Senator Ben Sasse- The Vanishing American Adult

well good evening ladies and gentlemen please find your seats we’ll get started program my name is ba-bye serve as president of the Bill of Rights Institute I’m delighted to welcome all of you here to this Kansas public lecture it’s an annual event made possible by the Fred and Mary Koch foundation we’re so grateful for their support in making possible this this conversation with senator Ben Sasse we’re delighted this evening to be able to have the opportunity to talk with with Senator sass about his important new book it’s called the vanishing American adult our coming-of-age crisis and how to rebuild a culture of self-reliance the Bill of Rights Institute features the American idea in the words of the Declaration of Independence in our mission and vision statements we seek to equip young people to be able under to be able to understand their rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness that they might not just MAO those words but really internalize own that idea and just prior to this evening’s event senator sass was able to take questions from a good number of students mainly from the Wichita area we’re so delighted that they and many of their teachers are able to join us this evening our purpose of the Bill of Rights Institute is to work with those teachers across the country some 50,000 strong that constitute about a quarter of America’s secondary school teachers in history civics and the teaching of the American idea to help those teachers we publish curricula including textbooks we do professional development training sessions around the country including one that recently was held in this city in Wichita with the United School District 259 about 250 teachers from across the area gathered to study the Constitution now I have to pause and mention that there was one headline today that you might have mentioned I might have missed it it appeared in the onion here’s that here’s the headline the Supreme Court admits it mistakenly used Belgian Constitution for last three ruling now our distinguished guest this evening has reflected deeply on the meaning of the American Constitution I don’t know maybe he’s thought about the Belgian Constitution as well but only when given speeches for the onion exactly that’s great what does it mean for us to be a creedal nation that’s one of the things that we’re going to talk about this evening our speaker is a fifth-generation Nebraskan he’s a corn Husker through and through go big red I know that’s a controversial thing to say here but nonetheless questions and answers later right with degrees from Harvard Yale and st. John’s College dr. sass is a historian he’s taught at the

University of Texas in Austin he has a varied and diverse array of areas that he’s worked in including business consultancy in the US House of Representatives as a chief of staff and most recently before being elected senator from the state of Nebraska president of Midland University now I mentioned that this book I think is an important one but it’s not important in the way that you might think of sort of the Washington definition of important I happen to live in the Washington DC area and there’s something called a Washington read a Washington read is when you pick up a book and you look to the back and you look to the index to see if your name is in it that’s the kind of town that Washington is but when you read this book what you find is Agustin and Aquinas Plato and Shakespeare Madison and Twain the poetry and prose of American democracy and what we’re so excited about to be able to do tonight is to focus our attention on those themes and so I’d ask that as you participate in this conversation by calling up on your phones or other devices SLI do.com SLI do calm it’s on the screen there if you enter the pot at the hashtag mark all you have to enter is X 100 and then typing your question but we ask that you make the questions really focused on the themes at hand and the three things that I really want to focus in our in our conversation with senators asks about our won the relationship between culture and politics secondly an idea that he advances that’s really one of the touchstones in this book embrace work pain embrace work pain why is it so important to have a strong work ethic and then third the senators injunction to us as a people that we revive civic education so it invite your questions along those themes or others that are taken up over the course of the evening but rather than talk about the sort of things of Washington and what’s happening in our nation’s politics right now that we go to a subject that the senator is called upstream from that place and in fact let me take my seat and we’ll get started with the conversation precisely along those lines please join me in welcoming senator Ben Sasse [Music] I haven’t been on Twitter in the last couple hours anyway so I’d have nothing to say on the card events I don’t know what’s happened that’s great well you speaking of Twitter you-you-you tweeted this past summer and write in the book something that I think is an important part of a point of departure culture and here I’m quoting from you is

upstream from politics culture is upstream from politics but if you might start our conversation by just telling us what what do you what do you mean by that boy if I don’t know I was gonna have to answer that I’d have thought more before I wrote it I think well so let’s define some terms for a minute maybe right politics is the word comes from polis right meaning the affairs of the city in Greece but we use politics to mean government most of the time and government is about power government is about compulsion and most things that are interesting in life aren’t about power and compulsion they’re about voluntary choice they’re about persuasion they’re about passion projects they’re about love right so the things that really matter in life the things that make you happy are doing there’s lots of data on this now as you mentioned a business strategy guy about work history but I’m trained as an academic historian and so I’ve never really done much social science or thought a lot about it but recently I’ve been thinking about the happiness literature and I say this because I know Arthur Brooks spoke here at this event a year or two ago it turns out that there’s quite a lot of social science on what makes people happy and it ends up there only about four things like if you ask someone on the man and woman on the street how complicated do you think is the algorithm that determines whether or not you’re happy most people think it’s like five hundred or a thousand things that go into that equation it turns out it’s four do you have a family do you have any friends and by friends I don’t mean do you have 50 or 500 people on social media I mean do you have actual friends and it turns out in an Aristotelian sense you can only have like three or four or five of those in your life a friend is somebody who when when they’re happy you’re happy and when they hurt you hurt you don’t choose to do it it just happens because you love them right I mean my it’s the way we parent my daughters are 16 and 13 my son is sex when one of my kids is hurting I don’t choose to hurt I just ache cuz I love them right my six-year-old is flying down the street on his bike grinning from ear to ear I don’t choose to be happy I just find my shoulders going back and my cheeks turn up and I’m looking at the Sun and the world is good right and and that’s what friendship is it’s an expansive sense of the self the family friends do you have a theological or philosophical worldview to make sense of death and suffering can you make sense of the fact that we’re different than the dog when your dog is on the porch and the sun shining on him he’s happy but he has no memory of bad stuff past or worried about bad stuff future he has no nostalgic memory of good past he has no anticipation of hope he’s just in the moment we’re not like that right and so we know that the world was a broken place there’s a lot of suffering do you ever give a worldview to make sense of that and number four and fundamentally do you have work like by far the largest statistical driver of human happiness is do you have work that you think matters not do you make enough money or do you have ankles or knees or back that hurts at the end of the day and that is there some jackwagon three cubicles down the talks too loudly but like do I think when I leave home on Monday morning and go to work that I’m

