Humility & Politics in America | Dr. David Bobb | BRI’s Constitutional Conversations

0:00 so I’m intrigued by by the the this idea of humility in how it was practiced by the by the founders by Jefferson and Madison how can how do you think we can practice it in our own day-to-day lives in classrooms and schools what is humility look like in our world well you know Madison is called the

0:23 father of the Constitution and I think for good reason but one of the things that we don’t often think about is that on fully 2/3 of the key votes throughout that four month process Madison was on the losing end and yet he stayed in the mix right he he recognized that even though he wasn’t getting everything that he wanted that the plan as a whole was was better than anything else and about

0:45 at the end of the convention there was this dramatic moment when they were gonna scratch some old wounds and and perhaps go into another long debate that might torpedo the whole thing in Washington intervened he didn’t speak except for that one occasion at the Constitutional Convention and then the elderly Ben Franklin stood up and he

1:06 said what we need to do here is doubt a little bit of our own infallibility in other words nobody here even in this gathering of the the delegates of the Constitutional Convention knows it all not even Washington we’re not giving absolute power to him every one of us

1:29 Franklin said would have some reason to think of this thing as a catastrophe let’s doubt our own infallibility though recognize that we’re fallible great phrase and come to a compromise and yes it’s really important to debate that compromise in that set of compromises and that’s what we love doing at the

1:51 Bill of Rights Institute but I think what we can learn from that is that intellectually you don’t know it all you never will morally you shouldn’t act with superiority over people whether you know more than they do or not the goal here and the only way that we’re ever going to get back to a better sense of what the UNAM is and how the

2:12 Unite’s Americans is if we all act a little bit more out of a sense that none of us is infallible because I think what we see in the political process so often is that the two major parties suppose that they can have a permanent realignment and that drives a lot of our discourse these days and a lot of people

2:34 feel like if I could get all of my viewpoint all of my policy positions and we could bundle them all together and they’d be one big package and we put them all into effect the the the nation would be saved and that’s a bad way that’s a bad mental model it’s a mental model that suggests some the other side you guys have nothing to offer and I

2:56 think in our country we’ve made so many things in that zero-sum game that that mental model has come to identify social interaction and what happens then is this ever-increasing arms race where the idea is that we will vanquish our foe and we will do so with maximum contempt

3:20 for who they are even as human beings and it’s a hard thing to recover that sense of you know what we’re all in this together it’s not going to be done by mantra or or slogan it’s not gonna be done by a 12-step plan it’s gonna require a really deep change of heart that I think is gonna have to start with young people

3:41 because the sad thing today is that there are a lot of citizens in this country who are pretty dug in on that mental model and what I love about so many of the young people that I see today is that they do have more openness to that potential that they can learn from other groups and that in in in

4:04 really being worried about that kind of zero-sum political ideology there’s an openness to the thought that maybe the other side has something to offer whatever that other side or sides might be and I think the job of us as educators is to ensure that that mentality gains more and more because in that humility I think really

4:25 does come the possibility of a recovery of what the hounam is