and brutal false allegations against people. That will be a great question. It was a feature of life in the late 18th and early 19th century. It's not accidental that they had lots of duels and that politicians died in duels. That was directly related to their experience of sort of toxicity and circulating misinformation and the like. So as of yet, you know, we don't have politicians

actually killing each other. So I suppose in that regard, we have something to be thankful for. But so they did have that with regard to the other side of the balance. You know, it's interesting. There they were a pretty literate people in the late 18th century. But beyond literacy, what they also were was a people where people would gather together to share news and learning. So

many households had a Bible and had an Almanac. But if they didn't, the town tavern would and people would literally come together for public readings of these things. So there was a culture of learning. And shared culture of trying to understand. I think that's probably the thing that's most different in our own time. That the experience of learning is so fragmented. And there's sort of such

a tsunami of possible information that you could lay your hands on that we don't tend to encounter it together. I have to say I think this is one of the things that makes college campuses so important. There are among that this point is rare institutions where we actually have the chance to build that experience of sharing. And shared learning, testing ideas together and the like. And

I do think when students come to our campuses now, it's a more unfamiliar experience than it would have been to people in the 18th century. Now so change of both positive and negative aspects. Exactly. So Michelle case asks, do you think the US Constitution needs to be updated to be more in line with modern inventions, values and technology? A little off from the past. From the

declaration, but I think a germane spiritual point of view. Well, let me say first again, I like the question. It really registers how rapidly things are changing around us right now. I think again, we all feel that. And I do think our institutions need renovation. For me to say that is not exactly the same thing. Those to say that the Constitution needs to be rewritten. There's

a lot that we can change in our institutions. I would have constitutional implications. Without actually having to change the Constitution to achieve that. So let me just give you one really concrete example. So we are not the first generation to have the problem of tribalism and factionalism. This was also true in the 1770s and 1780s. We have the Constitution because politics and 1780s was crazy. You

know, they couldn't get a quorum in Congress. They couldn't pass a budget. They were going to default on their war debts. Sound familiar right? You know, people were adding. So they called the convention to try to solve their problems and thought they were designing institutions that would really hold the problem of tribalism at bay. James Madison made the case for which features of the design were

to achieve this. He made this case in a set of essays called the Federalist papers. These were opinion pieces published in the newspapers before the passage of the Constitution. And then the 10th essay Federalist 10 as we call it. He explained why this new design was supposed to solve the problem of factionalism. It's a two part explanation. We have a habit of only teaching the first

part. So the part that we teach is that they had designed a representative democracy, not a direct democracy. So rather than having mobs of people come together to make decisions, you know, esteemed and distinguished representatives would be selected who would come together in the capital and produce a sort of synthesized and moderated steering direction for the country. But the second piece of this, I'm going to

be forget to teach. Is that was also going to be a broad republic. And by the word broad, he was literally referring to the geographic breadth of the country was referring to geographic dispersal. The idea was that people with extreme views would have trouble finding each other. Literally because of the geographic breadth, the rivers and the mountains and things like that. Therefore, they would have to

go through representatives to get their views into the public sphere. And so representatives would be a necessary filter. Well, you can see what happened to that. So social media has exploded that premise that geographic dispersal exists to help representation work. So we actually have to redesign representation to work in context where we have no geographic dispersal where people with extreme views can easily find each other.

A solution I like for that is ranked choice voting. What ranked choice voting means is in any given election, you know, people ranked their preferences, first choice, second choice, third choice. And the like and you knock out the bottom vote getter and reallocate their voters votes to their second choice until somebody gets over 50% threshold. That starts to get that filter back in again. So you

can filter out extreme positions and make sure that nobody can win before they've gotten a full majoritarian coalition. So that's an example of a redesign that would really change how our constitution operates. We don't have to rewrite the constitution to get that change. Well, thank you there. There's a question here that I think it's related in terms of polarization and social media, although social media isn't

talked about directly and common ground and something which you write about quite a bit, of course. And this is from way hand, and brothers who writes communication allows us to establish common ground, but successful communication also requires common ground. Are there lessons we can draw from the story of the declaration about how to approach this chicken eight problem to affect productive communication cooperation in the context

of contemporary fracturing and polarization. Gosh, that's a great question. I really appreciate that. So, I think that's a great question. The declaration, I think it's important to say that the declaration is really the end of a process as well as being the beginning of a new country. And that's a process that you could say was a 10 year long process, or you could say it was