needed if you are you’re probably gonna be happy and if you’re not you’re not gonna be happy well those things that’s culture family friends your worldview your work none of that stuff can be accomplished by power government has a role to maintain ordered Liberty so there’s not violence against your family and we care about the growing economy so that there’s work but fundamentally government is about a framework for that ordered liberty and that’s freedom from bad stuff freedom to the good stuff is what determines whether not you’re happy and that’s what I mean that culture is the important stuff and politics only works when it’s a derivative of culture of politics is trying to shape culture everything stinks one of those lines Olivia asks from the audience we are told we are deeply divided as a nation are we in fact as divided as we think and is this a result of culture or politics it’s a good question I I think that I think there’s a bad time I think I think we were really divided and there’s a lot of data that we could cite to talk about this but what I think is happening is we are tribal community forming relational beings we are social animals we are meant to have friendships and a pack around us we’re not meant to live in isolation and right now there’s so much hollowing out of local community there’s so much loneliness and we could talk about I won’t give my long-winded speech on the 4th revolution in the history of economics which is what I think we’re going through right now we’re transitioning we’ve had hunter-gatherers you had agrarian ISM yet industrialization the rise of cities we have this new thing this sort of mobile digital placeless economy where people are gonna change jobs more rapidly than it’s ever happened before in human history and I don’t use those words lightly the historian to me knows that my regular job as a historian is to be a skunk at a garden party to say historians tease out continuity and discontinuity over time and people always think the moment you live out is the most interesting radical disrupted crazy moment in time actually it’s usually not usually there’s way more continuity than discontinuity you just think this is a really special time because you’re a narcissist and you’re here right like that’s sort of the historians job is to be the boring skunk at the garden party that says now actually we’re not changing that much we really are changing a lot right now and we’re going from a world where hunter-gatherers in agrarians they didn’t have job choice you just did what mom and dad Grandma and Grandpa and your aunts and uncles did you just sort of you didn’t choose to specialize and become a thing you just became 8 or 10 or 12 and became better at doing what the adults of your community did industrialization in the rise of cities create a job choice and it was really disruptive from 1870 to 1920 as people at a mass level first had job choice obviously some people are always called to the clergy and law as a discipline emerged about 200 years ago as a profession but by and large people just did what their parents did and then those job choice in the late 1800s what we have is the world we’re gonna have hyper mega meta job choice forever I was

born in 1972 average duration at a firm in the 1970s was 26 years average duration that affirmed today is four years and and it’s gonna get shorter and shorter forever more technology is gonna speed the pace of this we’re gonna have 40 and 45 and 50 year olds getting disrupted out of their jobs and what that means is hunter-gatherers had tent communities that followed the Buffalo agrarians had villages around where they produced and fed the world or fed their community industrialists disrupted but we ended up having community formed around urban ethnic neighborhoods and you still had social density we have a world where your job changes all the time and so your neighborhood is a much much more transient place than people have ever had before and so right now to the back to the question are we disrupted right now are we really at war with each other I think what’s happening is we’re hollowing out local community and mediating institutions we don’t know our neighbors and we change neighborhoods all the time and so if you have fewer local friends we’re desperate for tribe and what’s happening in our politics as we hollow out the local is we’re trying to project at least anti tribe nobody really believes in our tribes like everybody knows in our politics that all these parties stink I’m the third most conservative guy in the Senate by voting record so this is not an argument from the mushy middle I’d make a case for my political view of the world but the Republican and Democratic Party these are not interesting groups of people for you to project your grand hopes and dreams on but that isn’t what’s happening right now is we politicize more and more of the national conversation what we’re not doing is saying oh I really believe deeply in my party we’re saying I really believe the other people those people are really wicked and so we’re creating anti tribe as a substitute for the lack of local tribe is not gonna work very well we’re gonna have to build new forms of social capital and we have to recognize that we’re embodied local beings you need actual friends not just people to scream at because they’re on the wrong cable network wanted to pick up on on what you said about kind of the the pretension or the the hubris to suppose that we live in in particularly unique times because one of the contentions of your book is that with the rise of a dull ting and you might say a few words about what that means and and why that’s such an important concept for us to really understand your thesis in this book but but if I were to offer a kind of challenge to the overall thesis hasn’t it always been thus you know haven’t we always had a time no matter what era what age whether it’s America or any other Society or civilization where there is a kind of Arrested Development what makes this concept of adulting unique and problematic today yeah that’s there are three media questions in there I think I’ll tease them out am I an old guys screaming get off my lawn the answer is no but I should have to justify why number two what is adulting and in really what is adolescence which was a good innovation in human history about 2,000 years ago and what is perpetual adolescence which is the thing that I’m worried about in this book and that’s a really modern

phenomenon and where does it come from I think it comes from the fact that we’re raising our teens differently than teens have ever been raised before because there’s almost always been lots of necessity on the teenage years there was things that we needed out of teenagers and so the distinction between production and consumption was something that people knew in their bellies by experience and our teams by and large don’t have to learn that because production isn’t required out of our teams well that’s new so first the distinction between adolescents and and perpetual adolescence most places and most times in human history there have been kids and there been adults and the difference is are you dependent or could you do enough to add value in your community largely have you hit puberty if you become biologically an adult we need you now you got to get to work there’s a tribe next door they want to invade us we don’t have enough food we need you to help farm we need you to pursue the Buffalo right so usually there has been childhood dependent state we need mom we need shelter we need security we need food we can’t make rational decisions we’re two or we’re seven right and then you got to puberty now we need you we got to push you out of the nest cuz you’re an imperative for us and adolescence is a concept that emerged about 2,000 years ago where for somewhere between 18 months and four years we say you get a greenhouse phase right after puberty so your body becomes an adult but we don’t think you have to go to full-time work you don’t have to quit school and learning you don’t have to pretend your morale fully-formed all of us who know 17 18 19 year-old boys they’re not MOLLE morally fully formed right their frontal lobe isn’t developed yet every seventeen-year-old boy in the history of time is driven his car too fast right I mean you know what I mean he drove his Buffalo too fast but there was always a lack of a feedback loop about prudential decision-making so you we’re not morally done you’re not school done you’re not economically and educationally done you’re not having you used to have to have kids now we don’t really think it’s ideal for 14-year olds to procreate we don’t form new households at that stage so we create this this protected space for adolescence that’s a good thing as long as we know it’s a means to an end it’s not the end in itself you don’t want to be stuck as a teenager forever and right now we’re drifting to a place where we’re pretending the ideal time is this stage where your body became an adult and yet you don’t have responsibilities and we don’t demand very much of you and you can just drift I don’t think that’s good for people I don’t think it’s good for kids I don’t think they’re ultimately happy there and Disney remade Peter Pan as a sort of utopian thing you could be stranded in childhood forever Disney didn’t ex they want to sell a bunch of you know admissions to their movies go back and read the real book the berry book behind Peter Pan it is a dystopian hell so Peter Pan is a horrible human being right he’s pushing 30 years old and he murders people but he’s so impulsive that he lives in the moment he doesn’t even have a historical memory he doesn’t remember how many people he’s killed or

what their names are he doesn’t care he’s stranded in this stage where his body as an adult and yet he has no accountability for his actions we are drifting to a place and again not I’m only 45 so I’m not doing old man screaming get off my lawn but we are drifting to a place where it’s really hard demographically to tell 10 and 15 and 20 and 25 year old boys apart 18 to 24 year old males almost half of them spend a majority of their waking hours playing video games I’m not beating up on you for having one bad you know month addicted to Tetris sophomore year in college but there’s the adolescence is a means to an end it is not a destination and throughout most times in history we’ve our kids enough that protecting the space of adolescents was special partly because they knew that they were ultimately needed a lot of what we’re communicating to our teams right now is we don’t need to teach you how to work because we don’t really need you you can just consume all the time and it turns out life is satisfying when you’re producing well going back to that happiness literature about work being needed is what helps you have a sense of dignity that you can live a life of gratitude to serve your neighbor not just consume all the time right one of the things you relate and I think it’s a great opportunity to talk a little bit more about that that work ethic that you you lament has has faded in America you talked a little bit about what an experience on a ranch meant for your daughter I wonder if you could just relate a little bit about that and what that kind of opened your eyes to yeah well I know some of your going to dinner next so I won’t give you all the gory details of what it looks like to live and work on a ranch but my girls are now 16 13 and boys six so two years ago our daughters were 14 and 12 and I am one of five people in the US Senate who’s never been a politician before this isn’t my dream job I wasn’t you know sort of gearing my whole life to do this and so we hadn’t really thought through we don’t want to raise our kids we don’t move to DC we don’t wanna raise our kids there we don’t know whether they would did tassel corn and I don’t know how to get kids character if you’re not shipping them to the fields in the summer but in the same regard I didn’t want to I didn’t want to be away from my kids Monday to Friday every week I love them and they need dad right it’s not it’s not ideal for me to travel five out every seven days so we have a deal at our house where I take somebody with me most weeks we rotate who my date is I get home on Friday nights my wife tells me who annoyed her most that week they become my date for the next week we’re not recording this right none of my kids are here so my my kids have a lot of Geographic change in their life they have intergenerational experiences they they are exposed to things that I think are good for them and yet they still don’t have a whole heck of a lot of work and I felt my wife and I felt like our 14 year old daughter was acting kind of spoiled and we know a lot of Nebraska is the largest cattle state in the Union now and we know a lot of ranchers we were like you know cow-calf season in March in Nebraska when it’s cold it’s