a 12 month process. Either way, but let me explain what the process was what it was was where a group of people with very divergent views had in the beginning, kind of, roughly shared sense of a shared problem. That's all, that's all they had, roughly shared sense of sort of frustration. And then they had leaders. They had people who were willing to be norm setters. This

is really important. Leaders who set positive norms. And what those leaders did, these are people like Sam Adams, John Adams, John Hancock, Richard Henry Lee again, I mentioned from Virginia. What those leaders did was establish a process of deliberating the organization where they were going to work together to diagnose their problem, come up with a shared diagnosis. And they spent years achieving a shared diagnosis about

what was wrong with their situation with Britain. And they didn't immediately agree at all. And then in relationship to that, having started to develop a shared diagnosis, then they could start to work on shared solutions. And how do they actually do this? I mean, this could sound slightly crazy, but they just committed to meeting regularly. They literally committed to standing meetings. They were going to just

keep doing it. They were going to stay together until they came up with a solution to their problem. And it was literally by working together about a shared problem that they developed that common language. So I guess the answer to the question is, the first job is just to be able to sort of get people with divergent views to say, yes, we have a shared problem.

That sort of step number one, that's all the common. And what you need is, yes, we can see a share problem, too much violence in our society. That is a shared problem. Step two, gotta have standing meeting, gotta be ready to stick with it until you get to some more definite shared diagnosis. And then some shareable solutions, you'll never get 100% shared, but what's that core,

you can get together that you can share, and then you build from there. So you talk a little bit about the reference in the recluse and all. And there's a question here about your thoughts on the Hamilton Jefferson Divide. Erich Young writes, my understanding is that Hamilton was anti-democracy and more in favor of an elite run society, whereas Jefferson was much more trusty in the intelligence

slash capabilities of the people. Interesting, yeah. So gosh, well, I mean, they were very different personalities for sure, for starters. So that's definitely to be said. And I appreciate that, you know, the power of Hamilton the musical. I love it, too. I think it sounds like whoever asked the question there, missed your name, but it sounds like you love Hamilton, and I share that with you.

So Hamilton, I think, honestly, gets a bit of a bum rap. You know, in the New York constitutional convention, he stood up and made the case for what he called in his vocabulary, a representative democracy. So he actually self consciously embraced the word democracy, not everybody in the time did Madison tended, for example, to embrace the word republic. There was already a little bit of kind

of friction between what those two words meant. And then Jefferson on his side, I mean, he was a Virginian at the end of the day. And the Virginians were aristocratic. It was really the, I mean, I think that's the reason why I was in the New York state. People of Massachusetts above all, who were the true Democrats, small D Democrats, where they were committed to town

hall meetings and things like that. So I would put the most democratic points of view, really under the labels of the Adams's Sam and John Hancock and the like. And then you get sort of more aristocratic with the Virginians. And then Hamilton was actually put him sort of halfway in between. Sounds like another book. There's, there's many. Many rabbit holes to go down on this stuff,

you know. As Richard, I can ask you, do you have another project of this sort? Are you, I mean, struck me that the Gettysburg address would be a natural given the way and heart inspect to the declaration. It's true. Well, Gary wills wrote a beautiful book about the Gettysburg address. It's very similarly structured. So I'm not sure I could actually top Gary wills on that one.

But I will tell you a funny story that has come out of this declaration work. But I'm not sure I could actually talk Gary wills on that one. But I will tell you a funny story that has come out of this declaration work. So I would tell you a funny story that has come out of this picture. And you get to know that the Gettysburg address

is a book. I am in the process of writing. So I quoted that long sentence, second sentence of the declaration to you right. Yeah. And one of the things that striking about it is how few people realize how long it is. So many people think that it ends after life, liberty of the pursuit of happiness. And the reason for this is because this rogue newspaper man

who made it like to make his money in Philadelphia by printing things faster than everybody else. And the publisher had published it and published it in his paper and stuck a period in that sentence probably just because he thought it was too long. And so then many versions circulated that way and the other half circulated with the whole sentence. Anyway, in my effort to really understand

one. It's been living in England for all these years. And it appears that Thomas Payne took into England to give to the Duke of Richmond as a part of trying to get revolution going in England. So it is actually quite raw looking story to be told about how England itself came much closer to a revolution than anybody. New and the role the declaration played and that.

Not the moment. Wow. Well, I think on that note, we should thank you, Danielle. Commencement ceremonies occur at Caltech on Friday, June 16th at 10 am. And we are really excited about having you on campus and person as delightful as it is to see you by zoom. It'll be that much better to have a three dimensional representation. So thank you so much. And thanks to all

who watched. Thank you for being with you in person next week.