miserable this’ll be good for her and so if you know the cows are born at between fifty and a hundred and twenty pounds and most of them are artificially inseminated so you have to match mom with the baby to get full payment for this baby calf you got to know who came from whom so you got to get them tagged quickly their ears can freeze first-time mamas they often you know are in duress and labor so there’s work you got to be out there at 9:00 at midnight at 3:00 a.m. at 6:00 a.m. like you never get a long run asleep in the 30 plus days of cow calf in season so we shipped our daughter off to work on this ranch and drive a pickup and go check cattle all night every night and she had to dawn rubber gloves to her shoulders and again I’m not telling you all the details and she would text me you know once every three hours shift with what she was learning and it was just gross like everything that was happening in her life there’s just a lot of poop in cattle ranch operations and she was suffering through this in ways that were miserable and we loved it like it getting your kid to suffer is one of the best ways to show him you love him no I turned him into tweets like every day my daughter would text me and I just made up hashtag from the ranch and I tweeted him out and these things went totally viral and I was traveling across Nebraska in the spring of 6 2016 and obviously the presidential election was pretty heated and you’d think if you’re a politician sitting your senator and you go into a town people gonna want to talk about politics everywhere I would go people would just come up to me and say I’ve been reading about your daughter on the ranch give me the guys cell phone number I want my kids to suffer tail well from suffering to optimism we have a question what makes you so optimistic when there are so many things that need improvement and you’ve pointed to some of the things where we’ve seen deterioration or the the trendline is going in the in the wrong direction but yet this book sounds an optimistic note you’ve sounded a few of them tonight what makes you so optimistic well the the big and log answer would require us to debate theology and all sorts of things about hope and where we think history is headed so I won’t do that but I’ll say this the book is only one-third analytics sort of lay the groundwork for what this new thing is of the way we’ve drifted to a kind of parenting in the digital mobile portable post-industrial economy and the kind of parenting we’ve drifted to isn’t thought out enough so I’m not beating up on Millennials in this book at all really so the New York Times didn’t like the book and they they wanted to trash that I was some you know grumpy guy who’s been a college president or done this and that thing and I’m beating up on Millennials the book is not a blame laying book at all if you read it it’s two-thirds constructive but to the degree I’m laying blame the blame is on we the parents and the grandparents not on the kids the kids are being raised at the richest time in place in human history and there’s a lot about that that is to be celebrated our kids are insulated from lots of bad things and that’s a blessing but you don’t want it therefore go on to say I want to insulate them from a lot of the good things that are

the foundations of character I don’t want to protect my kid from stitches right I want my kid to have some scars and bloody knees and stitches I want to protect my six-year-old boy to not fall off the fence that he’s walking on taking some risky behavior if he might damage his neck and end up paralyzed but I’m not trying to protect him from falling down and cutting up his knees because that’s good like that’s a that that scar tissue is the foundation of future character and we need to think it’s a little bit artificial but we need to think what does it look like to form work ethic in an era where we don’t really need 10 and 12 and 14 year old labor anymore that’s new in history right I mean as recently as the u.s. civil war economic historians estimate that more than 30 percent of the productive value of US households was added by kids under 14 which puberty comes earlier now than then lots of reasons about diet and whatnot but basically you thought of puberty around 1415 back then more than 30 percent of the economic value of a household was kids under 14 we don’t need our kids to add any economic we don’t know what to do with them but we’ve gone from a world with production and consumption as experiences that everybody would know in their belly to now we take our kids and we have progression through years or grades in school and then they have all this time that’s not in school which is different kinds of consumer experiences that’s not good enough people are happy when they’re productive and when they’re on their way to benefiting their neighbor and we need to self-consciously figure out how to do that we need to reach them to become not just functionally literate but a pet ative lee literally we want them to swallow stories we want them to care about it we want them to travel and develop empathy we want them to think about limiting their consumption because it turns out lots and lots of cotton candy doesn’t make you feel better afterwards we want to figure out how to become productive there’s a lot that we need to do and I hope that four people are interested in about two thirds of it is constructive I hope there’s something useful along those lines you you chart a course in which we can begin to recover what you call Ben Franklin’s nation that that idea of a people that prize work could you just sketch a few of those points that you think on a practical level we can do as a as a people to to recover that that esteemed place of a work particularly work with young people yeah I I believe deeply that it is far easier and our modern technologically saturated economy for parents to just do every task every task is easier to hire out or to do yourself than to actually teach your kids to do it one of the reasons we’re not good at getting our kids at work I think is because we’re lazy and doing the work to plan to get a more Kathak right like there’s almost no task around my house that my kids really started doing in a way that they were better at it right away than me me setting them up to do it took far more work than me just doing it myself and so like look around your house and figure out what’s everything you’re playing for if you’re paying somebody to mow your lawn why you know Aurel don’t you buying a mower and teaching your kids how to do it right

when when your kid is a year-and-a-half old and he’s crawling around at the base of the shower when I’m getting ready for work in the morning I can go get my socks but he needs to figure out how to add some value he’s 18 months now dude and so it teach you teach the it’s not a line I’ve ever used before I don’t think that’s gonna work I’m gonna ditch that but but I sort of you know wanted to find ways to put your kids up to different work when you’re paying the bills around your house why are you not teaching your 14 year old to be the CFO and doing accounts payable out of your house right let them write the checks and balance the checkbook and we try in a fairly discipline way at our house now to shift all possible work we can to our kids we’re not any good at it yet but we almost are at a place where they do half the work that we had to do my wife and I mid-40s you know this is a brand-new thing that to come about this quickly when I graduated high school in 1990 I live in a twenty five thousand person egg manufacturing town about an hour outside of Omaha when I was graduating high school about half the kids in my town we’re gonna go to college and half weren’t the half that we’re gonna go to college a third of them would flunk out in the first year so less than a third of the kids I’m graduating with we’re gonna end up sophomores in college and yet the 308th person graduating class everybody I knew had worked in 1990 had done some kind of work when I got to college in Boston kids from 50 states and more than 50 foreign countries again I’m not that old right this is twenty eight twenty seven years ago everybody I knew when I got to college had worked I became a college president in 2009 back in this same town that I’d grown up in there’s 130 year old liberal arts college had lots of problems was in danger of going bankrupt I was there because I do turnaround stuff and so the kids that were at our college these were not academically elite kids they were going to a school that had lots of problems so probably there were bumpy things in their lives that they didn’t have a guidance counselor trying to dissuade them from coming to our school ten years ago that was having problems and yet less than a third of the kids had ever really done any meaningful work that wasn’t because we had this wonderful work ethic in our intrinsic character thirty years ago and they were lazy it was that they grew up in a different time and we’ve most work from our households as we’ve gotten to sort of suburban eyes decks urbanized living as the the predominant American experience we have to self-consciously create those work experiments for experiences for our kids the book is not about policy or politics but if we were going to talk about the downstream policy and politics stuff there is also a nanny state culture which tries to have the labor market insulate kids from work some of it intentionally some of it unintentionally there are things we try to do to protect kids by making them you know detasseling kids I’m sure you guys have detasseling around here I know that we’re more wheat but if you drive just a little bit north and you get to to a corn country you see kids walking around with these space suits now because some regulators said that they could get corn rash you’re in a hundred degree field in July you’re gonna kill these kids of heat stroke by trying to protect them from getting a little bit of rash on their

chest and neck we got lots of stuff where we need to rethink these assumptions some places in the Northeast where parents have been charged with child abuse for allowing their ten and twelve-year-old kids to walk a block to the park it is far more dangerous to have your kid not going to the park than going to the park before we move to talk about the the importance of reviving the teaching of civics Marc asks what role does moral relativism play in our culture today a bad one I’ve had long answers can I just check the box and a gray I mean we need let’s disagree moral relativism and principled pluralism right moral relativism is the idea that there is no order things that there is no right and wrong it’s an asinine philosophy right nobody actually believes that but it’s sort of a lazy because as soon as you do then you’ve just declared a moral absolute that somebody else believed in moral things was wrong but let’s distinguish between that and principled pluralism principled pluralism is the idea that worldviews are in conflict we don’t agree about everything well that’s American right the American Founding was fundamentally about a whole bunch of people who believed really big and different things about heaven and hell for example and they decided they were gonna form a polity together where we would protect each other’s right to be what we might regard as wrong I believe one thing and you believe another and let’s come together and let’s form a community that says let’s wrestle over the really big and important things but let’s wrestle free from violence let’s wrestle by debate let’s create a public square where we rebuild the state that protects us from violence so that we can try to invite each other to my church versus your synagogue versus X versus Y versus Z and we can debate these things by persuasion because the human soul is actually too big to be compelled by force that’s a great segue into the the question of civics because I think you you you state very clearly in the book quote we need a baseline of knowledge a launching pad of common values and sentiments my question to you is where do we begin to find this well we have some great headwaters we have some great founts in this civilization and maybe it’s worth just thinking about 1787 together for a minute not just to give you a shout out for being the head of the Bill of Rights Institute but because it’s actually just a great common place to start our founders were stunningly arrogant people right I mean what what they did was they made an argument that throughout most times in places in human history they thought everybody else was wrong about the nature of government that’s pretty bold right they the American Revolution was fought for a whole bunch of different reasons and taxation and and different the distance across an economy that was changing that’s 1776 the the magic of America is Philadelphia 1787 1787 these people come together in a room and they say you know what we get

it though human soul is broken and there there’s all sorts of nasty stuff in the world and there’s somebody who wants to take your life and your liberty and your property and so we know that you need government we’re not utopian idealistic naive folks we know that you need government but most people in human history have always said that because you need government because you need somebody to wield the sword to keep us from descending into anarchy we have to be grateful for the king and whatever he says goes the king is first power is first and writes her derivative if you if you have rights it’s because the king and as beneficence grants you some of these rights the American founder said no actually that’s backwards we should all agree the world’s broken we’re gonna need government but let’s start with something more fundamental we believe in universal human dignity there are 4 million Americans at that time today we got 320 million of us there’s 7.2 billion people on the earth and we believe that 7.2 billion people are created with dignity we think they’re created as image bearers of God and they have natural rights and government is just our shared project to secure those rights government is not the author or source of our rights people and dignity comes first and government is just a tool government doesn’t come first and grant us right so that means all sorts of things it means that we don’t assume that the passive assumption on starting a new venture either a for-profit small business or a venture philanthropy we don’t think the passive assumption is prohibition we think the passive assumption is permission the government might prohibit specific things for specific reasons but if the government doesn’t have a legitimate reason to prohibit something then we get it do it compare that with England pre 1776 you want to start a business great you go and supplicate before the king in this court you see if he gives you a charter and if he doesn’t it’s illegal the passive assumption is prohibition the American founders reverse that and in that idea of universal human dignity you find the headwaters of how you can get to lots of shared belief and honest debate about all the really important stuff which happens locally I’ll pull up here but Margaret Thatcher when you say what does American exceptionalism it is that it is a it’s not American exceptionalism isn’t a claim that we are sort of superior to other people there are a whole bunch of nutjobs right now out there wanting to advance a kind of theory of conservatism that’s called blood and soil nationalism nationalism it’s a really bad on American idea and it’s a claim that American exceptionalism is somehow we’re earth nicly superior to other people no it’s not American exceptionalism is recognizing that historically what happened in 1787 was a great argument and the world benefits from this understanding of universal human dignity Margaret Thatcher had the famous line Europe is as a bunch of Nations founded by history and America is the only nation founded by philosophy which is what you were saying in your opening about the creedal nature of what it means to be an America an American America isn’t just about a place though it’s that but America is an idea I was having dinner with Bono last

year and he all of a sudden at one point just sort of says out of the blue you know the thing about America he goes I love Ireland right were the most beautiful people on earth and we make the best music and the island is is emerald golden beautiful he goes but nobody would say Ireland is an idea America is an idea where you were from everybody on earth looks to America as this place that believes in universal human dignity it’s a pretty good place to start it’s a great place to start one of the one of the challenges one of the challenges we see and this came up in the the student forum just a few minutes ago with social media that is that it has the tendency to exacerbate our polarization could you say a few words about how we can in this social media saturated world in which we live counteract that that tribalism or that that polarization and and point the way to this this idea that connected to bind us together yeah so first of all recognize the human bodies matter right it matters that we have bodies where we live in space and time and it turns out your real friends are people that you actually know and break bread with they have bodies social media can do all sorts of things to augment those relationships I have my basically my nine best buddies from college are all coming in this weekend to watch Nebraska upset Ohio State and football you Kansas folks know that we used to be really great and Nebraska is the winningest team in the last 50 years in college football because we were great from 50 years ago until 17 years ago we’ve fallen on hard times we are the biggest underdog of my lifetime this weekend anyway I digress I have nine buddies coming in to watch the Ohio State Nebraska football game with me social media has been a real blessing to those friendships because as we’ve had the three or four month run up to this we’re sort of in constant dialogue by email or Facebook or Twitter or whatever and it’s gonna be a better experience when we get together starting Thursday night for this long weekend because some of us who haven’t maybe seen each other in 18 or 24 months or all kind of all caught back up and we’ve been planning for this moment but that’s augmenting relationships of actual people who know each other right if you think social media can substitute for hue real human relationships all the data shows you’re gonna be lonely like there’s just tons of data on this you don’t have to be a conservative as I am to play this Robert Putnam a center-left guy who’s written all sorts of interesting things his book Bowling Alone sort of broke through into mainstream consciousness 15 ish years ago he has a new book out right now that I’d highly recommend called our kids came out last year the term our kids in 1950s 60s American America would have been heard in everybody’s ear in a

communitarian sense our kids are those kids in our neighborhood our kids are those kids one and two and three miles away maybe different socio-economic levels but we care about them because we’re a part of this polity together we’re a part of this Republic together we’re part of this neighborhood together they’re our kids our kids now Reed’s in the polling data overwhelmingly as to mean just your biological progeny just your kids and it turns out as we have more and more privatized experience and less and less connection to our neighbor people are thinking that social media what can can replace that and it can’t you you turns out if you go from zero to 50 to even 200 Facebook friends it tells you something about your local community network and you are happy or probably if you have 50 than zero and 200 then 50 but you’re not happier with 500 than 200 you’re actually slightly less happy and if you have a thousand social media friends you actually are spending a lot of time curating those relationships and they’re coming at the cost of actual relationships that you have so one thing you should be montt we need to be mindful of is the way digital consumption is changing our experience Wall Street Journal had a great piece on it this week on the smartphone but Atlanta if you want to goo let Atlantic Monthly had a wonderful piece last summer called is your smartphone stealing your brain and there’s a whole bunch of things that are happening in habit for innovation for teams and 20-somethings where we’re displacing real human relationships with social media and it doesn’t yield greater happiness last point and I’ve tried not to say anything to controversy because a controversial I wasn’t trying to get into politics but I worry that this might be misinterpreted that way but please hear me out Putin is a really really bad guy Putin is an enemy of free speech Free Press free religion freedom of association he is a really bad guy there is nobody on earth happier about American on American discord than Vladimir Putin Vladimir Putin can cut his budget for ships and tanks right now as he spends a little bit more on propaganda and info ops and he is winning so I don’t mean to get anywhere near the actual controversy of the way we do policing and the NFL’s response to that and president Trump’s response to Kaepernick that’s not my point there’s a big and important debate there and thoughtful loving neighbors will try to empathize and understand the other side of a lot of those debates I’m not here to talk about that there is policing debate there was a Kaepernick protest there was president Trump deciding to exacerbate those scabs all that bracket for a minute I’m not talking about what your view is on any side of that issue after that exploded two weeks ago do you know that two of the largest trending hashtags in the world instantly became hashtag taken the NFL and hashtag stand for the anthem how do you think that happened Vladimir Putin made that happen there are bot farms all across Russia that loaded American social media with hashtag take a knee and hashtag stand for the anthem he doesn’t give a rip

about patriotism to the American flag he wants Americans to hate each other and right now he’s really really good at this I spent a lot of time doing intelligence work in the US and I spent a ton of time in the skip the classified bunker and when you actually read what intercepts we get for what Putin is doing he is just happy as a pig in mud just spending money to exacerbate American discord and you do a lot of that through social media something like 30% of Twitter accounts are fake and that’s largely funded by foreign intelligence services to make us hate each other you talk about in the book the and and touched on this just a little bit today the warehousing of students if we move from the k-12 space where that has become a problem to the college sphere it was interesting you mentioned that about half of your high school classmates would have been heading off to college and the other half thought to pursue a career right away there’s a question from the audience that asks do you believe that education influences how engaged we are how much involved in civil society we are and we used to suppose that that college would be a a preparation for that but there would be lots of other pathways you care to comment on that question great and let’s distinguish between education and schooling because education is the big noble thing schooling is a tool really important means to an end I’m not attacking schooling right I’m former college president my wife spent an intercity biology teacher and administrator my dad was a lifelong high school teacher and football and wrestling coach so I believe deeply in American schooling and yet really important to be able to look at your tools with skepticism and as school is just a tool and so we should understand where we are in human history and how recent it is that we’ve thought schooling is the only way and I don’t mean just schooling in terms of through age 18 I mean schooling in terms of a universalized assumption about college now by the way 40 41 of 50 governors in the country have recently over the course the last decade renamed their old k12 kindergarten through K through Grade 12 bureaucracy they’ve renamed them P 16 bureaucracies to mean preschool through grade 16 that’s a terrible idea this book is not about policy or politics but I’ll get on my high horse about policy for a minute grade 13 is a disastrous way to serve 19 year old kids you do not want your people 7 & 8 & 9 years past adolescents to be in something that functions like grade school it is not a good thing for 19 year old kids to be indoors passively sitting and learning from some other sage on the stage we need them to be passionate about learning to be shaking the trees and knowledge to be throwing open the doors of the library to be wanting the internship to be wanting to get through school because it becomes a

means to an end of course I believe in the liberal arts but I mean that’s sort of pre-vocational part of school if you don’t know why you’re in college don’t be there know what you’re trying to get out of it and recognize it as a means to an end and when you use the data from me graduate in high school my little town 27 years ago whatever it would be and 50% the kids go to college I was a college president from 8 years ago to 3 years ago and I looked at the data at that point in Nebraska graduating high school kids it was at the beginning of that window so data was a couple years old so place of this 10 plus years in the past 31 / 29 % of Nebraska high school kids who graduated high school tried college as their next step 10 plus years ago it had fallen from 29 to 18% sorry I got them the math wrong 29% didn’t go straight to college and it went down to 18% only 18% not going straight to college in graduation how many more college graduates do you think we have in Nebraska now than 15 years ago none there are no more people graduating from college in Nebraska now than 15 years ago what we do is we flunk a lot of them out as sophomores because we don’t actually have any use for them we don’t have these other pathways and plans for how you become an adult and how you get prepared to work and so we just act like this one form is the right form for everybody even though the data shows that’s not what’s happening we just don’t have enough institutional pluralization for these coming-of-age institutions I think we need radically pluralized institutional form for 18 to 22 year olds which is when we think of sort of residential learning but we need different institutional forms from 40 and 45 and 50 year olds as well because those are the people who are being disintermediated out of jobs that’s never happened before in human history that you’ve thought that 40 and 45 and 50 year olds will regularly lose their jobs that’s the world where your kids and grandkids are headed or where you you 17 and 18 year olds are headed you’re headed to a world where not just your job not just your firm but your whole industry is gonna cease to exist when you’re 40 and again when you’re 47 and when you’re 52 we have to create a civilization of lifelong learners no one’s ever done that before that’s gonna be a big challenge we’re gonna have to succeed at it to maintain a republic but we need more institutional form not more homogenous ation of that form picking up on that what what do you see that gives you confidence going forward you know one of the touchstones you have in this book is is Alexis de Tocqueville and and the the vibrancy that he saw he didn’t go to Washington DC and say this is it right this that’s that’s a point that you make he he went out into other parts of of our land and and and saw this kind of dynamism where do you see that kind of rigorous thinking that kind of innovation that that can propel us into the into the place that we need to be and the educational sort of lifelong learning path yes I think we’re going through a bumpy time and yet I do think the the seeds are there of what having

talked villians since you say since you bring up the Tocqueville talk villians civil society can flower again but it’s gonna require lots of new institution building this is not not to pander to you but I know you all at the Bill of Rights Institute are training lots of school teachers across the country and some of your opening comments that is an innovation that came about through an experiment right lots and lots of experiments in America fail that’s a gift right if you try to define the one way to build the iPhone and you had mob Bell do it as a government contract in 1955 we would never get the iPhone right what you needed is Silicon Valley funding lots and lots of different things the vast majority of them they get funded by venture capital go bankrupt that’s all right that’s that’s sort of a winnowing process where failure is a fine way to experiment right in baseball your and the Hall of Fame if you get three out of ten hits in America we believe in that pluralism and a lot of that dynamism that comes from innovation your your toque to the line I won’t give my my big version of the story that I tell in the book but it is relevant that Tocqueville was stunned to find so much economic dynamism in America Europeans were surprised right so Tocqueville is writing mostly in the 1840s we think of our founding as 1776 or 1787 Europeans didn’t really think of us as truly independent till we won the war of 1812 the Brits had been distracted King George was crazy they were at war with France so when we win the war of 1812 they now think we’re truly independent and they think it’s kind of interesting these religious zealots at the perimeter of the earth are out there and they have pluralism and it’s interesting in a philosophical sense but they didn’t expect that we would be economically dynamic two decades later by the 1830s we have all this economic dynamism in America right we have the canal revolution we have the railroad revolution we have the proto putting out revolution which was like a factory system where you didn’t yet organize all the labor inputs around the one assembly line that the product moved around in different kind of craftspeople really interesting things are happening and so Tocqueville decides I will explain American innovation to Europeans I’ll explain to the French what they did and so he sort of makes himself a travel writer if you own democracy in America it’s 1,500 pages long don’t read it like that it’s really boring rip the binding off and leave it in five and seven page chunks all over your house just staple chunks of it together and read it like it’s magazine articles because that’s what he really wrote then it’s great stuff in five to seven page chunks it’s great when he was tried to get a payday out of it by making it a fifteen hundred page book not so good but it what he did was he said I want to figure out why America is dynamic and since there’s this really interesting economy they must have the best bureaucrats that’s what he thought and so he goes to Washington DC to define the meaning of America and he writes back to Europe he’s like this is a problem like I went to Washington DC it’s a swamp the people don’t work very hard they’re not that impressive not a lots changed and he says that he’s sort of this isn’t the meaning of America I got to find it and so there 25 states at

the time he travels to 17 state capitals and he writes back to Europe I have found the meaning of America it’s the Rotary Club it’s like these people are weird like we Europeans thought you have community or individualism you have government defined bureaucratically organized homogeneous community or you have loners off in the Montana woods right he goes turns out these Americans have this whole other idea they believe in community but that’s voluntary and so you have to persuade people to join your church you don’t get a charter from the king that you’re the one established religion and you get tax dollars you have to persuade people to buy your mousetrap you have to persuade people to invest in a new company to join your venture philanthropy to marry you whatever it’s by volunteerism his way of saying is Americans don’t believe in power they believe in love they believe in passion projects right we still believe that we still have that kind of dynamic innovation that grass tops Tocqueville II and localism if stuff bumps down in Wichita and it’s gonna come back up it’s not gonna come back up because Washington creates a great bureaucratic program for Wichita renewal right it’s gonna come up because people in this community at the grass tops level will persuade a bunch of people you’ll experiment whole bunch of them oh fail and some of them will thrive we’re gonna build new forms of social capital for the mobile digital economy we just don’t know what it looks like yet we’re gonna need neighborhoods again thank you we have time for one more question and this is a compositive of a number of the the threads that the time we’ve heard from from from students who are here for those who are interested in making a difference whether it be through social entrepreneurship or going into politics and public service and and and and trying to craft real policy solutions what words of advice can you can you offer in in closing you’ve been careful to note that that your book is not a policy tome but for those who wish to make a difference in policy what advice do you have for them and for us I mean I don’t want to say something that sounds pie-in-the-sky but I really do believe what ails us at this moment is a kind of epidemic of loneliness a decline of neighborliness and I don’t mean that in a sort of touchy-feely can’t we all just talk nicer to each other that’d be fine we should do that but that’s not what I mean I really mean we need to revivify neighborhoods and I mean that in a physical sense but I also mean it in a relational sense right we’re we’re clearly going to know more people and have more of those relationships be shallower than before that’s inevitable but when you think about what’s really gonna fix so much of what ails us in this moment a very very small piece of it is really gonna be driven by policy I’m I’m in government for a time I have

a six-year calling been there two and a half years and there are big policy things I care about right so the last major piece of social economic policy innovation in America was about 30 years ago 1986 we sort of went from having a defined benefit retirement pension to that if you want to change jobs in you were 28 or 48 in the past you had to abandon your pension it was a big job lock constraint in a world where I said we’ve gone from 26 year duration and affirm to four years and change today like as that was evolving over the course of the last decades we made an innovation that made it possible for you to have a tax protected portable 401k plan that’s really good that’s a good thing it’s not enough for 30 years of output in policy right and you could say we can have debates about healthcare and how much the government should subsidize it and if you’re like me and you want much more local decentralized regulation than having one-size-fits-all insurance regulation from Washington we can debate right versus left on that that’s fine but we should all recognize that one of the statistically the biggest driver of uninsurance in America right now is just job change and we don’t even know how to talk about that together right what is the biggest driver of uninsurance in America right you ask man and woman on the street they think pre-existing medical conditions we must have more sick people or socio economics we must have more poor people neither of those things are true we don’t have more sick people and we don’t have more poor people the reason we have had massively growing uninsurance over the course of the last thirty years is just because we changed jobs more the average uninsurance period when you change jobs is four to six months well if you’re changing jobs every 44 years six months out of every four years is one-eighth of the time that’s twelve and a half percent of your neighbors that’s dang close to what the uninsured population is of America well during those four to six months maybe when you get the breast cancer diagnosis and maybe when you have the car accident now you’re the pre-existing conditions population of five and ten years from now right that’s an example of a policy solution we need I care about that if you believe there’s a health care reform innovation that’s gonna come from politics that’s gonna fix our lack of neighborliness and our loneliness you’re smoking something right what’s really happening is we have far fewer real textured relationships and I think that what’s gonna happen with the the evolution of social capital is gonna be fascinating we’ve been through this once before well twice when hunter-gatherers settled down and started farming it clearly radically changed their societies we just don’t know what it looked like because we didn’t have alphabets right this is 11,000 years ago but uh 250 years ago from 1870 to 1919 20 as people left the farm and went to the cities 86% of people lived and worked on farms at the end of the Civil War six out of seven people okay 60 percent of Americans live and work in cities by world or two so more than half you go from six

out of seven people on farms to almost two out of three people in cities over 70 years it was a bipartisan consensus of politicians in America Woodrow Wilson Democrat Teddy Roosevelt Republican America won’t work anymore people can’t have self-restraint self-control self-discipline there’s no way the republic of small are in our republican party but the experiment of self-rule in a republic it won’t work in cities they all thought in the 19-teens both parties thought we needed a rule of bureaucratic experts from washington d.c because people in cities are way too stupid to govern themselves was the assumption right and so we did things like pass a law and a constitutional amendment for prohibition was terrible policy and yet it makes perfect sense if you go back and sit in that historical moment there were drunk fifteen-year-old Irish kids passed out in the streets everywhere that was actually what was happening in New York and Boston and Baltimore in Philadelphia in Pittsburgh and what ended up happening is we created new forms of social capital for the urban ethnic neighborhood that were different than the New England village or the Kansas prairie village of the Nebraska Prairie Village but it turned out that neighborliness was again known you had accountability for your actions your word mattered self-discipline self-restraint self-control our superior together discipline other restraint governmental control we believe in dignity we believe in freedom and so we need to build new kinds of social capital not much of that’s really gonna come from policy though there are lots of policy implications so to to put a fine bow on it if you’re 15 and you think you want to go into politics write that in a box somewhere and think about it again in 25 or 30 years and go do something that benefits an actual neighbor now thank you so much [Music] Thanks what